We keep inventing magic tools, declaring all that will die in their wake. A 50-year perspective on why this is almost never true, how magic tools help us, and why understanding the engineering is where the value always lies.
This makes a ton of sense—far too few people reach this conclusion and realize that picking one path or another is a key to their sanity and happiness!
That's a good point and I agree with what you said. But I think so many customers are accustomed to working with large, public or VC backed companies where response times are near immediate, product polish is higher, etc. When that's viewed as "the norm" then life becomes harder for bootstrappers.
I completely agree that bending over backwards for users is a competitive advantage and customers won't forget it. But that does need to somehow reconcile with your availability and life outside of work—that's the rub for small bootstrapped companies.
I understand your point—it's not about optimizing your process above all else (at the expense of speed, for example). But you can and should optimize your hiring process just like you would your sales process, onboarding process, etc and the outcome you're looking for is hires that are successful once hired. It costs companies far more if they sacrifice in the name of speed and make poor hires.
What we advocate for is making the technical assessment component relatively quick and painless, but using the work sample as a basis for assessing the other sorts of skills and intangibles that you mentioned. You can use your in-person time with candidates not to discuss their technical work, but to add requirements, talk through how they might build an additional feature, and generally assesses how well they communicate and solve problems beyond writing code.
The purpose of this paper is to present research that's completely independent of any product, and show how the concepts apply to software engineering specifically. What's your source in saying "software engineering has one of the highest amounts of variability in productivity of any profession?" That seems hugely unfounded.
Great points—I completely agree that the human element of hiring is of critical importance when it comes to building effective and high functioning teams. This article is intended to focus on the more technical/job focused component of hiring. That said, I agree with your comments here across the board.
I don't think that true—what the article is saying is that different hiring activities are more or less useful in predicting the future success of a hire. And the more measures you employee intelligently, the more predictive the process becomes.
That's true.... that might not be a company you want to work for. If there's not clear strategic direction and things constantly shift, it's very hard to hire anybody effectively into the org.
So you need to design you assessment process to reflect the real world scenarios the hire will encounter. It's surprising to me to hear so many developers push back on this notion that you can't design a predictive hiring process. If you were hiring a dentist, wouldn't a great way to assess them be having them fill a cavity? Or asking a chef to make you your restaurant's signature recipe? It seems very logical and the key here is that the work sample is reflective of what they'll encounter on the job.
I love this point—the more time you can spend selling the candidate the better. And I think the more effective your interview process, candidates take notice and probably need to be "sold" that much less.
Agreed that interviews are both a gatekeeping and social ritual, but from the perspective of the employer I do think "the point of a job interview" should very clearly be to identify candidates with the highest probability of being successful in the role.
I completely agree that if you're designing an sort of assessment process, you should go through it yourself or ask other engineers to go through it so it's reasonably scoped in terms of expected time commitment. You can also use assessment tools that specifically limit how much time an engineer can invest in working on the challenge, which is also useful in showing how much progress each candidate made in a set amount of time. The problem with this approach can often be that the candidate feels like they're working against the clock though, which isn't "real world."
Yes, but not generic tests—in order to design a hiring process that's actually predictive of future job performance, the "tests" have to be designed to be directly relevant to the real world work that the engineer will be tasked with.
Actually, yes! Erik Bernhardsson, the CTO at Better.com who is cited in the article a few times, does exactly that for finalist candidates that they ask to provide a significant work sample. I think that's 100% appropriate. But that said, a work sample doesn't necessarily have to be something that takes hours on end either.
Buildium stayed pretty true to their original market, focusing mostly on serving that market with a greater level of depth through additional products and services. RealPage, the acquirer, sells to a number of adjacent markets and is moving into the market for small, residential property managers via the acquisition.
I'm definitely in agreement that having some fundamental understanding of other areas of the business is a good thing, for everyone. The point I'm making is you need to be congnizant of where you spend your time and what new skills you invest time developing. I understand HTML and CSS at a fundamental level—I know what they're for and what's possible. But would taking a class in these skills have been the best used of my time as opposed to say, sharpening my skills around positioning or conversion optimization? Probably not. Knowing when to say no and rely on the expertise of others is an important skill to develop.
Thank you so much for the kind words! Buildium found a good market opportunity and built solid technology, but culture and how the business was run was definitely part of its special sauce and a major contributing factor to this sort of outcome. The Advantage is a great read! -Geoff