jonathan@researchcomputingteams.org
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Subcategories: Creating a Job Description, Interviewing and Evaluating, Onboarding, Other, Recruiting
Other tags: | Hiring: Other | Managing A Team: Interns |
Intern Onboarding Checklist - Research Computing Teams Here’s a 159 item checklist for onboarding, working with, and off boarding a semester-long intern. A good process will have to adapt itself to the work of your team, but this can be a starting list for your team to modify and evolve. A process that’s documented can be iterated on and improved!
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RCT Job Definition Worksheet: Letter, A4 - Research Computing Teams One huge difference between our work and that of (say) IT or large tech firms is that figuring out what the job is even supposed to be takes some doing. Our teams aren’t large or static enough to have pre-existing cookie cutter roles requiring previously documented skill sets. (Startups are more like us this way.) The work is fluid. Each hire, each job, is a bit of a one-off, a bit bespoke. Another point: hiring...
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Hire Good Writers, ”Getting Real”, Basecamp A short, thought provoking section from an interesting write up on building web applications by Basecamp. “If you are trying to decide between a few people to fill a position, always hire the better writer…. Good writers know how to communicate. They make things easy to understand. They can put themselves in someone elses’ shoes. They know what to omit. They think clearly. And those are qualities you need.” Breaking ties when hiring is genuinely hard, and I’m going to take...
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Picking problems for programming interviews - Will Larson If you do do coding as part of your interviews, it’s tough to find something that is relevant, hard enough to successfully distinguish between candidates, but easy enough to be doable. Here Larson plays with a few examples (one of which is a particular kind of data munging: something broadly relevant to our needs). His suggestions are to aim for problems that: Support simple initial solutions and compounding requirements Are solvable with a few dozen lines of...
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Does Stress Impact Technical Interview Performance? - Behroozi, Shirolkar, Barik & Parnin Tech Sector Job Interviews Assess Anxiety, Not Software Skills - Chris Parnin & Matt Shipman, NC State Whiteboard coding interviews are not widely loved by candidates. I don’t have interviewees live code but do I like watching candidates work through similar kinds of problems on a whiteboard. This study may finally make me rethink this. It’s a small study (N=48) where interviewees were assessed on their coding skills and randomized into two arms....
Continue...Other tags: | Hiring: Other | Technical Leadership: Software Development | Managing A Team: Career Ladders | Hiring: Creating a Job Description |
Research Software Engineers - Job Descriptions - Aalto Scientific Computing Group The Scientific Computing group of Aalto University has text for their job descriptions of a simple three-step (RSE1, RSE2, RSE3) progression for software development in their institution. It’s not a formally recognized ladder by HR yet but it guides their hiring decisions. The whole thing is just a few paragraphs long, but it’s very clear and is a lot more than most institutions have. The other internal documents they have on the page are...
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Series: Unpacking Interview Questions - Jacob Kaplan-Moss This series of questions ties in very nicely with last week’s discsussion of evaluating against requirements. Kaplan-Moss has five interview questions that he covers - maybe they’d be good for your roles, maybe not - with very carefully thought out rubrics for each: The value or skill that the question is designed to measure. The question itself Follow-ups to ask Behaviors to look for Positive signs / red flags in the answer Getting to this level for your...
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Increase your hiring success with job success profiles - Rod Begbie, LeadDev This sounds like how hiring works at most of the research computing teams I’ve seen: I’d seen enough job postings in my life to know you just had to come up with some qualifications (‘BS or equivalent in Computer Science’, ‘5+ years experience with Python’, maybe even a cheeky ‘Ability to work both independently and as part of a team’), throw them into a bulleted list, and start picking the best candidates from...
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Secret tips for effective startup hiring and recruiting - Jade Rubick These articles read together give a sense of what a really good hiring process could look like. Rubrick’s article starts well before the job ad goes out, and continues well past the hiring of any one candidate; it’s about strategy, pipeline, and iterating. But it’s intended to quite a wide audience, so doesn’t go into the details of interviewing for a particular type of role, which is where Cheung’s steps in. Rubick’s article starts...
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Writing Better Job Ads - Eli Weinstock-Herman This is a nice lengthy post on writing job ads. And given what I see scanning job ads for research computing team managers, the advice is needed! There’s too much for me to completely summarize, but some key points A Job Ad is a Landing Page… A job ad is marketing. An advertisement. I can’t agree with this enough. Even if what you have to post on your institutional jobs website is constrained to have to have all...
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My Lessons from Interviewing 400+ Engineers Over Three Startups - Marco Rogers, First Round Review Here we have a collection of interlocking articles and resources on interviewing for technology jobs. The parallels between startups and research computing aren’t made explicit as often as they should be. There’s a lot of need for tolerating uncertainty - in both cases, people are defining the problem while working on a solution. And with a small team but many changing things to do, everyone has to be adaptable enough...
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Why the best way to hire is incredibly boring - Laszlo Bock, humu Again - management isn’t complicated, it doesn’t require profound insights into the human condition or the right personality type - it consists of nothing more than the discipline of attending to the details. Bock despairs of the “one weird interview question” genre of articles that promises to give you that profound insight into a candidate without having to do any real work. But hiring doesn’t work like that. When hiring a human...
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Hiring (and Retaining) a Diverse Engineering Team - Gergely Orsoz, Sarah Wells, Samuel Adjei, Franziska Hauck, Uma Chingunde, Gabrielle Tang, and Colin Howe Hiring a diverse team, especially in research computing, is not the default. As empirical evidence, I offer… *gestures widely*. Therefore, default processes won’t get you there. With that the case, and because there’s moral and effectiveness imperatives to making sure you’re not excluding good candidates from opportunities on your team, then you need to change how the processes play out, which means...
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Work Sample Tests - Jacob Kaplan-Moss One of the things we can do to make ourselves more successful hiring is having really clear goals for what we’re hiring for - what a successful hire would be doing day to day in the job. Then we can perform principled and transparent evaluations of the candidate’s ability to start doing those things. In the first resource, Kaplan-Moss has fleshed out his series on what does and doesn’t make a good work sample test in technology. There are...
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The Thirty Minute Rule - Daniel Roy Greenfield We’ve talked a lot about having explicit expectations in your team, especially around communications. It’s been on my mind having changed teams very recently. Your team does have expectations about how people work together. (You’ll find this out very quickly if a new team member starts behaving very differently from team norms!) The only question: do you have those expectations written down somewhere? Having expectations explicit makes it easier for new team members to spin up, and...
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The Ultimate Guide to Onboarding Software Engineers - Csaba Okrona Eventually I’ll try to do a similar onboarding process starting-point checklist for full time staff. Okrona’s article touches on what some of the biggest differences will be (and it isn’t particularly limited to software developers) When you’re hiring someone you hope will be on your team and successful for a long time (at least a couple of years) doing work you don’t even know will happen yet, then there are other things you need to...
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Markets, discrimination, and “lowering the bar” - Dan Luu There’s a common, dumb argument that there can’t be sustained discrimination in a competitive hiring market place, because competition would have gotten rid of any such inefficiencies. Needless to say trying to negate actual reality with pure thought doesn’t work well, and Luu’s article here puts this article to rest. This is an older article that is extremely relevant to the hiring process text above; how you aren’t trying to hire some “best” candidate out there...
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Why Senior Engineers Hate Coding Interviews - Adam Storm Storm’s piece is related to the discussion last month on hiring criteria, and matching evaluation to what people would actually be doing on the job. Senior developers spend a more time deciding what to code than doing on-the-fly coding, and putting them into a whiteboard coding interview is stressful, unfamiliar, and doesn’t measure what you care about. Storm emphasizes this point, and suggest that if you really want to see if they can code or not...
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Building an SRE Team? How to Hire, Assess, & Manage SREs - Emily Arnott DevOps and SRE are two sides of a similar coin - bridging the gap between systems and developer teams to do better work faster. DevOps topics usually involve speeding release cycles, and SRE topics usually focus on improving automation, resiliency, and handling incidents, but there’s a significant degree of overlap. Even if you aren’t explicitly building an SRE or DevOps team, you can start hiring for these skills and approaches in...
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Use a candidate packet to improve your interview process - Jade Rubick Last week we looked at Rubick’s advice on hiring and recruiting, and one part was to provide a packet of information about the job, the work, and the organization to candidates after initial screening. Here Rubick goes into more details on what to consider including: Details on the interview process Why the organization is important, what you’re trying to do How work works - remote if that’s relevant, or offices Benefits Salary bands...
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Are your hiring filters working? - Jonathan Hall Once you are clear on the nature of candidates you’re trying to hire, it’s a lot easier to evaluate hiring processes - and once you have a documented repeatable process, you can evaluate and update iteratively. As Hall points out, everything we do in the process - from the job ad to the application form questions and onward - is a hiring filter. But is it a good filter? Does it enrich for the candidates we actually...
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Don’t Hire for Culture Fit - Ruchika Tulshyan, SHRM Executive Network I agree with everything in this article; “Culture Fit” too often means “like us”. So when people don’t give any better reason than “culture fit” for not wanting to hire a candidate, it ends up being wildly exclusionary. It’s also counterproductive! When you’re hiring, you want to grow the team not just in numbers but in capability, and hiring more of the same doesn’t get you there. As Tulshyan says, culture add is a...
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How to Freaking Find Great Developers By Having Them Read Code - Freaking Rectangle We know code is read more than it’s written, and that debugging, code maintenance, and incremental addition is more common and time consuming than “green field” code development. And yet, the entire software development community tends to vastly over-value writing code from scratch over understanding existing code. That’s true of research software development, too, which famously almost never starts completely from scratch. Here the article’s author recommends focusing a “coding” interview...
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Tell candidates what to expect from your job interviews - Julia Evans The goal of the interview process is to find out if there’s a good match between the job and the candidate; that’s more likely to happen if both the candidate and the interviewers are clear on what the process will be. Julia Evans points out that it’s straightforward and useful to document the process and communicate it to candidates ahead of time. The candidate will better know what’s important to the interviewers, and...
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TinyBird Tech Test - Javi Santana, TinyBird With a clear understanding of a role, it’s much easier to understand how to evaluate against that profile when you’re interviewing. Santana provides one real take-home problem they use at TinyBird, a company that builds real-time data processing tools. It involves writing up how you would solve a data ingest-plus-expose-an-API problem, and describes the rubric they use to answer it (it’s almost all about the communications, not the technical beauty of the proposed solution).
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I really like this documented hiring process by 18F in the US Government. It’s a well thought out process, and it’s written in a way that you could send to candidates so they know exactly what to expect. It’s even in GitHub. I also really like their technical pre-work - it’s either to provide some code they’ve worked on, or to do one of four exercises. The exercises are simple but non-trivial get-and-process-data exercises that would give a lot more confidence about ability to do...
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