In this recent post to his blog Brandon Savage offers a few suggestions on how you can "sell" your company to developers and get their best work out of them (because they want to do their best).

Lots of marketing students and sales professionals each year are required to read the book How To Win Friends And Influence People and for good reason: the book stands alone as one of the greatest books on sales ever. I decided to co-opt the title of that great book for this entry, because I want to talk about how to sell your company to developers – particularly, how to get the best developers to do the best work and make your company, well, the best at whatever it is that you do.

He suggests five things that you can do to help your developers and company along the path to success:

• Developers are not interchangeable
• Use the best tools, whether or not they’re free
• Nothing can make up for bad managers
• Technical people should be led by technical managers
• Identifying a developer’s skills and placing that developer properly is crucial

For as much as gender shouldn't be an issue in IT, sadly it still is. There's differences between men and women in our industry and Elizabeth Naramore has written up a post looking at some of those differences, the gender balance in the IT market and what can be done about the unfortunate shift its seeing towards fewer and fewer women in IT (and in her more specific examples, the PHP community).

I know many women don't get that far to make it to a conference or user group meeting. For one reason or another, they choose to skip the community bonding, leave an open source project after contributing, or maybe even leave the industry altogether. In fact, we're leaving in droves. I couldn't help but wonder to myself what those reasons were, so I embarked on my own little research project.

She looks at the IT job market overall, the distribution of the "gender numbers" in it and why some of it might be happening. She also asks why the gender difference should even matter and what can be done to help keep things even across the board.

She's done an excellent job on both researching and writing up some of the differing perspectives of the IT industry as viewed through a female's eyes and what both those women and the communities that want to draw them in can do.