How To Hire Developers Fast And Build Things

It's no secret that all IT leaders are under pressure to accelerate development cycles. But how do you hire fast enough to get the projects done?

Agile development and continuous deployment are helpful from a process and tools standpoint, but they only go so far.

A recent Fortune article, "The Global Talent Crunch," proclaims that "companies that don't have up-to-date, evolving skills sets will fall behind." I'd add that they'll fall years behind.

Anyone trying to hire IT pros is aware of the potentially unrecoverable competitive disadvantage that a lack of talent creates. Job listings, particularly those for STEM jobs, remain open for months. The Brookings Institute recently reported that "science, technology, engineering and math jobs take more than twice as long to fill as other openings."

[Your entire company must be committed to Agile techniques to get any real results. Read 6 Ways To Create An Agile Company Culture]

IDC estimates there are 11 million developers in the world. If you're only interested in the top 1% of these developers, that's still a pool of 100,000 -- more than the number of full time employees at Google and Facebook combined. Yet most of us still hire within our tiny professional networks or try desperately to source the skills we need from a limited local talent pool. Meanwhile, our competition is vying for the very same candidates.

To be fair, we're stuck in this rut because the pool of talent out there beyond our personal spheres has been difficult to access. But thanks to the Internet and communication and collaboration technologies, that barrier to hiring is starting to disappear. Gone are the days when traditional outsourcing was your only option or you had to do your best with what was available nearby.

Open source communities provide a great blueprint for this much-needed reinvention. As a working model, they have always been fully distributed and, as such, have greater access to global networks of talent. Tom Preston-Werner, CEO of popular code-sharing site GitHub, often says that if you do not have a distributed team you are, by definition, not working with the most talented people.

I manage a team of 200+ engineers spread around the world. There's simply no way we could hire all the people I need just in Silicon Valley. Our distributed team allows me to overcome the local talent shortage, but I'll be the first to say there are challenges to building a team this way. The most important thing I learned from creating our own distributed team, excerpted from my ebook, Hire Fast and Build Things, are:

What technologies do I recommend? Here’s a general list, largely informed by what our team uses:

Thanks to these technologies and the best practices we've established for diligent communication, we’ve grown our distributed team from two (our company's co-founders) to more than 200. Because we can hire anyone from anywhere and we're not confined to a commute radius, we have access to the best tech talent in the world.

There are amazing universities around the world that rival Stanford (apologies to my alma mater) and MIT. The students graduating from international universities often look for opportunities beyond their local job markets. The biggest barrier that companies have to hiring them right now is simply realizing that this possibility exists and making it happen.

I'm interested to hear others' experiences building and managing distributed teams, and welcome your stories in the comment section below. If you'd like to read more about my team, see my ebook, Hire Fast and Build Things.

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