Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Guide to scaling engineering organizations

stripe.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 148 posts

Re: Guide to scaling engineering organizations

#91

Post by deathanatos »

PopeDotNinja wrote: post #31
hoorayimhelping wrote: post #28

These are all great points and there are some good nuggets in this article but I feel like it misses the main issue with recruiting. The shortcoming in my experience, is hardly ever in the process, it's in the people who work in recruiting. When setting up pipelines, most of the people I worked with knew what we had to do - the points in this article are pretty obvious. What isn't obvious is how to find the right peo…

> I've only worked with a handful of recruiters that were actually worth anything I learned how to hire & train recruiters to work for me pretty effectively for certain pieces of recruiting. To you, what makes a recruiter good and/or not good? Maybe I can share some thoughts on how to improve the not good parts!

A technical résumé, to a non-technical recruiter, is just technobabble; they have no way of knowing whether the information contained in the résumé is generally good, or just someone BS'ing, or someone who doesn't know what they're talking about. Discerning whether a writer actually understands what they're talking about (particularly in the terse format of a résumé) generally requires a deeper understanding of the lexicon at hand.

They can be told to look for certain keywords, sure, but that doesn't, IME, seem to be sufficient to screen; obviously bad résumé use the right words (but in the wrong ways / in ways that to an expert clearly indicate a lack of understanding) so they pass the filter.

Brief technical screens can be done, but again, without technical knowledge, the recruiter can't know if the answer given by the candidate matches the answer they have in an answer key, if they are provided with one. Even relatively simple technical questions might have more than one right answer, or the answer might just be phrased in a way that a recruiter doing a human version of lexical edit distance isn't going to think passes, but any engineer would say would.

The problem in all of these is the lack of technical knowledge. Tech recruiters, on the whole IME, are trying to recruiter for a role that might as well be "town wizard". Any theoretical recruiter with technical knowledge would never work in recruiting — they'd fetch more in pretty much any real technical role, like an engineering role.¹

The other problem, again IME, is that there is a wide pool of candidates with very little actual experience, though they may have worked any number of years. Finding someone with actual knowledge and understanding of software engineering requires sifting through a lot of chaff.

¹One might see this as people aren't willing to sufficiently pay enough for recruiters / if you want a recruiter with technical knowledge, you need to compensate them adequately enough that other opportunities are not worth their time. I would agree here.

Re: Guide to scaling engineering organizations

#92

Post by physcab »

munchbunny wrote: post #90

I think this post missed one extremely important point. I almost never see it in blog posts, and yet the successful heads of 100+ engineer organizations all know this. Find good managers! Or groom them. Whichever. Just make sure you have good managers. I see endless posts about recruiting, and I see tons of posts about engineering culture, but I almost never see posts from these same sources about the nitty gritty of…

This is honestly the best barometer of employee happiness. Managers who want to build political empires, don’t have their employees best interests at heart, who communicate poorly, who make questionable moral judgements, or push work down the pipe for the sake of doing work is what makes employees miserable. Companies who empower these types of managers are terrible to work for.

Re: Guide to scaling engineering organizations

#94

Post by peterwwillis »

selestify wrote: post #73
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?

One idea would be standardized questionnaires. Rather than job sites being collections of buzzwords and tools, if they presented questionnaires that matched a variety of similar job titles, employers could simply fill out the questionnaire and be matched with candidates who answer similarly.

Re: Guide to scaling engineering organizations

#95

Post by boltzmannbrain »

Re "Don’t mistake productivity for engagement": The story is quite similar to my recent departure from a robotics startup. Even though the company had the suggested survey system in place, management made me feel like an engineering resource to be allocated rather than a person with career ambitions. The survey was one of several facades the CEO had in place.

Re: Guide to scaling engineering organizations

#96

Post by amw-zero »

munchbunny wrote: post #90

I think this post missed one extremely important point. I almost never see it in blog posts, and yet the successful heads of 100+ engineer organizations all know this. Find good managers! Or groom them. Whichever. Just make sure you have good managers. I see endless posts about recruiting, and I see tons of posts about engineering culture, but I almost never see posts from these same sources about the nitty gritty of…

What does a “good manager” look like?

Re: Guide to scaling engineering organizations

#97

Post by devonkim »

djg321 wrote: post #82
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…

Just out of curiosity, what is an example of a tech firm that would be considered a "body farm"?

Most of the services organizations that exist within enterprise tech companies scales very poorly and is supported by a high-margin software product or two. But the usually cited companies are Infosys, Capgemini, Wipro, Accenture. To make their businesses more sustainable / profitable they overwhelmingly favor labor cost arbitration and oftentimes aim at non-tech companies that still don't consider IT or software strategic to their business.

Then there's the "unintentional" body farms that organize due to structural reasons of massive funding combined with labor structure dictated to support a massive enterprise. Within defense, almost all the major defense contractors like Northrop, Lockheed, General Dynamics, and maybe Palantir these days (the bar for hiring is higher overall there, but not quite the full story) fight for huge, bloated Pentagon budgets that resembles VC funding except with military officers as partners and minimum headcounts are usually specified in contract vehicles. You'll oftentimes see at least n PhDs on staff, m veterans, p program managers, etc. as competitive factors for getting a contract ahead of other companies because with too small of a company it's deemed a risk to the government (people do take vacation, get into accidents, etc.). While there's been some efforts to make the RFP process better aligned towards outcomes, everything I've heard since I left the community has not been encouraging.

Re: Guide to scaling engineering organizations

#98

Post by ChrisCinelli »

munchbunny wrote: post #90

I think this post missed one extremely important point. I almost never see it in blog posts, and yet the successful heads of 100+ engineer organizations all know this. Find good managers! Or groom them. Whichever. Just make sure you have good managers. I see endless posts about recruiting, and I see tons of posts about engineering culture, but I almost never see posts from these same sources about the nitty gritty of…

Completely in agreement. Hire a bad leader when the company is growing and you risk one year later to have the whole company infested by all sort of people that you would not like to have around (managers included).

Some companies completely screw up themselves because of this. Startups usually do not think about this early enough and when the founders realize what is going on is too late and the company culture is screwed.

My favorite Steve Job's video on the subject: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rQKis2Cfpeo

Re: Guide to scaling engineering organizations

#99

Post by ticmasta »

amw-zero wrote: post #96
munchbunny wrote: post #90

I think this post missed one extremely important point. I almost never see it in blog posts, and yet the successful heads of 100+ engineer organizations all know this. Find good managers! Or groom them. Whichever. Just make sure you have good managers. I see endless posts about recruiting, and I see tons of posts about engineering culture, but I almost never see posts from these same sources about the nitty gritty of…

What does a “good manager” look like?

Exactly. If I could find good managers couldn't I just find good employees?

This seems like the answer to the first line question of "how do I scale an engineering organization?" but you are not at an addressable solution yet. It's valuable but not sufficient.

Re: Guide to scaling engineering organizations

#100

Post by ChrisCinelli »

amw-zero wrote: post #96
munchbunny wrote: post #90

I think this post missed one extremely important point. I almost never see it in blog posts, and yet the successful heads of 100+ engineer organizations all know this. Find good managers! Or groom them. Whichever. Just make sure you have good managers. I see endless posts about recruiting, and I see tons of posts about engineering culture, but I almost never see posts from these same sources about the nitty gritty of…

What does a “good manager” look like?

I would focus on somebody that is able to lead, first. You manage things, you lead people. Management is about handling complexity. Leadership is about creating simplicity.

I think the full answer to your question would deserve at least blog post ;-)

Post reply on HN