BRIAN DAILEY: Web Developer Extraordinaire

I finally got around to listening to the Nashville Feed podcast on Entrepreneurship in Nashville. It's worth listening to if you live in a middle-America city and you're a web worker.

Both Marcus Whitney and Chris Ennis addressed issues that they see facing the area: chief among them is lack of talent. Chris pointed out that there are a lot of talented developers working in healthcare. Marcus complained about local developers not having an "entrepreneurial streak" - they are happy, he says, working their day jobs and they're not really that interested in doing something new or risky.

Make something happen...

Part of this is probably true. However, I believe Chris and Marcus are a little too eager to lay blame at the feet of developers.

Why do developers in Nashville seem more interested in steady work?

Family Time. This is built into the area culture. Nashville is a family-friendly city (that's one reason I live here). Many of the developers here have families, so they're quite happy to take the 9-5 gig. That allows (most of) them to have evenings and weekends with their families, free of the fetters of the startup frantic to be the first to reach market. Startups generally require a lot more hours of work up front.

Steady Pay. Startups aren't known for their steady pay. In a city like Nashville, where venture capital money is hard to come by, most startups are based on sweat-equity. If you've got a family, it's quite difficult to go for a two or three month stretch without any pay at all.

Higher Pay. This is true up front, at least. From what I've seen of the Nashville market, pay for developers is pretty miserly. Most startups fail to recognize the exponential difference between a good developer and a newbie (as Marcus mentioned in the podcast), so they look at the vast difference in pricing ($25-$125 an hour) and, not knowing any better, go with the cheaper option. That's great for the developer just getting started, but it's bad for the high-caliber talent.

One of the primary gripes that I have with the Nashville area (and this is true of middle America in general, I think) is that there is very little appreciation for development talent. The "idea guys" see the developers as something akin to accountants: the "idea" is worth a million dollars (in reality, it's worthless), and the developers is just the wheel cog that they can plug in to make it happen. They do not value execution, and therefore they see no reason to appreciate the guys that are, ultimately, responsible for building a product.

As long as developers are just considered "cogs in the wheels", Nashville won't ever see a strong entrepreneurial development community. High-caliber developers will continue to either move elsewhere, or, as I have been doing for the past year, work remotely for companies based elsewhere. Developers who are willing to take on the additional risk of working with a startup generally want to be seen as valued partners (this is true in cases of sweat equity or just straight-up payment).

I honestly wish I had more opportunities to work with local startups. I miss the collaborative atmosphere that I was able to be a part of in NYC. I don't think you can replicate that with remote workers. But the only gigs here that I'm interested in are the ones that take development (read: execution) seriously.

Most of the other points that Marcus and Chris made in the podcast are absolutely correct. I do wish that they had discussed more issues that are relevant specifically to Nashville; you could have swapped out "Nashville" for a number of middle America cities of the same size and many of the same points would still have been applicable.