Getting To Yes: Solving Engineering Manager Hiring Loops That Reject Every Candidate
- Will Larson tl;dr: (1) Think about what you need engineering managers to do. (2) Refine those tasks into four or five key skills for the role. (3) Create an interview to evaluate each skill. (4) Create a rubric to score each of those interviews. (5) Train the interviewing team on the new rubric. (6) Remove interviewers from the loop if they refuse to use the rubric.featured in #245
Tactical Challenges In Hiring Junior Engineers
- Cindy Sridharan tl;dr: The costs incurred of hiring a junior engineer isn't always realized. "If a team isn’t willing to invest at least 1–2 years, they shouldn’t be hiring junior engineers." Investment comes in mentorship, manager's loss of productivity, and other ways outlined here.featured in #197
Tech Sector Job Interviews Assess Anxiety, Not Software Skills
- Chris Parnin Matt Shipman tl;dr: Study by NCSU & Microsoft suggests that whiteboarding interviews are deeply flawed. They create performance anxiety inhibiting coding ability, bias towards candidates who can afford to prepare and those the interviewee prefers.featured in #193
Tell Candidates What To Expect From Your Job Interviews
- Julia Evans tl;dr: Given candidates won't know your interview process from the start - which can lead to confusion - share a simple document beforehand outlining the process and how they should prepare. Julia provides Stripe's sample document.featured in #190
featured in #173
Understanding This Scientific Theory Can Teach Companies to Hire (and Retain) The Best Engineers
- Tyler Hakes tl;dr: Remove dissatisfaction factors to hire the best engineers - these are hygiene factors such as low salary or poor office space. Improve motivating factors to retain hires, such as creating interesting work and increasing responsibility.featured in #148
New Evidence of Age Bias in Hiring, and a Push to Fight It
- Patricia Cohen tl;dr: There is more evidence that companies discriminate against hiring older people, creating more litigation and research into the issue.featured in #145
Working Together When We’re Not Together
- Ruth Reader tl;dr: Distributed teams perform as well as in-person teams. However, there are issues in building connections and syncing schedules. Three recommendations - forge connections, spend time getting to know each other & set scheduling boundaries.featured in #136
How NOT To Hire A Software Engineer
- Nikita Prokopov tl;dr: Common mistakes include not giving interviewees enough time to solve problems, judging if a problem is solved but not the method it was solved by, not assessing how mistakes are handled, conducting multiple shorter interviews, whiteboarding and not tailoring to the interviewee's background.featured in #135