The Lost Engineer
Frog and Toad Try to Hire
Toad and Frog worked on a big new release.
They worked nights, and they worked weekends. They worked from their office, and they worked from home. As last, they released their new product.
“Oh drat,” said Toad. “Not only am I tired, but one of my developers just gave his notice.”
“Don’t worry,” said Frog. “We will mine our personal networks. We will soon find you a new programmer.”
Frog and Toad went back to their alma mater and began to look for an engineer in the tall grass beside the computer science building.
“Here is your new programmer!” cried Frog.
“That is not my new hire,” said Toad. “That candidate is too young. My developer had ten years of experience before we hired him.” Toad dragged the college kid’s resume to the trash folder on his laptop.
One of Toad’s friends from boarding school, a sparrow who was now a co-founder at another startup, flew down.
“Excuse me,” said the sparrow. “Did you lose a developer? I recently interviewed one at my startup, but we didn’t make him an offer.”
“That is not my new hire,” said Toad. “This person has only done front-end development. My team only hires full-stack developers.” Toad trashed the resume of the front-end developer.
They sent out an email to Toad’s engineering team, asking them to look in their own networks. One of Toad engineers passed along the name of a coworker from a previous employer.
“Here is your new programmer,” said Frog.
“That is not my new hire,” cried Toad. “She has only worked on teams at large companies but my developer was a 10x programmer, and we used to call him ‘The Wolf’.” Toad trashed the resume of the developer who had only worked at large companies.
A recruiter came out from behind a tree. “I heard that you were looking for a developer,” he said. “Here is a resume that I found online.”
“This is not my new hire!” wailed Toad after a 15 minute phone screen. “This developer is not a good culture fit. My team is likes to play foosball and go to the beer garden every evening, but this developer is boring and square.” Toad trashed the resume for the boring, square developer.
Frog and Toad went to LinkedIn. They searched developer profiles for the keywords “Java” and “web services” and “functional programming.”
“Here is your new programmer,” said Frog, “and I really need you to at least interview someone.”
“That’s not my new hire!” shouted Toad after the interview was over. “My developer talked about bloom filters and could implement splay trees in fifteen languages, this person got flustered when I asked him to implement a graph algorithm in Scala on a whiteboard while half a dozen other engineers watched.”
Toad trashed the resume of the developer who couldn’t code on a whiteboard. He was very angry. He jumped up and down and screamed, “The whole world appears to be covered in software developers, but not one of them is a good fit for my team!”
Toad ran back to the office and put on his headphones and stared at his org chart. He remembered that he had published a tech ladder on the company blog six months ago, and he decided that one of his junior developers was ready to take on more responsibility.
“Oh,” said Toad. “My new hire was working here the whole time. What a lot of trouble I have made for Frog.”
Toad pulled all of the resumes out of his laptop’s trash folder. He called each of them back, and interviewed them, and made them offers. He assigned them all to a new team which had a range of personalities and skills and backgrounds, and he made the newly-promoted developer their manager.
The next day, Toad showed his new team to Frog. Frog was amazed that Toad had been able to hire anyone at all and he jumped for joy.
None of the team members left after the first week of all-nighters. Toad had given them all a lot of equity and it hadn’t vested yet.
