Hire Every Engineer Like You'd Hire a VP(businessasusual.io)
10 pointsby mooreds9 hours ago1 comment
  • taybin8 hours ago
    Sounds great, but I'm not sure this will work well for individual contributors. Say the company is small, with a small team. Can you afford the amount of time it will take to find this bespoke unicorn engineer? Say the company is large, with a large team. Is this process going to scale to bring in, say, 50 new engineers?

    Maybe it works better with management tiers where their impact is more indirect, and there are fewer of them, which mitigates the problems.

    If I have a team in pain and we need more people on it, or different people, I don't know if I can wait six months for the one person I want to hire to become available and willing. Sometimes, you gotta go with who is available.

    • mooreds8 hours ago
      > If I have a team in pain and we need more people on it, or different people, I don't know if I can wait six months for the one person I want to hire to become available and willing. Sometimes, you gotta go with who is available.

      I think the point is that you should be building your network of folks before you need them. And that you should go to your network with a specific ask rather than "who is a good engineer?".

      Related, slightly: I had a business idea a few years ago when things were tighter for engineers to build a system that collected interested engineers email addresses and send them content about what the company was building. Basically a drip campaign tool for engineering talent rather than sales. I still think this would work for a company that was hiring regularly but that wasn't sexy enough to have name recognition.

    • esseph8 hours ago
      Companies are doing 7-9 interviews now for even mid level engineering and infra roles, and these companies are not doing anything unique. As someone often doing the hiring and firing, I do not understand it. If it takes that make interviews your hiring process itself is the problem.