For many, this behavior falls into the shocking-but-obvious-in-retrospect category like greed, selfishness, or the Kate Bush and Peter Gabriel duet.

Like many professional firms, Innova spends time doing things that we give away (i.e., no cash changes hands). And while rewarding in some ways, these relationships can be among the most unproductive that we maintain. Relationships may start via business development, civic engagements, long-shot gambles, or friend and family commitments. What unites these no-cash efforts is that they usually undervalue the time spent by the side doing professional design and development, and grossly overvalue the ideas generated by the side that doesn’t commit to follow-on work after an idea-exchange between the two parties. So for no cash deals, a new requirement is time commitment for the non-development party. And lest I sound hostile, I’ve been on both sides.

Put another way, while folks should be happy to engage in no cash work they shouldn’t touch no cost work.

This should work well for everyone. By raising the activation-energy of ideas, we’ll all make sure we’re working on stuff that is important to everyone.

Thanks for reading. 20 GOTO 10, then contact us.

My new blog, on the other hand, is astonishingly successful. If I have fewer than 30 000 uniques in a day then I feel bad; the record so far is around 130K. I’ve been linked from boingboing, neatorama, gawker, all the cool well-edited places. I’ve been #1 on digg and #1 on reddit. Possibly at the same time, I’m not sure because I am constantly distracted by how awesome my blog is.

Success of this magnitude obligates me to convey some part of the genius involved to you, the less-successful bloggers. Here are my secrets.

1. Be stunningly well-connected

I network with creative types in London and New York. I eat in restaurants that you have only seen as backdrops in Sex And The City. I wear $200 shirts and drive a Jaguar. I’ve kind of lost track of the point I was making, but you can also be well-connected through sites like Metafilter. Metafilter is essentially the internet for grownups and is surprisingly effective at getting the word out to people who like linking to new things. You have to pay to join, which keeps the riff-raff out.

2. Have an amazing idea

Good ideas are ideas that people will want to steal. In fact, if no one tries to steal your idea within two weeks you should accept that your idea is worthless and abandon it. Amazing ideas are ideas that are immediately obvious in retrospect. It’s important to note that your blog should not be about you, or any aspect of you or what you do, unless you are Britney Spears or her mother.

Most people are capable of coming up with at least one amazing idea in their lifetime. Even you.

3. Explain the idea in two words

If your idea takes up more than two words then it isn’t really amazing. Here are a bunch of great ideas that you will understand immediately:

• dogs-pooping
• alcoholic-recipes
• lardy-policemen
• obvious-hairpiece
• retarded-attorneys

Each idea is pretty much summed up in two words. It’s actually fairly hard to think up a bad idea in only two words; bad ideas take four or five words.

4.Stick to the script

Suppose your idea is “hopelessparking”. You blog some pictures of terrible parking where people take up two spaces, try to fit huge SUVs into compact spots, or, I don’t know, block other cars in for no reason. You make a nicely compelling story that registers with people. You start to develop a community and people start to send you hilarious pictures of terrible parking they’ve seen. Your blog starts to have in-jokes in the comments. A warmth permeates each new post.

The important thing now is to stay on target. Don’t start running stories about, for example, unreasonable parking tickets, or valet parking disasters. Your new bad-parking-obsessed community will rebel and your identity and meaning will be diluted. Your readers care about your project, probably more than you do.

5. Care about your idea

Creative people drop an idea when another idea takes its place. This is important because, to some extent, the things that apply to creative people also apply to you. The way to assure success is to develop ideas that you are attached to in more than a superficial way; if you start a blog about the front of cars looking like faces because its an idea that you’ve always cherished, you will have a winner of a site. If you do something just because you think it will be popular, you will not be successful.

6. Be regular

Successful blogs have a cycle such that a regular visitor has a reasonable chance of finding something new once a day. As your blog matures you’ll find it gets easier to post, so you can have a successful blog with around half an hour of effort every day.

7. Appeal to drunk people

This isn’t really important, it’s just that drunk people, like AOL users, tend to click ads more.

8. Bear in mind that this may be the most significant thing you do

If, like me, you regularly read the obituaries in the New York Times, The Guardian or The (London) Times, you will be aware that the aspect which makes a life expired worthy of newsprint is usually something that, at the time, probably seemed insignificant.

In a long life of being merely exceptional, I honestly expect my obituary – in whatever paper of record exists circa 2100 – to focus on one small part of my life that is regarded as phenomenal, such as my awesome blog.

This is entirely unfair. People who have selflessly spent their entire lives improving the lot of their fellow man, overcoming disadvantages, expanding the frontiers of knowledge, or otherwise being boring, very rarely make it to the obituaries. Yes, it’s a shame that the world is unfair, but the important thing to remember, as ever, is that the world should be unfair in your favor.

Wrong.

All of these tips sans a few can be applied to hiring developers in general. I know that Rails guys like to think they’re special (and Rails is pretty hot, to be fair), but you’re just all software developers. And half of you are going to jump to the next bandwagon that crosses your path anyway.

For example, my company recently hired a few PHP people, and we hit most of these marks (the sane ones) without any effort.

1. Don’t use Monster.com.
   Obvious. Why would you submit yourself to this level of pain anyway? I guess good for Java devs. Gotta be good for something anyway.
2. Poach from other companies.
   A little unethical? Maybe, but if some awesome coder isn’t being treated right at his company, you pull him away and give him what he wants. Then you sit back and watch him finish projects left and right. If you hadn’t thought of doing this, you’re not trying.
3. Don’t hire someone that doesn’t know X.
   Why the devil would you? Unless you’re hiring into an operations position or something similar, but if you’ve got an X Developer position open, your hire list had better only consist of people who know X. Otherwise you’re setting your company up for failure. (Or at least setting that hire up to get quickly fired.)
4. Look for open source contributions.
   These guys are like the Dark Oracle of the Obvious or something.
5. Personal Rails Blog Required
   …? Now I admit a personal coding blog is a good way to determine someone’s personality, but a requirement? That’s like requiring your coders to all wear Thinkgeek shirts. Some of them will, some of them won’t, and it’s no indication of skill whatsoever. Do we like it when we can browse someone’s blog? Sure! Are we going to send them away if they don’t? Of course not, we’re not dumb.
6. Degree not important
   Wow, this whole common knowledge thing is amazing. Our DBA, the venerable Bruce Wayne Nation (whose name must always be fully written for the Batman joke hidden in his middle name), got hired during the first bubble and didn’t finish college. He’s also the most reasonable and practical DBA I’ve ever had the joy of working with. I owe him donuts, too. Crap.
7. Look out for holes in their knowledge
   Now, in Rails, I guess you’re expected to be a graphic designer, a good UI developer, and a client and server-side master. However, again, with any hire (even non-technical ones) you want to look for things they don’t know and make sure you’ve got someone that can cover them, or that they’re willing to learn. Example: I’m not good with graphics. Don’t have an eye for them. So Innova’s got guys that do that, and I’m slowly learning. Slowly.
8. Avoid brand-name superstars
   Would you hire Paul Graham for your lisp project? Well, yeah, but he’d charge you a shit-ton even if he didn’t just ignore your email, so why bother? If he’s interested, he’ll call you. Why do you care anyway? If you have to rely on the noteriety a big name will bring you, then your products aren’t doing their job. Innova? Our clients top INC 500 lists and they get nominated for awards for stuff we did left and right. We’re awesome. Even if you’ve never heard of me.
9. Hire perpetually
   Some companies can do this, some can’t. We’re always looking for good developers to submit applications. We’re not necessarily picking up people left and right but there’s no point at which we won’t seriously consider anyone who passes muster. Some smaller companies can’t bring people on as they please or maybe don’t have enough work to go around. If you can’t stretch the budget, don’t try.
10. Have a company blog
    I tend to agree here. Obviously. There’s just nothing like being able to see everyone that’s working for a company and get a feel for the general attitude of the workplace like reading their blog. Does it attract good developers? Not on it’s own, but it certainly helps the good ones who do their homework about a company feel better about you.
11. Special compensation.
    Who would have thought that developers like to be treated special? Laptops and large screens make for happy devs. Innova gives pretty much anyone pretty much anything they ask for so long as they’ve proven themselves worthy of it. And trips to conferences would be sweet. Now, PHP tends to have poor conferences, at least around here (we’re thinking of running one ourselves, actually, in an attempt to buck this trend), so those are out, but Innova buys us lunch every day, gives us excellent bonuses, and the pool table and beer keg are just gravy on the awesome-train. If your company isn’t going the extra mile in a few areas, they aren’t trying. News flash: creative people working in a creative environment with the tools that make them comfortable output awesome work.

So yeah. Rails devs, you’re not special. Every developer would love those things, and some of us who are lucky actually get most of them. And if these things sound odd to you, fix your companies hiring policies. If you’re a developer that wants some of these things, send us a CV or resume or something, or find a company around you that’s similar. The original RubyInside post might be singling out Rails developers a bit much, but I will say one thing for it: anything that helps companies become better about this sort of thing is a win in my book.

It’s okay to be long, if you’re chunky. The great lesson of direct mail was that long letters always do better than short ones. That’s because once you’ve sold me, I’ll stop reading. But if I’m not sold and I get to the end, you lose. The web is infinitely expandable. So go ahead and tell your story.

Let me stress, this is quality advice, such that we practice here at Innova already. But sometimes you don’t need to build your core team of coders. Sometimes you have too much work for five experts to handle, and you need to supplement your crack team of experts with some lower-quality talent.

Let’s say you have some tasks that need to be carried out daily, but that require human intervention and aren’t suitable for a cronjob or the like. Or, you have some work that needs to be done but doesn’t challenge your awesome coders enough for them to prioritize it highly. It would be a waste of your experts’ time and your money to force them to do that kind of work — especially when you have a lot of this work, and it’s not completely trivial.

The Revolution guys make a point of equating programmers to other high-expectation positions such as CEO and Lead Architect and whatnot. Which is true for the guys that your business depends on. For the kind of work described above, however, try hiring someone who isn’t an expert.

Essentially, find someone just out of college, or with a lot of talent but not a lot of experience. Hire him. Hire him for less than you pay your other programmers, but give him the same perks. Maybe find several. These guys get to do the extra work that really isn’t driving the business forward, or that requires essentially a human shell script to keep it running.

The plus side: you’re paying slightly-above-average money for someone who may one day become a member of the Crack Team of Expert Coders. If the hire is straight out of college you can groom him to your coding styles and not have to worry about pre-existing brainwashing you’ll have to scrub away. The clients are happy, because their work is getting done, which makes you happy by extension. The new hire is happy because he’s in an awesome job that “understands how coders should be treated”, and he’s getting paid well.

The only downside is hiring someone when you really don’t have enough work for them — which isn’t a problem in most workplaces — or hiring someone who just doesn’t fit with your company or really isn’t that good at his job. But since you aren’t paying them a ton of money and you haven’t bet the farm on them, it’s easy to send them on their way and try again.

So, yes, absolutely do hire the best and the brightest for your core team of programmers. But when it comes time to expand a little, examine whether you really need to spent time, energy, and money searching for and courting the absolute best coder, or if you can get away with making your own expert.