On hiring and retaining engineers

Finding a brilliant engineer is no simple task, especially if you’re competing against those FAANG giants with deep pockets. So this week, we look at how you can hire and retain engineering talent with some lessons from the best in the biz.

How to beat the top dogs

Competition for tech talent is fierce, and as the below visual demonstrates, the major players (with one or two exceptions) have been able to offer ever-more lucrative packages over the last two years.

So what’s a hiring team to do? Perhaps take inspiration from John Ciancutti, the tech trailblazer who spent 13 years at Netflix (1999- 2012), where he hired hundreds of engineers in what was then a small but growing company. Following stints at Facebook, Coursera and Google, John is now VP/GM of Amp at Amazon, so he knows all about securing the best engineers from both inside and outside the FAANG tent (Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix and Google).?

But what’s the secret? Below, we’ve shared a taste of some of John’s valuable insights from his time scaling Coursera’s team, which appear in this First Round Review piece.

1 - Put yourself front and centre

“As a hiring manager, you are the most important factor in the candidate's decision. If they don’t think you’re great and that you're going to be a great manager, partner and support system, it doesn't matter what they think of your company. They won’t join you.”

2 - Find your own people

“Don’t just say, ‘Oh, Google has great engineers, I'm going to hire from Google.’ Be more thoughtful about the role you're looking to fill. What skills does it require? What are the companies that exemplify those skills. Who’s the best there? You’ll probably end up with a very different list than you think.”

3 - Remember it’s a team game

“You’ve got a healthy process if people are sharing recruiting emails with each other, and organically talking about what worked and what didn't amongst each other… In the end, the overarching goal is to get better and better at hiring as a team as you grow.”

How to interview engineers

“Today’s interviews are filled with posturing, political correctness, and small socially convenient falsehoods that have everything to do with large company recruiting constraints and nothing to do with you,” writes Slava Akhmechet, co-founder of RethinkDB, which was later acquired by Stripe, where Slava led product and engineering.

Slava put together a compelling and practical guide to hiring engineers, and hones in on three (and a half) themes that can help a recruiter determine whether a candidate is worth it:

Talent

“Talent alone is insufficient”, Slava writes. In order to weed out the genuine stars from the also-rans, Slava recommends that interviewers should ask the candidate to share their screen and give them a problem to solve, such as writing “a program that plays every possible tic-tac-toe game, and then prints the number of valid games”.

Is your CTO setting a useful problem-solving task that gives a true measure of a candidate’s competence?

Judgement

Slava sorts engineers into two camps, “tinkerers and engineers”, and explains why it’s important to hire candidates who represent a happy medium. “You want people who take great delight in building Rude Goldberg machines, but balance it with a broader sense of what they’re trying to accomplish.”

Slava suggests that if you want to measure for strategic intuition, for example, you should consider asking the candidate to write a technical essay.

“The medium for expressing tactical engineering talent is code. The medium for expressing strategic judgement is the memo (or its open counterpart, the essay).”

Personality

Slava writes that a candidate’s personality is one of hardest things to judge during an interview, though “if a candidate is belligerent to people during the interview, obviously don't hire them”. Other than that, Slava says it’s a good idea to “set up a low pass filter that might trap a few bad apples”, and contact references to see if any alarm bells ring.

Theatrics

An interview is like a performance, and testing a candidate’s endurance is perhaps one way to identify the good eggs. Slava suggests an interview with an engineer should last six hours (!) or more specifically: “Have your engineers interview the person, one by one, for about 45 minutes to an hour each.” The advantage of such a lengthy interview process is that the candidate will “feel they’ve earned the privilege to work at your company”, and secondly, “your engineers need to feel they know the measure of whoever they're going to be working with”.

What makes a good developer experience?

It’s one thing to successfully hire a software engineer, but another thing to keep them happy in the job. This RedMonk piece explains the importance of a positive DX (Developer Experience) when it comes to retention:

‘DX is becoming increasingly critical for companies of all shapes and sizes because developers are the most important constituency in building digital products and services… Why would a developer put up with a poor developer experience when they can likely find a job that better aligns with their needs and preferences?’

But what does good DX look like? “A great developer experience gets out of the way, leaving the developer in a flow state,” the author writes. “DX is about developer feelings – it is a sociotechnical system which should consider every touchpoint a developer interacts with to plan and produce software, from learning a platform to the very first line of code all the way through its promotion into production.”

The art of recruiting

If you’ve not had your fill of hiring tips this week, Guy Kawasaki’s 10 tips on the art of recruiting offer plenty of original insights on how to hire the brightest tech talent.

Recruiting fails

It’s always nice to be congratulated, but what if the well-wisher is an algorithm that doesn’t know what it’s congratulating you for? Sebastien brings us this week’s fail from the Twittersphere.

Thanks for reading

Once again, it’s been a ball. Do share this newsletter with anyone who might be interested, and see you next time!