Your Developer Can Sleep When He/She is Dead

3 min read,
Published Jan 13, 2012

Yes, they will. Your developer will sleep when he or she is tired and dead. For one of 2 reasons: either you’ve worked them to the point where they can’t write another line of code or maybe, just maybe you’ve made them actually excited about the project. It’s your choice, not only theirs.

Developers are in fact a special breed. A friend of mine was looking for a developer for his startup so he invited me for coffee to see if I could help him find one. He wasn’t sure what he actually needed: which skills or technologies his developer needed to have or how to find them. What he needed was actually a co-founder, a CTO and he had no idea what that meant.

Passion 1.0

There were 2 steps he could take. One was the natural option: hiring a developer and giving him a set of features to develop. That may lead to a working application, but not a great one. The other was something that most people, who have never spent time with code creating friends, don’t figure out until it’s late. A designer is excited about the right color, a business guy about the right payment model and a developer is no different… A new technology they can try, a new code set, an experiment that might fail.

So, when you’re not sure about how to fire up your developer:

  • Find a unique problem that they can solve while working on that “simple” app;
  • Find a new technology they might try out with it;
  • Just read Hacker News comments;
  • Go to StackExchange.

Remember, you’re not talking to developers – you’re always talking to hackers!

Their Choice, Your Happiness and a Great Project

While big companies will take the safe route and use technologies they are 100% certain of, you don’t have to. Want a great app? Find what excites and drives your future developer and give him the freedom to realize your ideas in the way that you might not have even imagined. You don’t know PHP in any case, so why stick with it?

Because your developer will indeed sleep when they are dead. Hopefully, not because you’re driving them crazy with unrealistic milestones but because they want to develop the next big thing on their terms as well as your’s.

What’s your tip for “dealing” with developers, those special someone’s in your (professional web) life.

Ivan Brezak Brkan