You cannot do it on your own. Whether you're buildings products or a consultancy, you need developers. You can't afford to outbid everyone else and, even if you do, another company will up the ante in six months. You can't rely on your network or universities to deliver fully ready Rails devs. Professional recruiters are no answer.
Your only real option is to build them. That's the situation LivingSocial faced, and in this session, we'll share lessons learned from the design, recruitment, and beginning months of Hungry Academy. Let's discuss:
- Recruiting applicants
- Evaluating aptitude
- Setting learning goals
- Designing a curriculum
- Determining what not to learn
- Handling diverse skill-sets
- Building group conscience
- Emulating real work
- Encouraging specialization
- Teaching culture
- Connecting to the community
- Mistakes we've made
Let's stop fighting over a too-small labor pool and, instead, bring in new people through apprenticeship. Take our lessons learned and create your own program.
While this is accurately described as a "soft" talk, I believe that the labor shortage is the single biggest danger to the Ruby/Rails community. If we don't start discussing new approaches, we're headed for a bad place.
My ratings on Speaker Rate (http://speakerrate.com/speakers/5639-jeff-casimir) will show you that my sessions are consistently among the highest rated at each event. This is a topic I'm passionate about and I know will resonate with the RailsConf audience.