Viewing profile — weswinham

It's also worth thinking about the timeline inclusive of hiring delay. More detailed requirements makes hiring slower. I know 2 startups both hiring their first set of non-founder …

It might help to know that a study measured how stressful live coding interviews were on candidates and found it to be VERY stressful. Half of the candidates did a coding exercise …

Yup! Onboarding can't just be tactical items. New folks have valuable perspective on your company and product. Soliciting new ideas from them not only helps the organization fight …

The more the company sees developers as a cost center (e.g. legacy companies who put developers in the IT org), the more they're looking for specific technologies. "I need a dev wi…

The market rewards being good at job searching and interviewing. It makes a bigger impact on compensation than actual engineering value. So get better at interviewing. If you're al…

I helped write a quick summary of 3 of these: https://www.woventeams.com/blog/3-books-every-new-engineerin...

In addition to those technical books, I'd check out: * Staff Engineer- Great for the tech challenges beyond senior-level https://staffeng.com/book * The Manager's Path- Good even i…

Written, async interviews give candidates who are better at the job an advantage from those who are just better at schmoozing and exaggerating their resume. So a C+ for effort, but…

I think you nailed it that it's a team composition question. Too many folks like that is a problem, just like too many folks who hate the pain of bleeding edge/messy/unstructured w…

This story would make a great culture test! "Would you hire this candidate?" You only want to work with team leads who agree with your answer, whatever that might be. Personally, I…

One sec. Just need to login to our CMS to update our tag line to "Woven: We're trying to unfuck developer hiring"

While that 1-week (or longer) ramp-up is generally true for companies, it's clearly not true for most (successful) open source projects. The things that a good open source project …

If the work is in any way usable to the interviewing company, definitely. We went that route for one of our work samples where abstracting out a context-mirroring scenario was goin…

Healthcare-improving UX Design Lead at PolicyStat | Indianapolis, Vancouver, or REMOTE | Full Time http://grnh.se/flev3r PolicyStat’s mission is to improve healthcare delivery thro…

Thanks for the heads up on the typo. Got that fixed. As far as the decorator syntax, I absolutely agree. That's definitely a thing we should have. I ticketed it up at: https://gith…

I'd say your choice between Quora's engineers being incompetent or AWS being dishonest/incompetent is a completely false dichotomy. Anyone who has been around AWS (or basically any…

That was definitely the eureka moment that made us realize that it was possible. I'm pretty sure someone on the django users mailing list actually pointed me to the phpserialize li…

Sure thing. I'm going to try and get together a follow-up post with some of the php session engine details and the apache configuration we went with. Hopefully you'll find it inter…

You're definitely correct that this post was light on the motivation for Django versus continuing with custom PHP. Perhaps it would be worth a follow-on post, as long as I can figu…

1) When evaluating the options (mid 2007), Django and Ruby on Rails were the two projects with the most community momentum, and I personally put a lot of weight on that. I had used…

We definitely could have ported the entire thing in under 22 months if that was our goal. The goal was actually just to make product improvements and gather customer feedback as fa…