Guide to scaling engineering organizations • Hacker News Board

Re: Guide to scaling engineering organizations

#121

Post by PopeDotNinja » Thu, Dec 06, 2018, 4:49 AM UTC

nosrednAhsoJ wrote: post #41

PopeDotNinja wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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!

I found that investing time in educating the recruiter on what you look for, and the why behind that criteria is key. A primary source of that investment is quick, direct feedback to the recruiter on why someone you just turned away is not a good fit. Helping them figure out how to deliver well-qualified candidates to you is not magic. It takes LOTS of effort. Once you develop that working relationship with a recruit…

I mentioned in another comment, but I filtered recruiters based on their ability to filter resumes. If they couldn't use their own time efficiently, I was gonna have a hard time. And yes, recruiters can be trained, and yes it is expensive training.

Re: Guide to scaling engineering organizations

#122

Post by PopeDotNinja » Thu, Dec 06, 2018, 4:50 AM UTC

hoorayimhelping wrote: post #49

PopeDotNinja wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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!

Thanks for the response! Collaborating with a recruiter is really enjoyable for me at places I've worked at that had mature recruiting pipelines. I could usually count on them to work with me on what the team needed and then take care of filling our funnel. I was talking more about the building a recruiting pipeline to help us scale product/engineering. Generally, a good recruiter is one who saves the org time, and a…

> When you recruit for a sexy company, it's probably really easy to build teams cause good talent seeks you out

Bingo. If you have to go out and find people, you're gonna have a hard time.

Re: Guide to scaling engineering organizations

#123

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Dec 06, 2018, 4:54 AM UTC

PopeDotNinja wrote: post #119

deathanatos wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 l…

Ah, I can see what you mean. I had good luck with making actually resume screening part if inter process for hiring recruiters. Here's basically how I did it: - pick one job to focus on, where it's near impossible for a non-technical person to tell if someone is likely to be a fit, such as a full stack web developer with experience in a JavaScript and a backend language - get 5 resumes, 1 obvious fit, 3 maybes, and 1…

[deleted]

Re: Guide to scaling engineering organizations

#124

Post by PopeDotNinja » Thu, Dec 06, 2018, 4:55 AM UTC

all2 wrote: post #50

PopeDotNinja wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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!

> I learned how to hire & train recruiters to work for me pretty effectively for certain pieces of recruiting. Care to share more about this process? Or link out to a blog post or something?

I mentioned some in this comment... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18615490

But also, you gotta people what you really want, starting with the job description. In my personal experience, 75% of unqualified applicants apply because they thought they were a fit when they never had a chance. Saying "seeking high energy team player who likes coding" is gonna attract everyone you didn't ever want to apply to do just that.

Re: Guide to scaling engineering organizations

#125

Post by jmtulloss » Thu, Dec 06, 2018, 5:34 AM UTC

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…

(context: I'm an engineering manager at stripe)

Stripe uses the same process for scaling our management corps as we do our ICs. All the steps are tailored to the role the person would be filling at the company.

That being said, I think this is a great point. All the considerations others have brought up in this thread can be multiplied for manager roles. It's very important to get this right when you're scaling up a team!

Re: Guide to scaling engineering organizations

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Post by sgustard » Thu, Dec 06, 2018, 5:36 AM UTC

wbc wrote: post #118

mratzloff wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it's rote for you, you probably aren't using those calls effectively to filter based on your dealbreakers.

mind sharing how you use these calls to filter companies?

I have a sizable salary requirement, for one.

Re: Guide to scaling engineering organizations

#127

Post by sonnyblarney » Thu, Dec 06, 2018, 5:38 AM UTC

inopinatus wrote: post #102

amw-zero wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does a “good manager” look like?

You grasp that you're not the talent. The job is to facilitate and enable those that are. You are Brian Epstein, not John Lennon. Someone who brings their team achievable goals, and the resources they need, and then gets the hell out of their way. Someone who encourages leadership (in all its many forms) to come from within the team, and doesn't see it as a challenge to their authority. Someone who understands that r…

Managers are often senior technical leaders and in those cases are 'the talent' in some capacity.

Re: Guide to scaling engineering organizations

#128

Post by sonnyblarney » Thu, Dec 06, 2018, 5:41 AM UTC

romanhn wrote: post #15

ppeetteerr wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you've ever done an onsite interview, you'd understand what a gruelling experience 6 hours of whiteboard problem solving really is. The worst part, of course, is that these exercises are completely irrelevant to the work most candidates will do on a day to day. That alone feels like a joke. Not to mention that you will be judged by people who also don't care about how well you balance a tree but are forced to anyw…

What does this have to do with Stripe? They're pretty clear on this point: "Our questions seek to understand how people approach real world problems, rather than testing for esoteric skills you might demonstrate on a whiteboard."

What one does on a whiteboard is not very esoteric.

Re: Guide to scaling engineering organizations

#129

Post by afarrell » Thu, Dec 06, 2018, 5:49 AM UTC

ebiester wrote: post #113

ChrisCinelli wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also found out that there are a few bad "managers" that end up raising because they are popular with people and their bosses. They usually have a very high EQ. You can see a few people with little technical acumen, shallow knowledge of the latest trends, very bad on processes and no work ethic that still rise in some organizations. These people spend a lot of time "managing up" on a side and on the other side they…

Here's the part of management that is hard to understand as an IC: 1/3rd of my job is "managing up," that is, getting my boss what they need to get their job done. This can be defining a hiring process, or writing part of a powerpoint deck or getting them the information they need to write it up for their presentation. 1/3rd of my job is "managing across," or working with other managers - the "shit shield" is often f…

What about separating the career manager role from the tech lead role. That lets you do things like have the person coaching an IC on how to produce estimates be a different person from the one requesting the estimate.

Re: Guide to scaling engineering organizations

#130

Post by afarrell » Thu, Dec 06, 2018, 5:53 AM UTC

munchbunny wrote: post #103

amw-zero wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does a “good manager” look like?

There are several common things to look at, just off the top of my head. These all take practice. 1. Organization skills/project management skills: ability to pull together internal/external resources, ability to create clear plans, ability to build relationships with other teams to make cross-team collaboration easier 2. Communication skills: ability to deescalate and mediate conflicts fairly, ability to give both p…

> these all take practice

They also often take theory. If you’re reading this and trying to learn more about management, don’t shy away from taking some time to read good books which teach about the theory of, say, how to be good at feedback.