Lately there has been the trend of creating job-posting boards and job-newsletters with a strong focus on the startup scene in Berlin. And if you look closely you’ll find the bigger amount of job postings there are for tech positions, very often the “CTO” even offered shares. As a result I lately got asked more often, “shall we post this on this new platform/blog/newsletter XXX? It seems pretty slick and nice. What do you think?”. My answer is simple and clear: “Don’t. Stop wasting your money. That won’t bring you anything.”

Don’t get me wrong, I am not just arguing against them because they are new and not established as a brand but they simply don’t work. That is rooted in the fact that they address only a symptom but not the actual problem. Sure, what you as a Founder/CEO of a startup see is that very few people apply and sure more exposure in general gives you more people to apply. But the actual problem behind so few good developers knocking on your door is very simply that there are rather few really good developers out there in the first place. This is a market, where every year more open positions are added than people graduate in the field.

So as a Developer I don’t really have to look for a job. If I want out, I tell a few of my friends and have dozens of offers by the end of the week. And I do that, causally, way before I’ve consciously decided to actually leave. On top almost every offer from any half established company is better than those by startups, just talking about the salary, 20%-projects, the infrastructure and teams to work with. So why would any developer ever sign up for a job-postings newsletter? That sounds like a rather silly idea.

Similar to job posting Blogs or platforms: with dozens of recruiting agencies requests a week, why would I even start searching in the first place? And you think, what I would by typing into Google then would be “job developer startups berlin”? Because otherwise I wouldn’t find those new, young sites but only those established brands with huge Adwords and SEO money.

Side note: On top, if you are looking for a CTO and some shares and even some salary along the line but you can’t even say what it is about, you lost already. What such a posting means is, you have nothing, no money, no team, hell you were not even able to convince one tech person to go along yet. And you want the bigger part of the pie? Seriously, tech people are not stupid.

The root of the problem is that too few start and do actual programming. There are just too few people out there doing it and until we change our education to foster and nature these skills in comparison with business and entrepreneurship-skills, there won’t be more. And no job board is going to change that. So instead, go out there, find someone who becomes as passionate about your idea as you are but don’t waste any money on those platforms.