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We are 3 partners and friends based in Milan, Italy, who started a crowdsourcing site which allows academics to work on short-term assignments.

We launched in March of this year, and managed to get a small funding (€55k) and grew the platform to ~1,600 academic users. We generated our first revenue and now want to take it to the "next level"; now here is the catch: none of us are coders (we developed with a third-party company). To optimise the platform going forward, we really need 1 or 2 young enthusiastic coders who would like to get involved (should have known this before but we learn as we go :)); of course we would pay an appropriate salary and provide equity exposure if things work well.

Surfing the internet here in there, it seems relatively easy to find people in the US, London or even Berlin, but how do we find coders for a project in Milan?

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3 Answers

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Who do you need exactly? What are the requirements for the position? How do you plan on technically interviewing the candidates if you are not coders?

I was "a young enthusiastic coder" myself not so long ago, based in other EU country. When I searched for a job I just copied my (fairly niche) skills into google and one company based in... wait for it... Milan came up high in the results with a matching job offer :) I applied, took a 2 hour flight for an interview and got the job. But I see a serious problem with Milan for any "young enthusiastic coder" - the accommodation is expensive (plus you need to pay much more up front than in other countries), which directly translates into low standard of living. Unless you adjust the salaries accordingly, which in turn makes the point of developing in-house less attractive.

To sum up, getting the people to send in CVs is the least of your problems. I could easily place your job add for free on a high volume programming forum.

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Thank you! Answering your points: the skills are: • Excellent Javascript/HTML/CSS/Ajax coding skills; • Good JQuery • Deep knowledge in Spring MVC Framework; • Experience in Glassfish Application Server; • EJB and Java Persistence API; • CSS-based design, cross-browser compatibility. To interview, you are right, a bit of leap of faith, but we will look into what the person has done before and we have a coder friend who can help us with the technical bit of the interview. the most important is finding someone who likes us, the project and wants to give it a real go - and that we can judge :) – user1073693 Dec 1 '11 at 16:28
Tranalates into: Not a junior coder, if willnig to travel translates into why should he work for you and not take money from a serious business as freelancer? – NetTecture Dec 1 '11 at 16:28
And I am even starting to believe that, given the stage where we are, even if it is not optimal, the coder could also be from somewhere else in Europe (at least the same time zone!) and work on it as a paid part-time project - then if it works well and we grow further we can think of the next stage - just thinking creatively. By the way, I think it is destiny that you work with a Milan company - are you sure you are not a young enthusiastic coder any more :)? – user1073693 Dec 1 '11 at 16:35
to NetTecture: we will pay an appropriate salary for his effort (in the context of a start-up!), so ~Eur1,500 a month and it can be a part-time arrangement (though needs to be consistent!). plus the right person for us would also naturally attach some weight to the prospect of being in start-up which has a high risk-adjusted return (little chance of disproportionably high pay-out) – user1073693 Dec 1 '11 at 16:41
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Here aer your two jokes: 1500 EUR is a joke for someone with this skill set (i.e. you dont pay - noone cares what you CAN care, people want their worth) and second "it can be part time" means "you cant have a full time job, so you get scrapped there, too". It is VERY hard to find a paying customer to utilize the "other part", hiring professinal coders is normally full time or not at all. Especialyl with a little chacne of... better start finding a way to pay market rate. As in: check your local hiring office what those people earn. Hint: 1500 a WEEK may be more appropriate. – NetTecture Dec 1 '11 at 17:00
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up vote 1 down vote

Are any of your clients CS majors? If you can find a happy client that can code your site, you might be able to convince them to invest time in a project they believe in (yours).

I am not form Italy, so I don't know the echo-system for programers, and I assume that you can do a better job finding their meetups, Quora, Facebook/LinkedIn groups and the likes... Join these groups, post what you are looking for, and crowdsource your way into finding the talent you need.

These guys might be more relevant then this community, as they are Italians.

Good luck with your site!

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Thank you, RonGa, much appreciated! Unfortunately, we dont yet have good CS clients; but we will definitevely post on the Italian Q&A site. – user1073693 Dec 5 '11 at 7:18
up vote 0 down vote

I live in Genova. I found my current job -numerical programmer @ IIT- through indeed.com. I also applied to a few calls in www.monster.it.

I'm saying this because if I did try to find a job using these tools -and found it!- you may use them to hire. They work perfectly in Italy.

BTW, SE is read worldwide! you only need english.

A presto!

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Grazie mille! We have indeed used them and so far got a decent bunch of CVs (15) from which we will now pick from. Non e' per caso hai qualche amico programmatore con il pallino delle start-up:)? (main language is Java) – user1073693 Dec 5 '11 at 7:14

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