Hiring-and-Interviewing.md

Hiring and Interviewing Candidates

Hiring

• Applied Humaning for Technical Interviews - by Cate Huston. Takeaway: In a power-based situation, the person with the power (the interviewer) owns the quality of the relationship. Don't give feedback on aspects you have no evidence for. Also: What does a good interview question look like? Answer: It should have multiple answers and tradeoffs. For developers: How does the interviewer handle the bits of the role that aren't coding?

• Creating the Dream Team: Transform Your Engineering Organization to Attract New Talent - by Andrew Hao. Takeaway: Focus more on building culture than offering perks. Assess your culture, set the example, and coach.

• Designing a Candidate-Focused Interview Process - by Gregory Koberger. Takeaway: A few novel ideas in this interviewing process, including a “Bring Your Own Project” component and a requirement that the hiring manager has done the job for a few months prior to hiring someone else.

• Develop Your Hiring System Like a Product to Eliminate Bias and Boost Retention - by FirstRound. Takeaway: "When creating a hiring system from scratch, you're actually building two products at the same time: 1) the process itself and 2) the resulting team. Viewed through this lens, every interaction with a candidate must have purpose, yield data you can learn from, and fit into a bigger vision for what you want to accomplish."

• Developer Survey Results - by StackOverflow. Annual survey. Takeaways: When assessing potential jobs, developers prioritize "opportunities for professional development" over any other factor by a large margin; the comp/benefits selected the most often relate to mental and physical health: vacation days, remote options, and health; 89% of devs at least "somewhat agreed" that diversity is important, up from 73% in 2016; developers generally supported "c-sat" and "being on time/budget" as the best ways to evaluate the performance of a fellow dev; there's a moderate correlation between remote work and job satisfaction.

• Don’t Hire Top Talent; Hire for Weaknesses. - by Benji Weber. Takeaway: "A weaknesses-oriented process might mean saying yes to someone inexperienced who’s good at asking the right questions. Someone whose feedback will help the experienced engineers in the team keep things simple and operable."

• Here’s Why Soft Skills Are More Important Than Technical Skills - by Alida Miranda-Wolff. Takeaway: "It is not enough to hire curious communicators with critical thinking skills and high EQ and CQ. We need to provide them with the resources and opportunities to sharpen their soft skills in the same way we would encourage them to get regular certifications, go to training courses, and shadow specialists to hone their technical skills."

• The Hidden Reason You Can’t Scale Your Engineering Team - by Jack Danger. Takeaway: Hiring only "senior engineers" is a recipe for failure. "When a team advertises that they only hire senior engineers, what they’re really saying is that their people and technology infrastructure can’t support hiring beginners – a strong indication of fragile tooling and a fragile team. If you’re at all interested in growth, this should serve as a huge red flag, because it is extraordinarily difficult to scale a fragile team."

• How Gusto Built Scalable Hiring Practices Rooted in Tradition - by FirstRound. Takeaway: "Traditions slowly become a part of your company’s DNA and self-reinforce over the years to become culture. And they need to be authentic. There is no formula for what the ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ traditions are. They’re different for each founding team."—Gusto CEO Josh Reeves.

• How Slack Supports Junior Engineers - by Carly, a Slack engineer. Takeaway: a detailed, in-depth, first-person account of getting hired at Slack as a junior engineer. An invigorating read that covers the author's interview process, hire, on-the-job Imposter Syndrome, mentorship experiences, and more. Offers good ideas for ramping up your own processes for hiring juniors/first-job engineers.

• How to Hire - by Henry Ward, CEO at eShares. Takeaway: Hiring is largely due to lack of scaling as a business and needing outside resources. It is more important to hire someone who can grow and contribute to your culture than someone who will fit in and have the same skillset as current hires.

• How to Hire the Best People You've Ever Worked With - by Marc Andreessen. Breaks down hiring into two categories: Criteria and Process. For criteria, keep in mind people who are interested in your problems, who are curious enough to find solutions, and who won't waste time on bullshit. For process, he highlights that a lot of companies sort of hire randomly, with interviewers doing their own thing. And so different combinations give different results. Injecting some sense of consistency should lead to evening out your interviewing process.

• How to Interview at Amazon - Leadership - by David Anderson. Takeaway: Though framed according to the activity of interviewing at Amazon and the company's principles, this detailed and thought-provoking article also provides insights on ideas on growing a team/tech organization; building a culture of customer-focused leaders; and much more.

• How to Make Executive Hires at Your Startup - by Steve Blank. Takeaway: "Know whether you’re hiring for search or execution. Show the job requirements visually as a pie chart. Prioritize each requirement by the width of the pie. Show your assessment of each candidate’s competencies by the length of the slices. Now with the data in front of you, the conversation about hiring can start."

• How to Take Your Engineering Team from Good to Great - by Tamas Torok. Takeaway: In this guide, we compressed all the knowledge we collected in recent years through interviewing tech leaders, reading countless case studies and using our own experience in the software development field. Learn more about the most effective hiring methods and figure out how to make your team more attractive to new developers. See onboarding practices and retention tips to decrease your team's fluctuation. See exactly what makes a team great and copy the practices they use. See how to set goals, motivate developers, organize communication and work. Easily identify the problems in your team by taking a data-driven approach. Set individual and team expectations, increase your developer team's productivity and make sure to provide regular feedback.

• How We Hire, Shapes Tech. - by Lenny Markus. Takeaway: "Make sure that your filtering process is applied to the right criteria: Will this person be able to perform the needs of the role at hand?; Will this person bring anything new of value to the team?; Will this person be able to learn? Don’t filter based on: GPA; School; Background; Bad interpretations of 'passion.'"

• Interviewing for Potential - by Brent Baisley. Takeaway: "A person’s ability to perform is based on their potential to succeed. Potential is the ability to be effective long term. Trajectory is the progress one has made on the path to reaching his or her potential. Performance is the act of tapping into our potential — it’s a side effect of potential and trajectory...What sets people apart is their ability to change, adapt, and evolve before it’s required. Those who proactively obtain new skills and knowledge have the highest potential to succeed."

• Let’s Stop Calling Them "Soft Skills" - by Seth Godin. Takeaways: Don't overemphasize so-called "vocational" skills. Real-world interpersonal skills are just as (if not more) important. Details categories of qualities like Self-Control, Productivity, Wisdom, Perception, and Influence.

• Make Stronger Offers to Engineering Candidates and Boost Your Closes - by First Round. Takeaway: "The secret to closing isn’t offering the most equity or saying just the right thing during an offer call. It’s really closely listening to and noticing what’s motivating each candidate during the entire process, and then explaining precisely how your company will serve those needs."

• My Lessons from Interviewing 400+ Engineers Over Three Startups - by FirstRound. Takeaway: A profile on Marco Rogers, who suggests interviewing in three-person groups; commit to doing more interviews, and having a huddle. Includes a schedule template for engineering interviews and also lots of insights into breaking down "soft skills" into something more meaningful.

• Never, Ever Compromise: Hiring for Culture Fit - by Elad Gil. Takeaway: "Your company culture is the foundation on which everything you do rests. Your culture acts as an unwritten set of rules that drives behavior and cohesion across the company. Cohesive, insular cultures are more resilient and can withstand shocks to it..." The article does point out that homogeneity of values is the idea, not homogeneity of backgrounds or personalities; however, its suggestion to use social outing tests (going to a bar) with candidates could reinforce monoculture.

• Observations on the Enterprise of Hiring - by Charity Majors. Takeaway: Honeycomb’s interview goals are to include no surprises, value realistic code with no whiteboarding, highlight communication skills, see every candidate at their best, and allow candidates to interview the company.

• 1 Personality Trait Steve Jobs Always Looked for When Hiring for Apple - by Betsy Mikel. Takeaway: "After swearing off seasoned professionals who had management experience, Jobs says he started looking for a different quality: passion. 'We wanted people that were insanely great at what they did, but were not necessarily those seasoned professionals,' he explains. 'But who had at the tips of their fingers and in their passion the latest understanding of where technology was and what they could do with that technology.'"

• Product Manager Skills by Seniority Level — a Deep Breakdown - by Brent Tworetzky. Takeaway: how XO Group has created six skills and management areas to determine product professionals' levels of seniority. Can be useful for interviewing candidates and determining which roles to offer them.

• Recruiting Diverse Engineering Candidates: What Tech Companies Still Get Wrong - by Angie Jones. Takeaway: The author describes her experiences interviewing with heavyweight tech companies like Amazon, Google, and Twitter, and reveals some of the disconcerting behaviors she witnessed during the process while praising the good. "All tech companies need to revisit their interviewing practices. Diversify the panel of people who will decide the candidate’s fate with the company; acknowledge that diverse candidates may be concerned with more than just the specifics of the job itself; and ensure that you allocate time for them to have their questions and concerns addressed. Finally, tailor the interview questions to the job for which the candidate is being considered, and steer clear of unjustified coding challenges that only serve to intimidate and stress candidates."

• Seek the Challengers - by Shripriya Mahesh. Takeaway: “[D]issenters are worth their weight in gold. If every employee is drinking the kool-aid, the company won’t question long-held beliefs, challenge itself, or stretch in new and interesting ways.”

• 7 Practical Ways to Reduce Bias in Your Hiring Process - by Rebecca Knight. Takeaways: Identify and actively seek to reduce bias. If you aren't talking about bias, you aren't changing anything. Standardizing your interview process reduces ability for subtle biases to creep in.

• Things Are Going So Well We’re Doing a Hiring Freeze - by DHH. Takeaway: "We’ve always been great fans of constraints, and capping the headcount in the face of growth is perhaps the biggest constraint of all. Especially because we’re not at all about running faster. Squeezing out more productivity from fewer hands. Quite the contrary."

• 25 Tips for Diverse Hiring - by Model View Culture. Takeaways: Externally, know what you want and be sure to actively pursue it. Internally, keep in mind hiring bias and internal culture. Ensure that your internals are prepared, as growing diversity is ultimately more important than hiring.

• What Managers Are Getting Wrong About the World’s Greatest Job Ad - by Blake Thorne at iDoneThis. Takeaway: A good job posting outlines the mission, the risks and the rewards.

• Why I Never Hire Brilliant Men - by anonymous. Takeaway: Be careful with the "brilliant" word. Many brilliant people start a lot and are visionaries or charismatic, but don't finish what they started.

• Why You Should Invest in Undervalued People - by Joe Emison. Takeaway: "There are excellent software developers who hate hackathons and would rather spend time raising their children on weekends than on coding side projects. There are people who are neuroatypical who can’t deal well with your unrealistic, on-the-spot brain teasers. There are people who need some additional training and mentorship to be able to ship software effectively for most organizations. These people are all undervalued by the standard hiring practices in tech, which means that, with some effort on your part, they’ll give the highest return on investment of any hires you can make."

Interviewing Candidates

• The Asana Engineering Interview Guide - by Isaac Wolkerstorfer. Takeaway: Level the playing field by providing a guide to the interview.

• The Best Way To Prepare for FAANG Software Engineer Interviews - by James S. Takeaways: To ace the FAANG interviews, it's important to be well-prepared in all areas, including coding, system design, and behavior. Additionally, practicing mock interviews on websites such as Meetapro is an excellent way to prepare thoroughly. Through mock interviews, you can receive detailed feedback directly from experienced interviewers.

• A Better Way to Interview Software Engineers - by Zach Millman. Takeaway: "When you spend an hour asking how to improve some code, it shows that you really care about code quality and collaborative engineering."

• Developer Hiring and the Market for Lemons - by Dan Luu. Takeaway: Companies are overly stringent, missing a lot of good people who aren't good at interviewing; see also We Only Hire the Best Means We only Hire the Trendiest by the same author.

• The Developer Hiring Process Is Broken - by Pivotal. Takeaway: "We believe coding is a social activity"; use pair programming around general CS topics; select for "basic engineering competence and the ability to think quickly and interact with somebody they don’t know."

• Do I Want to Work in This Company, or What Questions to Ask on an Interview - by Elena. Takeaway: Questions to ask in order to find out more about a company's culture, their approach to doing things, maturity level and other factors.

• The Guerrilla Guide to Interviewing (Version 3.0) - by Joel Spolsky. Takeaway: "You should always try to have at least six people interview each candidate that gets hired, including at least five who would be peers of that candidate (that is, other programmers, not managers)...If even two of the six interviewers thinks that a person is not worth hiring, don’t hire them...The trick is telling the difference between the superstars and the maybes, because the secret is that you don’t want to hire any of the maybes. Ever." And more great wisdom from the founder of Fog Creek and StackOverflow.

• The Hiring Post - by Thomas and Erin Ptacek. Takeaway: "Being good at navigating hiring processes requires a basket of skills that isn’t correlated with job performance." Warm up candidates, use work samples and scripted interviews and standardize the process.

• Hiring Without Whiteboards - by Lauren Tan. Lists hundreds of companies that don’t use CS whiteboarding.

• How to Assess Emotional Intelligence During the Interview Process - by Karla Cook. Takeaway: Five questions to ask during interviews. "Can you tell me about a time you tried to do something and failed?"; "Tell me about a time you received negative feedback from your boss. How did that make you feel?"; "Can you tell me about a conflict at work that made you feel frustrated?"; "Tell me about a hobby you like to do outside of work. Can you teach me about it?"; "Can you tell me about a time you needed to ask for help on a project?"

• How to Conduct a Good Programming Interview - by Li Haoyi. Takeaway: Focus on your primary goals. Usually they are: 1) Will the candidate be able to write working code if they join the team? 2) Can the candidate discuss code and problems with the people they'll be working with? 3) Can the candidate reason about arbitrary problems and constraints? 4) Is the candidate someone we would enjoy working with? From there, Li elaborates a strategy to perform the interview, including preparation, running it and conclusions.

• How to Interview Engineers - by Ammon Bartram (Triplebyte). Takeaway: Ask questions similar to real work. Ask multipart questions. Avoid hard questions. Make decisions based on max skill, not average/minimum skill. Most programmers prefer interviews to trials/take-homes, even though interviews aren't the best way to evaluate people.

• How to Make Tech Interviews a Little Less Awful - by Rachel Thomas. Takeaway: Don't believe that the smartest individuals make for the smartest teams. Think about whether you're hiring people just like you/yourselves; and consider false negatives. "[I]f an entire industry’s interview processes are biased against a particular group of people, members of that group will have a hard time getting hired anywhere, regardless of how talented they are." Based your interviews around these factors: It reesembles actual work the candidate would be doing in their job; clear rubrics; consistent and standardized; don’t have an elite-candidate fast path.

• Improving Our Engineering Interview Process - by Jeff Jenkins and David Park. Takeaway: offers an overview of a three-hour take-home they give and use for onsite code review.

• Interviewing - by Baron Schwartz. Takeaway: Understand what you're hiring for, ask questions about past performance only, and gauge potential by "asking questions about what challenged them and how they responded to it."

• Interviewing Engineers at Sensu - by Greg Poirier. Takeaway: A process that includes an architectural challenge and a coding challenge that can be done in pairs. Sensu grades candidates on a four-level mastery-centric scale. "If you’re not pairing with someone, we expect that you’re able to effectively transfer your expert knowledge of your solution to the rest of the team. So we expect a take-home assessment to be very well documented."

• Medium’s Engineering Interview Process - by Jamie Talbot. Takeaway: An excellent breakdown on grading candidate responses and assessment criteria, available as Creative Commons documents.

• Moneyball Hiring: the Interview - by Kelsey Foley. Takeaway: Look for a growth mindset and a diverse set of skills. Use a collaborative mini-hackathon instead of interviews.

• The One Method I’ve Used to Eliminate Bad Tech Hires: - by Amir Yasin. Takeaway: Use a paid take-home assignment followed by in-person discussion of the work.

• A Recipe for an Interview - by Jocelyn Goldfein. Takeaway: Offers a list of helpful questions for uncovering how candidates (product, engineering, etc.) handle situations related to their application of functional skills/competencies.

• Refactoring the Mirrortocracy - by Carlos Bueno. Takeaway: Provides everal good, tactical recommendations for interviewing at the end, such as "operate from a principle of hospitality," "study false negatives," and "enforce minimum standards of feedback."

• Screen Engineers Better with a Debugging Roleplay - by Pete Karl II. Takeaway: Using a text-based, role-playing debugging game on a phone screen, Localytics doubled their team size within six months.

• A Technical Hiring Process - by Dave Rolsky. Takeaway: Define criteria upfront; ask for a cover letter to screen for attention to detail and communication skills; use non-trivial homework for screening; do joint interviewing; and do pair programming on the homework code.

• There’s No ‘Silver Bullet’ to Increasing Diversity, but Here’s How We’re Making Progress - by Bhavin Parikh. Takeaway: use blind questionnaire review and structured interviews with rubrics; guide applicants in writing a cover letter.

• Thirteen Thousand, Four Hundred, Fifty-Five Minutes of Talking to Get One Job - by Jeff Kolesky. Takeaway: A first-person view of what would have made for better interviewing, with recommendations like "use homework assignments," "simulate the real world," and "help candidates prepare for the interview."

• Tired: Engineering Interviews; Hired: Engineering Auditions. - by Trek Glowacki. Takeaway: A six-stage audition process that emphasizes candidates' strengths. The steps: What’re You Great At?; Who Can Evaluate That?; The Pitch; Show Me What You’ve Got; Evaluate the Individual; Evaluate the New Team.

• We Built Voice Modulation to Mask Gender in Technical Interviews. Here’s What Happened. - by Aline Lerner. Takeaway: No effect from voice pitch; women stop practicing interviews more often than men after bad feedback.

• What Are Interviews For? - by Brujo Benavides. Takeaways: The article asks whether we should use the interview process to detect cheaters, or to check how the candidate and the company fit together; and about the consequences of choosing one approach over the other.

• You Can’t Fix Diversity in Tech Without Fixing the Technical Interview - by Aline Lerner. Takeaway: "Technical interviewing is a process whose results are nondeterministic and often arbitrary… [that] hit underrepresented groups the hardest."

• You Suck at Technical Interviews - by Laurie Voss. Takeaways: don't hire for what candidates already know, or for what they can remember during the interview; don't hire based on elite degrees or past employers; and don't hire friends and family. Instead, interview in order to find out if the candidate can do the job, if they'll get even better at the job, if they're continuous learners who can talk intelligently about technology, and if they're aware of what they don't know. Have a conversation, not an interrogation, and ask if you actually want to work with the person.

Interviewing Interviewers (for Candidates)

• The Two Questions I Ask Every Interviewer - by Wesley Aptekar-Cassels. Takeaway: "What is your goal when interviewing a candidate?" and "How do you evaluate how well you're meeting that goal?"