[Steering Committee] Fwd: [jug-leaders] Why is it so hard to recruit good [enough] people?

[Jason Lee]

Off topic, I guess, but interesting nonetheless.  Though not as interesting
as that, at some point, the three words "none," "the," and "less" were all
crammed together to make one word.  I think I may propose "asfarasiknow" and
"ifirecall."

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Svetlin Nakov <svetlin.nakov at devbg.org>
Date: Wed, Apr 2, 2008 at 12:08 PM
Subject: RE: [jug-leaders] Why is it so hard to recruit good [enough]
people?
To: jug-leaders at jugs.dev.java.net


 Hi, Leaders,



I have my own solution to the problem with finding skillful Java developers.
If I can not recruit good people, I can train them inside my company. It
works as follows:



1) We start a free of charge training course in Introduction to Programming
with Java (
http://academy.devbg.org/training/courses-intro/intro-to-programing-with-java/)
and attract 60 people with zero programming skills. It is easy to attract
people without fee.



2) We make an exam after the first week and select the best 30 students that
continue.



3) We make a graduation exam after 1 month (at the end of the introduction
course) and select the best 15 students.



4) For the second level course we have 15 junior people with high potential
and motivation. We train them for 5 months in all they need to start their
careers as Java developers (OOP, Java language, major APIs, databases, GUI
development, Web development, software engineering, team working):
http://en.academy.devbg.org/training/core-java-developer-programming/.
Training in performed in the evenings and in the weekends and senior
developers from our company train the juniors as part of their job. We have
created  curriculum of about 3000 PowerPoint slides with examples and
demonstrations and we constantly update them as technology evolves.



5) Finally we get 10-12 very skillful junior developers graduated our
trainings and we assign them in real projects. In fact they start working in
real project few months before graduation. After a year most of them can do
complex jobs with almost no supervision. After 2 years we have almost senior
people who can take team lead positions in small teams and can train junior
people.



It works at our company but it costs lots of resources, time and investment
so we force all our trainees to sign a contract for 2 years at the very
first lecture of the Intro Java course.



*Svetlin Nakov*

Chairman

Bulgarian Association of Software Developers

http://www.devbg.org
  ------------------------------

*From:* Fernando Fernandez [mailto:fernandez65 at gmail.com]
*Sent:* Wednesday, April 02, 2008 9:07 PM
*To:* jug-leaders at jugs.dev.java.net
*Subject:* [jug-leaders] Why is it so hard to recruit good [enough] people?



Antonio Goncalves wrote:

...  (why is it so hard to recrut good people) ...


Although some comments have been made already on this parenthesis, I think
this subject deserves a thread on it's own. We all know the problem of
finding good Java developers.

Initiatives like JUG Tech meetings/forums, JEDI, etc. are aiming at this
problem. The idea is that increasing the number and the quality of the
developers will solve the "production capacity" problem.

But aren't setting our expectations too high when we say "good"? If,
instead, we focus on decreasing the complexity of the development process
and enable "less good" people to do the job, it would be easier to
recruit...

Some weeks ago I was giving a talk in a Java oriented meeting and one guy
confessed that a fellow at his company still works in
RPG<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RPG_programming_language>and
generally takes less time to
*solve *a problem than he himself takes to *plan *for a solution with Java
technologies. I'm sure that this highly debatable, but I'm also sure that
this feeling is lurking around many users/customers minds.

Aren't we forgetting the other side of the coin? Increasing ease and
productivity of the technologies would reduce the stress in recruiting,
right?

As JUG Leaders, what can we do? First we must acknowledge the productivity
problem. Then we must help people to find solutions using current
technologies. And finally, we must suggest to Sun and other technology
makers that some effort should be done in this area.

After all, as someone was saying in our JUG mailing list some days ago, the
latest web technologies are now getting to be almost as productive as VB5
was in the early nineties - fifteen years ago! ;-)

Fernando


 --

Fernando Fernandez

http://www.linkedin.com/in/fernandez




-- 
Jason Lee, SCJP
Software Architect -- Objectstream, Inc.
Mojarra and Mojarra Scales Dev Team
https://mojarra.dev.java.net
https://scales.dev.java.net
http://blogs.steeplesoft.com
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