Of course we could probably find someone fairly easy if we would hire anyone who walked in the door and said "yay Delphi!".
Having such a small team means each person has a huge impact. Hiring a poor fit can be a net negative on the team and thus we'd be better without.
We've had poor experience with remote workers, including ourselves during corona lockdown, so we want someone who can be at the office at least 2-3 days a week. And they'll need to be competent in Norwegian, as most of the gov't documentation and customer interactions will be in Norwegian. So that narrows the pool quite a lot.
We've tried not specifying the language in the job ads, and have almost everyone turn away when they ask and we tell. Clearly many are worried about taking on an unknown, and how that will reflect on their CV.
As for taking months to be productive, that's certainly my experience. Obviously getting productive in Delphi doesn't take much time, our two latest hires had zero Delphi background, mainly Java or Python, but after a couple of courses they were good enough to commit solid work.
However what we need, due to our size, is that our devs can get a task, then go design and develop the solution on their own. Maybe ask some clarifying questions to team leader or customer along the way, but no hand-holding. This requires both acquiring domain knowledge and learning our existing code base.
Personally that took about a year or so, and I didn't get really good at it until after two years. This matches well with those who got hired after me.
Just curious, do you understand why you had difficulty with remote work yourselves? Remote work seems like it should be a good fit for jobs with rare language requirements; a lot of companies had fine experiences with remote work during the lockdowns; would be worth seeing if you could root out what the problem was.
> Just curious, do you understand why you had difficulty with remote work yourselves?
I've been trying to think a bit about it. So far what I got is mainly two-fold. The big one is that people seem to find it far easier to ask the colleague in the next office over when they're stuck, compared to over Teams. And it's far easier to tell people about new features you've implemented over lunch or similar.
I also much harder to direct someone over Teams, or illustrate, compared to pointing at their screen and tell them what to do or quickly drawing some flow chart on a piece of paper while together, so teaching is more difficult. We a brand new hire just before the lockdowns hit, so we noticed this very well.
Also you miss out on listening in on the corridor chats. There's quite a lot of stuff I pick up on just by listening in on the other devs or support chatting in the corridor. Oh those customers want something very similar to the feature X I'm working on right now? Let's join the chat and see if we can't satisfy two customers for the price of one. That kinda stuff.
I'm pretty sure if we had been fully geared and prepared for remote work it could work much better, but I do think it requires a different mindset and different management style.
> Oh those customers want something very similar to the feature X I'm working on right now? Let's join the chat and see if we can't satisfy two customers for the price of one.
Perhaps, and our team lead which also has the product manager hat catches many such scenarios, or we catch it during our team meetings.
But like I said we've got hundreds of customer-specific features and integrations, it's hard to catch everything, so no need to defer things when one of us devs can shortcut the process.
Having such a small team means each person has a huge impact. Hiring a poor fit can be a net negative on the team and thus we'd be better without.
We've had poor experience with remote workers, including ourselves during corona lockdown, so we want someone who can be at the office at least 2-3 days a week. And they'll need to be competent in Norwegian, as most of the gov't documentation and customer interactions will be in Norwegian. So that narrows the pool quite a lot.
We've tried not specifying the language in the job ads, and have almost everyone turn away when they ask and we tell. Clearly many are worried about taking on an unknown, and how that will reflect on their CV.
As for taking months to be productive, that's certainly my experience. Obviously getting productive in Delphi doesn't take much time, our two latest hires had zero Delphi background, mainly Java or Python, but after a couple of courses they were good enough to commit solid work.
However what we need, due to our size, is that our devs can get a task, then go design and develop the solution on their own. Maybe ask some clarifying questions to team leader or customer along the way, but no hand-holding. This requires both acquiring domain knowledge and learning our existing code base.
Personally that took about a year or so, and I didn't get really good at it until after two years. This matches well with those who got hired after me.