3 ms·

Personal network is something that is very powerful here and will be the top (if not only) means of recruitment for me. How did you go about recruiting and assi

Personal network is something that is very powerful here and will be the top (if not only) means of recruitment for me. How did you go about recruiting and assimilating the members of the team? Just as a curiosity, what is your role? Are you a technical guy? The "not specific to a domain" part is something that is definitely sort of outlandish. My idea does involve that (though it could be narrowed in scope). Perhaps that requirement is just too demanding of any single team. Thanks for letting me pick your brain!

tom_b 16y ago
I worked at a previous job for about 1.5 years with the engineer and had subjected her to what must have been a terrible interview back then. Timing worked in my favor - her contract wasn't renewed by the company she was working at when I got permission to hire two contractors. I had been staying in contact and gently recruiting her for a couple of months. She became unexpectedly available, she called me up and we brought her in immediately. I know a handful of great hackers and I've pretty much added her to the group. I was socially connected to the other person and knew he was smart and committed. I wasn't sure if his tech skills would be too rusty (he had been working on software outsourcing business development, working with overseas dev shops for an app outsourcer here), but I knew he'd work twice as hard as anybody else. Plus, he's the kind of guy who spent time learning Vietnamese when he was working with a Vietnamese software shop remotely. How can you doubt that someone willing to go that far just to make sure that communication is good? It's been a real win with him as well, he's picked up the medical research side of things much better than I have and has more than exceeded what I expected from a technical perspective. My role is a little weird. I am a tech guy (MS in CS) with a background in SQL hacking for the last few years (lots of low hanging fruit in the enterprise db world) with a side of presentation side stuff. I originally came into my role expecting to do pure db dev work, maybe some lightweight (tool-based) report dev occasionally. But then the two original team members all left the organization and I had to become kind of a de-facto admin/project manager/technical lead.

tom_b 16y ago

I worked at a previous job for about 1.5 years with the engineer and had subjected her to what must have been a terrible interview back then. Timing worked in my favor - her contract wasn't renewed by the company she was working at when I got permission to hire two contractors. I had been staying in contact and gently recruiting her for a couple of months. She became unexpectedly available, she called me up and we brought her in immediately. I know a handful of great hackers and I've pretty much added her to the group. I was socially connected to the other person and knew he was smart and committed. I wasn't sure if his tech skills would be too rusty (he had been working on software outsourcing business development, working with overseas dev shops for an app outsourcer here), but I knew he'd work twice as hard as anybody else. Plus, he's the kind of guy who spent time learning Vietnamese when he was working with a Vietnamese software shop remotely. How can you doubt that someone willing to go that far just to make sure that communication is good? It's been a real win with him as well, he's picked up the medical research side of things much better than I have and has more than exceeded what I expected from a technical perspective. My role is a little weird. I am a tech guy (MS in CS) with a background in SQL hacking for the last few years (lots of low hanging fruit in the enterprise db world) with a side of presentation side stuff. I originally came into my role expecting to do pure db dev work, maybe some lightweight (tool-based) report dev occasionally. But then the two original team members all left the organization and I had to become kind of a de-facto admin/project manager/technical lead.