Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 154: Why am I terrible at picking candidates and how soon can I quit my job?

Episode Date: April 22, 2019

This episode is sponsored by the O’Reilly Velocity conference. Register today and use discount code SKILLS for a 20% discount: http://velocityconf.com/skills. In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: I keep getting asked to interview new candidates. But my interview feedback history is pretty bad. I’ve said yes to hiring: Someone who’s super smart, but drives me absolutely crazy with constant argument and may cause me to take the time-honored Soft Skills advice and quit my job. My boss at my former company, who DID drive me to quit my job. My first (and only) hire back when I was a people manager, who turned out to be terrible, but I was told I had to keep him around because “it would look bad” to fire my first hire. What should I do? Is it acceptable to just keep turning down interview requests? I’ve wandered into a tech lead position, so I suspect I can’t dodge them forever. But I don’t want to keep suggesting bad hires just for the sake of getting more interview practice. Thanks for all the advice and the laughs! I’ve been a regular listener for a couple years. How long do I need to wait before bailing on a new job I don’t like? More than a month? It’s not totally miserable: the people are nice and the company has good prospects. But the technical decisions of the team lead to daily frustrations for me.

This episode is sponsored by the amazing O'Reilly Velocity Conference coming to San Jose, California, June 10th through June 13th. It takes more than great backlog grooming skills to be a great engineer. This is episode 154 of the Soft Skills Engineering podcast. I'm your host, Dave Smith. I'm your host, Jameson Dance. Soft Skills Engineering is a weekly advice show for software developers about non-technical topics.

And boy, do we know how to groom a backlog. You know how monkeys groom each other and they'll like pick little bugs and goop out of it? Yeah. I mean, that's the history of that metaphor, right? It's like, this ticket is a parasite, and I will devour it. I will eat it. No more OAuth 2 implementation.

The code review of that is just really gross. Yeah. Look at my mouth. Oh, I found this ticket about upgrading our SQL library nestled between your armpit hairs, Dave. oh my gosh that's the grossest thing you've ever said on the show yeah what a beautiful metaphor uh with that let's talk about our wonderful patrons who just love that kind of content so much that they're supporting the show financially thank you so much to matthew votovich uh voitovich sorry the agile ventures charity zach rannan louis santos nick cantar sean clayton sunny

ty sonic the hedgehog marie rousseau and chris hogan thank you so much to those folks who are supporting the show at the level where we shot them out at every episode and thank you to everyone else who has supported the show your contributions through patreon pay for hosting and stickers and taxes and design and all all kinds of stuff so thank you thank you all right shall i read our first question please do okay this comes from a listener named mike mike writes i keep getting asked to interview new candidates but my interview feedback history is pretty bad i have said yes to hiring the following number one someone who's super smart but drives me absolutely crazy with constant arguments and may cause me to take the time-honored soft skills advice and quit my job

number two my boss at my former company who did drive me to quit my job number three my first and only hire back when i was a people manager who turned out to be terrible but i was told i had to keep him around because quote it would look bad to fire my first hire oh wow okay going on mike says what should i do is it acceptable to just keep turning down interview requests i've wandered into a tech lead position so i suspect i can't dodge them forever but i don't want to keep suggesting bad hires just for the sake of getting more interview practice thanks for all the advice and the laughs i've been a regular listener for a couple years thank you mike wow man oh man we didn't hear about all the things that worked out though right maybe there

are hundreds of candidates that mike has said yes to that worked out with just a few poignant false positives yeah those false positives really stick out in your mind though because they stick around for a while you could consider replacing yourself in the interview with just a cardboard cutout of your sternly frowning face just leave that in the room for an hour and then fill out whatever form you use to submit interview feedback and just say no like yeah just say no to everybody and then you won't have to worry about that oh it's acceptable to just keep turning down interview requests yeah if you say no enough people will stop asking you an interview yeah that's a fair point like maybe it is maybe interviewing is not your strong point and

that's okay that certainly is a part of lots of people's job but it might be wise to say you don't want this to be a part of my job yeah it's not that i don't want to do it it's that you really don't want me doing this oh man i just love this is such a good i just love how honest mike is i mean mike mike's just like look i am terrible at this let me give you three examples you've convinced me you sound terrible yes you have convinced us i'm sure you're great in other important ways i was trying to think through candidates that i have said yes to who turned out to be mistakes and i think i've done this a fair amount too part of it is the source of my feeling that interviewing is nonsense in some ways because it's it's just so hard to judge

someone's future work performance based on an hour with them and there's lots of ways to get it wrong but one way to one one way to get it wrong that has few long-running costs is just to say no a lot yeah and i think that's a lot of people's process is like well if we're not sure we'll just say no and that way we might reject some good people but we will also hopefully reject some bad people that we can't tell or bad good and bad they're not value judgments but some people who do well and some people who wouldn't do well yeah so you in other words you favor a high false accept false reject rate in favor of a low false accept rate yeah yeah i've heard it said like the cost of a bad hire is so catastrophic that it's it's worth rejecting potentially good hires

so that's a thing people do is just get real strict and you see that in a very a bunch of different formats one is like making interviews extra difficult in ways that might not reflect normal job tasks so like kind of brain teaser puzzles are famous things that used to happen in tech interviews like how many manholes are in manhattan or whatever yeah oh i hate that that that's just like an excuse to say no to somebody basically right it's not like you did well so you're gonna do a good job at at the work well i like this candidate but their manhole estimate was off by three percent so gonna have to say no yeah huh what should they do what should mike do well i i don't know i mean i would love to sit in an interview with mike and just like tease apart

what kind of questions mike's asking and what is the rationale that mike is using to make the yes or no decision based on what was heard in the interview because yeah so you're saying it's not a thing maybe inherent in mike it could be just maybe you're interviewing wrong yeah very likely i mean it's very easy to interview wrong right it is i've done it um so have i and i've seen a lot of bad interview questions and i've been the candidate in a lot of bad interview situations but i've also hired a lot of really good people and feel like i have pretty good i have a pretty good success rate which i think i don't know i don't know if this is normal but you know i was trying to tally up like how many people I've interviewed. I don't even know. It's well over

500 people, maybe, maybe even pushing a thousand candidates over the last 15 to 20 years. And I can only really think of three hires we made, uh, where I said yes, and they turned out to be not a good hire. Oh, and I should say of those, you know, 500 to a thousand candidates, I've probably had a hundred of them actually get offers and start working with me. And I can really think of three. Now maybe there were more, maybe there were a few others, but it's not, it's certainly not over 10%. So I don't know what my false reject rate is, but my false accept rate is probably under 10%. Sounds good to me. Ship it. What's your secret? So boy, I think I don't really know exactly what I do, but I can tell you the thing that I have come to really appreciate in

my current role is I ask people to tell me about examples from their work when they've done certain things. Like I set up a situation and I say, have you been in this situation? If so, tell me what you did and getting those kinds of stories from people are these behavioral examples or technical examples well i do both but like behavioral would be like you know tell me about a time when you know you were facing a deadline without enough time to finish what did you do you know and i've got lots and lots of these questions i ask and you you can just and i assess them against what i would expect someone to do at that at their level of experience and you get really good answers like they're very telling and i compare that against people that i've worked with over the years

to see like, you know, is this something that I would expect this person to do? Or did they outperform that person or underperform that person? And then you can start to make an actual judgment call instead of, you know, instead of just like saying, I don't know, they seem nice, or they seem cool. Yeah. Do you feel like you have a strong model of what makes a good software developer in your head? I don't know if I could construct a software developer from the model in my head. But I feel like I have a good recognition model in my head where I can pretty reliably pass a set of behaviors through my recognition model and come out with a confident result. Okay. I think that answers my question. It's basically like you feel like from the information

you see, you can judge whether this is a thing that a solid employee would do versus not do at this level, it sounds like. I think so. Yeah. But however, having said that, I never base my decision on just the one hour that I spend with the candidate. Typically, we'll spend four, five, six hours with the candidate of lots of people, and we'll all compare notes and describe what we each learned and then with that whole picture then we can i can make a judgment call but never just with the time i spent with them and how much training or deliberate practice have you had at interviewing folks prior to my current company i had nothing but seat of my pants and watching other people interview and my current company i had several hours of actual training and then i

actually had people shadow me while i interviewed and they gave me critiques and feedback on my style. And so that's definitely leveled me up from where I was before. Yeah. So I have never had any formal training from the outside on how to interview. I think this is the question where maybe I realized my distrust of interviews is maybe just a reflection of me not being sure how to interview well. But I mean, I've read a bunch about interviewing, kind of done my own personal study, but never at any company I've ever been at has anyone said, this is how we interview here this is the bar these are the questions you've asked these are how we this is how we evaluate people it's always been like hey talk to this person decide if we want to hire them or not

and like like any sane person would be like okay now what like how do i know if we want to hire them but i think in our industry we're just like okay i'll do that so let me do when i started i was i was pretty young when i started interviewing and i think i felt flattered i was like oh cool they trust me enough they think i'm smart enough to make good judgment so yeah i'll do it and i love doing it and i still enjoy interviewing but the more i do it the more i realize that the thing i want the most is some kind of rubric some standardized pool of questions and kinds of things we evaluate that we can rate and compare folks to because otherwise it's susceptible to gut feeling and bias and i mean rubrics oh absolutely and i've written bad ones but um

hopefully if you're if you're yeah but hopefully if you're curating the rubric and evaluating it And iterating on it, you can see things that are on there that aren't helpful and things that should be prioritized more and whatever. But some standard is just so important because otherwise a lot of it can devolve into, did you like this person over the hour you spent together? Which is not a good way to decide if you should hire someone or not. That's a good way to decide if you should date someone. Maybe that's what you should do. Do I like them? But this is not for a work environment.

OK, you mentioned you mentioned a rubric and that you just want a rubric where you can like fill in the numbers and be like, OK, the rubric tells me higher or no higher. But I got to tell you, I created a rubric at my last job just like that. And I'm like, OK, we're here are the nine qualities we're looking for. Like, this is what we value in our company. We're going to rate them each on like a scale of one to four. And we did it. And then we filled out a rubric for this one. Like the first candidate that came through with this new rubric filled it out.

And the rubric said strong hire. But my gut said no. like, this is not a good hire. Don't do it. But I was, I trusted the rubric. And so we made the hire and that person turned out to be one of the people that I felt like we, that was one of the three. Yeah. Yeah. And so I'm like, I think that a rubric is not a silver bullet in this situation. Yeah. Or, or at least the rubric has to be refined over time. Yeah. Yeah. And when I say rubric, I mean, it should be some set of qualities or attributes you're looking for, but I think it should also have example questions to draw from or exercises to go through to help you. So it's

not just like resilience one through five and you're like i don't know like i pushed them and they pushed me back so five i guess they pushed pretty hard yeah that was a five level push i think we tested how long they could keep their finger over a lit candle and they kept it there a long time so they're pretty resilient like it should be specific enough that you know here's what i asked to evaluate this and here are the kind of answers that would result in this score this score this score that score i'm thinking of the medium one which i think is great well we can link it in the show notes but it's pretty detailed and it's all open i haven't interviewed there so i don't know how much it follows practice but that's been cool okay that's that's been helpful

the other thing i found is that how do i say this i feel like i have developed a pretty good ability to judge someone's technical skill where if they're if they're trying to do good work here's how good they are at solving technical problems but the other stuff feels harder and mushier to judge to me yeah like how easy are they to get along with how will they handle deadline pressure how how do they handle conflict in a team how do they how do they react to i don't know co-workers saying things they disagree with all kinds of other stuff that's not just how well can they write the code yeah yeah and that stuff is so important that's the stuff that seems harder and that's all the stuff that came up in mike's question too yep right like hired someone who's

super smart drives me crazy my boss of my former company who did drive me to quit yeah maybe the only hire when mike was a manager who turned out to be terrible maybe that was technical issues but yeah i mean the technical side i i just want to say i feel like the best way to judge someone's technical abilities is to as closely as possible have them do the kind of technical work that they would do in the job either through work samples or looking at their open source code or pair programming programming together just something that's like how would you work on things that you'll work on i just want to call out that it was really cute that we both said pair programming at the same time yeah especially given our last episode where we heaped some skepticism on

pair programming yep we never said we were consistent nope i cut you off though what were you gonna say i was gonna say you know mike says what should i do and i was gonna ask have you ever been have you ever shadowed someone in an interview where you're shadowing the interviewer are you asking me yeah no i've been in interviews where people shadowed the person who was interviewing me and i thought this is a great idea and i really wish that i had done this at some point i i but i i don't know how anyone my only experience for knowing how people interview is me being in interviews yeah being the interviewee so at at uh my first company well my second company out of college where i did a lot of interviewing we did a four-person panel

interview style and while on the one hand that's pretty intimidating to the candidate on the other hand interviewers get probably had something to do with the shadows like the shadowy figures that you cast when you're sitting up on your thrones yeah surrounding the candidate yeah did i say when i said shadow pretty stark it wasn't a metaphor these are actual shadows being being cast by a fire from torchlight all the propaganda pictures about like loose commits sink ships exactly maybe a little intimidating yeah anyway so even though it was an intimidating for the candidate, it was really beneficial for newer interviewers because a lot of times one of the four people would just be silent the whole time and they would just be observing. And what

I found was that later on, people would ask questions like, why did you ask this question? This is to the interviewer. After the interview is done, they'd say like, why did you ask this question? What were you trying to get at? And those are the most valuable things I think that you can share is what do you say in an interview and why? And I've had that opportunity a lot of times at my current company where I get to shadow other people and then they get to explain to me what their rationale was. Very, very beneficial. I think this reflects a trend in our industry, which is that everything besides the code is often pretty secondary in general and maybe a little bit less valued or thought about where you hear the old saw about hiring is the most

important thing we do, or maybe you hear that. I don't know. I feel like I've heard that plenty of times, but literally zero effort in my career from the organizations I've worked in has been put into making sure we hire well it's more just like make sure you're doing a good job and it sounds like you haven't had quite the same experience but it still sounds like before this current position it hasn't been really deliberately carefully addressed it was definitely less rigorous so you're you're not alone mike maybe that's one takeaway yes people who think they i think there are a lot of people who think they're really good interviewers and are horrible yes yes because they're they're just kind of making people jump through the hoops that they

have to jump through to get the job perpetuating the bad cycle one thing i have learned from every bad hire that i feel like i've been involved in i feel like i have one question that's like that's the person x question to try and suss out if this will fail in the same way person x failed it's like a it's like a release checklist where the checklist is built up of all the failures that have happened from previous deployments and now you've got this checklist exactly so you mentioned someone who drives you crazy with constant argument maybe think of a way that you would explore that in an interview or or you could even i'm constantly surprised by how directly you can just ask hey do you do this bad thing and people will say yes or no like and yes tell me about

people actually fought with your boss yeah and people will say yeah my boss was an idiot and i fought with them all the time and and yeah and maybe their boss was an idiot or maybe they just fight a lot you know like yeah you can just ask stuff yeah okay just so your advice is just ask stuff okay just okay no my advice is more specific it's think of think of things you wish you would have known about this person before they joined and think of questions you could have asked that might have illustrated that cool so hopefully you're improving you're not failing in the same ways where people people keep i don't know i can't think of anything funny to say the funny is gone that's because this is kind of a hard subject it is hard because the the thing i keep worrying

about is just bias and discrimination creeping in like you don't want to hire people who are like you and someone that you want to go hang out with after work as a buddy or friend or whatever that shouldn't be the criteria for having someone take a job on your team yep definitely it sounds like it's not though because these three people drive you nuts so good job yeah you've avoided that pitfall so what's our advice i mean dave dave in my mind your advice boils down to i'm really good at this what a jerk i am oh no you talked about behavioral things so or not behavioral things asking for for them to describe things they have done yeah so specific i'd say situations yeah exactly ask for specific examples of things they've done in situations shadow an interviewer

who has a good track record and you think does a good job and rubrics. So like what you were describing, you know, have, have a checklist of things you're actually assessing for that the company agrees make good employees. That can be a question that spawns a lot of other questions though, because if you work in a big company and there's nothing, then you might suddenly find yourself sitting down to say, okay, I tech lead at this company of 10,000 developers is now going to define the standard of what makes a good developer at giant mega company x like feels a little arrogant yeah well not arrogant it's more like that's a lot of time yeah it's a big it could turn into a huge project every time i do this i just feel like i wish someone else had done this

already yeah i i really enjoy doing this but i also uh get a little frustrated that it's so seat of the pants it's shocking to me how few companies take this seriously enough to actually allocate resources to it. Yeah. Well, you're not alone, Mike. They won't anymore because of this podcast. We fixed it, Dave. Way to go. Yeah. Good luck, Mike. All right. Good luck. You know, I've been thinking about which conferences to attend this year. What a coincidence. This episode is sponsored by the O'Reilly Velocity Conference in San Jose, California, June 10th through the 13th. Yeah, I checked it out. Velocity looks like a great event to learn new skills for building and managing cloud-native systems. They have a diverse lineup of 92 speakers from

companies like Spotify, Netflix, Google, Dropbox, and Cloudflare. There will be talks about cloud application development, microservices, security, and of course, the darling of the internet right now, Kubernetes. It looks incredible this year. You should come to Velocity if you want to learn about chaos engineering, cloud-native systems, and serverless, and you get to hear firsthand from the engineers who have built some of the world's largest scale and highest performing internet applications. It might seem worse in this domain, and it actually looks directly relevant to the kind of stuff we're facing right now really cool you can even become a certified kubernetes application developer while there and you get to meet a bunch of interesting people which is one

of the main reasons i attend conferences we worked out a sweet deal with the velocity organizers for soft skills engineering listeners you can get 20 off when you use code skills during registration i did the math and with that code you can get a pass for as low as 796 dollars right now go to velocityconf.com skills to register and use discount code skills oh and hurry because early pricing ends may 3rd would you like to read our next one yes this is a short one from an anonymous listener how long do i need to wait before bailing on a new job i don't like more than a month it's not totally miserable the people here are nice and the company has good prospects but the technical decisions of the team lead to daily frustrations for me oh that's it how short is too short huh

more than a month i it says uh my sister took a job and untook the job four hours later that's got to be a record yeah she walked in and did the orientation and was like you know and then just walked back out what was the job i don't know if i want to put him on blast publicly okay it was i i agreed with her decision though i will put it that way what was the industry it was the tech industry oh interesting there are some sketchy things that i don't love about this company okay and i think she she she wasn't really super into the tech industry before this and so i didn't have a chance to warn her off oh okay she noticed some of the things and then left well it sounds like her her uh radar is pretty well calibrated yeah i guess or it was just real bad

okay so how how soon is too soon so four hours is a good time that's the that's kind of the bar yeah yeah yeah this all depends a lot on how easily you can get another job too yeah because if you know you hate it but it's all you've got then you kind of have to stick around until you have something else yeah i guess we're assuming this is in this is developers who are generally in pretty high demand though so yeah that's fair assumption i think how will it look on your resume if you quit a job after one month two months three months you know does it does it change i i think so i don't want to steal your thunder though i know you have thoughts on this no i got nothing you share okay i mean if it's short enough just don't put it on your resume and if it's long enough if

it if it's just once it's probably okay as long as you have a compelling story for why you made that decision if it happens repeatedly as a pattern of a period of of a couple months and then another job in a couple months then i think that would raise a lot of red flags yeah but if you're just there for a month and then you quit just don't put it there we shall never speak yeah i'm pretty sure my sister doesn't put this company she worked at for four hours on her resume i have four hours of experience in the tech industry although i think it would reflect well on her judgment so maybe she should yeah it only took me four hours to discover like if you can if you can get the job at the beginning

of the month quit the job before the month is over and be started at a new job before the next month begins then even linkedin won't notice there's a gap in your employment which would be great i mean you can just say that you were doing a job search too i don't think it's bad to say you wanted to be careful about your job search and find the right opportunity now if that if someone asks you directly like did you work for company x for a period of 29 days then i guess feels weird to just straight up lie to them no i mean you could say yeah they probably just won't no because you didn't put it on your resume they'll never know they they have not been hiring private investigators to stalk you and if they have you probably shouldn't work there yeah i

think that once you get past the one or two month mark though then i would recommend sticking it out for at least six months or else it i don't know like jameson said really what we're looking for patterns like if i see a a pattern of quitting every three to six months i'm gonna be concerned about that when i'm looking at potential candidate but yeah and the the pattern it's it's it's not like are they a bad person it's just like okay so i'll spend all this time and money and effort to hire them and then they might quit in three months not worth it yeah exactly so so so you know if you do this one time i think it's no big deal i think most people have that one kind of unusual job stint on their resume where it was shorter than the others or a little bit different no big deal

yeah but still i would still recommend like you know if you've only been there a few weeks and there's technical things you don't like i wouldn't i wouldn't rush to to leave right away because of that if anything i would see if i could help improve the situation and i would give it a fair shake and i think a fair shake takes several months yeah that's a good point the people are nice and the company has good prospects yeah but the technical decisions of the team lead to daily frustrations for me so there's good news about that you cannot change whether the people are nice or not yep and it's it's kind of your job but it's also somewhat removed from you whether the company has good prospects or not but the technical decisions that's your job yeah that's

the stuff you do so like if oh the technical decisions of the team lead okay oh the team yeah one one team leads particularly no no no i thought it was just the team in general it says Oh, wait, of the team lead to daily frustration. Okay, yeah. That's a verb. Undo. English. Yeah, got it.

So yeah, so the team's making bad technical decisions and you're here to help. Like if there weren't technical challenges, then what would you be doing here? And I think sometimes engineers expect to come into a job and be like, this is going to be the greatest job ever. We're not going to have any problems. We're just going to take requirements from product owners

and turn it into this beautiful product with elegant code and ship that and it's going to be amazing. but in reality a lot of the problems we solve are actually self-inflicted yeah you're just fighting off rats with sticks while and if you can build something beautiful in the meantime that's that's great and you actually made some of the rats you accidentally bred the rats to thirst for human blood daily frustrations that's that's exactly the image i had yeah i mean yeah that's a good point i hadn't thought about the specifics of the situation. I was focused more on just the timeline, but that's

a, that is a good point. I get deep satisfaction out of resolving daily frustrations. If there's a process or a pain point that comes up over and over again, even if it's not enormous, there's often this range where if something is painful enough and causes huge enough problems, it'll get fixed. People aren't going to ignore it. And then there's some range of tiny little things that are so easy that people just fix them. But there's this huge swath in the middle of things that are painful, but they don't happen often enough that it feels like it's worth an investment or people have workarounds or people are used to it. I feel like I get a ton of satisfaction out of fixing those and improving developers, workflows, and processes where deployments

are easier. Documentation is generated more easily, or I don't know, all kinds of little things. You get fewer random emails from some system that you ignore, stuff like that. And I think that's fun stuff to work on. That's why you're a good manager. yeah and because i'm so good at interviewing two secrets to your success so we've shifted to chiding the question asker and saying do a good job but i i think you're i think our points originally stand that if you step in and it's just horrible and you bounce out pretty quickly and you know like i will never be okay with this and i just cannot take it anymore than if you leave pretty quickly i think that's fine yeah 30 days get out in 30 days after that

you got to stick it out for a while i think yeah and for every job that you quit i think you do need a coherent reason why or quit or get laid off or whatever for every job that you change the shorter it is the more people will ask about it so the more you need to have thought about how to explain your tenure there and when you say a coherent reason you mean a reason that doesn't make you look bad yeah so it can't be like i think it's it's generally not great to just say a lot of horrible things about how garbage the company is while that can be a contributing factor to you not staying there for a long time a question then is like why did you why did you work there like how did you miss that you know so it should be something that you can explain that will make

them want to hire you more not less bingo or you can just sweep it under the rug like it never happened yeah or that or just say you were an independent consultant and make sure that you have like one side project you've been doing yeah that whole time and a business card a little business card you can slide across the table yeah makes you legit oh man i want that now i don't slide enough business cards across tables what would it say what would your title be it just say business card james and dance is business no it wouldn't even say that it would just say business card maybe i'd say redeemable for one business on the other side or you need like a generic enough phrase that it could work in lots of different contexts

what if okay what if you got like thank you cards from hallmark or something those those were your business cards just says thank you happy just yeah or like happy birthday grandson or something and then you write your contact details on the inside oh oh business card i thought you said birthday card oh my bad but there's a little two dollar bill in there for you and my grandpa and my phone number so you can reach me about that job interview slash transaction yeah or if you want to talk about whittling or baseball my grandpa really likes baseball all right baseball is associated with grandpas in my head cool well have we answered the question? I think so. Good luck. Best of luck. Best of luck either quitting

immediately or in six months. Yes. All right. What can people do if they want their own questions answered? Go to softskills.audio and click on ask a question. And thank you so much to the people who have asked questions. They are great. We love them. Keep them coming. All right. We'll catch you next week.