No more heroes

What do you look for when hiring engineers?

A new year begins and with it new round of business initiatives and technology projects & programmes are released. As needs evolve, and with on-going scrutiny on efficiency and ROI, it is necessary to retain the highest quality technologists in the organisation and in many cases, “raise the bar” when growing teams.

Increasingly in today’s integrated landscape technology teams need skills over and above mere technical ones. Particularly in technology finance, gone are the days when just having outstanding “hard” skills is sufficient to ensure that the whole team performs. The need for business flexibility, solution adaptability, speed and a great user experience requires engaged and empowered technology professionals who can respond to problems quickly. And new, highly collaborative, rapid & responsive software engineering development practices demand a new skill-set of software engineers.

Without doubt, one size of engineer does not fit all organisations. Small dynamic companies often value some traits more highly than large corporate organisations. In software engineers, we look for people who have:

· Curiosity. A problem finder, not just a problem solver, and the desire to explore the boundaries of the “possible”.

· Initiative.

· Reasoning. The ability to apply deduction as well as inferential logic.

· Collaboration: A desire to learn and share information and knowledge.

· An unquenchable passion for creating the new.

· Communication: A feedback giver, articulate, both verbally and in writing.

· Flexibility, to let go of the known and embrace the new.

· The ability to balance (and prioritise) complex needs, including his/her own.

· Integrity: people who say what they mean and mean what they say.

· Empathy and compassion. To acknowledge others’ limits and work within them.

· Technical competence.

To recognise these skills in others, often it is necessary to cultivate these skills in ourselves, and in the teams we need them to join. Often, previous experience in prior organisational cultures & corporate structures prevent people from expressing their true skills. In many cases this reason alone is why they are searching for a new role. So cast your net widely to find skilled people. Look for the activities they engage in outside of work. Explore their whole network. Reduce the formality of the interview and explore their personality rather than just experience. Express the culture and values you want to cultivate and consider not just what they respond with but also the way in which they respond.

We adopt a wide range of empirical exercises to screen and induct new hires. Potential candidates join a team for a series of half-day, on-job working sessions. They’re given assault-course style, team-based interviews where they may be asked to present brand new information to an unknown audience. We bring almost all new recruits on as trainees, regardless of the ultimate role they will reach within the company.

What’s wrong with hiring heroes?

There are no true heroes in software engineering. Perhaps unlike finance, where rockstar fund managers can generate their own gravitational field by being bold (and right), it takes a truly collaborative team to create high performing software. No one individual can take an idea all the way through to execution alone.

Software engineering heroes are either fire-starters (but not finishers) or critical points of failure. In the short term, a software team that’s stuck in a self-worn groove of inefficient, ineffective habits or anti-pattern behaviour can make use of such heroes, but a long-term dependency on single individuals to be effective as a team is a fundamental sign of weakness within the team. It masks a lack of cohesion and collaboration, of trust and empowerment within the entire team. It prevents personal development, initiative and engagement in your engineers.

Hire heroes if you must, but make sure they’re dispensable.