Mar Bartolome - Hiring Demystified

Hiring Demystified
[EuroPython 2021 - Talk - 2021-07-28 - Brian]
[Online]

By Mar Bartolome

It's no secret that the hardest problems in computer science are cache invalidation and naming things... oh, and hiring.

In our industry we've developed a culture and a mysticism around hiring, with certain rituals and practices which are often so detached from reality that they've even become the subject of jokes and memes.

Hiring is a difficult problem, yet important to get right. Many developers are faced with the challenge of hiring other team members, without much clue into how to proceed, and end up just copying the well known rituals without stopping to analyze their effectiveness or implications. Often, this results in hindering both companies and candidates, especially those of under represented demographics.

In this talk I'll share my experiences and personal opinions both as a candidate and as an interviewer, analyze the implications of popular hiring tactics, and discuss what I consider effective ones, in order to hire the right developers for your team with minimum hassle for both sides.

This talk should be particularly useful to lead developers, managers, or any other engineers that might get involved at any level in the process of hiring other team members. But even if you never plan to hire anyone, this talk can still be very revealing for candidates, as it will give them insight on the rationale of the hiring practices themselves, why people usually fail interviews, and help them recognize when a hiring process is reasonable or not.