Talk about a reset button. (Image: screencap)

Startups and established tech companies alike love nothing so much as feeding their employees. How else does one keep developers tied to their desks for those all-night coding sprints? However, just a few days of eating at one's desk and the filth starts to build up--pizza grease, Cheeto dust, and let's not even discuss the trauma of soaking one's setup in cold coffee.

Luckily, Logitech has heard the prayers of techies everywhere and just debuted a keyboard that is washable. We're not talking a mere sponge bath, either--the demo video shows a keyboard fully immersed in a tank of water. Finally, freedom from the consequences of our lunch-related decisions.

Surely it's only a matter of time before we see this added to the standard array of Silicon Alley/Valley perks. At the very least, it'll do more for the quality of one's worklife than a Segway.

(h/t @Farhad Manjoo)

The scene of the gathering, during last year's Dumbo Arts Festival. (Photo: flickr.com/glans)

We knew Dumbo's vacancy rates were low, but we hadn't realized they were this low. The Wall Street Journal reports that yesterday Dumbo techies gathered at an unusual outdoor watering hole: Underneath the Manhattan Bridge.

Perhaps the roar of the traffic overhead provides a kind of natural white noise?

Office-sharing startup Loosecubes organized the event, setting up shop with the three essential ingredients for an outdoor summit of tech folk: picnic tables, Wifi and beer. The Dumbo Improvement District also participated, but it sounds like this little shindig was primarily about selling folks on the beauty of flexible office space. After all, the company does start charging fees this fall:

While large companies like Google Inc. and Facebook Inc. have offices in pricey neighborhoods such as Chelsea and Midtown, younger tech entrepreneurs want a laid-back, almost entertaining atmosphere for work. What's more, they don't want to commit to one location.

"We think of our customers a lot as local nomads," said Campbell McKellar, founder of Loosecubes.

Careful there, Ms. McKellar. Given the nature of this promotion, you might not want to harp too hard on the concept of your customers as transients.

It also sounds like this perhaps wasn't the most productive afternoon these folks have ever had:

Most of about 50 casually dressed people at the event Thursday stood around drinking beer and eating sandwiches at what sometimes felt like a festive cookout. But a group of about a dozen toiled away at four picnic benches littered with empty iced coffee cups.

That said, developers working while their non-technical coworkers socialize probably isn't entirely unheard of for a summer Thursday, either.

If the concept appeals, the event will be held every Thursday for the rest of August.

Rise and shine! (Photo:flickr.com/waferboard)

This man is not happy with Facebook: "Your team doesn’t seem to understand that being “good negotiators” vs implying that you will destroy someone’s business built on your “open platform” are not the same thing." [Dalton Caldwell]

Ears perked up over in Mountain View at this public display of unhappiness on the part of developers. [All Things D]

Speaking of Facebook, the company finally admitted it's got more fakes than a sorority house. [CNET]

Today, in patent-suit potshots: Apple accuses Samsung of “bad faith litigation misconduct.” [Businessweek]

Two boosters of the local tech scene would like cheaper apartments. Honey, spit in one hand, wish in the other. [Forbes]

In L.A., too many city hall employees are using their work computers to watch the Olympics. [LA Times] 

Mitt Romney is not a member of the "thumb tribe," which is apparently a thing. [Politico]

But we’ll get to that.

Much like unicorns or rent-controlled apartments, software engineers are a rare, fascinating breed. Many are sensitive to sunlight, only wear hoodies and boast a blood composition of 90 percent Mountain Dew. Unencumbered by emotional irrationality, they operate primarily on logic, using highly complicated algorithmic equations to make even the simplest of decisions, like which sushi place to order from. They are obsessive, strange and brilliant, and they make some of the most beloved products in our modern world.

But cultivating a happy developer requires special attention and care: you can't just toss them into a new office environment armed with a cheap tote bag and a laptop riser and expect them to come up with the next Facebook. Both early-stage startups and established technology companies have recognized the creature comforts that are key to attracting and retaining talented developers, and they are far from the typical yearly pizza party that most employees are used to.

“Developers, especially the ones I worked with [at Rackspace], tend to really like being able to sit in front of computers and write code all the time,” said Marisa Keegan, a corporate culture consultant who used to work as a “Culture Maven” at Rackspace. “They don't want to be interrupted or be pulled away from that task of writing code, so flexible work hours are necessary.”

Free food is also a major draw for companies hoping to keep devs happy. “Not to stereotype, but they were young single guys who didn't really want to have to cook their own food, so if we had food for them, they loved it,” said Ms. Keegan.

At the startup at which this reporter used to work, the office was decked out with a ping pong table, a fully stocked fridge and top-notch computer accessories. We were also privy to occasional company treats, like an ergonomic advisor, a masseuse and free pizza every Friday.

Forrst founder and CEO Kyle Bragger told Betabeat over email that he had seen the following first hand: “Those keg machines, workout equipment, booze, nap pods, arcade games, motorized standing desks and treadmills you stand on while working.”

At Asana, a collaborative information managing application, each employee gets $10,000 to customize their workspace, which leaves us to wonder: how much does a Sports Illustrated calendar cost these days? Jason Throckmorton, one of Asana's PR folks, clarified over email that the $10k is meant to cover the cost of a workstation, like a laptop, a mouse, etc. And, admittedly, ergonomically-friendly office chairs don’t come cheap. Tal Safran, a freelance developer at Branch, proudly sent us a picture of his swag-looking $500 home office chair.

Referral programs are also a way that companies encourage developers to bring their talented dev friends into the fold. Plus, it’s easier to keep engineers happy when their friends are around.

“We do have the obvious ping-pong table and well-stocked kitchen. We're big on coffee here: Stumptown or Grady's Coldbrew,” said Annie Werner, a community coordinator at Tumblr. “But perhaps one of the coolest perks is our ‘Refer Madness’ program. Basically, if you make a successful referral, then you get to pick a fun/interesting ‘adventure" you’d like to have for a day, and Tumblr will pay for it. It might be just you, or include other members of your team. A few people cashed in on their Refer Madness bonuses together recently so that we could all take a company field trip to Medieval Times.” (Oh, what we’d do to see David Karp jousting with costumed knights in a gold paper crown.)

And let’s not forget the company-labeled swag, of course.

“T-shirts were a really big deal for Rackers,” said Ms. Keegan. “We had t-shirts for every occasion. One of the projects I worked on was a new recruiting campaign. We interviewed employees and asked them what drew them to work for Rackspace, and one of the developers said, ‘If it weren't for all the free shirts, I’d have to come to work naked.’ So that actually became one of our recruiting campaign for software developers.”

Google is famous for its swath of drool-worthy perks offered at the legendary Googleplex, the company's Silicon Valley headquarters. Employees enjoy daily meals prepared by world-class chefs, special rooms designated for taking naps, sporadically-placed massage chairs and even Japanese toilets with seat warmers and built-in bidets. In the summer, you can take a dip in the wave pool that lies smack in the middle of the Googleplex. This reporter has seen these things with her own eyes! And they are magnificent.

“I love Google's perks but I by no means feel I MUST have any of them,” said Mike LeBeau, a senior software engineer at Google, in an email. “I think a lot of the perks are really effective and a very smart way to keep employees happy and productive.”

While the food and games are great, some developers don't require material goods as much as a relaxed company culture to get their coding juices flowing. You know, like a place that's okay with bare feet.

“I take my shoes off,” said Mr. Safran. “It's not necessary, but way more comfy.”

Whatever works.

Yes, here is how ESPN plans on attracting the best developing talent in the world to their company and their API:

Okay, okay. To be fair, they added a parenthetical:

Still, note the distinguishment between "nerds" and "awesome sports stuff," as if

(A) Nerds are incapable of doing anything but servicing "awesome sports stuff."
(B) "Awesome sports stuff" and "nerds" are generally mutually exclusive.
(C) They still have yet to fully process that thing with the hands and the eyes and the imaginary books the two guys on the Knicks keep doing. Maybe they're making fun of "nerds"?
(D) They've run out of the creative force used to bring racist Asian puns into the equation because all of those resources have been devoted to covering Jeremy Lin, so they just decided to malign other people besides Jeremy Lin known for their mental dexterity.

Either way, here's hoping some "nerds" show ESPN's API what kind of "awesome sports stuff" they can build, like a single-serving app that launches a DDoS on Bristol, or something that prevents Chris Bermann from getting his third and fourth lunches.

[Further insight from Mr. Langer here.]

fkamer@observer.com | @weareyourfek

The company is based in Irvine, California, but recently opened an office in New York. With the office expansion of companies like Google and Twitter, says CyberCoders CTO Matt Miller, “We are seeing a significant demand for various types of web development, as well as candidates who manage projects and the sales team to support those efforts.” Startups are unlikely to ask a staffing firm for help with hiring up, but their numbers offer a nice overview of coveted jobs and compensation.

Based on data from job postings, client input, and salary ranges from its database of candidates, the company says the top ten tech jobs in New York City for 2012 are:

1. PHP Developer, $96,071
2. Sales Engineer, $106,500
3. Java Developer, $104,500
4. Network Engineer, $103,750
5. Sales Manager, $86,250
6. Project Manager, $78,333
7. Ruby Developer, $106,667
8. Python Developer, $103,333
9. Mobile/Web Engineer, $85,000
10. Product Manager, $97,500

If you're going after New York's most poachable technophiles, of course, you're gonna need to up the ante.

Big time multi-tasker

Twitter just acquired a bunch of top-notch Silicon Alley engineering talent with their purchase of real time search firm Julpan, adding about a dozen staffers, including some high level Xooglers. The company also opened up an official NYC office a few months back.

Now they are making New York part of their whistle stop developer tour, hosting a Twitter "Tea Time" at betaworks with some help from the folks at SocialFlow.

"There’s a lot going on in the ecosystem and we’d like to take this chance to share the highlights with you - including the latest developments with the platform, areas of opportunity that we’re seeing, and a heavy focus on the iOS 5 Twitter integration for developers," wrote Twitter's Jason Costa. "We’ll also be holding a Q&A session with members of the platform team, plus time to hang out with each other."

Over time betaworks, which focuses on the real-time web, has become closely aligned with a big part of the Twitter ecosystem. It's bit.ly links count for a big percentage of shortened links on Twitter and Tweetdeck has now been acquired and integrated directly into Twitter. Now they are actively helping the company to build a better relationship with NY's developer community.

Nike for Nerds

When Ken Little left The New York Times to work for fast growing New York startup Etsy, the company had an engineering team of around 15 people. Over the last year and a half Mr. Little has helped to recruit and manage an engineering team that now numbers over 80. A big part of that has been re-imagining the developer culture and workflow for a site that now does over $300 million in gross annual sales on more than a billion page views.

"I joined when the company was at the tail end of using you typical development workflow, some derivative of waterfall that just wasn't working," said Mr. Little to an audience of young developers at the Times Open Series last week. "We needed to create an environment that encouraged experimentation and speed without sacrificing quality."

These days the team at Etsy is deploying their code base as often as thirty times per day with small iterative changes. "Our maxim is, if you're not coding, be a catalyst," said Mr. Little, who admitted he sometimes felt a little useless moving from the hands on work of writing code all day to managing a team of engineers. "We want to a situation where there is no barrier to entry for people from design, product or front end who can contribute to the code base."

The way companies think about coding has to be radically different than it was a decade earlier, says Mr. Little. "The web is not installed software. We want people to commit daily to the trunk, to ship that daily, and to have as few branches as possible." Etsy graphs everything to measure what works, from bugs to downtime to pots of coffee consumed.

They use a whitelist system to push half-baked code out to small teams without scaring the crap out of the entire staff. And they set a pretty low bar for pushing code live. "If you've got a feature or change you want to test, we can impliment on 1% of our user base. If it moves the metric it was supposed to, then we know its worth trying at scale."

Mr. Little's full presentation is embedded below.

A real head-scratcher.

If you asked Betabeat about our idea of a good time, applying for jobs would be nowhere near it. In fact, we'd rank the act of writing cover letters, selling yourself to prospective employers and getting scrutinized across the interview table somewhere closer to "The Worst."

Not so Austrian developer Nikolaus Gebhardt. Although happily self-employed running a game-related software development start-up, Mr. Gebhardt revealed an oddball habit on his blog Irrlicht3d.org (named after the open source 3D graphics engine.) His dirty little secret? He applies for programming jobs without any intention of taking them. And he likes it!:

"It 's not that I don't have a job, or that I don't like what I do, but since I am self employed and running my own company I have the feeling that I am coming out of touch of what the current job market is like, and so I started to apply for jobs at different companies once in a while. Just to keep in mind how this is like and for the fun of it."

Other things that Mr. Gebhardt enjoys apparently include being taking down a notch by strangers:

"I think this is also a good training should I need to be employed again in the near future: As 'CEO' of your own company, you tend to become a bit arrogant and tend to get an exaggerated opinion of yourself. Doing job interviews helps you to keep down to reality a bit."

Thanks to Mr. Gebhardt's masochistic tendencies, however, he has a good vantage point from which to assess changes in the recruiting climate for developers. Though years of applying for jobs (he doesn't need or necessarily want), Mr. Gebhardt started to see a pattern:

"I noticed that all this has changed a bit: Human resources divisions of companies tend to treat applicants like meat and recruiting agencies don't even know what kind of people they are looking for . . . If a recruiter seriously asks me for a clearance certificate by the police for a job as website back-end programmer, then I won't apply for the job. If you want me to program a puzzle test for several hours just to apply for your company's crappy underpaid job, then no, sorry. If you want me to fill out your custom online application web form with about 50 fields where half of the comboBoxes don't contain the values which would be correct for me, then I simply apply for a job at a different company."

Recruiters, let's try to show Mr. Gebhardt a better time, shall we? After all, this is what he does for shits and giggles.