I work remotely as a manager and my staff are all around the country.  I think the advantage to being able to work from home is enormous.  You may very well find a good person who will work full-time for a "non-competitive" salary in order to not have to move from where a spouse has a good job and the kids are settled, especially if the work is interesting.  

Some of my staff are developers, and I find no disadvantage to the fact that we are all telecommuting.  We are in touch constantly via skype and other channels, have video calls regularly, and feel very much a team.  A shared project management system like Asana can help too.  

Of course, it may not work with all developers -- you need to be sure you are hiring someone who is a good communicator, self-motivated, and knows what s/he is doing.  Another caveat is that it can be harder if you have only one telecommuting employee and the rest of the team is together.  When several people are meeting in a room and one is on a speakerphone or something, that doesn't work too well.   But you can do things to ameliorate that.  

Bottom line is if you have good people, it doesn't matter where they work.

Priscilla



-----Original Message-----
From: Code for Libraries [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Kim, Bohyun
Sent: Friday, August 15, 2014 12:44 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: [CODE4LIB] Hiring strategy for a library programmer with tight budget - thoughts?

I am in a situation in which a university has a set salary guideline for programmer position classifications and if I want to hire an entry-lever dev, the salary is too low to be competitive and if I want to hire a more experienced dev in a higher classification, the competitive salary amount exceeds what my library cannot afford. So as a compromise I am thinking about going the route of posting a half-time position in a higher classification so that the salary would be at least competitive. It will get full-time benefits on a pro-rated basis. But I am wondering if this strategy would be viable or not.

Also anyone has a experience in hiring a developer to telework completely from another state when you do not have previous experience working with her/him? This seems a bit risky strategy to me but I am wondering if it may attract more candidates particularly when the position is half time.

As a current/past/future library programmer or hiring manager in IT or both, if you have any thoughts, experience, or ideas, I would really appreciate it.

Thanks,
Bohyun