My email is in my profile if you'd like to chat. :) Hope to hear from you!

Startups do not have much money. Even the ones that do should aim to keep their burn rates low. That generally means paying for a few experienced, battle-hardened engineers that produce results instead of picking up the cheap, green labor right out of school.

Training junior engineers is important -- they are the future of our industry, but hiring a junior engineer at a startup is a recipe for disaster. Most startups simply can't afford such an expense and it would be irresponsible to try.

yeah right...

You should work on an open source project.

There are plenty of large projects that would be thrilled to have a developer who wants to tackle something more than a small bug, but you have to go find them.

Moreover, open source projects are much more deserving of your talent than the people posting on this thread trying to get some free work out of you. Don't undervalue yourself.

What are you interested in?

Personally, I have contributed to Python, Django and AngularJS because I use all three on a daily basis. Think of something that interests you and I'd be happy to help you find a project that fits your goals.

I have been solving problems with software for almost a decade and developing my skills with every new project I take on. That means you can rest assured that I have a lot of experience bringing ideas to reality and I can solve your business problems quickly and efficiently.

Project I have worked on include building web services with Python, Django, Ruby and Rails that had a collective reach of over 23 million users, crafting numerous single-page applications (SPAs) with AngularJS, Backbone, React and jQuery, and storing information on homes and user-generated events with PostgreSQL, MongoDB and Elasticsearch.

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Check out my most recent project, a Django and AngularJS tutorial called Building Web Applications with Django and AngularJS, at Thinkster.io: https://thinkster.io/brewer/angular-django-tutorial/

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Online profiles:

Github -- https://github.com/brwr Stack Overflow -- http://stackoverflow.com/users/2052923/james-brewer Hacker News -- https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=jamesbrewer

If you can believe it, I ripped out a lot of the original content to reduce the size of the tutorial!

In fact, it is my experience that most good engineers can accurately debate many concepts with which they are unfamiliar.

When you are selling high-priced products to consumers you have to sell an idea first and your product second. Let me offer an example.

I used to sell beds. Selling expensive beds to your every day person is really hard, because they are so expensive. Who is going to spend $7,500 for a luxury Tempur Pedic when they could get cheap mattresses from Big Co for $300? Eventually, I gave up trying to sell beds. It was just a waste of time because nobody every bought them.

Then something interesting happened: somebody gave me the advice I gave you.

You see, when you are selling something expensive, you can't just push the product. You have to sell your customer on the experience.

How did I apply this to mattress sales? It was easy!

Did you realize that you spend approximately 33 percent of your life sleeping? Sleeping is your body's way of regenerating itself. It's the biological equivalent of turning off your laptop when it starts to overheat. It gives your muscles and tissue time to rebuild themselves. It gives your brain time to digest everything you've learned that day.

A good set of mattresses will last you 20 years. With that said, very few people go so long without replacing their bed. In reality, a bed will last about 10 years; less if the customer has a lot of money or moves frequently. But let's assume a 10 year lifespan for your new $7,500 bed.

Over ten years, that bed will cost you $2.05/day.

Now is $7,500 a lot up-front? Absolutely. But like anything else of high quality, this bed is an investment. And what an investment it is. I will bet you that a luxury Tempur Pedic will give you a better ROI than most stock traders who have been in the biz for 20 years get.

How?

Simple. Better sleep = better productivity. If you got a great night sleep every single night, do you think you could turn that extra productivity into $10 dollars each day? I know I could! If I were productive for one extra hour each day, I would make an extra $100 a day.

Assuming you make an extra $10 a day from your new found productivity, this bed will pay for itself five times over throughout its lifespan.

And so on and so on.

You see, I'm no longer selling a bed. What I'm selling is a complete experience, an investment and a new way of life. $7,500 doesn't seem so bad when it makes your life better for the next 10 years now does it?

What's the point of my rambling?

You need to avoid selling your coworkers on testing. Very few people like testing and the only sure-fire way to make somebody do something is to make them WANT to do it.

Instead, try selling them on how their lives will improve if they increase the quality of their software. Show them how they will benefit from shorter release cycles, fewer bugs, higher quality code, etc. Show your coworkers the benefit of taking the time to correctly architect a solution before they start implementing it. How does taking the time to learn and correctly use the tools at their disposal benefit THEM?

Will this be difficult? Absolutely. People don't want to change. Your job is to make them WANT to be better. There is simply no other way to accomplish your goal with any lasting impact. Sell your team on the complete experience, the investment and the new way of life.

Hope my two cents helps. :)

"People don't buy what you do, they buy why you do it". You sell the bed not based on the quality of the materials so much as the improvement that it gives to their life.