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29 Nov 09

How I Hire Programmers (Aaron Swartz's Raw Thought)

www.aaronsw.com/hiring - Preview

HR programmers

05 Nov 09

Is it Time for You to Earn or to Learn?

www.bothsidesofthetable.com/...me-for-you-to-earn-or-to-learn - Preview

Startup HR

Over time I took to telling people the following, “join BuildOnline because you think you’ll get great experience. Join because you like the mission of what we’re doing. Join because if you do a good job we’ll help you punch above your weighclass and work in a more senior role. And if you ever feel that in the year ahead of you you don’t think that you’ll increase the value of your resume and you’re not having fun then go. Join because we pay well but not amazing. Stock options are the icing on the cake. They’ll never make you rich. Don’t join for the options.”

28 Sep 09

Hacker News | Ask HN: Hiring Decisions

news.ycombinator.com/item - Preview

27 Aug 09

Early Stage Hiring

fbfund.com/early-stage-hiring - Preview

Startup HR

08 Aug 09

“Blink” and the Art of Hiring the Best - Assembla Consulting: Accelerate Your Software Development

consulting.assembla.com/...and-the-art-of-hiring-the-best - Preview

What if you could tell, immediately, whether a given person is going to be a great addition to your team? You would be the greatest manager in the history of the world. Thats the promise held out by a careful reading of the book Blink, the Power of Thinking without Thinking, by Malcolm Gladwell.

Hiring the right people is the single most important thing you can do to ensure the success of an IT project. Good people do the right thing, do it fast, and do itwith minimal management intervention. This is especially true in software development, where the good engineers are anecdotally reported to be ten times as productive as the average contributor. I believe this, and I have invested time in recruiting to makes sure Im working with the best people I can find.
Over the years I have tried a lot of different ways to qualify potential team members. I havedone interviews, puzzles, calls, chats, code reviews, trials, and reference checks. When I experimented with different methods of qualifying developers, and tracked the outcomes, I was surprised to find that most of these activities were useless. I want to ramp up my teams quickly, and many of these activities added a lot of delay to the process. Even simple Instant Messenger interview added about a week to the typical recruiting cycle. Some of these activities were worse than useless. For instance, if I did a phone or in-person interview, I often ended up liking a particular person, but hiring a bad developer.
2 more annotations...
- So what is the right information? If you are hiring a developer, the best information is a direct test of their ability to work on software. I hire developers for distributed development teams, so it is relatively easy to put them into a trial. I just send some passwords, some documentation, and a trial task. I learn an enormous amount in just a few days by taking their (email) questions and seeing the results of their work. What surprises me is how efficient the trial is and how irrelevant everything else is. I save a lot of time and some money by giving all my qualified candidates a paid trial, even though I am paying for their time before I have screened them.
- To earn commit privileges, you need to participate in the development project and submit a series of modifications that pass review. So, our inspired by open source development process can give us the answer to a critical business question how to hire the best, quickly. The book Blink explains why its effective.

03 Aug 09

Shanghai High-Schooler Wins International Coding Crown - China Journal - WSJ

blogs.wsj.com/...ins-international-coding-crown - Preview

programmer HR

This year, Facebook and the National Security Agency were sponsors — and both are using the event for recruiting purposes.

The best of the best was 18-year-old Bin Jin, a high school student from Shanghai, who swept the algorithm competition and beat contestants with doctoral degrees, as well as Petr Mitrichev, a Moscow State University student and three-time world algorithm champion.

01 Aug 08

Building a Software Company: How to hire an idiot

Wow, I remember how idealistic I was when I was about to bring on my first
employee! After dealing with bad bosses over my career, after doing a whole lot
of thinking about how I was going to be a great boss, and after doing a whole
lot of reading about how to hire effective people, I was really looking forward
to it. I was going to:

nukemanbill.blogspot.com/...how-to-hire-idiot.html - Preview

Only problem was, I couldn't quite afford an employee yet. By then I had been
working a couple years by myself, earning good profits in the $200K range but it
was based on just one or two sales a year, and each sale took 6-12 months to
finalize. With so few customers I could easily go a year without sales, I
feared, so had to set aside my profits to cover that. And if I were going to
hire someone, I'd really want six months or a year's payroll set aside for them
as well. I just couldn't afford that yet.
Serendipitously, I was approached a little while later by a former VP of my big
competitor, at my industry's main exhibition where I had a small booth. He was a
friggin' VP of a $100 million a year company! Well, their former VP, he said.
Wow though, I was flattered. I demoed my product to him, explained my company,
and his mouth dropped open. He started gushing about how incredible my product
was (well, it was, I guess) and asked why the "fuck" wasn't I selling $100
million a year?! I said well, I'm sort of at capacity... and... errrr... I'm
more of an engineer, and, uh.... I don't know why. I didn't want to tell him
what I feared, that it was just this thing I made on my own, some of the code
was crap, and things like that just don't sell for millions.
3 more annotations...
- We talked a little more and I couldn't believe when he asked to work for me for
  free! Well, on commission. But hey, that's money I wouldn't have made anyway. If
  he brings in a million bucks a year in profit, he's worth 10% of that,
  certainly!
- I mentioned to my uncle (an experienced big-ticket salesperson) about this new
  guy I was bringing on board, and he told me to be careful because "guys like
  that will do anything to make the sale and don't care if they leave you high and
  dry. I've seen it LOTS."
- So I set off on my promises of being a great boss. I let my new sales guy do his
  thing, trusted his judgement, didn't ask to be CC'd on things, gave him the
  resources he needed, just set him loose. $25K in stuff he said we absolutely
  needed -- slick brochures, sponsor some conference, ads in the trade journal,
  coffee mugs, pens with our logo -- I readily paid for. I wanted him and us of
  course to succeed.

30 Mar 08

Wall Street Stole My Smart Friends | jsomers.net

jsomers.net/street.html - Preview

entrepreneur hr startup

14 Nov 07

Assembla Blog | The number one developer qualification: Can build from scratch

If I ask a candidate "have you ever designed and built a piece of software by yourself", and they respond enthusiastically with a description of the project, then it is very likely they will succeed in a trial. If not, then there is some probability that they lack the ability to design software. However, it is almost certain that they lack the creative joy that comes from laying down whatever kind of code you want to lay down, and the rush that comes from conjuring something out of formless bits.

blog.assembla.com/...on-Can-build-from-scratch.aspx - Preview

developer hr

Sometimes I see resumes (often from India) that show a developer has worked for years on a series of team projects that involve five or ten team members. In this case, you often have to go back to some college project to dig up the evidence. If you find an individual, from scratch project that the candidate is excited about, no matter how old, that is a good sign. If not, the probability is very small that the candidate will succeed in a distributed team trial.
I would not argue with you on the achievements described in resumes of potential candidates. However, it is certainly a fact that candidates who are excited about giving a bunch of floating bits some structure have a very big drawvack.