Developers, software engineers, smart people, people have needs, these needs differ and certainly differ in weighting from person to person but I think the below lists the key desires of most. I, of course, can’t speak for everyone, I would however, like to be as complete and thorough as I can—I’m a techy, it goes with the territory—so please contact me if I’ve missed anything. Whilst this post is focused on software engineers it could equally apply to any profession that needs brains and experience.

I believe strongly that software engineering is a creative process. Not only is it a creative process like painting, making a photograph, giving a speech or product design it also requires large amounts of technical expertise. That’s it’s, an inate gift and hard earned knowledge and then, if that weren’t enough, determination to be successful and with the right environment: successful with others. These people are therefore incredibly hard to find, these are the people that will change the world.

People like these, people like you, can change the world, people like you have changed it, it’s sappy, I’m sappy, I won’t appologise. Below are some notes for your prospective employeers, custodians of your working life whilst you let them, I hope I can make a reasonable job of it.

Respect them

It pains me that I have to even say this: engineers deserve respect, they do a extremely mentally challenging job and the good ones, they’re smart, damn smart. When you treat them like children by taking away decision making power, coating their days in pointless process due to lack of trust or, worse of all, not listening to them then you do everyone a disservice. You won’t get even a tiny fraction of the benefit you could get out of them.

“Imagine what you’ll enable people to achieve if you believe in them”. \ — Dan North

So do it, believe in your people, let them know by showing them respect.

Listen to them

Listen to software engineers, they have opinions not just on software engineering but on everything from product developement, through personnel and on through P&L, they may not be right all the time but if they are as smart as you want them to be then they’re going to be right a whole, at a minimum they’ll give you new angles. Listening is the foundation of respect.

Other developers like them

Software engineering is a team exercise, of course from time to time we need alone time to think, but most of the time bouncing ideas of like minded people is going to be the best course of action. Be it pair programming, whiteboarding new ideas or discussing the latest technology over lunch, great software engineers like to spend time with other great software engineers, it makes them happy—fundamentally happy.

Remember software engineers, especially open source developer are ahead of most in terms of interacting online and therefore being part of a team doesn’t need to mean physical proximity, it could be via hangouts, hipchat or even good old IRC.

Fundamentally they want to work with other smart people with a common purpose, best make that common purpose yours.

Other smart people

Great developers want to work with smart people in other disaplines too. This could be product development, sales, marketing, procurement or personnel. It helps everyone grow, so unless you are running a production line (and why wouldn’t you automate that?), then make sure you only hire the best people throughout your organisation. Perhaps I’m stating something obvious: hire smart people—what I mean is hiring is the most important thing you do.

Access to tech conferences

Even when you get the best engineers working together in a team, with the best professionals in other disaplines, the knowledge and thinking can get a little stale. Engineers, we like to get out and meet other likeminded souls who haven’t been our team mates for years. Some of us even like to speak at conferences (cough), firstly because it feels good to share information, be part of something bigger and secondly it’s because it provokes a conversation. Let your gals and guys out once in a while, pay the airfare, put them up somewhere nice and let them meet other smart people.

Companies that talk about their (cool) technology.

This goes hand in hand with the conference attending, if you speak about the great things you are doing then people are going to want to come and work on them. Smart people want difficult challenges and they want to solve them in smart ways and then they want to brag about it. Smart people who want to do this and can’t are on the constant look out for those that will let them.

One word of caution, if you technology isn’t great you’ll do more damage than good try to palm it off as good. Either be honest and speak to the challenges or don’t bother.

Freedom to express their views

The best engineers tend to be opinionated (the reverse doesn’t necessarily apply) and so by definition they like to put forth their opinions. If you restrict them from doing so you’ll firstly make them sad and secondly deny them the chance of being challenged and finding out there was more to learn (there always is). Also be prepared for this taking multiple forms, for some this could be a posting on a message board, other it might be an empassioned monologue during a meeting but best of all it might be a commit to github.

Open source

If your software is closed then it makes it very hard for your software developers to engage with the outside world of software engineering in a meaningful way. It also takes away their ability to show off what they’ve been doing. Smart people like to show other smart people how smart they are from time to time. They do it a little for their ego but mostly to start a conversation with other smart people and learn.

By putting your software out there you’ll show the world that your company is made of smart people too and you’ll capture their attention, perhaps they’ll help you write your software, perhaps they’ll become a colleague (perhaps they’ll be your boss [ssshhh]).

Hardware & software they need/want

I’ve lots count of the times I’ve heard engineers lamenting being fobbed of when asking for better equipment. The logic goes something like, we have a standard build, it will only work on this configuration and it’s good enough for the guys in legal (no offense) so suck it up (of course most budget holders will put it more nicely than that but the engineers will hear ‘we don’t value you’).

Just stop it, let your software engineers pick any laptop, desktop, mobile phone or flux capacitor they want and as long as it doesn’t cost the price of a new family car every year, go with it. It will make them more productive, happier and ultimately it’ll save you money in time spent discussing it—don’t believe me, want a business case, tough, you won’t get the best techs to work for you if you don’t.

Safe environment for innovation

Everyone should be allowed to innovate, it shouldn’t be scheduled and it shouldn’t be the sole perview of a few chosen individuals, if you want to spend time looking into Huffman Coding and using it to increase data read times from disk then that’s what you should do—who else but the smart person thinking about that problem is going to have a better opinion of whether it’s a waste of time or not? Bear in mind it might not be her ‘job’ to be worrying about data density read speeds, go with it, what’s the worst that could happen?

A career path

It’s no longer good enough to force your best engineers to be people managers once they hit a certain pay grade, a few might want to, let them, but most won’t: so stop it. Give them something else to aim for that gives similar benefits: reward package, pension, car, bonus, blah. What else is there to aim for you might wonder, if it not a big team and a huge budget? It’s probably access to hard problems, large amounts of hardware, time and people but, you know, ask them, they’ll tell you.

Minimal politics

Normal people dislike office politics, engineers dislike them even more, make sure you have an office that is focussed on your purpose not playing silly beggars; enough said.

Minimal process

Have the absolute bare minimum of process that makes you feel comfortable, see how it feels and then remove some more, after about 10 iterations of this your probably where you need to be. The more process you have the harder it is to change and technology is all about change, therefore the more process you have the less likely it is that you’ll have great technology.

Meaningful appraisals

Appraisals are mostly theatre, make what happens useful and remove the rest. Make sure that someone that understands what the individual does leads the appraisal and don’t leave it more than a week to give positive or negative feedback. As a great boss of mine once said, appraisals shouldn’t be a 6 monthly surprise. There are entire libraries of books on this subject but that’s about the size of it. Everyone wants to know, objectively, how they’re performing, even or perhaps especially the best performers suffer from imposter syndrome, so let them know they’re doing a great job and don’t make them fill in a 10 page form every 6 months.

A company with a purpose

The worst possible thing is to have no meaning. A recent article talked of gifted people being plagued by feelings of meaningless, more than those less able. If your organisation has no common purpose then talented people are going to feel it more keenly. Have one goal, communicate it, then communicate it again, when it doesn’t happen, ask why, make changes, involve your engineers and keep communicating it. Did I mention you need to communicate your common purpose? What is it? Write it down, write it on the wall in spray paint, write it on every wall. If that purpose doesn’t interest them, shake hands and move on, if it does you can guarantee they’ll be fired up to know that everyone cares and that you care.