It's a Software Engineer State of Mind (Report)
We created a thing. It can help you hire great people.
Welcome to the latest entry in The Workaround. You’re in good company with thousands of fellow entrepreneurs and innovators who have subscribed!
I’m your host, Bob, and my mission here is to share personal, behind-the-scenes stories of ups and downs from my career leading tech startups and corporate innovation.
I write to make you think, smile, and discover a shortcut to success or a trap to avoid.
Here we go…
Nobody joined a startup because it was easy, but last year broke the mold. I’ve built and sold two companies since 2004 and have never seen it so rough as 2023. Today, as founders of Hearty, a recruiting business serving startups, our team felt the pain along with you!
But we survived and advanced.
The companies that have made it through these lean years—and those launching today—are stronger, smarter, and more likely to succeed. Every old habit is being re-evaluated, including how to attract and retain staff.
Meanwhile, the people working in technology jobs—in software engineering roles and way beyond—are also a lot wiser, and many are rethinking where they work. Over 35% of employees are “Highly Likely” to look for a new job in the next six months, up from 17% in 2021.
Over the past two years, we’ve worked with over 100 early-stage startups and well over 1,000 engineering candidates–most of whom have spent much time working at startups. We’ve seen mindsets change on both sides and gotten an inside view of the state of the market that the usual surveys and data pulls don’t reveal.
Today, we’re putting all our biggest insights into your hands with our first annual Software Engineer State of Mind Report.
(We think it’s helpful beyond engineering roles, too…)
Five Top Takeaways
This report is the product of a combination of an online survey and one-on-one discussions with over 1,000 developers in the past year. In some cases, we compare results to a previous survey from October 2021.
Overall, we’re starting to see daylight in the startup world, and these next five months will be when a majority of growth-oriented hiring takes place. It might not be a “war” for talent like we saw in 2021, but the odds of amazing candidates applying through your career page are extremely low. The best candidates are already working, so you’ve got to attract them.
You really should download the entire report here. It’s got all the charts, graphs, breakouts, pro tips, and additional rabbit holes that would clutter up a substack post. As a teaser, here’s the Top Five Takeaways:
Startups are still winning. Despite the layoffs and declining equity valuations, people are even more interested in working at startups than they were two years ago.
You need a stability story. Nearly everyone in a startup role today is worried about layoffs and worse. They are making preemptive moves to stronger firms.
Tech stacks matter. Engineers want to work on what’s new and fear losing opportunities by being stuck in older languages.
Culture cannot be an afterthought. Sure, some of the gimmicks of 2021 are gone, but location flexibility and a positive team dynamic are even more important today.
Provide options beyond options. There’s less belief that your stock will skyrocket, but there are creative ways to win over candidates by letting them help build an offer letter.
It’s a Marketing with Meaning World
Back in 2008, while I was a partner at a fast-growing digital advertising agency, our senior client at J&J asked me to give a speech to her organization on “The Future of Marketing.” It was a daunting assignment that led me to waste a lot of time sitting at my desk, staring at my cube wall, and waiting for inspiration to strike.
Eventually, my mind wandered to the rise of digital marketing and what held our work together. I realized that digital was giving people unprecedented choices in the media we consumed—and a lot of that new-found freedom led us to choose to skip the classic model of interrupting advertising. Back then, we used DVRs to skip ads and blocked banners with some of the first browser extensions.
Meanwhile, the Internets gave people access to new ways to discover information and enjoy entertainment—and marketers have always had a role in meeting these needs. Brands hired our agency to add value to their customers’ lives through our work—ranging from a meal-planning tool for people with diabetes from Abbott to a banner ad for Pringles that was so fun people clicked it over 90 times.
I realized that this trend would continue, and the future would shift to Marketing with Meaning, in which brands would need to earn customers’ attention (and their business) by creating advertising that adds value to their lives. I put my thoughts into a speech, our clients loved it, and they gave us more of their business.
A few years later, I sat down and put the speech into a book published by McGraw-Hill titled The Next Evolution of Marketing: Connecting with Customers by Marketing with Meaning. Clearly, the world kept evolving in this direction. I take no credit for the trend, but I enjoyed being a signpost through my writing and speaking.
So it was a no-brainer for me to sit down with our team and create this Software Engineer State of Mind Report. It’s much more fun for me as a marketer to write something of significant value rather than playing with outbound spam copy. And so far, the response rate is a lot better, too.
I’m sure your business is sitting on a ton of relevant data and insights that could be turned into valuable content that helps your customers solve problems and make decisions.
It doesn’t take crazy hours or budgets to assemble—and please don’t assign A.I. to write it for you. Just write what you know—in a format that lets you speak from your heart. In today’s economy, this is the only way to forge the level of trust that leads to a long relationship. That’s why I continue to think the future of marketing is bright.
BONUS: Cool Content of the Week
A little something I found meaningful. You might agree…
The value of hiring a recruiting agency as a startup
Many of our startup founder clients had never worked with a recruiting agency before engaging with our firm. Like any use of money, opinions vary, so they go to trusted sources to learn and get referrals. Recently, I heard a repeat founder, Shaan Puri, share why he believes in going with external recruiters. In this 60-second YouTube clip from his podcast, Shaan summarizes the benefits better than I can.