Every engineering hire is a miracle. – Etsy CTO Kellan Elliott-McCrea on the Craft of Hiring Engineers When you’ve reached a certain scale, hiring entry-level engineers becomes a fairly deterministic process – you go to university career fairs, gather resumes, schedule interviews, and hire N members of the graduating class. Yes, it’s a huge oversimplification, and I’ve […]
Category Archives: Recruiting
As I look back on my time at TripAdvisor and HelloShopper, and think about conversations I’ve had with various startups, one of the recurring themes has involved building and managing engineering organizations, particularly during rapid growth phases. From five to fifteen, to twenty five, to seventy five, to a hundred fifty, and so on. Each of these ramps […]
Note: This is the first post in a series of musings and reflections on my first year in startup-land. The most important goal for any manager is to ship product, and the highest leverage task toward that end is to build a great team. I’ve had the privilege of working in companies with great engineering […]
It’s been a couple of months since I left TripAdvisor, and as I’ve been coming up for air, I’ve been going through the necessary process of re-evaluating the conventional wisdom I’d come to accept over the past six and a half years. Some of it was great – generally applicable best practices that I’ll use for years to come. […]
In a strong engineering organization, there are typically two main technical leadership tracks. Different companies have different names for them, and their responsibilities can sometimes overlap, but for the sake of this discussion let’s call them “leads” and “managers.” The lead is the alpha nerd – this is the engineer who guides the team technically, […]
It’s campus recruiting season again, which means that career fairs will soon be flooded with hopeful companies looking to find the next generation of amazing students to build their paradigm-shattering, game-changing, world-beating visions of glory. Or CRUD database apps. Whichever. This is also the time when people like me write blog posts about how to […]
College recruiting season is almost upon us again, and I’ve been doing a little research to try to find a new question. My current question is OK, but it’s a little clunky, and I’ve been sniffing around for something new. In my research I’ve been going through Programming Problems. It’s a good compendium of the different […]
It’s easy enough to step on a landmine (or swallow a grenade) when interviewing for your dream job. But what about the interviewer? How can you screw up an interview with your dream candidate? Don’t ask forbidden questions It’s amazing how many people are asked to interview without being given even the most basic instructions […]
Circus Manager: How long have you been juggling? Candidate: Oh, about six years. Manager: Can you handle three balls, four balls, and five balls? Candidate: Yes, yes, and yes. Manager: Do you work with flaming objects? Candidate: Sure. Manager: … knives, axes, open cigar boxes, floppy hats? Candidate: I can juggle anything. Manager: Do you […]
So, it’s time to retire my interview question. It feels like people are doing better on it than they used to (Glassdoor?), and frankly, I’ve asked it so many times that just walking into an interview room is enough to make me want to start chewing my own arm off. Still, if I’m going to […]
Dan Dreams of Coding 