Culture
Could a random hire thrive in your organization?
I made a couple posts (applicant-designed hiring, randomized hiring) about how less-controlled hiring processes could lead to designing an organization where more folks could thrive. It’s largely a thought experiment, so I’ll share my thoughts :) What would need to work for a random hire to thrive? Smooth onboarding...
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Why do we always think our team is so great?
If you ask someone experienced what they think of their team, they’ll usually tell you their team is the best team they’ve ever worked on. It’s so rare to hear someone say they think their team is bad or even mediocre. Why is this? We rationally understand that most...
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And what if we hired randomly?
A couple posts ago, I wrote about letting candidates choose their own hiring process. But for years, I’ve been toying with the idea of something even more radical — what if we hired randomly? This sounds silly, but wait! Think of a time you’ve transferred teams, or came in...
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Managers learn lessons on the backs of their reports
When you make mistakes as a manager, you usually don’t pay the price. Your reports are always the ones walking away worse off — they have to deal with the repercussions of your mistake, and probably didn’t learn anything useful. This is an inherent part of hierarchical power dynamics....
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What if candidates controlled the interview process?
The software engineering interview process at most jobs is similar- phone screen, some programming work, a bit of architecture or systems design, cross-functional (aka “culture fit”) interviews. Companies are all over the place on how well they execute this formula, but the general formula is the same. Not only...
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Reflections on over-engineering
My entire career has been spent replacing other people’s applications. The closest I’ve come to greenfielding was spending 3 months rebuilding MilkRun and then migrating data from the old system to the new (none of the code or schema was kept). I think I’ve been pretty successful at replacing...
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Feature team models that work
Along with a number of “monolith to microservice” transitions, I’ve been a party to many “functional team to cross-functional team” transitions. I think there are some patterns and rules of thumbs that are widely applicable. The place these transitions fall down is where the definition of “cross functional” is...
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Jim Crow is hiding in Silicon Valley’s hiring
What do Silicon Valley interview processes have in common with Jim Crow literacy tests? A surprising amount!
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And now, some terrible advice
In a previous post, I talked about the most important advice I’d ever gotten. Now, lest you think some people are really wise and just dispense good advice constantly, I’ll tell you about how the same individual also gave some terrible advice.† The advice can be distilled down to...
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How the Zapier interview process is making me rethink my own
Over the last two months of looking for a new job, I’ve applied to over a couple dozen companies and interviewed with about a quarter of them. The process that stood out the most was Zapier’s. Their interview process is non-typical from start to finish. They have a great...
