One Year as a Tech Lead

Primo : blind auditions are a good idea

Seriously you should be using blind audtions. Look up the research. At my workplace we like to say that we punch above our weight class. In order to do that you need to do things differently.

Secundo : and not for the reasons you think

Basically beyond the pro-social aspects; Bind Auditions allow you to interact with the applicant in the way that you interact with your co-workers most frequently. We are a distributed team; Most of our interactions happen in slack and through github. We use video chat (Hangouts or Zoom) two or three times a week and face-to-face interaction twice a year. Talking to applicants in person or on hangouts as a first line just doesn’t make any sense. Throw on the biases you have from reading their resume (which we don’t do) and you’re not really interacting with the applicant at all. You’re “interviewing” a bundle of nerves and your own biases.

Terzo : Here’s where things get really difficult

Everything leaks personal data. You don’t really realize this until you try to eliminate all personal info. There are the obvious things; resumes, cover letters, and email addresses. I have our HR person filter all those things for me. I get a list of ‘Candiate N’s (as an aside I was really hoping that Candidate 47 was going to turn out awesome (I am a nerd)).

Then the pronoun policing, which is only slightly harder. In english we are used to using he and she. Using they all the time takes some getting used to.

More insidious data then starts to become apparent. When a person mentions that they learned to code at RailsBridge or some other similar organization that serves minorities, I know something about them that I wouldn’t have otherwise known

Then strangely enough one of the hardest things is navigating the Terms and Conditions of the various sites you need in order to actively interview a technical candidate.

I’m looking at github here. Basically, github doesn’t want you to create a bunch of throwaway accounts that’s actually against their T&C but, if you let people use their own accounts that can leak a lot of personal information. Github has been totally awesome. Their legal team is currently working on a ammendment to their T&C to support blind auditions which is totally cool. Still they want you to limit yourself to a fixed set of accounts with leads to new problems in itself.

Trying to re-provision an account can bleed information the other direction. We want candidates to come to a programming challenge clean without seeing other people’s solutions. Our programming task is not terribly difficult in itself. The task is built on a real need we had and took a few hours to implement. The hard parts of the task are in dealing with the vague wording. You have to hop on slack and actually interact with us if you want to do well.

So far, slack hasn’t been a problem with their single user private channels which are awesome for this use case.

Quarto

Is it worth it? I’m not sure yet. We’re still going through the process (We hire kinda slowly). I’ll update as more data becomes available but, as of now at least my co-workers are loving the process.