Great developers are raised, not hired

Re:Great developers are raised, not hired by teddyh on Friday April 12, 2019 @06:35PM (#19649652)

But that’s not the trick. The trick should be that you train your employees how to do your business, and then you pay them more than what they’re worth to someone else. Since you’ve trained them in the ways of your business, they’re worth more than that, but only to you, and that’s the trick. Nobody else could squeeze as much value out of these people as you could (since the training is specific to what your business does), so you can afford to keep them, and the people have no monetary reason to leave.

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Re:Great developers are raised, not hired by scarface74 on Sunday April 14, 2019 @12:03PM (#19660153)

I never thought about this, but this definitely seemed to be the original thinking at one company I worked for.

As far as I know, the company was started in 2003. The founder wrote a custom IDE, VM and compiler. This was the only company that used it.

He hired a bunch of people from a well known but not well regarded private for profit college and paid them below market rates. Of course developers on this proprietary platform were completely useless anywhere else.

By the time I came aboard in 2008 and the rest of the “adult supervision” - a new CTO and developers - they were in the process of transitioning to C#.

Once the bottom fell out of the market with the 2008 recession, they laid off most of the developers working on the proprietary stuff who hadn’t learned C# on their own. They also forced the founder out. They kept me around because I was the only person who both knew C# and knew enough C++/MFC to maintain the old system.

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Re:Great developers are raised, not hired by teddyh on Sunday April 14, 2019 @02:35PM (#19660896)

Yes, when digging a moat you have to be careful that it does not drown you as well.

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