Imagine you're a one man shop and you think you're ready to hire someone to help. Would you rather that person pair up with yourself during code production, or go off and do the other half of the tasks on their own? Maybe a little of both?

I'm not really a one man shop, but I'm the only developer in house. I also play the roles of sales and support..

Alex,

If you have to ask this question, maybe you are not yet ready to hire an employee.

In my opinion, you have to be in control. You have presumably developed a way of doing things: but your processes, techniques and standards will not magically find their way into the mind of your new hire unless you put it there. You do this by putting together a training and induction plan and following up on it by reviewing and interacting with your employees on a frequent basis. Only by talking to your people and reviewing their code (at a very detailed level, expect this to take a lot of time) will you understand their strengths and weaknesses and be able to feed that back to them. Do not be surprised to find massive gaps in the knowledge of seemingly capable people - we all have them, there is just too much to know and too much change these days. Some people will surprise you with hidden skills, others will disappoint by putting CHAR(5000) columns on tables that are expected to contain 10 million rows within 2 months ( happened to me last week).

Without guidance people will go off in their own directions, probably bringing along bad habits from their previous jobs, and it will bite you in the ass later at a critical moment. People also have a tendency to work on the things they enjoy and to put off difficult or boring tasks, and you have to watch for that to keep your project on schedule.

Most people like to be managed, they like to have a definite goal to aim for. Your job as a supervisor is to ensure that you get your staff's motivations aligned with your business aims.

Seems to me that if you need the employee, you hire them understanding that it will take some time to bring them into the fold of how you do things. Pair up with them in the beginning so that you both get a feel for each other. Give them tasks that you know can be completed in a set timeline and review their work with them. You can tell a lot about a person by the way that they deal with constructive criticism. You'll know if this isn't going to work after the first 30 days (probably sooner). If its not working, don't prolong it. Just cut the cord and move on to the next candidate. If this is a long term position, your'e better to take the time up front to make sure you have the right person for the job.

Thanks for the great comments, guys.

Phil, I think your comments would work best in the most ideal situation, but I don't have time to be that thurough against my own production.

Then again, maybe I'm not ready. I'm walking the line between having too much work to do for myself and being too scared that I'm going to hire the wrong person.

Alex, I know your frustration. I have actually had to turn away clients because I didnt have the time to do the work but couldnt find someone that I was comfortable giving the work to.

Its a tough spot to be in.

I got rid of employees years ago.

I agree, be your own boss... it will only end up in tears IMO. Seriously if you can afford to lose money before making money then go for it otherwise stick with what you comfortable with. My 2 cents.

In The Netherlands we have a saying among entrepreneurs: "I wish you a lot of employees" or something like that, which means something like: the more employees the lower the profit and the higher the risk of getting out of business.

It's not all bad of course, but having, say, 2 employees who do your work, has serious consequences: you have to manage them, hire someone who does the office overhead and make sure you make enough money to pay them every month, also when they're not that productive or when profits are low. To keep them working, you have to hire a sales guy/gal as well, which together with the office person makes 4 employees for 2 effective workers. The bigger you get the more workers per office/sales you get of course, but when you're small it's skewed.

That's why we always work with contractors. We define a fixed project, hire a contractor to do it and that's it. You might pay a little more to the contractor, but in the end, it's not that high compared to the overhead you need to keep employees happy and busy and payed.

Another issue is the way you work, which is already discussed earlier in this thread. I work with a semi-agile method nowadays (not completely agile, but somewhere in between), with a document which contains design decisions and aspects to work out in the current phase. That way I can move forward very fast. The advantage is that I don't have to wait for another person to complete a given element I have to work with nor does another person have to wait for me to complete a given aspect. It's therefore key to have projects which are separated from eachother so one doesn't affect the other. You can achieve this in a number of ways, for example by interface stubbing (the way Open source projects do this: they define a lot of interfaces and then hand them to developers to implement them. This has disadvantages beyond belief but it can work pretty well). So it's not always a 'gain' to have a second pair of hands on deck: the work has to be scheduled efficiently so both people can work at full speed ahead.

More great comments!

Well, we're already a two person shop. For the past 3 years (I've been here 5) we've survived quite well off walk-ins and return customers. Word of mouth is great! We had no marketing or even a real sales person (That's me and the other guy). The "other guy" is the real boss. He owns the company, pays the bills, fronts me this very nice building, and does all the paper work. He also handles the video production side of the business.

I say this becasue we haven't really been looking for a developer per say. I just wanted to get your feelings on that. What I think would be most useful around the office is a $10/hour (Greenville, SC) worker bee that can run errands and organize things. OH, and someone to answer phones. And now that I think about it, she probably needs to be female.

About the developer though, I think what I'm most afraid about is not being able to find someone with the same drive I have. I may not be the best programmer in the world, but I freakin LOVE writing code for some reason! I want to be as good as I can and I think that trait is of utmost importance.

I could probably handle the coding tasks without any help if I had someone else doing tasks that don't pay anything.

alexdresko wrote:

I could probably handle the coding tasks without any help if I had someone else doing tasks that don't pay anything.

I agree making coffee for the boss is a read time waster

davisg wrote:

alexdresko wrote:

I could probably handle the coding tasks without any help if I had someone else doing tasks that don't pay anything.

I agree making coffee for the boss is a read time waster

That's what I just finished doing!

Is this correct? "Ik wens u heel wat werknemers."

swallace wrote:

Is this correct? "Ik wens u heel wat werknemers."

"Ik wens u heel wat werknemers toe." the verb is 'toewensen', we like to break things up

Dank voor de verduidelijking.

Geen dank, kerel