Comment by ken | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ken | Hacker News Reader

How's your hiring process? It sounds like you're trying to be all things to all engineers -- and not being any of them to almost anyone.

(We're tight-knit and cultured, but loose and independent! We're moving fast, and slow! We're making something simple, with a million LOC! Our process has "fail-safes", and yet somehow we have a ton of bugs!)

The one dichotomy I believe is that you're micro-managing and not managing. Your engineering management is probably running around offering spot-fixes. They're not providing direction. What kind of company is it? From the lack of consistency, I'm not picking up on any culture at all.

I can't tell what type of software you're making but if you're just hiring for "engineers", half of them will think you're moving too fast, and half will think you're moving too slow. NASA isn't going to hire a Facebook developer to write avionics, and FB isn't going to hire NASA engineers to write emoji-pickers.

You need to figure out what kind of company you are, and then hire (and maybe fire) based on that. No engineer is accusing NASA of being too fastidious, or Facebook for moving too fast, because everybody is on the same page from day one.

I don't think hiring is especially hard if you know who you are. Almost every software company (i.e., your competition) is terrible at hiring. Figure out your culture. Apple could hire even when their stock was in the toilet because they weren't afraid to show the world what they represented.

> You need to figure out what kind of company you are, and then hire (and maybe fire) based on that. No engineer is accusing NASA of being too fastidious, or Facebook for moving too fast, because everybody is on the same page from day one.

That makes a lot of sense.

The multitude of complaints show me that we're not only communicating what we want to, but also we're failing at communicating what kind of engineers we want.

We're currently changing our hiring process, and I will give that feedback to HR and to C-levels.

That's really good advice.

Thank you.

Not just hiring, but leadership of existing employees. Be careful not to try to brush it off as "We hired the wrong people (so we just need to fire everybody and start over, and all our problems will be solved)".

Many people are flexible enough that they could work for a range of styles. In the absence of leadership, they have to make up the answer themselves. Everybody makes up their own answer, and then everybody is frustrated that their coworkers aren't behaving correctly for their view of how the company should operate.

At every level, your engineering managers need to know what type of company it is, and provide clarity.

"We've got 'fail-safes' on our SAAS release process, and we're still shipping 100 new bugs a week. Clearly, something is horribly broken here. Based on our company values, we can all see that the solution is ___." Remove the fail-safes? Fix the fail-safes? Ship more often? Ship less often? Kill the product? Cut features? Spend a month just fixing bugs? There's no one correct answer, but you have to decide.

QUESTIONS:

1) Does your company have a solid Business Strategy?

2) Does everyone in the company understand and support this Strategy, and know how they contribute to it?

3) How do individuals know when their decisions and actions are aligned with the Strategy and contributing to the company's success?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com