I can relate to this, but I can also relate to the other side of the question. Sometimes it isn't me, its you. Take someone who gets things done and suddenly in your organization they aren't delivering. Could be them, but it could also be you.
I had this experience working at Google. I had a horrible time getting anything done there. Now I spent a bit of time evaluating that since it had never been the case in my career, up to that point, where I was unable to move the ball forward and I really wanted to understand that. The short answer was that Google had developed a number of people who spent much, if not all, of their time preventing change. It took me a while to figure out what motivated someone to be anti-change.
The fear was risk and safety. Folks moved around a lot and so you had people in charge of systems they didn't build, didn't understand all the moving parts of, and were apt to get a poor rating if they broke. When dealing with people in that situation one could either educate them and bring them along, or steam roll over them. Education takes time, and during that time the 'teacher' doesn't get anything done. This favors steamrolling evolutionarily :-)
So you can hire someone who gets stuff done, but if getting stuff done in your organization requires them to be an asshole, and they aren't up for that, well they aren't going to be nearly as successful as you would like them to be.
The other risk is of course the people who 'get a lot done' but don't need to. Which is to say they can rewrite your CRM system and push it out to the world in a week but only by writing it from scratch.
Word f'ing up. I was recently fired from a remarkably relatable situation where a hot ninja startup had no effective intake process, so for orientation I had one pair-programming episode regarding an intensely technical internal aspect of the application before being sent off to fend for myself in their repository. Couple this with an office and project management style predicated on "who can interrupt the loudest?", having multiples of these conversations occur simultaneously, and an absolutely open office plan.
But hey, the CEO had sold a previous company for good money so this means he knows what he's doing. I'm sure they'll be a huge success.
I'm not saying that I'm God's gift to college-dropout programmers, but I'd never had a problem succeeding in a job until this one. In reaction to this state of affairs I had considered that maybe I need to be at a huge company that has better processes, but your Google tale says maybe otherwise.
So you can hire someone who gets stuff done, but if getting stuff done in your organization requires them to be an asshole, and they aren't up for that, well they aren't going to be nearly as successful as you would like them to be.
You've sort of nailed it. Also what I see is, how much people are addicted to the NIH syndrome. They have a ways of working which they won't change, adapt or even agree debate for their own good.
The way I see, too much or too little process are both equally dangerous. The key is neither to over play nor under play the game. Too little management leads to wandering in the wild with no goals, plans, tracking and destination. Often overly delayed projects.
Too much management gets in the way of achieving what would have been even easily possible.
After all the analysis I can say, sure you may want to hire every smart guy on the market. But you must also know to manage them. Bunch them together, create a positive environment and enable them to be as much productive as they can be. Good people need to be taken care of, Senior developers/architects even though not managers need to have some people skills. Its simple, if interacting with people is a part of your job.. People skills become part of your job.
To be good alone is not sufficient, if you are good alone you can probably get a maximum of 9 hours worth of job done everyday. But if you can manage 10 such brilliant guys you can deliver 90 hours of such work every day. But that requires spotless planning, tracking, course correction and most important creating an environment where such people can be productive.
Nothing big in software these days can achieved without team work. If a person is not good with teams, may be its time for him to look somewhere else. Being a jerk, rude and arrogant with junior developers may help you give a false sense of superiority but that won't bring you success.
"Google had developed a number of people who spent much, if not all, of their time preventing change...The fear was risk and safety."
I think you nailed it here. But something to realize is that this is not unique to Google, this is true in any large corporation.
The issue is that as people develop careers within the corporation, they become interested in what is most politically expedient for said career. This means they become very averse to any situation where the individual might personally look bad.
This means that aggressive projects which could have a high level of reward and equivalent risk for the company get waylaid disproportionate to their overall risk/reward ratio.
I think your point about people not understanding the systems that they are working on compounds this idea, as it makes the risks of changing a system appear higher (because they do not know the system).
"So you can hire someone who gets stuff done, but if getting stuff done in your organization requires them to be an asshole, and they aren't up for that, well they aren't going to be nearly as successful as you would like them to be."
So very true. I'm in this situation at my current job: I was hired as a dev, was told to fix organisational things by senior management and am now meeting resistance and roadblocks for various reasons. I'm a dev, and I'm not an asshole, and I also have no authority to steamroll people. At first I felt empowered but lately I've just felt bogged down. It's a sucky feeling.
It pretty much depends on what are you looking for: a procedural executant or a project developer. A project developer can execute very well for the first couple of times, but expect from one to get bored with the same speed.
You have to find the right tasks for these "very smart people" instead of hiring them to do the wrong job. The alternative is to hire really dumb people, at least they'd never be able to do anything more or better than what they're told.
I 100% agree with this. Sometimes it is the wrong manager or the wrong environment which makes a productive person less so. In this case the person and their manager either need to work it out, or the person may need to leave the team, group, or company and find a home where their talents can really shine (or, if the manager does this to everyone who works for them, hopefully their manager realizes this and fixes it).
"As part of our hiring process at Mixer Labs, we would often give people a half day coding exercise. "
I (and many people who I've hired) don't have time to waste on your startup. I can tell within two minutes if someone can code or not. I've never understood the need to have someone write code (and then nitpickingly critique the code because it doesn't look like my code) when I can just ask them and know if they are lying or not.
And I've hired a LOT of super fantastic programmers.
Well, recently I interviewed at a place where they called me in 18 rounds of interviews over almost 3.5 full days.
The only reason I was putting up with them was because of friend inside who had referred me. The thing is they made me right endless code rounds after rounds and I did code pretty well. I solved close to 90% of the problems without the internet. But most of them were coding problems.
During the final rounds, I don't know what got into them. They started going into Core CS areas. And damn then they started the Algo pop quiz. Some how during the last 3-4 rounds they started giving out the perception that they were not happy with some one who did not know the algorithms from the book memorized by heart. And that even good coding skills can't compensate for that.
After that they called me back and told, that some other department from the same company would like to have an another round. I just politely denied and, cut the call.
It's kind of a two-way thing. If they're investing enough time into telling me about them, what projects they have and what's exciting about them, what the environment is like, what hardware they use, what they do after work, whether they have any employees using Dvorak †, then sure, if what I'm hearing sounds good, I can devote half a day to them. But on the other hand, I've had a company administer a test and then a coding exercise with contact via email from their secretary, and maybe I'm spoiled but I'm not doing a multi-hour task for you to earn the privilege of talking to a person involved in development.
There are real diminishing returns on technical interviews. If you've got well thought out, well structured questions that cover the key areas for your organisation, unless you're doing something massively complex or specific, you can work out whether someone has the level of competence you're looking for in a couple of hours.
Two things:
a) I once heard a good quote and I think it's often true and helpful to think about if hiring: "Talent doesn't come in convenient packages".
b) The best traits of someone are very often some of their worst as well. Be mindful of that when trying to find the "perfect" candidate. Example: Someone who communicates well might also communicate (i.e. talk) a lot instead of working at their workstation for extended periods. The point is to not expect perfection from people. And by perfection, I mean excellence in several types of disparate skills.
With the exception of Lazy, I've seen almost all of these at our fund:
I find most of these are pretty easy to fix:
Lack of urgency.
This one is simple, give a deadline for every task assigned.
Good people will hit their targets or let you know well in advance if they won't.
Easily distracted.
Hmmm, I'd say something here but there's that old expression about the kettle calling the pot black:)
Starts but never finishes things.
I'm not sure how this is allowed anywhere, but for us we follow the Peter Thiel principle,
that you have one major task to do and that's what you'll be judged on.
This seems more of a management fail.
Argumentative.
This is where we fail the most.
We try to hire smart people and fortunately/unfortunately smart people have strong opinions on how things should be done.
We've settled on a hybrid of the Microsoft, you own your area for smaller decisions,
and the "disagree and commit" style of decision making for larger decisions.
Slow.
Unfortunately this is a deal breaker for us.
If you can't keep up then you don't make partner at your 3 month review.
Perfectionist.
This just follows from the "Lack of urgency" and the "slow" categories.
You can code your algos and systems as well as you want as long as they work and come in on time:)
Something about this mindset is depressing to me. Obviously we all want to get shit done, and every company wants to hire people that get shit done, but this definition of 'get shit done' seems very narrow and robotic. The author seems to want to evaluate a programmer's efficiency the same way we evaluate the efficiency of an assembly line or a sorting algorithm.
The problem is that the smartest, most creative, and overall most productive people often don't think this way at all. Instead of slogging away obediently at a problem for six hours, they might dilly-dally on twitter for two hours before having a lateral insight that lets them solve the problem in 15 minutes. They might go to Thailand for the first 3 weeks of a 4 week project then, in a semi-sleepless 100 hour binge, produce a technical masterpiece with a beautiful UI and additional business-savvy features no one else could have thought of thrown in on the fly. Would it be better for your company if this person just sat at his or her desk and focused perfectly and coded 10 hours a day like a good little robot? Does it matter? The same qualities that make some people brilliant will tend to make them unable or unwilling to work like this. You can gripe about irresponsibility or lack of discipline, but they are indeed getting shit done, just not the same way you do. You can pass on them because they don't fit your mold if you like--a more open-minded company will quickly be there to capitalize on the value they offer.
""As part of our hiring process at Mixer Labs, we would often give people a half day coding exercise. "
I'm just letting you know, I'm not working with you. Luckily, after years of experience I have been able to arrange lines of clients wanting me to get stuff done for them so I'm capable of screening companies like you on simple cues like this.
Have fun finding a slave who'll just do what you ask, no questions asked, no creativity involved.
Of course, I'm lazy but only about things that don't really matter. Only stupid people laboriously move huge tons of mass by dragging them; smart people invent a wheel and an internal combustion engine.
I don't fully agree with this, it depends on what type of project you are working on.
There is a certain type of cowboy programmer that depends on thinking quickly and having a good memory. This type of programmer can write code that works, really quickly -- provided the size of the project can fit entirely in their head. Because of this, they can do really well on small size projects but they never learnt proper code design and architecture skills, because they never needed them. This type of programmer ends up not being able to scale as the size of the project gets larger, because eventually they reach the limit on how much code they can remember at one time, and the lack of code design that lets you reduce the number of things you need to be aware about in order to write new code without breaking anything really starts to bite you.
Maybe I did not state things very well. This isn't just about short term projects. Some things will take many months of work to complete (e.g. v1 of some key scalable infrastructure).
It is not about doing short fast sprints - it is about being long term productive as a member of a team. Productivity includes good design and thinking through what is needed up front. But it is also about marrying thoughtfulness to efficiency.
I call bullshit. In my experience it's very rare for people to fall into almost any of those adjectives naturally... especially developers. These are people who almost universally love to write code.
Most of the observations listed here I'd be more likely to line up with a lack of investment and clear alignment of goals and priorities. The tone of the article seems to further support to me the lack of an environment that's nurturing to the team members' motivation.
In my experience, the difference between a GSD engineer and an average engineer is the understanding that it is up to you to be motivated, focused, and effective.
And, I've worked with many GSD engineers, so they definitely exist.
"I don't care how smart someone is - if they are unable to work hard and crank out a large amount of high quality work, they will weigh down your startup."
Don't forget that you need to pay them like-wise.
It's acceptable to accept slower (but still high-quality) work in exchange for less pay, etc. And sometimes it's even acceptable to let the quality slack for the same reason.
I think this is some of the best advice on hiring for a startup I have seen in a while. I just don't think the typical "reverse all the words of a sentence in place" is as helpful. With stuff like StackOverflow, it seems much more valuable that someone can figure something out and "get shit done", especially in a startup where there is so much to do.
Going forward, I will probably only hire someone after seeing them work on a small project, maybe even pairing with them in the process.
For every one true GSD person you'll find, there are ten who'd rather spend all day arguing about how their tools aren't perfect or they are waiting on X person/thing. In larger teams it becomes easier and easier to blame the 'X'.
A good rule of thumb to spot these people is how much yak shaving they require before they will start adding value. If they walk in and say "well I need new new system A from IT, and hours B approved by HR, and version control system C, and software stack D, and my last company had E, and, and, and etc..." The big red flag is when they ask for all of this serially and not in parallel. Then you know you've got somone looking to setup excuses for why they haven't delivered. A true GSD will carve through obstacles as much as possible.
A good analogy is the out of shape person who wants the platinum gym membership, new workout clothes/shoes, the trainer, and the diet plan, but always needs something else before they can start working out. Meanwhile the GSD person is going for a jog and doing pushups.
Expecting 1/2 day free labour will filter out experienced, non-desperate engineers. I've put up with that kind of stuff in my early 20s but certainly wouldn't any more, unless my personal situation was desperate.
I have to say that some combination of these negative traits can describe me at certain points in time. I'll set out to try to build the "perfect" thing, and then snap to reality and use the quick-and-dirty solution.
Procrastination, distraction, laziness, lack of follow-through, slowness, those all manifest themselves when I have no reason to be engaged in the work. The work might just be a really bad match (example: endless maintenance and toiling through bad legacy code, putting out fires, when I could be designing and building something half decent).
Good points. We all have moments where we exhibit some or all of these traits. This is not about an individual moment (or e.g. working for a terrible, demotivating manager, or on a crappy project).
But I do think there are some people who may be very smart or experienced, but who just are not very effective. Some of this could be contextual (in which case it is valuable for both you and them to find them a new home), but sometimes it is just a person's personality or approach to work.
I can relate to this post. Specially around Slow and Argumentative. These are cloaks in which faux-smart people hide under. I had experience with a developer who would not want to lift a finger until he absolutely knew that the feature he was about to build was assured unquestionable success. So we would gather some data to figure out users predisposition to use the feature, and still nothing. in the end he would not experiment and we fired him
Just about all of these problems can be solved with good agile practices like pairing and scrum.
People are way more productive, focused, and determined when pairing. It's simply much harder to waste time and produce low quality work when you're directly accountable to the person next to you.
Scrum solves the urgency, commitment, follow-through, and slow problems. Each iteration the team has to commit to a set of tasks to get done. If they don't make it they have to figure out why they didn't, and how to improve. This continuous reflection and optimization is how team's get good and fast.
Of course there will be people who can't be brought into the team, but they are few and far between. And you can't tell until you've created a team for them to be brought in to. So instead of focusing so much on the fantasy of hiring a great team, learn how to build a great team.
i've found scrum to be the worst possible "methodology" on the planet and can't stand pair programming. i've also been known to get things done on occasion.
nothing about making software is one size fits all. forcing scrum and pair programming sounds like a really good way to get an enthusiastic team, but guarantees little else.
This is a bit too one-sided. Hiring those who GSD is obvious, but it's not the only thing. Context is important -- what are you building? Do you need algorithmic expertise? What about scale? Platform experience?
Applying one aspect to hiring, especially at an early-stage startup, is a poor approach.
This is a fair point - you should definitely tailor your hiring approach to your needs. But for all the types of people you mention, I think you would want people who are very productive and able to GSD for their areas.
Do you think this is not the case? Or are these specific types of roles where you think having effective people are secondary?
I can't tell you how much more I would value someone who takes 4 weeks to build something that works 100% of the time over someone who takes 1 week to build something that works 95% of the time. Something that works 95% of the time is worse than useless IMHO.
The replies to this topic are the most ridiculous programmer-equivalent of Internet-toughguy posturing.
Have you seen the people, money and time resources NASA put into the code which runs on space flight hardware? The reviews on reviews on reviews, the exactly specified every code path, the complete tracking and investigating of every bug in their codebase ever and checking all of them for wider applicability... and they don't get 100% success in years of applying their processes to a comparatively small and limited codebase.
Wasn't Zed telling us about how 37 signals restarts their Ruby in Rails processes every day due to instability and memory leaks? Guess that makes their lower-than-100% success rate multi-million dollar generating software "worse than useless", eh?
[+] [-] ChuckMcM|14 years ago|reply
I had this experience working at Google. I had a horrible time getting anything done there. Now I spent a bit of time evaluating that since it had never been the case in my career, up to that point, where I was unable to move the ball forward and I really wanted to understand that. The short answer was that Google had developed a number of people who spent much, if not all, of their time preventing change. It took me a while to figure out what motivated someone to be anti-change.
The fear was risk and safety. Folks moved around a lot and so you had people in charge of systems they didn't build, didn't understand all the moving parts of, and were apt to get a poor rating if they broke. When dealing with people in that situation one could either educate them and bring them along, or steam roll over them. Education takes time, and during that time the 'teacher' doesn't get anything done. This favors steamrolling evolutionarily :-)
So you can hire someone who gets stuff done, but if getting stuff done in your organization requires them to be an asshole, and they aren't up for that, well they aren't going to be nearly as successful as you would like them to be.
The other risk is of course the people who 'get a lot done' but don't need to. Which is to say they can rewrite your CRM system and push it out to the world in a week but only by writing it from scratch.
[+] [-] rhizome|14 years ago|reply
But hey, the CEO had sold a previous company for good money so this means he knows what he's doing. I'm sure they'll be a huge success.
I'm not saying that I'm God's gift to college-dropout programmers, but I'd never had a problem succeeding in a job until this one. In reaction to this state of affairs I had considered that maybe I need to be at a huge company that has better processes, but your Google tale says maybe otherwise.
</vent>
[+] [-] kamaal|14 years ago|reply
You've sort of nailed it. Also what I see is, how much people are addicted to the NIH syndrome. They have a ways of working which they won't change, adapt or even agree debate for their own good.
The way I see, too much or too little process are both equally dangerous. The key is neither to over play nor under play the game. Too little management leads to wandering in the wild with no goals, plans, tracking and destination. Often overly delayed projects.
Too much management gets in the way of achieving what would have been even easily possible.
After all the analysis I can say, sure you may want to hire every smart guy on the market. But you must also know to manage them. Bunch them together, create a positive environment and enable them to be as much productive as they can be. Good people need to be taken care of, Senior developers/architects even though not managers need to have some people skills. Its simple, if interacting with people is a part of your job.. People skills become part of your job.
To be good alone is not sufficient, if you are good alone you can probably get a maximum of 9 hours worth of job done everyday. But if you can manage 10 such brilliant guys you can deliver 90 hours of such work every day. But that requires spotless planning, tracking, course correction and most important creating an environment where such people can be productive.
Nothing big in software these days can achieved without team work. If a person is not good with teams, may be its time for him to look somewhere else. Being a jerk, rude and arrogant with junior developers may help you give a false sense of superiority but that won't bring you success.
[+] [-] ohyes|14 years ago|reply
I think you nailed it here. But something to realize is that this is not unique to Google, this is true in any large corporation.
The issue is that as people develop careers within the corporation, they become interested in what is most politically expedient for said career. This means they become very averse to any situation where the individual might personally look bad.
This means that aggressive projects which could have a high level of reward and equivalent risk for the company get waylaid disproportionate to their overall risk/reward ratio.
I think your point about people not understanding the systems that they are working on compounds this idea, as it makes the risks of changing a system appear higher (because they do not know the system).
[+] [-] davedx|14 years ago|reply
So very true. I'm in this situation at my current job: I was hired as a dev, was told to fix organisational things by senior management and am now meeting resistance and roadblocks for various reasons. I'm a dev, and I'm not an asshole, and I also have no authority to steamroll people. At first I felt empowered but lately I've just felt bogged down. It's a sucky feeling.
[+] [-] UtestMe|14 years ago|reply
It pretty much depends on what are you looking for: a procedural executant or a project developer. A project developer can execute very well for the first couple of times, but expect from one to get bored with the same speed.
You have to find the right tasks for these "very smart people" instead of hiring them to do the wrong job. The alternative is to hire really dumb people, at least they'd never be able to do anything more or better than what they're told.
[+] [-] eladgil|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] silverbax88|14 years ago|reply
I (and many people who I've hired) don't have time to waste on your startup. I can tell within two minutes if someone can code or not. I've never understood the need to have someone write code (and then nitpickingly critique the code because it doesn't look like my code) when I can just ask them and know if they are lying or not.
And I've hired a LOT of super fantastic programmers.
[+] [-] kamaal|14 years ago|reply
The only reason I was putting up with them was because of friend inside who had referred me. The thing is they made me right endless code rounds after rounds and I did code pretty well. I solved close to 90% of the problems without the internet. But most of them were coding problems.
During the final rounds, I don't know what got into them. They started going into Core CS areas. And damn then they started the Algo pop quiz. Some how during the last 3-4 rounds they started giving out the perception that they were not happy with some one who did not know the algorithms from the book memorized by heart. And that even good coding skills can't compensate for that.
After that they called me back and told, that some other department from the same company would like to have an another round. I just politely denied and, cut the call.
[+] [-] aboodman|14 years ago|reply
Common knowledge is that hiring programmers is insanely difficult. If you have a gift for it, you could make craptonnes of money!
[+] [-] jarek|14 years ago|reply
† List exaggerated
[+] [-] eladgil|14 years ago|reply
Our test was not primarily just code quality.
When we brought people in we would look at:
1. Approach. Did they use e.g. an open source pre-existing module or write something themselves? Did they come up with a creative solution?
2. Culture fit. While they were in working with us, how did they interact with the team? Did they enjoy working with us and vice versa?
3. Productivity. How much did they actually get done?
[+] [-] Tyrannosaurs|14 years ago|reply
There are real diminishing returns on technical interviews. If you've got well thought out, well structured questions that cover the key areas for your organisation, unless you're doing something massively complex or specific, you can work out whether someone has the level of competence you're looking for in a couple of hours.
[+] [-] pavel_lishin|14 years ago|reply
How?
[+] [-] dusklight|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] d3fun|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aridiculous|14 years ago|reply
b) The best traits of someone are very often some of their worst as well. Be mindful of that when trying to find the "perfect" candidate. Example: Someone who communicates well might also communicate (i.e. talk) a lot instead of working at their workstation for extended periods. The point is to not expect perfection from people. And by perfection, I mean excellence in several types of disparate skills.
[+] [-] TheBurningOr|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chollida1|14 years ago|reply
I find most of these are pretty easy to fix:
This one is simple, give a deadline for every task assigned.Good people will hit their targets or let you know well in advance if they won't.
Hmmm, I'd say something here but there's that old expression about the kettle calling the pot black:) I'm not sure how this is allowed anywhere, but for us we follow the Peter Thiel principle,that you have one major task to do and that's what you'll be judged on. This seems more of a management fail.
This is where we fail the most.We try to hire smart people and fortunately/unfortunately smart people have strong opinions on how things should be done.
We've settled on a hybrid of the Microsoft, you own your area for smaller decisions, and the "disagree and commit" style of decision making for larger decisions.
Unfortunately this is a deal breaker for us.If you can't keep up then you don't make partner at your 3 month review.
This just follows from the "Lack of urgency" and the "slow" categories.You can code your algos and systems as well as you want as long as they work and come in on time:)
[+] [-] danenania|14 years ago|reply
The problem is that the smartest, most creative, and overall most productive people often don't think this way at all. Instead of slogging away obediently at a problem for six hours, they might dilly-dally on twitter for two hours before having a lateral insight that lets them solve the problem in 15 minutes. They might go to Thailand for the first 3 weeks of a 4 week project then, in a semi-sleepless 100 hour binge, produce a technical masterpiece with a beautiful UI and additional business-savvy features no one else could have thought of thrown in on the fly. Would it be better for your company if this person just sat at his or her desk and focused perfectly and coded 10 hours a day like a good little robot? Does it matter? The same qualities that make some people brilliant will tend to make them unable or unwilling to work like this. You can gripe about irresponsibility or lack of discipline, but they are indeed getting shit done, just not the same way you do. You can pass on them because they don't fit your mold if you like--a more open-minded company will quickly be there to capitalize on the value they offer.
[+] [-] mannicken|14 years ago|reply
I'm just letting you know, I'm not working with you. Luckily, after years of experience I have been able to arrange lines of clients wanting me to get stuff done for them so I'm capable of screening companies like you on simple cues like this.
Have fun finding a slave who'll just do what you ask, no questions asked, no creativity involved.
Of course, I'm lazy but only about things that don't really matter. Only stupid people laboriously move huge tons of mass by dragging them; smart people invent a wheel and an internal combustion engine.
[+] [-] dusklight|14 years ago|reply
There is a certain type of cowboy programmer that depends on thinking quickly and having a good memory. This type of programmer can write code that works, really quickly -- provided the size of the project can fit entirely in their head. Because of this, they can do really well on small size projects but they never learnt proper code design and architecture skills, because they never needed them. This type of programmer ends up not being able to scale as the size of the project gets larger, because eventually they reach the limit on how much code they can remember at one time, and the lack of code design that lets you reduce the number of things you need to be aware about in order to write new code without breaking anything really starts to bite you.
[+] [-] eladgil|14 years ago|reply
It is not about doing short fast sprints - it is about being long term productive as a member of a team. Productivity includes good design and thinking through what is needed up front. But it is also about marrying thoughtfulness to efficiency.
[+] [-] famousactress|14 years ago|reply
Most of the observations listed here I'd be more likely to line up with a lack of investment and clear alignment of goals and priorities. The tone of the article seems to further support to me the lack of an environment that's nurturing to the team members' motivation.
[+] [-] sdh|14 years ago|reply
And, I've worked with many GSD engineers, so they definitely exist.
[+] [-] wccrawford|14 years ago|reply
Don't forget that you need to pay them like-wise.
It's acceptable to accept slower (but still high-quality) work in exchange for less pay, etc. And sometimes it's even acceptable to let the quality slack for the same reason.
[+] [-] epo|14 years ago|reply
Unless of course he missed off his other criterion "will work for peanuts".
[+] [-] chrisabruce|14 years ago|reply
Going forward, I will probably only hire someone after seeing them work on a small project, maybe even pairing with them in the process.
[+] [-] johngalt|14 years ago|reply
A good rule of thumb to spot these people is how much yak shaving they require before they will start adding value. If they walk in and say "well I need new new system A from IT, and hours B approved by HR, and version control system C, and software stack D, and my last company had E, and, and, and etc..." The big red flag is when they ask for all of this serially and not in parallel. Then you know you've got somone looking to setup excuses for why they haven't delivered. A true GSD will carve through obstacles as much as possible.
A good analogy is the out of shape person who wants the platinum gym membership, new workout clothes/shoes, the trainer, and the diet plan, but always needs something else before they can start working out. Meanwhile the GSD person is going for a jog and doing pushups.
[+] [-] muyuu|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jcromartie|14 years ago|reply
Procrastination, distraction, laziness, lack of follow-through, slowness, those all manifest themselves when I have no reason to be engaged in the work. The work might just be a really bad match (example: endless maintenance and toiling through bad legacy code, putting out fires, when I could be designing and building something half decent).
[+] [-] eladgil|14 years ago|reply
But I do think there are some people who may be very smart or experienced, but who just are not very effective. Some of this could be contextual (in which case it is valuable for both you and them to find them a new home), but sometimes it is just a person's personality or approach to work.
[+] [-] medinism|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] samd|14 years ago|reply
People are way more productive, focused, and determined when pairing. It's simply much harder to waste time and produce low quality work when you're directly accountable to the person next to you.
Scrum solves the urgency, commitment, follow-through, and slow problems. Each iteration the team has to commit to a set of tasks to get done. If they don't make it they have to figure out why they didn't, and how to improve. This continuous reflection and optimization is how team's get good and fast.
Of course there will be people who can't be brought into the team, but they are few and far between. And you can't tell until you've created a team for them to be brought in to. So instead of focusing so much on the fantasy of hiring a great team, learn how to build a great team.
[+] [-] unshift|14 years ago|reply
nothing about making software is one size fits all. forcing scrum and pair programming sounds like a really good way to get an enthusiastic team, but guarantees little else.
[+] [-] jroseattle|14 years ago|reply
Applying one aspect to hiring, especially at an early-stage startup, is a poor approach.
[+] [-] eladgil|14 years ago|reply
Do you think this is not the case? Or are these specific types of roles where you think having effective people are secondary?
[+] [-] billforsternz|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jodrellblank|14 years ago|reply
Have you seen the people, money and time resources NASA put into the code which runs on space flight hardware? The reviews on reviews on reviews, the exactly specified every code path, the complete tracking and investigating of every bug in their codebase ever and checking all of them for wider applicability... and they don't get 100% success in years of applying their processes to a comparatively small and limited codebase.
Wasn't Zed telling us about how 37 signals restarts their Ruby in Rails processes every day due to instability and memory leaks? Guess that makes their lower-than-100% success rate multi-million dollar generating software "worse than useless", eh?
[+] [-] skcin7|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cbs|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Tichy|14 years ago|reply