The article seems to me to have lots of information on hiring and very little on scaling. In my experience hiring is one of the smaller problems in scaling, the largest by far is how you avoid massive drops in individual productivity that if unchecked come with large teams delivering complex functionality. It's a technical problem for engineers to solve more than it's an HR or management problem.
Guide to scaling engineering organizations
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Re: Guide to scaling engineering organizations
#62The article seems to me to have lots of information on hiring and very little on scaling. In my experience hiring is one of the smaller problems in scaling, the largest by far is how you avoid massive drops in individual productivity that if unchecked come with large teams delivering complex functionality. It's a technical problem for engineers to solve more than it's an HR or management problem.
if you hire people that won't do bullshit job over and over, you end up with a organization that doesn't have that kind of problem.
You can see this happen in places that have layoffs every now and then, or that hires a dozen contractors for each fulltime employee. When that happens, you have people doing automation job while hoarding knowledge of which button to press, then you get to the point you describe.
Re: Guide to scaling engineering organizations
#63The good point of the article is bringing people up to speed as soon as they are hired.
Yet everyone here will only see the bad points of the article, which is pretty much a recipe for bro-culture and hiring fluent english speakers exclusively.
Re: Guide to scaling engineering organizations
#64The good point of the article is bringing people up to speed as soon as they are hired. Yet everyone here will only see the bad points of the article, which is pretty much a recipe for bro-culture and hiring fluent english speakers exclusively.
Not to mention how expensive that flow chart looks.
Re: Guide to scaling engineering organizations
#65The good point of the article is bringing people up to speed as soon as they are hired. Yet everyone here will only see the bad points of the article, which is pretty much a recipe for bro-culture and hiring fluent english speakers exclusively.
Not to mention how expensive that flow chart looks.
It is not as expensive as hiring the wrong person.
As you iterate, your win percentage (AKA how many people you bring in and actually hire) goes up. We got to a point where we hired 75% of the people we brought in to the office.
Re: Guide to scaling engineering organizations
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've heard somewhere that companies like Stripe would rather have false negatives than false positives in hiring.
That's the logical tradeoff for any company. Bad hires create an incredible amount of damage that can sink a whole team. It is x10 better to have no hire than a bad one.
It's missing nuance.
For most companies missing out on an excellent hire is worse than hiring someone subpar.
Re: Guide to scaling engineering organizations
#67I fear that earlier stage companies will read posts like this and implement it blindly without considering the big picture, which is:
- Stripe is a large and resourceful company with a relatively large engineering team. They can afford to have people focused only on things like this.
- The demand to work at Stripe is high. Therefore they can afford to have a long, grueling interview process. Most engineers will not want to go through a 7 step hiring process at a low prestige company.
Re: Guide to scaling engineering organizations
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've heard somewhere that companies like Stripe would rather have false negatives than false positives in hiring.
That's the logical tradeoff for any company. Bad hires create an incredible amount of damage that can sink a whole team. It is x10 better to have no hire than a bad one.
Why are bad hires so damaging? I've encountered very unskilled coworkers, they didn't do any serious damage, just wasted some people's time and money.
I'd actually say the opposite: standout engineers can be very valuable, I'd rather work on a team with a couple lemons and one really good engineer than 3 middle of the road engineers. So I think that false negatives can be damaging, especially because it's probably the best people with the most options who won't bother with an excessive interview gauntlet.
Re: Guide to scaling engineering organizations
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not to mention how expensive that flow chart looks.
It is not as expensive as hiring the wrong person. As you iterate, your win percentage (AKA how many people you bring in and actually hire) goes up. We got to a point where we hired 75% of the people we brought in to the office.
> It is not as expensive as hiring the wrong person.
Do you have numbers to back that up?
Re: Guide to scaling engineering organizations
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is not as expensive as hiring the wrong person. As you iterate, your win percentage (AKA how many people you bring in and actually hire) goes up. We got to a point where we hired 75% of the people we brought in to the office.
> It is not as expensive as hiring the wrong person. Do you have numbers to back that up?
Having built & led many teams, the time and energy that goes into managing an underperformer or a poor culture fit far outweighs the cost of thorough interviewing.
Even worse, you have to go through the hiring process again! So we can at least say it costs twice as much.
As mentioned, this kind of investment in the hiring process requires you to actually iterate it and continuously improve your win percentage. If not, you might be throwing money away.