Loading ...Over the last month I’ve spent a fair portion of my time searching for web developers (making the move over to my first Mac has taken up the rest - but, with hindsight, it’s a move I wholeheartedly recommend). Having experienced the recruiting process for an RPO account with Microsoft, I know this isn’t an easy process - especially if you don’t know anything about the technologies that a candidate must be skilled in (I’m not looking that this as a recruiting exercise, but even hunting for potential business partners can, at times, feel like a more formal recruiting process).
After sitting myself down with some great web development tutorials at the start of 2007, and having focused on them almost 100% since then, I’m now in a much better position for understanding just what makes a great web developer (my strongest area is XHTML, CSS, and design disciplines). So, it should now be much easier for me to find the right web technologists - but it isn’t necessarily the case.
As your knowledge of a technology and industry grows, so do your expectations of quality, professionalism, and skill sets. This means that, although you can find technologists much more easily, you inevitably take much longer over analysing each portfolio and project example, to the point where, if you’re not careful, you could be taking just as much time over the process as you would be if you knew little about the technology, but were happy just to discover someone whose resume ticked the relevant boxes.
I’ve been looking for web developers to work with one some project ideas. The main idea, and I don’t think I’m giving too much away by saying this, is to work with, and leverage, the Facebook F8 platform. I’m a Facebook fanatic and have been since I started using the service regularly last year. It works great (no more MySpace 404 errors), all my friends use it, and the development team are rockstars with a real understanding of what their user base needs (note: this isn’t always what they think they need). I’m eager to meet entrepreneurial developers who are excited about creating and building innovative and fun social web applications for Facebook, and who would also like to partner up with someone who want’s to get stuck into designing and building the front-ends to real working projects (that’s me!). The right developers will most definitely be avid Facebook users - because if they don’t use the service, they won’t know how to build for it. This is an important point when it comes to building social web applications, and it’s something that I intend to touch on in a follow-up post (I post infrequently, so it might take a while!).
Although I don’t feel as though I’ve scoured the Web quite yet (I’ve only really covered the hot spots directly surrounding Facebook platform - see the developer board or Inside Facebook), I’ve found that finding developers who can really get the most out of Facebook platform isn’t easy. Here’s a few reasons why;
- They’re already working for Facebook
- They’re building their own applications
- They’re building apps for more money than I want to bootstrap a project with right now
- Facebook platform is still very, very new, and as they keep saying, very much a 1.0 release, and many developers have yet to try out the platform
If you can’t get experienced Facebook platform developers, the next question is; Facebook is built on PHP, so surely it’s just a matter of finding a great PHP developer? But I don’t think that this is true, and it brings me back to my point about understanding a technology, and that understanding bringing a new level of complexity to the process. You’re no longer just looking for someone with three years + of PHP in a professional coding environment, because that doesn’t in anyway mean that they’ll create a great social web application for Facebook (unless you provide them with a complete blueprint of the application, including all the standard Facebook service conventions, which only an experienced user would remember - like ‘wall-to-wall’ postings). You might just be better-off finding someone with much less coding experience, but far more enthusiasm for Facebook, and the will to pursue F8 as a niche area of technical expertise. This looks like the angle I want to take, because I’m new to web development myself, I’d rather find developers that are looking for people that they can grow into technologies with.
Now that I have a better idea of what I should be looking for, I thought I’d make a blog post about it (it’s got to help with the search!), so Facebook focused PHP/Rails developers please feel free to leave a comment or two!
