Hi folks đ
Well, I blinked and 3 months have passed. In that time my son has turned one, my teams have gone through all sorts of changes, and the world is looking like a much brighter place.
I wonât lie - I think part of my hiatus was driven by COVID burnout. Thereâs only so much energy you can put into so many things and after a year in lockdown, I had trouble keeping up with releasing consistent content. I had quite a bit, to be fair, but have had to backdate once I actually hit the merge button.
If you havenât watched Bo Burnhamâs Inside Iâd give it a shot. He pretty much hit the nail on the head for grasping how do you live up to your values without becoming a soulless sellout. That said, to get back to it I figured I would offer not one but two of my newer articles (thereâs thirteen to catch up on) to digest as we close in on the start of summer.
It's not hard to care
I handwrite every single email I send to candidates.
Every. Single. One.
Of course, it doesnât scale. Of course, it is time-consuming. Of course, rejection sucks, and Iâll probably get rejected by 99% of the people I reach out to.
If hiring is your most important activity, then why would you ever put in a âcopy and pasteâ-level of effort for people that could provide MILLIONS of dollars of value for your organization?
Have you ever received an email that was copy-pasted? Have you received an email where they used the wrong name (or reversed your first name with your last name)? I can answer yes to all of those.
Itâs pure lunacy to me that recruiters and hiring managers donât put any effort into the candidates theyâre trying to hire.
Always write a personal note. Always pay attention to their experience, their wants, their needs. Always be a human first, and a hiring manager second.
How to find great engineers
One of the hardest jobs as an engineering manager is to hire and build a great team. The other is to retain and engage them (but thatâs for another day). The purpose of this article is to walk you through step-by-step how to find and hire great engineering talent.
Top of the funnel
Create a Monthly Engagement Calendar. Hiring cycles often happen at the start of the month (and year) so do most of your sourcing at the beginning of the month.
Reach out to DEVELOPER social networks. No - not LinkedIn. Not Facebook. Not Instagram. Hereâs some that have worked well:
Hacker News âWho is Hiringâ thread. Post every month on the first business day. The challenge is you can only do 1 posting per company. So only have 1 engineering manager post for your company.
Reddit subs for your programming language/framework. r/technology or r/programming will get you nowhere. But if youâre hiring a Scala developer, r/scala allows you to post job threads.
Slack communities. Hiring JavaScript developers? Thereâs a Slack community for that.
Find language/framework-specific channels. Still not getting any interest from the first two steps? Hereâs an example of where you can source JavaScript developers from:
For Node:
https://discordapp.com/invite/vUsrbjd
https://dev.to/t/node
https://hashnode.com/n/nodejs
https://spectrum.chat/node?tab=posts
For React:
https://discordapp.com/invite/0ZcbPKXt5bZjGY5n
https://dev.to/t/react
https://hashnode.com/n/reactjs
https://spectrum.chat/react?tab=posts
Do the work yourself. Your recruiting team, if youâre lucky enough to have one, is probably great. And they need your help! Their job is to supplement your hiring, not do it all for you.
The best way to convince developers to join is to be genuinely interested in them and convince them that the role you are hiring for is perfect for them.
First contact
Set up a 30-minute phone call ASAP. Since youâve posted to so many communities, it can be difficult to respond and check in on them. Encourage folks to email you to schedule a time to chat on the phone and engage with them personally.
Keep the phone call informal. You really only need to focus on 4 things:
What your company is about
What your team is about and how it fits into your companyâs grand vision.
Learn more about the candidate, what theyâre looking for, and why theyâre interested in you
A brief overview of the hiring process (this leads them into the next step by encouraging them to start your interview process).
Interview unconventionally
Youâve invested a lot of effort into hiring. You may not have implemented all of those strategies but the most important thing about your interview process should be to stand out from the crowd and wow your candidates with a pleasant & fair interview experience.
People loathe contrived interview problems (e.g. reverse a linked list in memory, traverse a 2D array in a spiral). They especially hate when those problems have nothing to do with the actual work they will be doing. So donât ask them!
People love practical questions that test the skills they use. Interviewing someone on the UI layer? Ask them to implement a mockup. Need an architect? Have them design Twitter. If you engage candidates with problems they will really encounter, youâll learn their true capabilities and they, in return, will feel properly evaluated (read: happy with the interview experience).
People are impressed by non-traditional approaches. Iâve used tiny take-home pull request exams to engage an often overlooked part of every developerâs core job: reading code. Most interviews require developers to write code, but few ask them to read code.
New things Iâve read recently
For Beginners:
https://www.filamentgroup.com/lab/practical-accessibility-1-semantics/ - A shortcut to learning accessibility is to understand when to use all of the HTML tags.
For Seasoned Pros:
https://infrequently.org/2021/03/the-performance-inequality-gap/ - The performance budget for mobile even in 2021 is surprisingly low.
For Experts:
https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2021/03/complete-guide-accessible-front-end-components/ - Exhaustive but helpful list for understanding accessibility in front-end development.
For Managers & Leaders:
https://ochronus.online/the-5-common-mistakes-of-new-engineering-managers/ - So much to agree on here - please stop coding so much, managers!
đ Thatâs all folks đ
Aaaand weâre done with issue 130 of the User Interfacing Newsletter.
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Cheers,
Adam