Hiring Geeks That Fit

Hiring a person for your team is the single most important decision you can make. It has long-lasting impact, whether you are the manager or a team member. Would you like to learn to hire great people? Not sure how? You need this book. Great geeks are not the same as skill-based staff. You need to analyze your culture, determine your problems, define the essentials you need in a candidate, and then you’re off and running. Great geeks adapt their knowledge to your context. One developer or technical manager is not interchangeable with another. Hiring Geeks That Fit takes the guesswork and cost out of hiring.

Hiring a person for your team is the single most important decision you can make. It has long-lasting impact, whether you are the manager or a team member. Would you like to learn to hire great people? Not sure how? You need this book. Great geeks are not the same as skill-based staff. You need to analyze your culture, determine your problems, define the essentials you need in a candidate, and then you're off and running. Great geeks adapt their knowledge to your context. One developer or technical manager is not interchangeable with another. Hiring Geeks That Fit takes the guesswork and cost out of hiring.

This is the digital version of the printed book (Copyright © 2004). Proven Methods for Attracting, Interviewing, and Hiring Technical Workers Good technical people are the foundation on which successful high technology organizations are built. Establishing a good process for hiring such workers is essential. Unfortunately, the generic methods so often used for hiring skill-based staff, who can apply standardized methods to almost any situation, are of little use to those charged with the task of hiring technical people. Unlike skill-based workers, technical people typically do not have access to cookie-cutter solutions to their problems. They need to adapt to any situation that arises, using their knowledge in new and creative ways to solve the problem at hand. As a result, one developer, tester, or technical manager is not interchangeable with another. This makes hiring technical people one of the most critical and difficult processes a technical manager can undertake. Hiring the Best Knowledge Workers, Techies & Nerds: The Secrets & Science of Hiring Technical People takes the guesswork out of hiring and diminishes the risk of costly hiring mistakes. With the aid of step-by-step descriptions and detailed examples, you'll learn how to write a concise, targeted job description source candidates develop ads for mixed media review résumés quickly to determine Yes, No, or Maybe candidates develop intelligent, nondiscriminatory, interview techniques create fool-proof phone-screens check references with a view to reading between the lines extend an offer that will attract a win-win acceptance or tender a gentle-but-decisive rejection and more An effective hiring process is crucial to saving an organization the costs and consequences of a bad hiring decision. Not only is a bad hire costly in terms of recruiting expenses and the time spent hiring, it can also bog down or derail projects that may already be running late. You, your team, and your organization will live with the long-term consequences of your hiring decision. Investing time in developing a hiring strategy will shorten your decision time and the ramp-up time needed for each new hire. Technical leaders, project and program managers, and anyone putting together a team of technical workers will greatly benefit from this book.

Sam Selvon’s Moses Ascending depicts West Indian Immigration in England. Moses, a Trinidadian who has been in England for some years now represents immigrants who come from all corners of the world to seek a better life. Like many immigrants he is hard-working. After years of living in a dingy basement he saves up enough money to buy a house. Moses calls this his dream house in the beginning of the book but later on he realizes that the house is a piece of garbage.

Are you a technical person, such as a software developer, tester, writer, or project manager? You know that a job search is tough. You have to network, online and in person. You have to customize your resume for each job, so you can showcase your talent. You have to look for a culture that fits you. How do you start? Treat your job hunt like the project it is. Use agile and lean project management approaches that allow you to create a visual system. You'll increase your productivity, track your progress, evaluate your work, gain feedback, and throw out what doesn't work while building on your successes. Learn from your past career to optimize for your next step. Full of tips, stories, and humor, you'll apply practical techniques to take control of the most important project you'll ever work on: find your next best job.

Introduction -- The Silicon Valley Caste System -- Ideologies and Mythologies -- Black Geek Girls: Silicon Valley's 1% -- First-Generation Geek Girls -- Second-Generation Geek Girls -- Transnational Geek Girls: Caste, Class, and Diasporic Capital -- Code-Switchers: Race, Class, and All-Women Coding Boot Camps -- Conclusion. The Future of Tech Feminism.

Scale collaboration, not process. If you’re trying to use agile and lean at the program level, you’ve heard of several approaches, all about scaling processes. If you duplicate what one team does for several teams, you get bloat, not delivery. Instead of scaling the process, scale everyone's collaboration. With autonomy, collaboration, and exploration, teams and program level people can decide how to apply agile and lean to their work. Learn to collaborate around deliverables, not meetings. Learn which measurements to use and how to use those measures to help people deliver more of what you want (value) and less of what you don’t want (work in progress). Create an environment of servant leadership and small-world networks. Learn to enable autonomy, collaboration, and exploration across the organization and deliver your product. Scale collaboration with agile and lean program management and deliver your product.

Distributed agile teams have a terrible reputation. They don’t deliver “on time,” and too often, they don’t deliver what the customer needs. However, most agile teams, have at least one remote team member. And, agile approaches are here to stay. Don’t blindly apply agile practices designed for collocated teams. Instead, learn to use three mindset shifts and the agile and lean principles to create your successful distributed agile team. Use the tips and traps to help your team succeed. Leave the chaos of virtual teams behind. See how to help your distributed team succeed.