My belief is that hiring decisions are the most important ones I make, so I want to know the people I'm hiring and I want them to know me. This is going to sound cheesy and it's not one-size-fits-all, but it all comes down to cultivating relationships.
So I talk to devs via email that I've met on HN. Or on twitter. Or at <insert language here> user groups. Or via other devs. I'm interested in what they're working on...not just because I might want to hire them, but because development is interesting, right? That's why we all read HN. :) And developers rarely get to talk to people that "get" what they're doing outside of their work colleagues.
It's a great way to learn about new things. It's a great way to get questions answered when you bump up against an issue. It's a great way to help other devs when they hit a wall that you've maybe hit before. And it also a fantastic way to find guys you think might want to work with you and vice versa.
I know that sounds really kumbaya, and it probably doesn't scale or whatever. But I'm not trying to be a huge enterprise software company that has revenues in the gazillions. I'm just trying to be a small shop that does really amazing work and is a place where really good geeks love to work.
I'm ok with having a distributed team; in an ideal world we'd be able to get together physically more than we do. But if there's an amazing talent in Seattle or someplace else really far from where I live I'm not going to let geographic separation keep me from working with that person.
But...I definitely don't have it all figured out for sure...half the time I feel like that xckd strip where the guy freaks out as he's signing his mortgage loan because he still thinks about how cool it would be to be Batman.
So I talk to devs via email that I've met on HN. Or on twitter. Or at <insert language here> user groups. Or via other devs. I'm interested in what they're working on...not just because I might want to hire them, but because development is interesting, right? That's why we all read HN. :) And developers rarely get to talk to people that "get" what they're doing outside of their work colleagues.
It's a great way to learn about new things. It's a great way to get questions answered when you bump up against an issue. It's a great way to help other devs when they hit a wall that you've maybe hit before. And it also a fantastic way to find guys you think might want to work with you and vice versa.
I know that sounds really kumbaya, and it probably doesn't scale or whatever. But I'm not trying to be a huge enterprise software company that has revenues in the gazillions. I'm just trying to be a small shop that does really amazing work and is a place where really good geeks love to work.