Why are developers allergic to job opportunities?

There is so much demand for programming talent. As developers, we have our pick of places to work. Even better, if we don’t like a place for whatever reason, there is very little stigma to leaving and finding a better fit elsewhere. We should be seeing serious “career selection,” with developers flocking to the strongest teams while weaker ones die off. Why isn’t that happening?

I believe that increasingly spammy impersonal recruiters and watered down, generic “We’re looking for Rockstars” job board posts, have left us developers completely turned off by anything to do with jobs. All this "job" noise creates a significant tax on our personal time if we want to just passively explore what’s out there.

We’ve been talking with lots of fellow developers, and what they’ve told us is that the most important things to them are the team members they work with, the challenges they’re coding on, and the overall culture of the company. Unfortunately, this is precisely the information that is missing in all the job spam we receive. To get a sense of these things, you have to go through an extensive interview process and even then you may not get a real sense of what a company is like until you start working there. We started thinking about how we could move the most important things about a new job to the front of the exploration process so Coderwall members could easily and quickly assess a team, its culture, and the real work they’d be doing so today we are announcing the preview of a new feature, in-depth team profiles.

Check out team Heroku and LivingSocial to see a preview of these new enhanced profiles.

We hope developers find their dream job with this if they don’t already have one. We recognize that at the moment we only have a few teams to explore and they happen to be heavy on Ruby and located in San Francisco, but we’re in the process of adding several teams around the world using a diverse set of languages & technologies. We will scout and vet out the best places to work and showcase them here.

We hope you like the direction and invite you to share your thoughts and comments. If we’ve left something out, holler so we can incorporate it. You can email me personally at mdeiters@coderwall.com and I’ll work to quickly mold this into something that works for you. If your team is on Coderwall and hiring, email me to join the wait list.

What about the Achievements?

Many joined Coderwall for just the achievements and we apologize they haven’t been released as fast as everyone would like. The good news is we are doubling down on achievements and upgrading the whole achievement system to be a more comprehensive way to show off the awesome work you’re doing. This is important to Coderwall and we’re committed to making our achievement system the best it can be. That’s why we are looking to have a lead engineer join us to solely work on building the next generation of the achievement system. If you live in SF, want to learn and work with Node.js, and this sounds like an interesting challenge, check out the Coderwall Team Profile to apply and help build more awesome.