How To Recruit And Hire Great Software Engineers

Want a great software development team? Look no further. How to Recruit and Hire Great Software Engineers: Building a Crack Development Team is a field guide and instruction manual for finding and hiring excellent engineers that fit your team, drive your success, and provide you with a competitive advantage. Focusing on proven methods, the book guides you through creating and tailoring a hiring process specific to your needs. You’ll learn to establish, implement, evaluate, and fine-tune a successful hiring process from beginning to end. Some studies show that really good programmers can be as much as 5 or even 10 times more productive than the rest. How do you find these rock star developers? Patrick McCuller, an experienced engineering and hiring manager, has made answering that question part of his life's work, and the result is this book. It covers sourcing talent, preparing for interviews, developing questions and exercises that reveal talent (or the lack thereof), handling common and uncommon situations, and onboarding your new hires. How to Recruit and Hire Great Software Engineers will make your hiring much more effective, providing a long-term edge for your projects. It will: Teach you everything you need to know to find and evaluate great software developers. Explain why and how you should consider candidates as customers, which makes offers easy to negotiate and close. Give you the methods to create and engineer an optimized process for your business from job description to onboarding and the hundreds of details in between. Provide analytical tools and metrics to help you improve the quality of your hires. This book will prove invaluable to new managers. But McCuller’s deep thinking on the subject will also help veteran managers who understand the essential importance of finding just the right person to move projects forward. Put into practice, the hiring process this book prescribes will not just improve the success rate of your projects—it’ll make your work life easier and lot more fun.

WINNER of Computing Reviews 20th Annual Best Review in the category Management “Tyler’s book is concise, reasonable, and full of interesting practices, including some curious ones you might consider adopting yourself if you become a software engineering manager.” —Fernando Berzal, CR, 10/23/2015 “Josh Tyler crafts a concise, no-nonsense, intensely focused guide for building the workhouse of Silicon Valley—the high-functioning software team.” —Gordon Rios, Summer Book Recommendations from the Smartest People We Know—Summer 2016 Building Great Software Engineering Teams provides engineering leaders, startup founders, and CTOs concrete, industry-proven guidance and techniques for recruiting, hiring, and managing software engineers in a fast-paced, competitive environment. With so much at stake, the challenge of scaling up a team can be intimidating. Engineering leaders in growing companies of all sizes need to know how to find great candidates, create effective interviewing and hiring processes, bring out the best in people and their work, provide meaningful career development, learn to spot warning signs in their team, and manage their people for long-term success. Author Josh Tyler has spent nearly a decade building teams in high-growth startups, experimenting with every aspect of the task to see what works best. He draws on this experience to outline specific, detailed solutions augmented by instructive stories from his own experience. In this book you’ll learn how to build your team, starting with your first hire and continuing through the stages of development as you manage your team for growth and success. Organized to cover each step of the process in the order you’ll likely face them, and highlighted by stories of success and failure, it provides an easy-to-understand recipe for creating your high-powered engineering team.

WINNER of Computing Reviews 20th Annual Best Review in the category Management "Tyler's book is concise, reasonable, and full of interesting practices, including some curious ones you might consider adopting yourself if you become a software engineering manager." --Fernando Berzal, CR, 10/23/2015 "Josh Tyler crafts a concise, no-nonsense, intensely focused guide for building the workhouse of Silicon Valley--the high-functioning software team." --Gordon Rios, Summer Book Recommendations from the Smartest People We Know--Summer 2016 Building Great Software Engineering Teams provides engineering leaders, startup founders, and CTOs concrete, industry-proven guidance and techniques for recruiting, hiring, and managing software engineers in a fast-paced, competitive environment. With so much at stake, the challenge of scaling up a team can be intimidating. Engineering leaders in growing companies of all sizes need to know how to find great candidates, create effective interviewing and hiring processes, bring out the best in people and their work, provide meaningful career development, learn to spot warning signs in their team, and manage their people for long-term success. Author Josh Tyler has spent nearly a decade building teams in high-growth startups, experimenting with every aspect of the task to see what works best. He draws on this experience to outline specific, detailed solutions augmented by instructive stories from his own experience. In this book you'll learn how to build your team, starting with your first hire and continuing through the stages of development as you manage your team for growth and success. Organized to cover each step of the process in the order you'll likely face them, and highlighted by stories of success and failure, it provides an easy-to-understand recipe for creating your high-powered engineering team.

Learn how the best teams hire software engineers and fill technical roles. The Holloway Guide to Technical Recruiting and Hiring is the authoritative guide to growing software engineering teams effectively, written by and for hiring managers, recruiters, interviewers, and candidates. Hiring is rated as one of the biggest obstacles to growth by most CEOs. Hiring managers, recruiters, and interviewers all wrestle with how to source candidates, interview fairly and effectively, and ultimately motivate the right candidates to accept offers. Yet the process is costly, frustrating, and often stressful or unfair to candidates. Anyone who cares about building effective software teams will return to this book again and again. Inside, you'll find know-how from some of the most insightful and experienced leaders and practitioners—senior engineers, recruiters, entrepreneurs, and hiring managers—who’ve built teams from early-stage startups to thousand-person engineering organizations. The lead author of this guide, Ozzie Osman, previously led product engineering at Quora and teams at Google, and built (and sold) his own startup. Additional contributors include Aditya Agarwal, former CTO of Dropbox; Jennifer Kim, former head of diversity at Lever; veteran recruiters and startup founders Jose Guardado (founder of Build Talent and former Y Combinator) and Aline Lerner (CEO of Interviewing.io); and over a dozen others. Recruiting and hiring can be done well, in a way that has a positive impact on companies, employees, and every candidate. With the right foundations and practice, teams and candidates can approach a stressful and difficult process with knowledge and confidence. Ask your employer if you can expense this book—it's one of the highest-leverage investments they can make in your team.

In this instant New York Times Bestseller, Geoff Smart and Randy Street provide a simple, practical, and effective solution to what The Economist calls “the single biggest problem in business today”: unsuccessful hiring. The average hiring mistake costs a company $1.5 million or more a year and countless wasted hours. This statistic becomes even more startling when you consider that the typical hiring success rate of managers is only 50 percent. The silver lining is that “who” problems are easily preventable. Based on more than 1,300 hours of interviews with more than 20 billionaires and 300 CEOs, Who presents Smart and Street’s A Method for Hiring. Refined through the largest research study of its kind ever undertaken, the A Method stresses fundamental elements that anyone can implement–and it has a 90 percent success rate. Whether you’re a member of a board of directors looking for a new CEO, the owner of a small business searching for the right people to make your company grow, or a parent in need of a new babysitter, it’s all about Who. Inside you’ll learn how to • avoid common “voodoo hiring” methods • define the outcomes you seek • generate a flow of A Players to your team–by implementing the #1 tactic used by successful businesspeople • ask the right interview questions to dramatically improve your ability to quickly distinguish an A Player from a B or C candidate • attract the person you want to hire, by emphasizing the points the candidate cares about most In business, you are who you hire. In Who, Geoff Smart and Randy Street offer simple, easy-to-follow steps that will put the right people in place for optimal success.

A "good" programmer can outproduce five, ten, and sometimes more run-of-the-mill programmers. The secret to success for any software company then is to hire the good programmers. But how to do that? In Joel on Hiring, Joel Spolsky draws from his experience both at Microsoft and running his own successful software company based in New York City. He writes humorously, but seriously about his methods for sorting resumes, for finding great candidates, and for interviewing, in person and by phone. Joel’s methods are not complex, but they do get to the heart of the matter: how to recognize a great developer when you see one.

A human-centric guide to solving complex problems in engineering management, from sizing teams to handling technical debt. There’s a saying that people don’t leave companies, they leave managers. Management is a key part of any organization, yet the discipline is often self-taught and unstructured. Getting to the good solutions for complex management challenges can make the difference between fulfillment and frustration for teams—and, ultimately, between the success and failure of companies. Will Larson’s An Elegant Puzzle focuses on the particular challenges of engineering management—from sizing teams to handling technical debt to performing succession planning—and provides a path to the good solutions. Drawing from his experience at Digg, Uber, and Stripe, Larson has developed a thoughtful approach to engineering management for leaders of all levels at companies of all sizes. An Elegant Puzzle balances structured principles and human-centric thinking to help any leader create more effective and rewarding organizations for engineers to thrive in.

Leading a fast-growing team is a uniquely challenging experience. Startups with a hot product often double or triple in size quickly—a recipe for chaos if company leaders aren’t prepared for the pitfalls of hyper-growth. If you’re leading a startup or a new team between 10 and 150 people, this guide provides a practical approach to managing your way through these challenges. Each section covers essential strategies and tactics for managing growth, starting with a single team and exploring typical scaling points as the team grows in size and complexity. The book also provides many examples and lessons learned, based on the authors’ experience and interviews with industry leaders. Learn how to make the most of: Hiring: Learn a scalable hiring process for growing your team People management: Use 1-on-1 mentorship, dispute resolution, and other techniques to ensure your team is happy and productive Organization: Motivate employees by applying five organizational design principles Culture: Build a culture that can evolve as you grow, while remaining connected to the team’s core values Communication: Ensure that important information—and only the important stuff—gets through