Tips on Hiring Employees | Hacker News Reader

Tips on Hiring Employees

erica.biz

17 pointsericabiz13 comments

Tip #0: Blast annoying popups in the face of your readers, then tell them that you sold your company for a million.

>Tip #3: But They Still Are Your Employees I will fetch my boss a sandwich exactly once - then I he can find another employee.

You want me fetch a sandwich - either I am hired as an admin or I have significant equity.

>Tip #4: Make Sure They Give You Status Reports

You can read the log from my checkings if you want - any decent system should be able to send you an email about this.

>Tip #5: Never Be The Only Interviewer >Tip #6: Always Hire for a Trial Period

Do so if you can get away with it - but given the choice between two different employers, don't be surprised if a good portion of your prospects will choose the other.

>Tip #9: Three Employees? Time for an Office That would depend on the situation - but this seems like a good rule of tomb.

>Tip #10: How to Beat the Big Companies at Their Own Game Worth reading for this point alone, except it doesn't say much that Joel had said. You are properly better of reading his blog.

Tip #0: Blast annoying popups in the face of your readers, then tell them that you sold your company for a million.

I never made it to reading the article since I closed the tab after seeing that much. Spammy and tacky - no thanks.

> You can read the log from my checkings if you want

If I were a boss and wanted a quick update on how things were going, the last thing I would want to do would be trawling through your git logs and diffs.

But that is exactly what I have been working on.

If you just want to see where we are going, look at the number of closed bugs, burndown chart, etc.

Sometimes you need a brief, human-friendly report of the general state of things. I suppose there are tools that can provide something similar, but that's assuming that everyone uses them, which for some types of employee, they certainly don't.

Personally, and I've learnt this the hard way, micromanagement is often a bad idea. Perhaps rather than status reports once a day, because work becomes piecemeal if this is done and not interesting. Instituting status reports once a week is better. Firstly, because it will then actually give the employee the opportunity to see their weekly body of work; and secondly, it will also be more meaningful for seeing what has been done, as it will focus on results, as opposed to: spoke to so and so for half an hour regarding xyz.

Exact my thoughts. At my current employer the activity reports are only used to establish billing for the customers.

Actual progress tracking happens on a 15-minute Monday briefing. Each developer report the status on the tasks he been assigned, and works out TODO for the next week, together with the manager. It feels more humane than daily over-your-shouldering, and presenting results among your peers gives enough incentive to actually get the shit done.

"status report" is vague. Devs can maintain an internal blog where they just post a few sentences about what they are doing, any problems, etc. Or run an internal status.net server. It doesn't have to be onerous.

Fair point. I suppose I was thinking about it from the perspective of a non-dev worker. I can see the benefit of an internal blog.

I was expecting this to suck, but I thought it was actually a very good article. I've had a lot of experience with all of the points listed (good and bad!) and I wish I knew this years ago!

One point I would make about the 3 people in an office thing. Find out how many of you would be in the office at the same time and consider renting virtual office space unless you have domain specific needs that require your own space. You can usually get a postal address, a certain number of hours or days a month and all of your bits together for a lot less than a full office.

Depressing that you still need to have popup ads on your blog even if you have made a million dollars.

We are just in the process of hiring a new programmer, so this popped up in just the right time. Tip #1 is very important and we are already very aware of that one. Right now it's a 3 man shop, and I can't imagine working with someone I can't grab a beer after work.

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