When we decided to hire to some help for the design and copy writing on our web site, I was particularly pleased with the hunting references Anita came up with for our recruitment services at RubyFocus. What does it take to hire a Rails Developer?

I've long believed that Rails is the perfect recession technology because when you do things the Rails way, your productivity is just so much higher than with other frameworks. I'll write another blog post to dissect the reasons for that. For now, I'm just observing that the industry seems to agree with me, because we continue to see strong demand for experienced Rails talent which continues to be short in supply. It's a rare week when I don't receive a couple of recruiter inquiries for some sort of Rails job.

So for developers offering their services, Rails is a seller's market. In any such situation the one in demand has a choice and can afford to be picky. And Rails developers are.

What to do if you're trying to hire? Our web designer speaks of "proper gestures"--I love that phrase. What do developers ultimately want? It's not much different from any human working on a team and project. They want to be respected for their talent, they want to know that their potential will be put to good use, they want to grow and continue to learn. Simple really.

It thus boggles my mind when a job candidate recently told us that an agency he was represented by asked him questions like "Do you code?" and that although he listed on his resume a dozen API's and technologies he has recently used. How recruiters like that stay in business is a mystery to me.

What's more important is that "proper gestures" doesn't stop at reading the resume. We find candidates don't want to work in places where they are forced to override their better judgment to do things that they know for a fact will cause trouble 3 months down the road. Experienced developers understand "technical debt" like the backs of their hands, because they've been there paying it off. See how Ward Cunningham explains this term. High technical debt is the opposite of "code integrity" a phrase my business partner Eric at RubyFocus has coined, and just like high debt, low integrity will get you in trouble.

Developers know they're in trouble if you ask them to take the seat belts off while going 100 mph down the highway, which is the equivalent of telling them to skimp on tests during crunch time. It causes actual fear in people, because they'll get blamed for problems later, and that fear often leads to frustration and anger. No way to create a habitat!

When our web designer Anita speaks of "certain cues" this is what she means. DHH in his 2008 keynote speech at RailsConf talked about that the work you do today is really to set up you in a better place for tomorrow. I believe in that. Do you? How do you convey this to your developers and job candidates? How do you entice them? Do you have the decisiveness to act so you can reap the results?