On FogCreek.com they've posted a new interview they recorded with PHP community member Cal Evans about how to find, hire and retain developers for your business.

We’ve interviewed Cal Evans, author of ‘Culture of Respect’, and we discuss how to find, hire, and retain Developers. He gives tips on where to find great developers, how to write job ads which appeal to them and how best to interview them. We also discuss ways to build a great team culture that can help startups and growing businesses compete with the big guys for talent.

You can catch the interview in a few different ways - either through the in-page video recording, audio-only over on SoundCloud or you can download it for listening offline.

Cal Evans has posted a great tongue-in-cheek post to his blog today giving reasons why you shouldn't hire PHP community members to work at your company.

It is no secret that I spend a lot of time promoting the PHP Community. It is a vibrant, helpful and friendly community and I’ve said before that I believe it to be one of the most important asserts of the PHP language. I’m also a realist though; I’ve built teams and I’ve hired developers. [...] I have experience in this area and I have strong opinions. I am going to share one of those opinions with you right now: Don’t hire developers who are active members of the PHP Community.

His list of "don't hire" reasons are:

• PHP community members solve problems
• If they can’t solve a problem, they usually know who can
• They love to show off
• They make their employers look good at conferences.
• They work for free

For each topic, he gives a brief summary explaining its relation to the "don't hire" mentality. Reading between the lines, you'll see his true message, though - PHP community members have a lot to offer you and your business. Their visibility and experience (and connections) can only benefit the work they do.

On Reddit.com there's a recent post asking about testing developers as a part of the hiring process and how difficult it should be.

I developed an exercise for applicants. They must use an open source framework to make a simple bulletin board. It requires account creation, login, thread creation, message creation, unread message indication per thread, and logout. Every applicant is given this exercise after passing an initial test. The initial test is a simple disqualifier and is not challenging for anyone not lying on their resume.

There's some great discussion in the comments about things like the suggested time limit, opinions on other methods that could yield the same results, thoughts on the validity of even taking the test based on the level of the job. The popular opinion, though, is that it's too much work for an applicant to go through unless there's a very specific need. As one commentor put it:

Most of the excellent programmers will have jobs. Those that don't will probably have several options (unless you're in a very small market) for where to work. When it comes down to applying to the place that wants you to spend a bunch of your own time on their application, or some other company... They'll go with some other company.

The Builder.com.au site has a new article posted today about Open Source developers and why your company could benefit from adding them to your workforce.

Some companies are afraid that hiring an open source developer would be a liability - possibly reverse engineering their proprietary software and then releasing forked versions into the community. Although these may sound like justifiable fears, they overlook some very important benefits that come with hiring open source developers. Let's take a look at some good reasons to hire open source developers.

They list the five reasons (from a business perspective) companies shouldn't be afraid of adding Open Source developers to their teams:

• You can see more than their resumes.
• Open source developers have had to think on their toes and patch the programs that Microsoft has (often times) intentionally broken.
• Open source developers are [generally] very passionate about what they do.
• Along with an open source developer you will enjoy open source support.
• And like adopting any open source project, you will save money.

If you're a developer out there and are looking for that next job (contract or otherwise), you might check out this advice from Cal Evans as to what he, a hiring manager in the past, has looked for in a developer's resume.

am often asked to take a look at friends resume to give pointers on how that can make it more effective. Invariably, my advice is the same, so I'll share it here. When I was a manager and in charge of hiring, your resume had to get my attention for me to even consider it. If you got my attention, you had a much better chance at getting the job. That's the secret: get my attention, and get the job.

He points out that the usual situation is one manager to a large group of applicants. You may see the job post once, but so do 30 other people and you're all trying to grab attention. What's his recommendation? Brevity. Keep the first page short then dive deep behind that. There's more great tips in the rest of the post.

Richard Thomas has ventured out into a new consulting venture that he's announced today:

As I mentioned in the prior post I am pretty much a "Jack of all Trades" when it comes to website development. [...] So with that I have revived my consulting company under the name PHPJack, my website is http://www.phpjack.com.

Plus, not only has the company been launched but he's already looking for other developers to hire on and help him with "a couple projects" that are already in the works. Send him a resume at richard [at] phpjack.com if you're interested (Seattle area only).

Andi Gutmans has good news for anyone out thre that has wanted to get involved with the Zend Framework on a more official level - they're looking to grow the core team:

Zend Framework has become an immensely successful project. [...] There's a large community of contributors, over 15 translations of the documentation and runs some cool apps like IBM's QedWiki. We are currently looking to grow the team with very experienced Senior Web developers, both from within and outside the PHP community.

Those interested should look forward to working in a "broad, vibrant and passionate community". Check out the full job description for more information.

Andi Gutmans has good news for anyone out thre that has wanted to get involved with the Zend Framework on a more official level - they're looking to grow the core team:

Zend Framework has become an immensely successful project. [...] There's a large community of contributors, over 15 translations of the documentation and runs some cool apps like IBM's QedWiki. We are currently looking to grow the team with very experienced Senior Web developers, both from within and outside the PHP community.

Those interested should look forward to working in a "broad, vibrant and passionate community". Check out the full job description for more information.