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Guide to scaling engineering organizations

stripe.com

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Re: Guide to scaling engineering organizations

#71

Post by avip »

jhpriestley wrote: post #68
avip wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

Not sure your 'lemons' qualify as 'bad hires'. I've refrained from defining, as it requires context, but the 2 pillars of badhirism are negative productivity and negative attitude. Being "unskilled", by itself and in void, does not imply a bad hire IMO. We are all "unskilled" occasionally.

Re: Guide to scaling engineering organizations

#73

Post by selestify »

avitzurel wrote: post #32

I did not read the article to the end (I plan to). It's mostly good and I agree with the point it's making. However, I think we need to flip it on its head. From my point of view as an engineer, your pipeline doesn't really matter, no matter how smart and well thought out it is. The weakest link in the pipeline is what isn't mentioned here, how do you get candidates into the pipeline. I get 5-10 recruiting emails a w…

Is that because you're not responding to the recruiting emails or they don't get back to you after you respond? How would you imorove that process?

Re: Guide to scaling engineering organizations

#74

Post by mediocrejoker »

scarejunba wrote: post #43

Nice post, guys. Would you mind saying what you mean by 'lurking'? In all my life on the Internet, it's a positive thing when joining a community. You're invisible to everyone and just read. Why should people not do this? It seems harmless to be in read-only mode.

I was confused by this too.

I noticed that in both places they use the term, they say "lurk in", almost as if it's a term with an accepted meaning within Stripe.

The fact that they say "read to your heart's content" also suggests that they aren't using "lurk" in it's usual meaning (which to me is reading but not commenting).

Re: Guide to scaling engineering organizations

#75

Post by devonkim »

ppeetteerr wrote: post #22
devonkim wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn’t say ANY company necessarily. A lot of companies even in IT are body farms and low wage, expendable (but still necessary) labor is their lifeblood where they trade off quality for more volume. Employee turnover doesn’t matter much besides in the highest ranks in that case either. A “bad” hire in such companies is one that causes such irreparable harm that it costs the company more in reputation / brand than…

You don't have to be a body farm to justify someone considered a "false positive" at a large employer. Most companies outside of the top employers have a hard time staffing up. They might just want someone to fix their bugs, not someone aspiring to invent the next Kubernetes.

Every company I’ve seen that needed people dedicated just to fix bugs was in a downward spiral with maintenance mode software. Those organizations outside really slow moving but well financed bureaucracies are disappearing rapidly as investors pull money by divesting or selling to larger companies that wind up casting off the unprofitable / non-growing lines of businesses they acquired.

It’s pretty evil IMO to hire people as FTEs into such organizations when you are probably better off with consultants that are at least used to short term gigs.

Re: Guide to scaling engineering organizations

#76

Post by mediocrejoker »

gcbw2 wrote: post #63

The 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.

Can you explain how the article is "a recipe for bro-culture"?

Why is hiring fluent-speakers of the language in which the company conducts operations a bad thing?

Re: Guide to scaling engineering organizations

#77

Post by Shaanie »

jhpriestley wrote: post #68
avip wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

Lemons can significantly impede a team's velocity and, more importantly, the team's overall happiness. It's difficult to enjoy and take pride in your work when the code base either looks like shit or require that you spend most of your time reviewing/cleaning up the mess the lemons create.

Will your standout engineers enjoy working with the lemons?

Re: Guide to scaling engineering organizations

#78

Post by louthy »

jhpriestley wrote: post #68
avip wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

Unskilled is a problem of course, but with an unskilled, but ambitious individual, they can be mentored. In my mind a bad hire is someone that has a negative drag effect on the psychology of the work environment or the project.

I had one hire who was brought in as a junior dev, thought he was better than he was and that he didn't deserve to do the grunt work he'd been assigned, and then proceeded to constantly bitch about anything he could. He was so negative that when he finally moved on I was super relieved.

That psychology of "why even bother" can just sink into people's subconcious and become problematic. It's hard to spot who's going to be like that at an interview though.

Re: Guide to scaling engineering organizations

#79

Post by grandtour001 »

Please no recruiter phone screens. It's just a choreographed dance where everybody knows what's goin to happen. The recruiter sells you the company about x, y, z values that nobody cares about. The candidate says something about looking for bigger opportunities and challenges.

Re: Guide to scaling engineering organizations

#80

Post by sheepmullet »

ppeetteerr wrote: post #4
stevoski wrote: post #2

Judging by the article, you need to go through a _lot_ of interviews before Stripe makes you an offer. I wonder if they miss out on whole groups of job candidates because those candidates have good job prospects that don't involve this gruelling slog. Of course, Stripe does seem to have an excellent team.

I've heard somewhere that companies like Stripe would rather have false negatives than false positives in hiring.

> I've heard somewhere that companies like Stripe would rather have false negatives than false positives in hiring.

The top tech companies can reject 10 good candidates for every 1 that they hire because there is a massive surplus of engineers who want to work for these companies and so time to hire for them is actually reasonable.

99% of tech companies don’t have the overwhelming surplus of good applicants to make this work. So when they try they see time to hire jump from 4-8 weeks all the way up to 6-12 months without any real decrease in false positives.

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