> I figure that when I'm ready to start hiring other developers, I'll only be hiring developers sophisticated enough
Spoken like someone who has never had to actually hire people! It's harder than you think.
Spoken like someone who has never had to actually hire people! It's harder than you think.
I haven't had to hire for myself, but I've done plenty of technical interviewing over the years, and worked with countless programmers. Most just aren't the kind of material I would want to hire. The ones I would want to hire, even if they haven't used Clojure, would be excited about the idea and at least conversant in the advantages (and disadvantages) of functional languages relative to OO languages.
So it's making the job harder, but also easier.
The problem isn't necessarily sorting through resumes or giving good interviews. It's that all of the developers you want to hire have satisfying and rewarding jobs.
Here's my thinking, and I'd love some feedback on this. I live in Minneapolis, home of more Fortune 500 companies per capita than anywhere else on Earth (really!). These giants are full of very smart engineers that are frustrated and stifled by the nature of the beast they work in. I want to try to poach talent out of the giants by, among other things, offering a chance to work with technology that wasn't chosen by two years of committee meetings. And of course the speed, clarity of purpose, and control over their own destinies that comes with a startup.
This gets to another value of mine, and is going to play into my hiring. I want to hire people who have real-world experience in mainstream enterprise programming/ops. I'm building a product targeted at simplifying the lives of enterprise engineers, and I think it's very important that I hire people who have felt the customer's pain directly. I could get kids fresh out of school, but they won't have that experience.
I must admit that I was looking for a bootstrapping co-founder instead and even 50% market rate didn't make sense in that context so I don't know if they would've followed through, but it sure as hell didn't feel like a tough sell.
Once you get to 10 it's a very different ballgame.
So why doubt this same thing can happen again? It's like doubting that MD5 will ever be broken, or questioning whether something like Roman numerals can be improved upon. Of course it can, and will.
Unfortunately the song doesn't "keep it real".
If you're trying to find these developers through job postings I don't think you're going to have much success.
Your target market is developers passionate about Clojure so if you want to hire those you need to go to where they are; which most likely isn't Monsterboard.
At Clojure meetups there's a palpable sense of eagerness in everyone I talk with that isn't using it on a daily basis yet though and I would find it hard to believe if that didn't have a significant monetary effect.
As far as recruitment goes, especially in large numbers, I will definitely concede that it will be hard to scale up to large numbers without using traditional hiring channels and that those channels will most certainly fail you when recruiting this specific a skill-set.