[bluedino]

We're a web development company in a 'company town' where everyone seems to work for a single Fortune 50 company. You think it'd be easy to hire developers away when you offer good pay and benefits, 4.5 day work weeks, flexible hours, casual dress code, and we buy you whatever hardware you want.

We don't get a single qualified applicant. We use Ruby and Javascript, it's a ~ 25 person company so you can make a difference, you can work on iOS or Android stuff. If you only know a different programming language, we'll still hire you and let you learn if you can prove you're competent.

We're not silicon valley or a 'cool' city, but we're near a few state universities. I guess people would rather sit in a cube, in a suit, while they work on legacy internal apps in VB and .Net for a cold, dark corporation and wait 20 minutes each morning in line at the security gate just to get on the damn property.

[Spooky23]

It's a risk reward thing. I'm one of those company town people. You put up with a certain amount of nonsense in a big company, but you get stability, career path, great benefits, etc.

Small companies aren't nirvana, and if there are few small companies, you're taking a big risk that you're stepping into an organization where the owner's dumb nephew will be made an SVP over you. In the valley, you jump ship. In the "company town", you need to uproot and move.

[vonmoltke]

I saw this attitude quite a bit at the large defense contractor I used to work for. As in your case, I'm in an area without much of a small-company tech culture[1]. Additionally, this area saw a big telecom surge during the dot-com bubble. A number of people left for telecoms large and small during that period, then got burned on the bubble pop and came back humbled. This reinforces the culture of staying put and dealing with whatever crap the company descides to put them through.

Defense contractors are a bit of an oddity, though. Its a quasi-government job, overall the most stable private sector employment, and has excellent benefits. Someone starting at my former employer out of undergrad today does have a reasonable chance of retiring from there. It seems like the workforce is slowly distilling down to those for whom such old-style employment is highly desirable.

[1] Its slowly changing, but it seems to be mostly B2B services, marketing and advertising shops.

[olivier1664]

Just an idea: qualified applicants could preffer to work for themself.

[peacemaker]

What town are you talking about?

[bluedino]

Midland, MI