Should we hire a developer?

At NCVO, we’re considering hiring a developer for the first time.

That feels a bit scary. But it also feels exciting. We want to take some time to think carefully about whether this is the right thing to do, and learn about how to do it well. In this post I’m going to share our thinking, what we are hoping to learn, and how.

If you’re reading this and you are a developer working in a charity, especially if you are the only developer hired by the organisation, we’d love to talk! (my contact details are at the bottom).

Why hire a developer?

If you’ve read my previous posts, you’ll know that we’re trying to make some ambitious changes to how NCVO makes a difference using technology. We’re rebuilding some user-facing services. We’re implementing and building new stuff in the background too.

We are working hard and we are positive about where we’re heading. But two things are proving more challenging than we anticipated:

Money

We have some great technical partners that are central to us achieving what we want to. But there’s no getting away from the fact that good agencies generally have day rates that are challenging for charities to afford.

So, we hope that having a developer in our team will help us to develop and maintain our products more cost-effectively.

Being responsive

We are committed to an iterative, test and learn approach. But working with agencies generally means booking sprints in advance. Sprints are expensive. There’s always lots in the backlog to think about bringing into a sprint. We’re getting better at planning sprints, but we’re not doing those smaller tests and iterations that could allow us to deliver value more quickly. Or that could enable us to show our colleagues what being responsive to user needs and behaviours can look like (and how exciting it can be).

So, we hope that having a developer in our team will help us to develop our products more flexibly, and with shorter test and learn cycles.

Why now?

It’s not the first time that we’ve considered hiring a developer. In the past it felt too risky because we didn’t have confidence in our knowledge and skills. We think now may be the right time, because:

1. One of the challenges we were facing was a fragmented digital portfolio, covering a range of technologies. Now we’ve rationalised and are actively developing the core of our technology in Python (including Wagtail, which is built on Django/Python).
2. We have been developing our team in other ways. We now have a head of team and two product managers with technical expertise and experience managing complex projects with our partners. It feels like we are now set up to work effectively with and support a developer in the team. And we have new technical partners who are interested in supporting us to develop our in-house skills.

What are we hoping to learn?

Although we think that this is the right next step, we want to test this assumption. And we want to learn about how to do it well, to give us the best chance of success. Because although we may want to hire a developer, from what I’ve heard it’s not necessarily easy.

There are a bunch of things that we want to learn, and assumptions that we want to test, which we’ve captured in a knowledge board. Including:

• What motivates a developer to work in-house in a charity, especially if they will be the only one?
• What is a competitive salary for a developer with the skills and experience we need?
• What development opportunities and career progression will they expect or look for? What helps them stay in their job? What keeps them motivated?
• What IT set up will they need or expect?
• What is the right balance for this role between developing new products, iterating existing products and maintaining live products?
• How will our team need to adapt to work best with and support a developer?
• What works for an in-house developer when collaborating with technical partners? For example, if joining a team with external developers for a sprint? How about code review?

To explore all of these questions (and probably more!) I’m working with Nissa Ramsay of Think Social Tech. We’ll be interviewing developers to learn from their experiences. We’ll be looking at job descriptions and vacancies. We’d also love to talk to other charity digital people that work with developers in their team.

We’ll be sharing what we learn (completely anonymised of course) in a future blog post.

If you’re reading this and you are a developer, working in a charity, we’d love to talk! Especially if:

• You are the only developer in the team
• Your charity has reasonable digital capabilities with lessons and experiences we could take on board. Perhaps you’re in a smaller, digital first organisation, or a larger organisation with a digital team including perhaps a product manager/service designer.

You can reach me on megan.griffithgray@ncvo.org.uk.

Note: after we’ve learned lots, and shared what we’ve done, if we decide to go ahead we’ll start a proper, open recruitment process. This research is completely separate to any future recruitment.