Seeking Serious Partners

   The life of a Java engineer happens in the enterprise. Heavily funded project ideas come from the executive suites and teams of engineers fan out to flesh out the requirements and get architecture on paper. These engineers tap their brains to give their employers the greatest value for their development dollars. These same engineers are not permitted to suggest new lines of business. That task and the creativity that goes with it are the qualities that the modern enterprise engineer pines for.

    In the back of their minds, as these same talented engineers sit in meetings hashing over the minutae of the current product's requirements, they are daydreaming about the features and design of the idea they had wanted to build, but can't. They are told their ideas are not in line with the company's strategic plan. Their idea is not related closely enough to the company's current domain and heaven forbid a company open new lines of business. These frustrated engineers wish they could be working on their own ideas, the place where their passion lays--but invariably they can't.
   According to Marissa Meyer--now president of Yahoo--even Google's famous 20% time to work on something the developer chooses is a fiction. Developers never get to pick what they work on--somebody else does that. That sucks, right? ew developers in a large enterprise are allowed any say in what they work on--and they hate it.

   Enter the startup with its all-hands-on-deck mentality. Every engineer is taxed to their breaking point, achieving their vision--and loving every second of it. The realities of the modern enterprise--coupled with the dream of starting something fresh and new (and maybe getting rich doing it)--equal an environment where everybody feels the itch to build a startup. The mood is ripe for services such as FounderDating. The existence of these vibrant marketplaces ensures that motivated engineers and their fellow entrepreneurs on the business side can find each other and, perhaps, build great companies.

   On another level, there is a multitude of talented engineers and a heap of companies desperate to hire them. The two parties simply cannot find each other. Yes, certainly there are sites such as Elance and ODesk that promise to eliminate the friction between startup founders looking for suitors--but that rarely seems to pan out. Why? The same reason that one can say "On the internet, nobody knows you're a dog". Any developer can claim any level of expereience, because nobody checks. In essence, on unvetted sites such as Elance and ODesk, there exists a profusion of international developers who come and go without warning, leaving unfinished projects and unsatisifed contracts in their wake. Quality on these sites remains rare and in the end many potential developers and entrepreneurs give these sites a pass. There is so little chance of finding quality talent--why bother. Developers who actually can deliver are drowned out by the frenzy of posting and offering and nothing ever gets decided. Unvetted places like Elance and ODesk do not work because there is no way to verify the quality of the vendors--other than testimonials from former customers. That too, though, can be counterfeited by networks of fake developers, all cross vouching. Surely, some work gets done on these sites but the number of dissatisfied customers are non-trivial.

The solution to both these problems remains in the union of the wide access that comes from being on the net with a process of vetting candidates. The latter vetting process counteracts the inherant weaknesses of the shotgun approach common on the Elance- and ODesk-style sites. The chance to do it right--have the freedom to innovate with the reliability of a vetted candidate pool--is what makes offerings such as Toptal have a fighting chance to incubate some great companies.