An Evolutionary Approach To Staffing Software Product Teams
- Patrick Roos tl;dr: “A common pitfall that many companies face is the temptation to staff a product team quickly and from scratch with a large number of mostly external developers.” Phase (1): Lay the Foundations with a minimal team i.e. 1-3 entrepreneurial engineers and domain expert (2) Expand with precision: 1-2 engineers who match the culture and work ethic. (3) Scale through specialized feature teams.featured in #500
How To Find Great Senior Engineers
- Ken Kantzer tl;dr: Ken finds it hard to gauge experience when hiring and has developed 3 strategies to help: (1) Case Studies: Prepare a 1-2 page story that lays out, a particular technical scenario in deliberately broad brushstrokes, and then ask the candidate to figure out what they’d do. (2) Three Why’s Technique: Practice of asking someone to describe something, and then pressing them three more times for more details. (3) Ask them to Break the Rules: A more specific instantiation of a famous interview question “What important truth do very few people agree with you on?”featured in #496
How I Build And Run Behavioral Interviews
- Ben Kuhn tl;dr: “I used to think that behavioral interviews were basically useless, because it was too easy for candidates to bullshit them and too hard for me to tell what was a good answer. I’d end up grading every candidate as an “okay, I guess” because I was never sure what bar I should hold them to. I still think most behavioral interviews are like that, but after grinding out way too many of them, I now think it’s possible to escape that trap. Here are my tips and tricks for doing so!”featured in #493
Add More Rigor To Your Reference Calls With These 25 Questions
tl;dr: 25 questions including: (1) How does this person compare to the best you’ve ever seen in the role? (2) On a scale of 1 - 100, how would you rank this person? (3) On a scale of 1-10, how do you rate XYZ on specific trait or ability? (4) Can you tell me about a project that would have failed without the candidate? (5) What haven’t I asked that, if you were me, you would want to know about this person?featured in #489
How To Hire Low Experience, High Potential People
- Tara Seshan tl;dr: “After 1000+ hours of interviewing candidates, making many mistakes in hiring and firing, and closely imitating the best possible behaviors of my “hiring savant” managers, this is what I’ve learned about separating the wheat from the chaff in order to find amazing yet unconventional people.” Tara provides a guide for finding such folks.featured in #488
How Hard Is It To Cheat In Technical Interviews With ChatGPT? We Ran An Experiment
- Michael Mroczka tl;dr: "Does ChatGPT make it easy to cheat in technical interviews? To find out, we ran an experiment where we instructed interviewees on our platform to use ChatGPT in their interviews, unbeknownst to their interviewers. The results were surprising, but as a preview, know this: companies need to change the types of interview questions they are asking — immediately."featured in #485
featured in #484
When Is Hiring Coming Back? Our Predictions For 2024
- Aline Lerner tl;dr: (1) 2024 is the year when hiring comes back (2) Mid-level & senior eng hiring will pick up significantly, come Jan 2024. (3) For at least the next 6 months, compensation at a given level will stay flat. (4) For at least the next 6 months, down-leveling will continue because of inertia. (5) For at least the next 6 months, recruiters are going to be increasingly stretched thin, which means that applying online is going to be an even less effective way to get into companies. (6) The hiring bar will not return to where it was for a long time.featured in #472
Hire Better Managers: 35 Interview Questions For Assessing A Candidate
tl;dr: (1) What are 1-2 questions you always ask your team members in one-on-one meetings, and why? (2) If I asked someone on your team about your leadership style, what would they say? (3) Tell me about a time when you delved into significant detail and got your hands dirty. (4) What ritual or practice have you found to be most effective for helping your team connect and collaborate? (5) Why did you leave IC work?featured in #462
The Engineering Executive’s Role In Hiring
- Will Larson tl;dr: Will discusses your role as an executive in your organization’s hiring, the components you need to build for an effective hiring process and provides concrete recommendations for navigating the many challenges that you’re likely to run into while operating the hiring process. He gives you enough to get started, build a system that supports your goals, and start evolving it into something exceptionally useful.”featured in #444