Clever Geek Handbook

“Do you google people?” Or 5 things we did when we hired (but we won’t)

Hi, with this post we want to call the Timlids to talk. More precisely, to launch the “Timlid Call” project, in which every two to three weeks our Pyotr anotherpit , Kirill flashhhh and Artem arasskosov will call an interesting guest through Google Meet and talk about a sensitive topic.



In the first issue, we talked about the difficulties of hiring with Anton ap_gubarev Gubarev, who for five years has been managing technical teams on a remote site and has his own telegram channel about how it feels. Below you will find a text squeeze, as well as the full audio and YouTube version of the conversation.







1. I interviewed blindly



Anton: It’s been a long time before I started using the video for an interview. Communicating with other companies, I know that many continue to call up without a video, maybe even just by phone. Video is actually very important. Communicating face to face, you better see a person’s emotions, what he thinks, because it is displayed on his face.
When conducting an interview, we will definitely use the video: naturally, the interviewee is warned about this, and the recording remains only with us. Other team leaders can revise it: for example, if a person did not fit into one team, but can fit into another, there would be no need to pull him again so that he repeated about the same. The team leader Timlid will watch the video and decide whether to call a person for a substantive conversation. For example, one of the developers, seregazhuk , got into the company this way .



2. (Not) forcibly delegated



Someone likes to not only write code, but to solve the entire business problem to the stop. What to do with developers who really want to exclusively program, but don’t want to do the product at all, to be honest, we don’t know (but we’ll be happy to phone and discuss - write ).

Anton: The main task of the team leader is to make a team that can “go” without him. Without a person to whom you can delegate, nothing will work. In the first stages I, let’s say, learned from my mistakes. When I went on vacation or something else happened, the work almost got up or the productivity dropped at times. Therefore, over time, I began to try to make of one employee who could replace me: but this person was not ready, had no inclination ... Or, literally today, he interviewed a person. He looked at me very surprised when I asked questions about managerial functions, about the impact on the product: “Like, why? There is a team leader who can do all this. ”

To some extent, the product company also expects developers to want to participate in the life of the product: this way a person will be more useful for his team, and a team leader in case of emergency may not have time to do everything. Accordingly, in each interview we try to pay attention to how a person relates to managerial functions: what problems he solved in the last place, whether he set tasks, whether he talked with business, whether he conducted a code review, etc. From this we can conclude who can be carefully led to the delegation, but if only he himself will ask “give me” - then please.



3. Impressed the usefulness of a person by visibility (or lack thereof)



When a developer comes to you, you may see his GitHub, on which two abandoned projects from 2015 are test-task_1 and test-task_2. And, perhaps, there will be so much information that you can sit and read articles, code or human reports for hours. But is all this necessary?

Kirill: When I have a pool of several developers, first of all, I want to talk with someone who had a sexy github profile, or with someone who wrote an article that was not disgusting. Because I’ll think: “Yes, he’s probably interested in what he’s doing.” Although I often worked with people who did not write articles at all, did not speak, and there was nothing about them on the Internet.
We did not reveal any correlation between publicity and the quality of a person’s work. He may be a talented developer who simply does not like to write open source, does not have time for a project - or “saws” it, but keeps it in a private repository (maybe he even has three of them there).



4. Googling a person



Anton: When I was freelancing, I often hired the same freelancers - and there I googled to find bad reviews. It was justified and applicable. When you work for a company, you don’t. I do not collect any personal data - I do not dig into who he is friends with, where he goes, I also do not look at his pictures.



But blogs, personal sites, telegram channels, comments or posts on Habré, if a person attached them is often interesting. Reading what a person writes about, I will understand how he relates to hype technology, how he relates to legacy code. Finally, I’ll understand how he will join our team. I came across one person, he had a blog: there was a lot of politics, obscenities and all that. It is clear that a person, so to speak, is emotional. Accordingly, this must be taken into account: if you have three calm in the team, and someone new on the dealers will raise the bucket all the time, this will affect the team.
The amount of information about a person on the Internet will not affect his hiring in any way: no definitive conclusion can be drawn from it. But she will help to understand what should be clarified at the interview. Before each interview, the team leader can spend 20-30 minutes to make individual questions for each candidate - they complement the standard list of what the developer is interested in. Sometimes it just helps to find contact: if a person is engaged in aquarium fish, you can start a conversation with this - and after 5 minutes the person becomes less stressful, more open, and the conversation goes more efficiently.



5. “So, we have one-on-one today, come on, sit down, we will talk”



Everyone has a problem. This is normal. For this, they came up with 1-to-1. Not everyone wants to share something - but the fact that a person has no suggestions or is always “happy with everything” can serve as a strong indicator of health. At the same time, sometimes a person may think, “I’m sitting here writing code, now it hurts, I don’t want to speak incomprehensibly about what right now.” Here the format of meetings nailed to the floor is not suitable.

Peter: I have all the meetings on the calendar, I am like this: “So, meeting on the calendar, we are meeting.” A person has the opportunity to speak about what has become painful, but he is like this: “Yes, yes, yes, everything is fine, listen, the task is burning there, let's discuss the task better.” As a result, one out of ten cases ends with a full-hearted conversation: they are treated like a half-bind, but at some point they shoot, simply because you regularly interview. That is, the conversation took ten minutes five minutes, but the eleventh took two hours and it was necessary. My question is: how, if you make the meetings irregular, do not miss the moment when a person needs to speak out - because he himself does not initiate this. "
Many teams today have floating meeting schedules. That is, people have an understanding of what cycle they are going to - for example, this is a week - the specific date and time are discussed in Slack. Sometimes the meeting is spontaneous: there is a reason, you immediately write “let's call you, now I’ll dial”. This, in particular, helps not to think up problems on the principle of “like gathered, let's discuss something.” If team meetings are held once every couple of weeks or a month, then for 3-4 days the team leader offers time slots: “Let's discuss everything that happened during the month.”



ps Thanks to everyone who read. We will be happy to talk on sensitive topics - write in a personal or telegram , and the team leader will call)



pps In the full version of the conversation:





Audio on Soundcloud





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