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(I'm a Director-level with 30 reports in my organization, with a few managers as direct reports. These thoughts below reflect my current problems as well as pro

(I'm a Director-level with 30 reports in my organization, with a few managers as direct reports. These thoughts below reflect my current problems as well as problems I had when I was "just" an engineering manager. Note that the problems don't go away, just increase in scale...) Number one for first two questions: hiring. Finding solid, dependable people with the right skills and attitude is really, really hard. I probably spend 30-40% of my time on the hiring side of things. We have so much work to do and not enough people to do it, and combining that with the slow rate of inbound high quality candidates means that I have to spend a ton of my time screening and talking to candidates. Someone else mentioned turnover, but I have never (so far in 6 years) had anyone quit while working under me, so turnover for me has been really low. Number two problem relating to the above: diversity. It's nigh impossible to find women and other marginalized groups. They're in such high demand and the supply is so low that it's just so hard to hire people and have your team not look like a team of white dudes. For the third question, I talk to my old bosses and coworkers the most. I have a fantastic relationship with my last two bosses. Nowadays we're peers (same title, different companies) and we compare notes and mentor each other. If you don't have someone like this already, I suggest going to meetups (post-COVID) and meet other engineering managers. A shortcut to this is to find a new job, and then your old job colleagues can be your external mentors ;) That said, there's nothing wrong with having mentors within your company. Just be up-front with them about what you're looking for, especially if they're upper management. For the fourth question, I've never really found that tools have an impact in either direction. I've yet to find a tool outside of Excel/Google Sheets and email that is indispensable.

abatilo 5y ago
Not having any turn over in 6 years in our field is kind of amazing. Do you think you're doing something different than the standard set of practices? How have you retained people for so long?
- Jemaclus 5y ago
  I would love to take credit for this, but I'm not sure I'm doing anything particularly mind-blowing. I would honestly attribute it to sheer luck. That said, my company has had increased turnover in the last 6 months, but my organization has not. Just to be clear that I'm not claiming nobody is leaving the company. But if the company overall has attrition and my team doesn't, I must be doing something right, right? Not necessarily... again, could be sheer dumb luck that I have people that hate looking for jobs or something. (Disclaimer: I have fired people, and I have had two people transferred off my team onto other teams, and both of them have left the company, but I don't count those as attrition under me.) But if I had to pick something as a thing that I do to make sure my teams are happy and want to stay, it's this: I care deeply about the people who work for me. I'm a people-first leader. I firmly and strongly believe that unhappy people do shitty work, and happy people do good work. I believe that you don't get what you don't ask for (eg, raises, promotions, cool projects), and I also believe that most people won't ask for those things... so I pro-actively ask for them. Our 1:1s are their time to talk about whatever they want to talk about. It's not my time to pontificate. But if they don't have anything to talk about, I'll ask them questions! Things like: where do you see yourself in 5 years? Are you happy with the project you're working on? Are there cool projects that you want to work on? Is there a piece of technology that you haven't used that you would like to learn? And then once I get those answers, I work with them to achieve those goals. If they want to be a manager in 5 years, then we work on that. If they love the project they're on, then I get them more involved. If they want to work on Project X, then I figure out a way for them to transition off what they're doing now and move on to the other thing. I also spend a lot of time getting to know them as people. I know their partner's and kids' names, their hobbies, where they go on vacation. I frequently ask questions about those, like, "Did [partner's name] get that promotion?" or "Are you looking forward to your next trip to Disney World?" or "Has [kid's name] seen the movie The Mitchells & The Machines?" and so on. I'm transparent and honest. I make it clear that I support them as much as I possibly can, and that I would rather they be successful and happy than successful and miserable. One of my guys came to me about three months ago and said, "A recruiter from Stripe reached out to me about a role there. Why shouldn't I apply there?" and I just shrugged and said, "You should. You should always have an idea of what you're worth on the market, and if you think that's a better fit for you than here, I support you." And he applied and he got an offer and it was a little more than he was making here, but he declined because he felt like he'd be a cog in the machine at Stripe versus a valued member of my team. On the flip side, the offer clarified some ideas that he had in his mind about where he wanted to take his career, and so for the past few months we've been talking in our 1:1s about how to shift his career into a different direction, and he's been taking advantage of some opportunities that have come up. (NOTE: Despite the above scenario, I would never ever suggest to your boss that you are looking elsewhere, no matter how good your relationship is with your boss. It puts us in a very difficult position regarding certain decisions around pay raises and bonuses and promotions and hiring and so on. I did give this feedback to this engineer.) So if I had to claim credit for anything, it's just that. The soft skill of treating people like people, trusting them to do their jobs well, and giving them the space to make mistakes, learn, and grow along with me. After all, I don't know what the hell I'm doing either. :) (I really do think I got lucky with a team of rockstar engineers.)
  - fuzzythinker 5y ago
    No turn overs in 6 years is really impressive. Not currently looking, but would love to know the company you're working for and possibly/hopefully grab a coffee when I'm in the area. Please shoot me an email (under my profile).
    - readonthegoapp 5y ago
      My general understanding of 'turnover' includes firings, but not layoffs. And that seems appropriate to me. Maybe 'attrition' or some other term would more accurately describe how stable a unit/org is outside of firings. Or you could just say 'Nobody has quit me/the org, but I helped two folks transfer.'
      - Jemaclus 5y ago
        That may be a better way to phrase it, yes. Nobody has quit me or my org voluntarily. Thank you.
dan_quixote 5y ago
Have you found hiring to be significantly more difficult in the last 6/12/18 months? I don’t mean the process - that’s universally more difficult since COVID began. I’m referring to the quality and behavior of candidates. Our job postings get as many responses as ever, but the candidates rarely match their resumes lately. And the number of interview no-shows is much higher than normal. This has turned into an astronomical rejection rate. Is anyone else seeing the same? If not it is long past time to re-evaluate our process.
- Jemaclus 5y ago
  I haven't seen that myself, but I don't think it's particularly surprising. We do get a lot of fresh college grads applying for jobs that I wouldn't normally consider them for, but we just either redirect them toward more junior roles or don't even process them altogether. I also have a fantastic relationship with our recruiter--we talk almost daily--and our minimum requirements (vs what's posted on the job ad) are clear enough that I normally don't get a lot of low-quality resumes sent to me directly.
  - matheist 5y ago
    This might be obvious, but not to me --- why are your minimum requirements not the same as what is posted on the job ad?
    - Jemaclus 5y ago
      Great question! This is true of every industry, not just tech, but essentially it boils down to this: the job ad is for the ideal candidate. Sometimes you'll see ads for things like "10 years of Go experience" and then you look it up and you see that Go has only been around for 10 years! How many people can satisfy that?! Well, they can't, but wouldn't it be great if we got someone who could? It's kind of like dating. You fill out your Tinder profile and you say you want someone SMART and FUNNY and BEAUTIFUL and TALENTED and INDEPENDENT and NERDY but also ATHLETIC and WANTS TO SPEND TIME WITH YOU and MAKES A LOT OF MONEY and HAS COOL PARENTS and ENJOYS THE SAME THINGS YOU DO and and and and... And then you go on dates, and you realize that that perfect person doesn't exist, so on a case-by-case basis you say, "This person is smart and funny and talented and nerdy and I love spending time with them, but not the most attractive or the most athletic, and you know, that's OK!" or maybe "This person is beautiful and funny and athletic, and they also can't carry a tune or understand the complexities of my work life... but I can deal with that!" or in many cases, "This person ticks off every one of those boxes except.... we don't have anything in common and our conversations are boring... so no thanks." Similarly, we have job descriptions that are say that we want someone with these 100 different things... and then we get the applicants in and pick the ones that satisfy as many of them as we possibly can. OK, so maybe you don't have 10 years of Go experience, but you have 5 years of Python experience AND you built your own CI/CD pipeline? That's cool! Let's talk. I can teach you Go, and you can bring your CI/CD genius to the table! It's about putting your ideal case out there and seeing what comes in and then deciding what to compromise on. If this sounds weird to you, consider the alternative: posting the minimum requirements. It would like filling out your Tinder profile and saying you want someone who CAN BREATHE and HAS SKIN and BATHES SOMETIMES. lol, how big of a disaster would THAT be? (The big secret is: apply for any job that looks interesting, whether you think you satisfy the requirements or not. You never know! Honestly, most of it's for SEO anyway.) Does that help?
jawns 5y ago
> It's nigh impossible to find women and other marginalized groups. They're in such high demand and the supply is so low that it's just so hard. I have interviewed a bunch of women and non-white devs lately, and I doubt they would agree with you. This morning I interviewed a very impressive woman of color who said that she's struggled to find engineering jobs. I've noticed that it can be MUCH harder to find women and non-white candidates when your existing engineering team does not already have much gender/racial diversity. And that stands to reason. Nobody wants to be the token "diverse" hire. Is it possible that your company has already developed a reputation for its lack of diversity, so those candidates just aren't interested?
- dijit 5y ago
  I guess it depends "a lot", my previous job was _incredibly_ pro-diversity, so much so that it actually made me feel terribly inferior for being born white/male/straight. (yes, yes, fragile ego/masculinity, sure). We struggled very hard to find BAME candidates that weren't from India (India is a nightmare to migrate people from) and Women just.. didn't exist. We fast tracked every woman to second level interviews but there were just pitifully few and the ones we did get were quite poor fits (read: MS SQL DBAs where we used Linux/FreeBSD), we did make extended efforts to hire junior levels and train them (where we would have not done the same for a white male Swedish candidate (This was Sweden btw)) but that didn't pan out so well. This was true in other teams too. Add to this: the few women we had were heavily promoted in social, photo and print media and some of them didn't like it (becoming essentially "token females") and quit on that basis, the culture that sprang up was quite toxic after that, outrage mobs trawled the main internal off-topic company mailing list so much it had to be shut down. I hope I won't get crucified for saying this, it's my opinion and it is very obviously biased because I lived through it and feel somewhat burned; though nothing I have said is non-factual. The point I'm making is: Women and minorities are hard to hire because they are in limited supply, almost by definition, and heavily promoting the ones you have leads (at least some of) them to be disenfranchised. Forcing the situation and hiring just anyone on those metrics alone seems to (in my single case) cause very politically motivated people into the company who then seek to bully others or spend countless company hours on shaming the company to spend money on political causes they support.
epicureanideal 5y ago
> Number two problem relating to the above: diversity. It's nigh impossible to find women and other marginalized groups. They're in such high demand and the supply is so low that it's just so hard to hire people and have your team not look like a team of white dudes. Aren't "marginalized" and "in such high demand" somewhat contradictory? Rather than "marginalized", which implies active resistance to the entry of people into the industry, which is clearly not the case, perhaps a more neutral term like "relatively rare" would be both accurate and not contradictory. But of course, what I just said is thoughtcrime, even though it's obviously true.
- Jemaclus 5y ago
  You might be incorrectly conflating "underrepresented" with "marginalized." While it's true that the marginalized groups that we're talking about (women, people of color, people with disabilities) are also underrepresented, those are not the same things at all, and I chose the word "marginalized" intentionally. Here's a link to what seems like a decent definition of "marginalization" to me: https://www.inhersight.com/blog/guide/marginalization https://www.inhersight.com/blog/guide/marginalization
  - epicureanideal 5y ago
    I would argue that people with disabilities are the only people in that list who are actually discriminated against and marginalized in the tech industry (or in most other areas of life), and yet far fewer resources are dedicated to reaching out to them and encouraging them to join companies than the other groups mentioned. I suspect we would disagree about the facts of who is marginalized or discriminated against, and that's probably not something we can resolve in a comment thread. My position is based on data I've read, and I'm sure yours is as well, but it would probably take a lot of time to merge those data sets and come to a consensus opinion. At this point, I actually think some of the people in the "majority group" are being marginalized, due to the focus on basically anyone else being preferentially hired. When a person from the majority group is being considered for a role, the attitude I've seen expressed during hiring discussions is, "But is there nobody else available? Ugh. Oh well, I guess we need to hire this white guy." And that's not limited to attitude... I've heard very similar words expressed.
stuff4ben 5y ago
I hear you on the diversity front. As a former team/tech lead engineer, I was responsible for most of the hiring and resume screening on my team. Finding women and minority candidates was difficult, but unfortunately I was also hampered by the application intake process. In other words, my company wasn't reaching out to places like HBCU's or non-tech-bro events/meetups. That was mostly a function of HR. As a director you'd probably have more sway that I did at the time so maybe rejigger your outreach efforts to be more diverse?
- Jemaclus 5y ago
  I do attend a number of Women Who Code meetup events and I've been to two HBCU career fairs in the last few years. It's definitely something we do, but as you suggest, we could always do better. I'm a big advocate of this, but our recruiting team is the one who does most of the sourcing efforts and it's been tough to get them to think outside their traditional high-yield tech-bro mindset. I'm working on it!
fatnoah 5y ago
>It's nigh impossible to find women and other marginalized groups. I was a VP Eng with a slightly larger team, and EVERY subteam in my org included one or more folks in those groups. I didn't go through any particular effort, but it's one of those things that builds on itself. Finding ANYONE was really difficult, so I couldn't target specific groups and hired anyone qualified that accepted an offer (which is probably how things should work). The key was that many of the leaders of this tech company, including CEO and COO were women. That helped demonstrate that we weren't hiring folks just to hit quotas and that there really wasn't a glass ceiling at the company.
- Jemaclus 5y ago
  Yeah, at my company, our CEO and half of our C-level execs are women, but less than 20% of our engineers are women. To your point, every team in my org also has one or more... but it's not enough to have one in each team. More than half of the population of the United States are women, and far less than half of our engineering teams are comprised of women. And when talking about people of color, the stats are even worse. It's less about whether we have any and more about whether our team composition reflects the population accurately. To your other point, one of the reasons our teams are composed inequitably like this is because of exactly what you described: we have to take ANYONE who is qualified and accepts an offer, because otherwise we'd never even come close to our hiring goals! (Not that we ever meet those, anyway...)
  - wdroz 5y ago
    > More than half of the population of the United States are women, and far less than half of our engineering teams are comprised of women. You should try to match the pipeline, not the general population. For the bachelor in CS, women are only 18% in the US. Less than 20% of your engineers are women → normal outcome. [0] -- https://www.computerscience.org/resources/women-in-computer-science/ https://www.computerscience.org/resources/women-in-computer-...
    - fatnoah 5y ago
      Correct, the pipeline is one of the biggest problems to solve, IMHO. When I actually looked at metrics, the makeup of my org was actually a fairly accurate representation of the pipeline as a whole, which was very encouraging. It was an interesting state of affairs. When we were eventually acquired, I receive many comments praising the diversity of my org, and it was noted several times that, of the many dozens of acquisitions made by the company, ours was the first woman led company.
ablekh 5y ago
I'm curious about what roles you're currently hiring for. After reading your other thoughtful comments on HN, I'm even more curious to virtually meet you. :-) If you care, feel free to reach out to me at aleksandr <dot> blekh <at> Gmail.
908B64B197 5y ago
> Number one for first two questions: hiring. Finding solid, dependable people with the right skills and attitude is really, really hard. I probably spend 30-40% of my time on the hiring side of things. We have so much work to do and not enough people to do it, and combining that with the slow rate of inbound high quality candidates means that I have to spend a ton of my time screening and talking to candidates. Spending 30-40% on hiring is a lot. How is the current compensation and what does your hiring pipeline looks like? Internships? One of the smartest decision I've ever seen was to simply raise initial offers by quite a bit. Suddenly the quality of applicants just jumped. > Number two problem relating to the above: diversity. It's nigh impossible to find women and other marginalized groups. They're in such high demand and the supply is so low that it's just so hard to hire people and have your team not look like a team of white dudes. I'm curious why does it matters? Shouldn't folks be hired on their abilities rather than some arbitrary reasons?
- lifebeyondfife 5y ago
  This is a great question. Diversity is the solution to groupthink. From the book Surrounded By Idiots, the author demonstrates that people with different backgrounds and behaviour models come together to make stronger teams. As engineers become more senior, they have a hand in design, in product etc. they bring something of themselves to their software solutions. Making software with only a team of white dudes means you miss the mark on issues important outside that group. Also, inclusion goes hand in hand with diversity. People from all ethnicities and not just cis males can code, but if your team is mainly white guys, you have to work twice as hard convincing others that they'll be welcome and fit right in otherwise it becomes a self perpetuating pattern. Also, "abilities" is subjective. If your exemplar for software engineer progression is a path that fits a majority white man route into the industry, and plays to the strengths of the people you promote, you'll over-index on those abilities. It's a good question to ask, what skills are we missing out on because our lack of diversity leads us to self selecting? For transparency, I'm a white cis male manager, who manages a team of almost exclusively white cis males. I'm working on some long term strategic projects to help foster diversity in engineering in my city.
  - 5y ago
burntoutfire 5y ago
> it's just so hard to hire people and have your team not look like a team of white dudes. What's wrong with that? I'm not in the US, so I don't know. Is there a law against teams of white dudes? Or is it just about avoiding a possible witch hunt by the media/activist?
krenel 5y ago
Wanted to PM you but no contact info, so I'll do it thru here. > Finding solid, dependable people with the right skills and attitude is really, really hard. 1. What are the soft skills of the candidates that you most value? 2. After 6 months, what the most important aspect that you value to decide if it was a good/great hire? 3. Offtopic: Do you have an all time favourite book for growth/self improvement you could recommend? Thanks in advance!

abatilo 5y ago

Not having any turn over in 6 years in our field is kind of amazing. Do you think you're doing something different than the standard set of practices? How have you retained people for so long?

Jemaclus 5y ago
I would love to take credit for this, but I'm not sure I'm doing anything particularly mind-blowing. I would honestly attribute it to sheer luck. That said, my company has had increased turnover in the last 6 months, but my organization has not. Just to be clear that I'm not claiming nobody is leaving the company. But if the company overall has attrition and my team doesn't, I must be doing something right, right? Not necessarily... again, could be sheer dumb luck that I have people that hate looking for jobs or something. (Disclaimer: I have fired people, and I have had two people transferred off my team onto other teams, and both of them have left the company, but I don't count those as attrition under me.) But if I had to pick something as a thing that I do to make sure my teams are happy and want to stay, it's this: I care deeply about the people who work for me. I'm a people-first leader. I firmly and strongly believe that unhappy people do shitty work, and happy people do good work. I believe that you don't get what you don't ask for (eg, raises, promotions, cool projects), and I also believe that most people won't ask for those things... so I pro-actively ask for them. Our 1:1s are their time to talk about whatever they want to talk about. It's not my time to pontificate. But if they don't have anything to talk about, I'll ask them questions! Things like: where do you see yourself in 5 years? Are you happy with the project you're working on? Are there cool projects that you want to work on? Is there a piece of technology that you haven't used that you would like to learn? And then once I get those answers, I work with them to achieve those goals. If they want to be a manager in 5 years, then we work on that. If they love the project they're on, then I get them more involved. If they want to work on Project X, then I figure out a way for them to transition off what they're doing now and move on to the other thing. I also spend a lot of time getting to know them as people. I know their partner's and kids' names, their hobbies, where they go on vacation. I frequently ask questions about those, like, "Did [partner's name] get that promotion?" or "Are you looking forward to your next trip to Disney World?" or "Has [kid's name] seen the movie The Mitchells & The Machines?" and so on. I'm transparent and honest. I make it clear that I support them as much as I possibly can, and that I would rather they be successful and happy than successful and miserable. One of my guys came to me about three months ago and said, "A recruiter from Stripe reached out to me about a role there. Why shouldn't I apply there?" and I just shrugged and said, "You should. You should always have an idea of what you're worth on the market, and if you think that's a better fit for you than here, I support you." And he applied and he got an offer and it was a little more than he was making here, but he declined because he felt like he'd be a cog in the machine at Stripe versus a valued member of my team. On the flip side, the offer clarified some ideas that he had in his mind about where he wanted to take his career, and so for the past few months we've been talking in our 1:1s about how to shift his career into a different direction, and he's been taking advantage of some opportunities that have come up. (NOTE: Despite the above scenario, I would never ever suggest to your boss that you are looking elsewhere, no matter how good your relationship is with your boss. It puts us in a very difficult position regarding certain decisions around pay raises and bonuses and promotions and hiring and so on. I did give this feedback to this engineer.) So if I had to claim credit for anything, it's just that. The soft skill of treating people like people, trusting them to do their jobs well, and giving them the space to make mistakes, learn, and grow along with me. After all, I don't know what the hell I'm doing either. :) (I really do think I got lucky with a team of rockstar engineers.)
- fuzzythinker 5y ago
  No turn overs in 6 years is really impressive. Not currently looking, but would love to know the company you're working for and possibly/hopefully grab a coffee when I'm in the area. Please shoot me an email (under my profile).
  - readonthegoapp 5y ago
    My general understanding of 'turnover' includes firings, but not layoffs. And that seems appropriate to me. Maybe 'attrition' or some other term would more accurately describe how stable a unit/org is outside of firings. Or you could just say 'Nobody has quit me/the org, but I helped two folks transfer.'
    - Jemaclus 5y ago
      That may be a better way to phrase it, yes. Nobody has quit me or my org voluntarily. Thank you.

dan_quixote 5y ago

Have you found hiring to be significantly more difficult in the last 6/12/18 months? I don’t mean the process - that’s universally more difficult since COVID began. I’m referring to the quality and behavior of candidates. Our job postings get as many responses as ever, but the candidates rarely match their resumes lately. And the number of interview no-shows is much higher than normal. This has turned into an astronomical rejection rate. Is anyone else seeing the same? If not it is long past time to re-evaluate our process.

Jemaclus 5y ago
I haven't seen that myself, but I don't think it's particularly surprising. We do get a lot of fresh college grads applying for jobs that I wouldn't normally consider them for, but we just either redirect them toward more junior roles or don't even process them altogether. I also have a fantastic relationship with our recruiter--we talk almost daily--and our minimum requirements (vs what's posted on the job ad) are clear enough that I normally don't get a lot of low-quality resumes sent to me directly.
- matheist 5y ago
  This might be obvious, but not to me --- why are your minimum requirements not the same as what is posted on the job ad?
  - Jemaclus 5y ago
    Great question! This is true of every industry, not just tech, but essentially it boils down to this: the job ad is for the ideal candidate. Sometimes you'll see ads for things like "10 years of Go experience" and then you look it up and you see that Go has only been around for 10 years! How many people can satisfy that?! Well, they can't, but wouldn't it be great if we got someone who could? It's kind of like dating. You fill out your Tinder profile and you say you want someone SMART and FUNNY and BEAUTIFUL and TALENTED and INDEPENDENT and NERDY but also ATHLETIC and WANTS TO SPEND TIME WITH YOU and MAKES A LOT OF MONEY and HAS COOL PARENTS and ENJOYS THE SAME THINGS YOU DO and and and and... And then you go on dates, and you realize that that perfect person doesn't exist, so on a case-by-case basis you say, "This person is smart and funny and talented and nerdy and I love spending time with them, but not the most attractive or the most athletic, and you know, that's OK!" or maybe "This person is beautiful and funny and athletic, and they also can't carry a tune or understand the complexities of my work life... but I can deal with that!" or in many cases, "This person ticks off every one of those boxes except.... we don't have anything in common and our conversations are boring... so no thanks." Similarly, we have job descriptions that are say that we want someone with these 100 different things... and then we get the applicants in and pick the ones that satisfy as many of them as we possibly can. OK, so maybe you don't have 10 years of Go experience, but you have 5 years of Python experience AND you built your own CI/CD pipeline? That's cool! Let's talk. I can teach you Go, and you can bring your CI/CD genius to the table! It's about putting your ideal case out there and seeing what comes in and then deciding what to compromise on. If this sounds weird to you, consider the alternative: posting the minimum requirements. It would like filling out your Tinder profile and saying you want someone who CAN BREATHE and HAS SKIN and BATHES SOMETIMES. lol, how big of a disaster would THAT be? (The big secret is: apply for any job that looks interesting, whether you think you satisfy the requirements or not. You never know! Honestly, most of it's for SEO anyway.) Does that help?

jawns 5y ago

> It's nigh impossible to find women and other marginalized groups. They're in such high demand and the supply is so low that it's just so hard. I have interviewed a bunch of women and non-white devs lately, and I doubt they would agree with you. This morning I interviewed a very impressive woman of color who said that she's struggled to find engineering jobs. I've noticed that it can be MUCH harder to find women and non-white candidates when your existing engineering team does not already have much gender/racial diversity. And that stands to reason. Nobody wants to be the token "diverse" hire. Is it possible that your company has already developed a reputation for its lack of diversity, so those candidates just aren't interested?

dijit 5y ago
I guess it depends "a lot", my previous job was _incredibly_ pro-diversity, so much so that it actually made me feel terribly inferior for being born white/male/straight. (yes, yes, fragile ego/masculinity, sure). We struggled very hard to find BAME candidates that weren't from India (India is a nightmare to migrate people from) and Women just.. didn't exist. We fast tracked every woman to second level interviews but there were just pitifully few and the ones we did get were quite poor fits (read: MS SQL DBAs where we used Linux/FreeBSD), we did make extended efforts to hire junior levels and train them (where we would have not done the same for a white male Swedish candidate (This was Sweden btw)) but that didn't pan out so well. This was true in other teams too. Add to this: the few women we had were heavily promoted in social, photo and print media and some of them didn't like it (becoming essentially "token females") and quit on that basis, the culture that sprang up was quite toxic after that, outrage mobs trawled the main internal off-topic company mailing list so much it had to be shut down. I hope I won't get crucified for saying this, it's my opinion and it is very obviously biased because I lived through it and feel somewhat burned; though nothing I have said is non-factual. The point I'm making is: Women and minorities are hard to hire because they are in limited supply, almost by definition, and heavily promoting the ones you have leads (at least some of) them to be disenfranchised. Forcing the situation and hiring just anyone on those metrics alone seems to (in my single case) cause very politically motivated people into the company who then seek to bully others or spend countless company hours on shaming the company to spend money on political causes they support.

epicureanideal 5y ago

> Number two problem relating to the above: diversity. It's nigh impossible to find women and other marginalized groups. They're in such high demand and the supply is so low that it's just so hard to hire people and have your team not look like a team of white dudes. Aren't "marginalized" and "in such high demand" somewhat contradictory? Rather than "marginalized", which implies active resistance to the entry of people into the industry, which is clearly not the case, perhaps a more neutral term like "relatively rare" would be both accurate and not contradictory. But of course, what I just said is thoughtcrime, even though it's obviously true.

Jemaclus 5y ago
You might be incorrectly conflating "underrepresented" with "marginalized." While it's true that the marginalized groups that we're talking about (women, people of color, people with disabilities) are also underrepresented, those are not the same things at all, and I chose the word "marginalized" intentionally. Here's a link to what seems like a decent definition of "marginalization" to me: https://www.inhersight.com/blog/guide/marginalization https://www.inhersight.com/blog/guide/marginalization
- epicureanideal 5y ago
  I would argue that people with disabilities are the only people in that list who are actually discriminated against and marginalized in the tech industry (or in most other areas of life), and yet far fewer resources are dedicated to reaching out to them and encouraging them to join companies than the other groups mentioned. I suspect we would disagree about the facts of who is marginalized or discriminated against, and that's probably not something we can resolve in a comment thread. My position is based on data I've read, and I'm sure yours is as well, but it would probably take a lot of time to merge those data sets and come to a consensus opinion. At this point, I actually think some of the people in the "majority group" are being marginalized, due to the focus on basically anyone else being preferentially hired. When a person from the majority group is being considered for a role, the attitude I've seen expressed during hiring discussions is, "But is there nobody else available? Ugh. Oh well, I guess we need to hire this white guy." And that's not limited to attitude... I've heard very similar words expressed.

stuff4ben 5y ago

I hear you on the diversity front. As a former team/tech lead engineer, I was responsible for most of the hiring and resume screening on my team. Finding women and minority candidates was difficult, but unfortunately I was also hampered by the application intake process. In other words, my company wasn't reaching out to places like HBCU's or non-tech-bro events/meetups. That was mostly a function of HR. As a director you'd probably have more sway that I did at the time so maybe rejigger your outreach efforts to be more diverse?

Jemaclus 5y ago
I do attend a number of Women Who Code meetup events and I've been to two HBCU career fairs in the last few years. It's definitely something we do, but as you suggest, we could always do better. I'm a big advocate of this, but our recruiting team is the one who does most of the sourcing efforts and it's been tough to get them to think outside their traditional high-yield tech-bro mindset. I'm working on it!

fatnoah 5y ago

>It's nigh impossible to find women and other marginalized groups. I was a VP Eng with a slightly larger team, and EVERY subteam in my org included one or more folks in those groups. I didn't go through any particular effort, but it's one of those things that builds on itself. Finding ANYONE was really difficult, so I couldn't target specific groups and hired anyone qualified that accepted an offer (which is probably how things should work). The key was that many of the leaders of this tech company, including CEO and COO were women. That helped demonstrate that we weren't hiring folks just to hit quotas and that there really wasn't a glass ceiling at the company.

Jemaclus 5y ago
Yeah, at my company, our CEO and half of our C-level execs are women, but less than 20% of our engineers are women. To your point, every team in my org also has one or more... but it's not enough to have one in each team. More than half of the population of the United States are women, and far less than half of our engineering teams are comprised of women. And when talking about people of color, the stats are even worse. It's less about whether we have any and more about whether our team composition reflects the population accurately. To your other point, one of the reasons our teams are composed inequitably like this is because of exactly what you described: we have to take ANYONE who is qualified and accepts an offer, because otherwise we'd never even come close to our hiring goals! (Not that we ever meet those, anyway...)
- wdroz 5y ago
  > More than half of the population of the United States are women, and far less than half of our engineering teams are comprised of women. You should try to match the pipeline, not the general population. For the bachelor in CS, women are only 18% in the US. Less than 20% of your engineers are women → normal outcome. [0] -- https://www.computerscience.org/resources/women-in-computer-science/ https://www.computerscience.org/resources/women-in-computer-...
  - fatnoah 5y ago
    Correct, the pipeline is one of the biggest problems to solve, IMHO. When I actually looked at metrics, the makeup of my org was actually a fairly accurate representation of the pipeline as a whole, which was very encouraging. It was an interesting state of affairs. When we were eventually acquired, I receive many comments praising the diversity of my org, and it was noted several times that, of the many dozens of acquisitions made by the company, ours was the first woman led company.

ablekh 5y ago

I'm curious about what roles you're currently hiring for. After reading your other thoughtful comments on HN, I'm even more curious to virtually meet you. :-) If you care, feel free to reach out to me at aleksandr <dot> blekh <at> Gmail.

908B64B197 5y ago

> Number one for first two questions: hiring. Finding solid, dependable people with the right skills and attitude is really, really hard. I probably spend 30-40% of my time on the hiring side of things. We have so much work to do and not enough people to do it, and combining that with the slow rate of inbound high quality candidates means that I have to spend a ton of my time screening and talking to candidates. Spending 30-40% on hiring is a lot. How is the current compensation and what does your hiring pipeline looks like? Internships? One of the smartest decision I've ever seen was to simply raise initial offers by quite a bit. Suddenly the quality of applicants just jumped. > Number two problem relating to the above: diversity. It's nigh impossible to find women and other marginalized groups. They're in such high demand and the supply is so low that it's just so hard to hire people and have your team not look like a team of white dudes. I'm curious why does it matters? Shouldn't folks be hired on their abilities rather than some arbitrary reasons?

lifebeyondfife 5y ago
This is a great question. Diversity is the solution to groupthink. From the book Surrounded By Idiots, the author demonstrates that people with different backgrounds and behaviour models come together to make stronger teams. As engineers become more senior, they have a hand in design, in product etc. they bring something of themselves to their software solutions. Making software with only a team of white dudes means you miss the mark on issues important outside that group. Also, inclusion goes hand in hand with diversity. People from all ethnicities and not just cis males can code, but if your team is mainly white guys, you have to work twice as hard convincing others that they'll be welcome and fit right in otherwise it becomes a self perpetuating pattern. Also, "abilities" is subjective. If your exemplar for software engineer progression is a path that fits a majority white man route into the industry, and plays to the strengths of the people you promote, you'll over-index on those abilities. It's a good question to ask, what skills are we missing out on because our lack of diversity leads us to self selecting? For transparency, I'm a white cis male manager, who manages a team of almost exclusively white cis males. I'm working on some long term strategic projects to help foster diversity in engineering in my city.
- 5y ago

burntoutfire 5y ago

> it's just so hard to hire people and have your team not look like a team of white dudes. What's wrong with that? I'm not in the US, so I don't know. Is there a law against teams of white dudes? Or is it just about avoiding a possible witch hunt by the media/activist?

krenel 5y ago

Wanted to PM you but no contact info, so I'll do it thru here. > Finding solid, dependable people with the right skills and attitude is really, really hard. 1. What are the soft skills of the candidates that you most value? 2. After 6 months, what the most important aspect that you value to decide if it was a good/great hire? 3. Offtopic: Do you have an all time favourite book for growth/self improvement you could recommend? Thanks in advance!