1 Reason Why I’ll Never Hire a Developer Who ISN’T Self Taught
By: Alec Mather
Tags: Education, Startup, Entrepreneurship, Business, Hiring

1 Reason Why I’ll Never Hire a Developer Who ISN’T Self Taught

You’re basically about to get your developer pregnant…

Back in college I encountered this 1 conversation, like, a bajillion times. It went a little something like this.

“Hey Suzy”

“Hey Jimmy”

(I’m Jimmy)

“Hey do you know anything about how [insert topic] works?”

“Why? You stuck on some homework?”

“Nahh”

“What class is it for?”

“It’s not for a class.”

“…what? Then why are you-”

Aaaaaaaaaand stop the scene.

You probably see where I’m going with this. Wanting to learn for the sake of learning is somehow a foreign concept to college students. And after encountering this conversation so many times, I realized what was actually going at at college.

“This here is a run out the clock situation.” -Stanley Hudson

I realized that people weren’t actually interested in their classes. I also realized that being “curious” was synonymous with being “smart.” People thought that if you wanted to learn something, for no other reason than to learn it, you were probably a pretty smart person.

I’m the perfect example of the facade.

I have always been an absolutely horrible student. I was told by my high school guidance counselor that I should drop out. I applied to one college, the University of Iowa which I didn’t even get into at first. (Which is incredible because you can basically sneeze on your ACT and get a full ride.) But another guidance counselor got me in my calling the school because she liked me. In college I did just a little better at first. Eventually I did well in the classes I was interested in, and just tried not to fail the classes I hated. (Literally fuck you Logic of Arithmetic)

I can’t even get to the nearest McDonald’s without Google Maps.

(^that’s actually not a joke)

But my friends thought I was smart, because I used my free time to learn things I was interested in.

And that^s the key.

Answer this question honestly.

What do you do with your free time?

What I’m about to explain to you, is an example of how I’m going to use self-awareness to learn a life lesson.

I’ve been using this hypothetical scenario to learn a lot about myself:

Imagine I can take care of all your basic needs. All your essentials. You get a basic little apartment, enough food to eat, nothing fancy but you have everything you need. You never need to work, you never need to do anything. What do you do with your free time?

I asked myself this question, and the truthful answer, I’d code. I’d sit down with a pot of coffee, stimulate the shit out of my body, and code. And I was confident with my answer, because I had a history that backed it up. I spent every minute I had, pulling out my laptop, building apps.

The important takeaway here, is that I did it because I wanted to, and not because I thought I was going to get something in return (a college degree, a good paying job, whatever).

I used self-awareness to understand that I did what I did because it had intrinsic value to me. I then used that information about how I treated this thing (coding), to know what to look for in others that I want to work with.

So how does this relate to hiring a developer?

First, you need to realize 1 thing:

You aren’t asking someone to just build something and be done. You’re about to form a relationship with this person, and create a living breathing thing together. And that thing will either live or die depending on your developer’s ability to create, and your ability to support that creation.

You’re basically about to get your developer pregnant…

It’s a metaphor…

The takeaway is that as someone who is about to hire a developer, you absolutely need this 1 quality:

You need them to care.

Let me say that again.

You need your developer, to care.

I have no problem with people who would rather go out drinking, or watch Netflix, or sell pickles on the street, I don’t give a shit what you want to do with your life.

But I want to hire someone who really deeply cares about what they work on. Someone who would do it for free. Someone who feels something a little painful inside when they hear that something isn’t working quite right, but who lives for the blissful flow of writing in their favorite programming language.

(cough javascript)

And some might say, “ok sure they care, but can they do what I need them to do?”

And my response is this, “investing an extra month or two into mentoring someone who deeply cares about what they do, yields infinitely more rewards than hiring someone who has experience with your technology but goes home when the clock strikes 5.”

Think about it this way. Would you rather spend a little bit more time creating functions that work to make your life easier in the long run? Or would you rather get the result right now by hard coding everything.

Sorry if you aren’t a developer, that analogy probably makes zero sense.

So back to my college experience.

It was very clear to me in college who did and didn’t actually care about programming. And there was 1 thing that separated every single person into one of those two categories. They either taught themselves more code in their free time, or they didn’t.

And this is not to say that every self-taught developer is the “bees knees,” there are a lot of idiots out there. But there are just as many idiots who graduated with a computer science degree. I’d just rather pick from the pool of people who choose to do it because they enjoy it.