Pablo Fernandez

Tag: hiring

  • red apple

    The ultimate developer perk that’ll let you hire anyone you want

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    To convince people to come work for you you offer them, aside from compensation, perks. And you try to have better perks than your competitors (other employers). Brainstorming with my friend Justin a few years ago I came up with what I believe is the ultimate perk and since then I’ve been desperatly trying to find a place to deploy it. I haven’t found a place where I feel even comfortable bringing it up, that’s how far I am from deploying it, so I’m sharing it with the world. If I was running my own company, I’d deploy it in an instance, not giving it a second thought.

    This is the perk: every developer gets a confidentiality-bound personal assistant. There wouldn’t be one PA per developer, because they don’t need nor have enough work that can be delegated to keep one person fully occupied. Instead there would be one for all of the developers (or two, or three… or whatever you need depending on how many devs you have).

    First, I don’t think this would be a very expensive perk, because actually delegating work to a PA is a skill that you have to learn and most developers will not have it. Most developers will not know where to start. But most developers will likely enjoy saying “I have a PA” or “I have a secretary”. Having said that, I would actually run courses for the developers to learn to delegate because…

    It’s a perk that pays for itself. You might think you are paying for extra employees or contractors, but your developers are likely the most expensive salaries in your books. So if they can pass a task to someone else, you are saving money, not spending money. Let’s say a developer needs to arrange a call with a vendor to discuss a technical mater. They have to search for the right person, their contact details, go back and forth over emails. Imagine if the developer just tells their PA “Can you arrange that call?” over a Slack message and that’s the end of it. Back to coding!

    Think about making reservations, making doctors appointments, running errands, making phone calls in general (this is why they should be confidential). Developers tend to hate phone calls. Imagine if they could delegate to someone complaining about a flight ticket that got canceled! I once had a coworker who spent half a day on hold while pretending to code.

    It’s a perk that generates retention: you know why Google pays for food, haircuts, laundry, doctors on-site, etc? It’s because that generates a lot of retention. When you quit Google, you not only need a job, you also need to find a hairdresser, a place to clean your clothes and make doctor’s appointments. They treat you like children and you became as dependent as you were on your parents. I’m not exactly sure where the ethical boundary is here, but offering a free PA feels on the good side of things.

    It’s unique: nobody is doing and I bet nobody will start, even after it’s been proven successful. It’s like private offices: we have the studies to prove that developers need silence to focus and yet we cram them in open office buildings. Private offices, and PAs, are for the three-piece suit executives, not for the lowly developer, so it’s not a perk likely to get devalued when everybody picks it up, because nobody will.

    It’s loud. Imagine when the developer is hanging out with other developers and jokingly says

    Have your people call my people to arrange it

    Oh… you don’t have people? I do… this email address and phone number is my PA, just call them… and if you want a PA, come work for us.

    I’d love to try this some day… 

  • woman with hands on her face in front of a laptop

    You should not send rejection emails to job candidates when…

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    You should not send rejection emails to job candidates when there was no interaction. For example, in the case of rejecting someone just from the application, without a screening call.

    There’s a mantra that good recruiters and hiring managers take on the difficult task of sending rejection emails instead of just ghosting candidates. But I don’t think this should be a black and white decision. Do you agree? Disagree? Please leave a comment with your point of view, I’m intrigued.

    When you had a screening call with the candidate, then the candidate will likely be wondering about the next step, so if the rejection happens at this or any other later stage, then yes, ghosting is extremely rude and you should always send a rejection email and possibly some feedback for the candidate to improve. More on that later.

    If there hasn’t been any interaction, you shouldn’t have your only interaction with the candidate be a rejection. The reason for this is that most of us have, at some point, been desperate, and started applying to lots of jobs hoping that someone would pay us some attention, hoping we may accidentally open a door, and because being homeless is worse that shotgunning job ads. And actually, when the job ads are anonymous bland indistinguishable walls of text, there’s not a lot you can do other than hit apply and move on, so don’t hold it against the candidate.

    The problem is that then this candidate might have hundreds of applications that result in tens of rejections emails. Rejections for roles the candidate forgot about 10 seconds after hitting apply (how long can you remember a non-descript job post about an anonymous company anyway?), so all you are doing by sending the rejection is reminding the candidate that they didn’t get something they forgot they tried to get. When you get tens of these, one after another, it’s emotionally debilitating. It’s no wonder that a candidate might snap at one too many rejections.

    Oh, and about feedback: if you have nothing to say, don’t say anything. If you are going to give feedback, give actionable feedback. Giving someone impossible feedback is a slap in the face. For example, for a few years, I’ve been wanting to have an engineer manager position at a big scale-up or at a big company. When I get rejected and I ask for feedback, most of the time it boils down to “You haven’t been an engineer manager at a big company before”. What am I going to do with that? They might as well tell me “Have you tried being a different person? Have you tried having been born in a different country?” It’s useless and infuriating.

  • My biggest hiring secret: text interviews

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    I built a kick-ass team of 6 developers in little over 6 weeks, by myself, doing all the hiring and without using any recruiters. When I tell people how I did it there’s one aspect of my hiring process that raises the most eyebrows: text interviews.

    When someones profile looks promising (CV, GitHub, cover letter) I send them a text message over Google Hangouts, WhatsApp, Signal, etc asking them if they are free for 10 minutes. I don’t even book a time, it’s a short informal text conversation. The goal is to evaluate how good they are at maintaining that type of communication which is important for all development teams and essential for distributed ones. These are some of the questions I ask:

    • How did you learn to code?
    • How did you learn programming language X?
    • What do you want to learn next?
    • What are the pros/cons of distributed companies?
    • Can you tell more about project X?
    • In your application you said X, what did you mean? Can you clarify?
    • Do you have any questions for me?

    The sad reality is that a lot of people don’t pass this stage and only a few pass it with flying colors. This makes it a good filter to put at the very beginning.

    But there’s another reason why this is a good first filter: I can hold several text conversations at the same time. I can probably interview about 4 people at the same time this way. Or, I can interview 1 or 2 as I keep on doing other work, reading documents, addressing questions, etc making it not only of high efficacy but also highly efficient.

    I didn’t invent this, I was inspired by how Automattic hires according to The Year Without Pants. If you have any questions feel free to just ask in the comments and if you need any help hiring developers, don’t hesitate to contact me, but know that I’m not a recruiter.