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How to Decide if a New Hire Will Be a Team Player in the Interview

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Re: How to Decide if a New Hire Will Be a Team Player in the Interview

#21

Post by mkramlich »

coldcode wrote: post #15

If you really want to know if a (otherwise qualified) developer will fit into your team you should do contract-to-hire. Anything less is a guess. Every team is different, every need is different and every candidate's experience is different. Assuming you can ask a magical question or two and know is the realm of psychics.

I strongly agree that something like that is the best approach. I'm developing a process I'll call YRR (for Yes, Real and Reciprocal) to define one particular take on this idea. I'm going to try to enforce using it on others, as much as I can, going forward. So tired of people making guesses. So tired of "tell me your life story", so tired of being told I'm under-qualified or over-qualified for things I know I can do and clearly have a track record of doing, etc. So much time wasted on meta instead of doing the real things itself we want. And too many formal/bureaucratic hoops, unpaid, people expect you to jump through. The traditional recruiting/applying/hiring process, at least as its done in the more formal parts of the software development field is badly broken, almost a circus not to be taken seriously. Can it work sometimes? Of course. Could it be done much much better? Hell yes.

Re: How to Decide if a New Hire Will Be a Team Player in the Interview

#22

Post by 6d0debc071 »

Are you a team player? Well now, that kinda depends on the team, doesn't it? You can't just slot people in and out like identical Lego blocks. "Ah, yes, I'll take a bag of 15 size-10 database programmers with 4 years experience please."

Charitably, I'd call this a complexity problem - it costs resources to look into individuals, and that's why you have an interview process rather than having the people who do the job talk to the person and see what they think.

Uncharitably, I'd say there are people seriously out of touch with their humanity. Who view people as components because they don't care about people. Perhaps because, if you do, it's emotionally draining to get to know so many people and then hurt them by turning them down.

Since it's hard to believe this is really an efficient long-term approach to recruitment, I suspect the truth lies somewhere in between.

Re: How to Decide if a New Hire Will Be a Team Player in the Interview

#23

Post by mtkd »

Why do they have to be?

Just because a person isn't 100% 'team player' material doesn't mean they are not capable of massive step-change contributions to a team activity.

If you hire all 'team players' or all PhDs or all men or all people who have been successful in their lives you are likely to have a team that has less capability than one that has some diversity.

Unless you're just building a production line - in which case you probably want the uniformity.

Re: How to Decide if a New Hire Will Be a Team Player in the Interview

#25

Post by gaustin »

chollida1 wrote: post #20
coldcode wrote: post #15

If you really want to know if a (otherwise qualified) developer will fit into your team you should do contract-to-hire. Anything less is a guess. Every team is different, every need is different and every candidate's experience is different. Assuming you can ask a magical question or two and know is the realm of psychics.

> If you really want to know if a (otherwise qualified) developer will fit into your team you should do contract-to-hire The difficulty here is that no one who is even mediocre would ever do a "contract to hire". If they are good they have options and there just isn't any upside to doing a contract for hire when you can take another full time job. Contract for hire is a big red flag!

It is actually a good way for some employees to go from proven track record with tech X to building a proven track record with tech Y. Especially for those that don't dedicate a lot of free time to building demos/products.

Re: How to Decide if a New Hire Will Be a Team Player in the Interview

#26

Post by incision »

I wonder how my honest answers to that line of questioning would be interpreted?

">What were the biggest challenges the team faced?"

Struggling with a crony manager whose universal incompetence worked its way into every aspect of the project. This ultimately made a smoking wreck of the first public milestone.

">Walk me through the biggest team problems and how they were resolved. What was your role in this?

After the major public embarrassment described above I was sent before a panel of consultants to effectively interview for my job. I successfully convinced the consultants of my own my own plan to recover the project while laying provable blame for the project dysfunction on the problem manager.

The team was appointed a new manager who was happy to stay all but completely out of the way. I was made technical lead and given free reign to pull together a new team. Within six weeks we completed a new public milestone with 4x the scope of the previous failure without a hint of trouble.

---

Personally, I see "team player" often being confused with simply being subordinate to the established team.

I think there's definitely wisdom in a mentality of service, to the team or the job.

Thing is, the team may be best served by having part of it removed and the team function may be best served by a completely different team.

In my experience, people don't like to hear that.

Re: How to Decide if a New Hire Will Be a Team Player in the Interview

#27

Post by aestra »

acuozzo wrote: post #12
csours wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really like asking questions about what a person has done (especially as personal / home projects), also to a lesser degree what tech blogs they frequent (if they only mention aggregators, thats half a demerit). What are the weaknesses of these questions?

The problem with rating a candidate on the basis of his personal/home projects is that it excludes potentially-excellent candidates who are __unable__ to work on anything at home due to, e.g., having several young children and half-dead parents to care for. (Also, don't try to retort with "so ask them about the personal/home projects they did before having kids", as that wouldn't be sufficient to cover the people who…

Or how about those potentially-excellent candidates who don't have children but just have a life? I love my job. I love writing code. I am passionate about it. The time I spend at work I mostly enjoy, but 40 hours a week is enough for me. I would rather spend the rest of my time with the people I love or on other ventures that don't involve sitting in front of a screen. If you don't want to hire me because my job isn't my entire life, than I don't want to work for you. Nobody should be penalized career-wise for enjoying their free time.

Re: How to Decide if a New Hire Will Be a Team Player in the Interview

#28

Post by kabdib »

incision wrote: post #26

I wonder how my honest answers to that line of questioning would be interpreted? ">What were the biggest challenges the team faced?" Struggling with a crony manager whose universal incompetence worked its way into every aspect of the project. This ultimately made a smoking wreck of the first public milestone. ">Walk me through the biggest team problems and how they were resolved. What was your role in this? After the…

Biggest challenge: A fake scrum system whose claim was "this will make us into great teams" when really all it was used for was micromanagement and scapegoating.

"Your velocity is off by ten percent. We're concerned."

"You're the most talked about person in the scrum-of-scrums."

Gahhh.

Re: How to Decide if a New Hire Will Be a Team Player in the Interview

#30

Post by mathattack »

I find this is very hard to screen for by looking at resumes, and almost as hard to detect in interviews. Even with an interview, sometimes people just talk a good game. The only reliable methods I've seen are "Hiring people you already know to be good team workers" and "Watch them over a 10 week internship."
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