A couple of days ago I had a chance to speak at a local meetup. It probably won’t come as a surprise that I was speaking on Kanban. In fact, it was a test run of one of my presentations I was preparing for one of big events. The point is, only few people shown up.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t complain. Actually, such events are always win-win. Speaker gets some valuable feedback and an audience attends a session for free, which they would have to pay for otherwise. My end of the deal worked fine – I’ve already improved the session basing on feedback I received. However, I was somehow surprised, and in a negative way, that only few people popped up.

Well, maybe “surprise” isn’t the right word. If you asked me I would say that most people didn’t really care to exploit chances to learn, so they wouldn’t use this one either. People, in general, don’t want to learn. They don’t, even if they state otherwise. People, again, in general, are lazy. They are, even if they deny.

So no, I didn’t expect wild crowds even though I believe the message about the meetup reached quite a bunch of people. I see the same pattern whenever me, or my friends, are involved in organization of a local community events.

However, since I always consider a glass half-full I see a good side of the situation too. If you happen to be the part of this small bunch of people and you actually care to exploit any occasions to learn, not only do you unwind yourself but you also become a demanded employee on a job market.

I was discussing with one of my friends how does he see himself as an engineer. His point was that he wasn’t a rock star developer. My point was sort of similar. He wasn’t a rock star developer… yet.

What I consider as one of his biggest strengths is his urge to learn. He doesn’t have a problem to invest a couple of hours of evening or weekend to attend local community event. He does this as A, it is a chance to learn and B, it is an occasion to meet interesting people and exchange experience with them.

What he basically does is he’s consciously working on becoming a better professional than he is right now. So if you asked me about his value on job market I wouldn’t answer talking about what he knows at the moment, but what kind of potential the guy has and how he is using it. Give me the choice among him and another developer who is very skilled but have a regular “I don’t give a damn” approach and it would be a no-brainer for me when it comes to choose who I want to work with.

Sometimes I hear complaints about different trainings or presentations people attend. It wasn’t that stunningly mind-blowing, or the trainer could have been better, or two third of content wasn’t new at all or whatever else. Now, let me stress it, in my whole life I’ve never been on a training, conference or meetup where I wasn’t able to learn anything at all. Yes, it is true that sometimes you learn by negative examples, meaning the only thing you get is knowledge how not to do things. But it is still a lesson, and a valuable one!

So even though I expect people don’t give a damn I’m still surprised why it is so. If I asked all these people whether they want their career to be just a bit better they would agree in a second. And yet they do nothing to improve the situation they’re in.

If I counted all the hours I voluntarily spent on learning, including all the ramblings I share on this blog it would be hell lot of time. And believe me; I don’t regret any minute spent on this, even though I learned many things I don’t use at the moment. And no, no one paid me for that. It was just an investment on my side. The investment, which pays off, as I’m better professional today than I was yesterday. Or so I hope.

This basically means that if you happen to hire me you don’t just buy what I am today, but you also get all the potential I’m striving to exploit. The same I look for when I hire. I look at who you can become in a couple of years, not only what you’re worth now.

Why am I writing all that? I do, to make you move your butt, look for occasions to learn and exploit them! Yes, I have selfish motivation as well. Next time I do something in local community I want to see more faces popping up. I want to see more people who strive to learn since it means there are more people I want to hire. And now that you asked, yes, I consider it win-win.

Let me start with a side note: this post could either way be titled “The Question I Will Ask during Interview.”

It all started when I asked my better half one question we often use during interviews with developers. Actually it may sound a bit weird to ask a surveyor a question taken from an interview with a programmer. It may sound even weirder that my wife’s answer would easily put her in a better half of answers I get for the question. Without sweating.

The question is simple: imagine you have programming language which has addition, subtraction and multiplication of integers already implemented. Your goal is to propose an algorithm for division operation.

Disclaimer: I am well aware I’ve just published one of my standard questions from interviews.

Other disclaimer: no, I don’t do that because I have an evil plan not to ask the question any more.

Another disclaimer: I do know that some, not so many actually, candidates I interview happen to google this blog, or even read it from time to time.

One last disclaimer: I am not dumb. Or so I believe.

What’s going on then? What I want to share with you today is that many questions you’re going to hear during an interview with me are just excuses to dig deeper. In this very case the question could sound more like “show me the way you think” but it would be sort of hard to answer the question stated this way.

But there’s more. Not only do I look at your reasoning and the way you tackle issues but also you give me some insight when you give up. In other words, I don’t look for an answer although there probably is one, which is sort of optimal. I try to observe how you act when solving not-so-complex issues. Something you’re going to do pretty damn often if you accept the job.

This is a pattern I follow when recruiting. I could probably safely publish the whole list of my standard questions and I would still learn what I want about interviewees.

Of course that doesn’t mean we don’t check technical expertise. We do. Well, “we” is sort of abuse here. My colleagues do. So while my wife would probably shine during the “soft” part of an interview, blank stares she would give during technical part would scare away our recruiters in just a few minutes.

The interesting part is: if you don’t have decent answers during the first part your technical excellence doesn’t make any difference. We just don’t want to work with people who find it hard to think.

And by the way: yes, this is an experiment. I’m waiting for the moment when an interviewee tells me that they’ve read an interesting post recently so the next question isn’t a surprise. At all.

Anyone wants to bet when it’s going to happen?

After my last post about gut feeling recruitment one of my friends dropped me an email to share a story. The story was, as you may guess, about someone who wouldn’t make it through gut feeling recruitment but actually the company hired the guy and he ended up being one of top performers in the team.

It was a kind of guy who rocks on the technical part of the interview but something is actually telling you he isn’t the right fit to the team. As it eventually appears whatever “something” is it tells you the wrong thing.

For the sake of the argument I consider the “something” to be gut feeling.

Well, I’ve never said that gut feeling recruitment is 100% successful… OK, I’ve kind of said that. So I was wrong. Actually it’s more of a risk which may, but also may not, become true. I know folks who are so-called cellar programmers and they rock. I mean they really shine as long as you don’t force them to go out of the cellar and allow them to do what they do best – code. More often than not they would fail in the gut feeling test.

They won’t be life and soul of the party no matter how hard you push them toward this role. Anyway, last I checked it was still lower than coding on the list of traits we expect from developers. But then, don’t just ignore it – I’ve seen way too many, say, socially challenged folks who are virtually destroying teams they join to take it lightly. Just treat is as a risk.

You may find how wrong your gut feeling was which is a kind of double win: first, you get top performer to your team and second you get damn good lesson that you’re only a human and you err.

So yes, gut feeling recruitment fails from time to time, like pretty much any rule out there. It’s healthy thing to challenge your rules and I’m thankful to my friend for reminding me that.

Recently I’m recruiting a lot again. What I’ve noticed is how my approach to recruitment changed over past few years. Well, probably if you refer to recruitment tips or avoiding hiring mistakes series changes aren’t that drastic. However I still see a big difference.

I was always putting down a lot of notes during interviews. When you’re recruiting like crazy that’s the only way you’re going to distinguish different candidates after a while. It hasn’t really changed. Where’s the difference though?

Now I’m writing way more about my feelings about the interview and interviewee than I used to. I actually focus on this instead of scribbling specific answers I get to my questions.

Why?

That’s simple. I found that actually my feeling about the candidate are more valuable in terms of deciding whether we want to hire someone or not. It’s kind of gut feeling recruitment but then if you ask right question your gut feeling can be pretty darn good.

And yes, now that you ask, there is a trick here. I generally don’t ask about any technical stuff, no matter whether we hire developer, quality engineer, designer, technical writer or whoever. This is another part of the interview – there are people who actually know the technical stuff, whatever kind of stuff we’re actually discussing, way better than I possibly could. What more, most of the time I’m not in the room when all those hard-core questions about programming languages, testing tools and such are thrown at an interviewee.

It wouldn’t change my gut feeling anyway.

What I’m personally looking for during an interview is the way people think, methods they use to tackle problems, whether they are creative beasts and generally whether they are folks I’d love to spend an evening over a couple of beers discussing professional stuff.

And of course, there are situations when my gut feeling tells me “go” and my fellow recruiters tells me “not even close to yes” and that of course means rejection. However you’d be totally surprised how rare these cases are. I actually am. And by the way it’s never the other way around – when I say “no” while my fellow recruiters tell me “hell yeah!” It just doesn’t happen.

For some reasons if you aren’t a person who is interesting speaker when we’re discussing rather general subjects, sometimes even loosely connected with a job description, you won’t get away with good answers to technical questions. Actually you’re probably going to fail at technical part of the interview at least as much as you failed as non-technical one.

That’s why now I care way more about my gut feelings built during general chit-chat.

I’m recruiting like crazy recently. It means I spend a lot of time on interviews with different fellow interviewers. First interesting observation is that basically all interviewers I know (me included) start with some, usually rather detailed, plan. We want to check some traits and technical knowledge. We want to get some feelings whether a candidate would be a good match to a team.

A short break. You’ve definitely heard this one: “Plans are useless but planning is indispensable” – the famous quote from Dwight D. Eisenhower. Not a surprising thing that it applies to interviews as well.

So yes, I do start interview with a plan, but I hardly ever follow it step by step. I prefer to go with the flow of conversation. I prefer to dig over interesting things I hear from candidate instead of going through a standard list of questions. I prefer to wander around different subjects to get the gut feeling whether a candidate would fit the team.

Every interview is a kind of experiment for me. As a rule of thumb – the further we go away from my initial plans the better is my opinion about the candidate.

There’s another perspective as well. Every interview is an experiment done on my general interview plan. From time to time I hear that I ask interesting questions during interviews. Well thanks; I invented them all during interviews. Usually talking with especially interesting candidates.

If your interviews are all done routinely and looks each time exactly the same rethink whether your job is just to ask some standard questions. If so, are you more than just an HR droid?

If you treat every interview as an experiment you will learn more about candidates and improve your hiring skills as well.

This awful feeling somewhere in the stomach.

Yes, exactly the same you experienced last time when you got email announcing that one of your team leads was leaving. The same which kicks you every time you hear “we must talk now” from one of your team members.

You haven’t seen it coming.

Now, you suddenly are all motivated to get a raise for the guy. Everyone is. Hold on. It won’t change anything. You screwed it in far more places than just with salary. People almost never leave only because they want to earn more. Well, at least it is so in our industry.

My question is: do you even know why the guy is leaving? Yes, “they offered him better salary” and “he was looking for a new challenge” but you know, he sent them his resume in the first place. Do you know why?

And no, not because there was a better salary or a new challenge as there were nothing at that point of time. Nothing but frustration with your organization, that is. And you know, people don’t get frustrated only because the grass on the neighbor’s lawn is greener.

So do you know the answer?

Hint: people don’t get frustrated in a minute. It takes time. Months. Sometimes even years. Yes, you should have seen it coming.

This feeling in your stomach means two things: you’re losing fight for your people and you don’t even know why.

Now, you can do more of the same thing you already are doing (throwing money at people, anyone?) and you will be failing as you are already failing. But maybe, just maybe, it is good time to try different approach to people? Maybe it’s time to start paying attention to what they’re trying to tell you over and over again for at least a year already. Maybe it’s time to start keeping your promises.

Of course you can’t please everyone. Of course it will happen on occasions that you won’t be willing to give people what they want. But at least make it your own conscious decision. Then, if nothing else, you will see it coming.

If you’re losing a fight for your best people don’t blame economy, CEO, new competitor or anything else. It’s your fault in the first place.

And what does it tell you about a manager if he can’t keep his team and he is surprised every time his team member gives him a notice?

Meade Rubinstein started interesting discussion under my posting about great performances in failed projects. We came to a dilemma. Would you prefer to hire project manager with history of successful projects or rather someone with history of great management?

Meade tends to value more projects track record stressing we always find excuses for failure whenever we need it and comes with success factor as the primary and most important measure for project managers.

I, on the other hand, lean towards treating effort as more important than goal itself. I believe there are situations when even best PM won’t help and the only method to avoid scar on personal track record is to keep away from them. Avoiding risk isn’t an attribute PM should have, is it?

Consider you have two candidates. Jim succeeded in many past projects. He knows all the theory and pretty much practice. He gets thing done his way. Unfortunately you consider him as a kind of asshole and you’re afraid he can harm team chemistry. Jane fails more often. Maybe she’s a bit too mild. However she’s very competent and has a lot of experience from difficult projects. She led teams to achieve as much as possible, even when it still wasn’t enough.

Your choice. Jim or Jane? Why?

I’m in a situation where I have to review my professional future a bit. It happened so a few of my friends are in similar position at the moment so there are a lot of chances to discuss the subject. A strange thing for me, as a person who is involved in project management, is how often people don’t have a plan B.

We look at our careers seeing ourselves in our today workplace. We plan several months or several years with the current company. Until then we want to develop specific skills or gain experience in specific areas. Then we think about moving somewhere else either to get fresh view on things or to push the career to higher level. Cool.

What if the plan doesn’t work? Your branch of the company can evaporate (yes, it did happen). There can be some mess in the company resulting in changing your status for the workplace from “bright future here” to “no future here.” You can be simply fired. The work can appear quite different than they told you during recruitment. What then?

Of course I’m far from blind skepticism here, but if your bright future is tightly woven with your current workplace, well, you may play a tricky game.

And this brings me to the question from the subject: what will you do five years from now? I’m far to expect definite answer from anyone including myself. What more I’d expect a number of options as an answer, although definitely there will be some top choices and others which are considered only as a rescue plan.

If you asked me I’d say I’d prefer to be in the middle of building another team of people who share my passion of developing good software (yes, it would be yet another time). However I’d see me also on a position of an outsider who was hired to help to organize things in software development and/or project management a bit (a consultancy job… ouch). I don’t consider positions of project manager or software analyst as scars on a resume. Actually not the ugly ones. A good idea for a startup, possibly neither the first nor the second one at the time, would also be appealing (although so far no successes at that area). I’m not sure if I would go for a boring VP role responsible for drinking coffee and surfing the web but probably I’d take it into consideration too.

As you can see there’s really a bunch of choices and all of them are possible in a given perspective of time. How about you? What will you do five years from now?

I had a brief discussion with one of my friends about changing a job. One thread was especially interesting. We discussed whether a substantial change of profile for a few quarters can be considered as a flaw on your career.

To give a couple of examples: an experienced team manager taking a position of simple software engineer or a senior-level manager switching for a year to a role of software analyst.

Of course there are two perspectives. One is here and now. Do I suit given position? Do they want to hire me? Will it bring me fun? Those answers have to be positive if you want to think about that kind of switch. The reasons to make the move can be different from not having any other option to make some kind of creative vacations from your current role.

However there’s another point of view. How recruiters will look at that in the future? Will they believe you wanted to take a brake or they’ll assume you’ve failed in looking for a similar position? It can be considered as a scar on your, otherwise glowing, resume.

My advice in that kind of situation is: forget about resume. If the job is going to bring you fun, take it. Your career doesn’t have to be bookish. Anyway as far as you care to prepare individual papers for each company you apply for you should be able to point your strengths and hide your weaknesses. Believe me – you don’t get hired because of your CV but because of impression you make.

And talking about scars, they can even make you look better. Ask Harrison Ford.

I’m just after 7 hours of interviews in a row. Exhausting. Don’t try that at home. I know I should use smaller chunks. It would be better both for me and for candidates. Anyway I made it on purpose and I don’t regret although my brain is dead today.

I had some time to think about the way we interview and how it is connected with small size of our company. When you’re small you recruit much different than when you’re big. You don’t have evil HR team organizing the whole thing. Sometimes you struggle with not enough resumes. You can’t afford to make 6 interviews before hiring a person. It’s different.

How to deal with that?

1. Many to one interview model.
I usually take a colleague with me to have numerical advantage over a candidate. OK that’s really to have better coverage of merits on our side. And we sometimes ask similar questions so it limits redundant answers. After all we still can cross check our opinions. It also limits our needs when talking about meeting room reservations, which can be quite a pain in the ass.

2. One interview is enough.
We don’t have enough time to make numerous interviews so we stick with one meeting although we’re not religious when talking about interview time. We don’t pack it into an hour. Standard plan is hour and a half although, depending on the candidate, we can go longer. One interview is enough, one hour is not.

3. Do look where others don’t.
People suck at writing resumes. Yes, they should learn that but you can’t force them. But you can find real gems among poorly written resumes. That’s a hard work and most of poor papers are followed by poor candidates but that can be your chance.

4. Don’t waste the time.
As you don’t have your HR army recruitment takes your time. Time you could have spent on other tasks. Don’t waste it then. When you see there aren’t even a chance, end quick and go do something more useful. I can’t force myself to just end interview at the very moment I realize I waste the time. Instead I just ask a couple of finishing questions, which takes just a few minutes more. If you went out from my interview after a quarter, I’m sorry but your chances aren’t good.

5. Make it tough.
Make it nice, but tough. You have way less chances to evaluate a candidate, so make the test difficult. Other way you’ll be guessing, not deciding. And you don’t want to guess whether the candidate is worthy, do you?

6. Be honest.
You’ll probably get some questions from a candidate you’d rather not answer. Sure you have the choice. You can say the truth, color a bit the reality or just lie. Choose the answer number one. Be honest. You can lose a person who will go to another company but you won’t lose your credibility. And if you lied about important things he’d leave soon anyway. Personally I wouldn’t like to work for a liar.

7. Exploit your strengths.
Remember you’re small and you’re proud of that. If you don’t believe in that repeat it to yourself until you believe. Small companies are cool. You can always find a solution for any issue as far as you want it. You don’t have strict corporate rules. For some people it is a great plus. And for you having people who like your organization is even bigger plus. You won’t be big, but nothing should stop you to be cool and fair. You’ll find people who appreciate that.

Having said that, if you like to work in a small and cool company, remember we’re recruiting like crazy now. Feel free to ruin my day being one of those people who steal another couple of hours from my schedule and kill my brain during days like today. Hopefully your approach and knowledge will stun me and the day will be rescued. I will be more than happy. You can be sure.