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Business

How To Hire Great Software Engineers

In a recent post about leadership, I emphasised that the goal leadership is to build and maintain effective teams. Your employees are your most valuable resource, and your success ultimately depends on theirs. It's crucial to provide them with the necessary tools, a comfortable work environment, quality mentors, and a clear, compelling vision that highlights the importance of their efforts. However, their ability to achieve both current and future goals also depends on their talent and skills.

I recently lead on the recruitment efforts at ChaseLabs and wanted to write this post to share some of my experiences and learnings from this undertaking. A lot of the ideas in this post are taking from McCuller’s (2012) book How to Recruit and Hire Great Software Engineers: Building a Crack Development Team. Rather than re-hash the structure of this book, I have written out five lessons to help guide your decision making.

What We Know About Leadership

What frustrates me about business books is that they tend to make generalisations based on anecdotal evidence or observations. Their claims often boil down to the logic of: “Here is what I think is correct. This rich and successful person did it, and so to be rich and successful you should too”.

These books start with an agenda, then cherry-pick evidence in support of it. When really it should be the other way around: evidence first.

In the spirit of an evidence first approach, Hogan & Kaiser (2005) published a paper titled What We Know About Leadership. In their paper they reviewed the scientific literature on leadership to make an empirically grounded claims about the consequences of leadership and offer a straightforward summary of the characteristics of good and bad leaders.

I really like this paper, and despite its age, I believe that the claims about leadership hold water today. So, I am writing this post to summarise the main points of their article, providing readers – and perhaps more so myself – a condensed version that can be read in just five minutes.