Best Blogs for October

The nights are getting longer and colder and that means more time you curl up with your favorite electronic device for some good reading!

Right now, you need reading material more than ever, and our best blogs for include stories on hiring tech talent, the value of top talent and how COVID-19 has altered the tech labor landscape.

Hiring Top Tech Talent

Hiring (and keeping) the best tech talent for your company is not as impossible as some might claim. The important thing is to know what motivates professionals working in IT. Perhaps surprisingly, some top motivations have nothing to do with money.

A major motivator for IT professionals is proper recognition. Programmers and other tech professionals want management to appreciate the difficultly of their work on technical level. They worked hard to gain their technical skill set and simply want respect for having it.

Another big motivator is the chance to do cool stuff, and often. Tech professionals don’t want to be excluded from interesting projects and new technologies. Beyond being fun, doing cool stuff on the job also has positive career ramifications. For example, programmers who simply maintain and update code written by someone else run the risk of falling behind in their field.

Also, typical programmers would like management to listen to their ideas and concerns, then work actively to incorporate their input. Essentially, they want a voice.

Any hiring process is a two-way street and if you can speak to top candidates’ motivations, you stand a much better chance of hiring (and keeping) top tech talent.

Read the whole story here.

Why Top Talent is Worth the Investment

The most successful tech executives at companies like Netflix understand that top tech professionals are worth their weight in gold. This understanding is rooted in what is commonly referred to as “the Rock Star Principle.”

The Rock Star Principle is derived from well-known study in 1968 that involved nine entry-level programmers doing a number of coding and debugging tasks over the course of two hours. The researchers said they had anticipated best programmers outperforming their average counterpart by two or three times. However, the best programmers in the study were far superior: 20 times quicker at coding, 25 times quicker at debugging and 10 times quicker at execution than the worst programmer.

As you might imagine, the study had massive implications in the tech industry, as it drove home the notion that some programmers can be worth a lot more than their more average counterparts.

Read the whole story here.

COVID-19 Effects of Tech Professionals

One of the lesser, but not pointless negative effects of COVID-19 has been on tech professionals. In a recent survey of tech professionals from .Tech Domains, 81 percent said they are rethinking their lifestyle to accommodate changing personal needs. At least six-in-ten respondents said they are fully remote and many also said they’re more open to freelancing than they had been previously. Those who reported being “completely remote” were 12 percent “much more likely” to consider freelance work and 51 percent of those in a hybrid model said they’re “much more likely” to consider freelance work in the future.

Fortunately for these folks, the number of freelance job openings in many tech fields rose by at least 25 percent, year over year, from April to June 2020.

Read the whole story here.