Upside Potential

No new hire walks in the door knowing what they need to know in order to do well on the job. From outside the company, they cannot possibly understand the details of the work and how it gets done on the inside. The same goes for personnel dynamics that one understands only through participating in them. A good hire has the ability to acquire understanding, experience, and skill on the job and put them to good use. They have upside potential.

And how do you gauge upside potential? And how do you help someone realize that potential after hiring them? A number of ideas follow, some of which pertain to developer roles. But much of it applies more broadly than that.

Resumes #

Looking at resumes gives you the most basic sense of a candidate’s experience and capability. But just as job descriptions tend to become wish lists, exaggerating the requirements beyond any realistic expectation, resumes tend to exaggerate the experience, accomplishments, and capabilities of the candidate.

The trends in a resume matter more than the claims. Did the candidate take on progressively more responsibility or demonstrate increasing accomplishment? Did they get stuck in a job or change with high frequency? Do they resemble an earlier-stage version of someone whose work you respect? While you can glean some understanding of upside potential from a resume, it’s more useful for screening. And LinkedIn is just the online version of same.

Projects #

For developer roles you will want to look at projects. What’s in their GitHub account? Something more than the handful of standard bootcamp projects? Are all of the projects forked from elsewhere, or are they original? Does the commit history show a compulsion to code? Have they invalidated it with an embedded picture?

Hobby projects are the best, because they reveal genuine, self-directed interests. And candidates usually show their level of passion and commitment clearly when talking about them. If you find someone highly motivated in hobby projects and can position them similarly in work projects, they will have fun at work.

Interests outside of programming, grounded in physical-world activity, appear to correlate with practicality of mind. People who live only in digital worlds can become too abstraction-oriented. I like to see that a candidate has a physical-world hobby: gardening, board games, quiz night, home repair, auto mechanics, cycling… The particulars matter less than the mere fact of real-world engagement. The trade-offs inherent in real-world activities help inform thinking in the more abstract digital realm.

Finding the Level #

Sometimes you speak to someone for five minutes about a topic unrelated to their work, and come away knowing that they are very good at what they do. How can this be? It’s about their ability to find the level.

One of the most important qualities in a software engineer is the ability to zoom in and out across many levels of abstraction. The right level depends on the topic, the audience, the problem at hand, the maturity of the domain, the context of communication, etc. Great programmers make finding the level look easy, when it is most assuredly not.

When you speak to a programmer about topics outside of programming but they hit every level correctly through the conversation, you know that they have this most essential work skill.

The importance in finding the level also arises entirely outside of programming. Think of this the next time you speak to an accomplished salesman or when you have a good or bad customer support experience.

The Unknown #

People doing creative work spend most of their time banging their heads against the unknown. So how do they react? It’s relatively easy in an interview to poke around and find an area where you can push the candidate across the boundary of their knowledge. And then what? Some argue, some fold, some think silently for a long time, some ask clarifying questions, some become frustrated, some ask for help, and on and on. How they react to the unknown is very telling in how they will interact with the rest of the team.

When faced with an unusual request, how do they react? Someone recently shared with me a technique I have yet to apply, but I like the sound of it. He gives someone a large document and says “Read five pages starting on page 100, then we’ll talk about it.” Do they resist? How and how much? What does this say about their openness to new inputs?

Effective Management #

If you decide to move forward with a candidate, how do they reach their upside potential? They must at least have effective management. This brings in the question of references.

No candidate will provide bad references, so references are not useful for screening. Therefore I do not use references to inform a hire/pass decision. However they can shed light on how to manage the candidate effectively. For this reason I ask for former managers as references, not peers or subordinates. Ideally I speak to more than one. This is difficult for some candidates, but essential. And I explain to the reference that I want to learn from them how to be an effective manager for the candidate. The three questions I ask are:

• What does it take to position the candidate for success?
• What are the signs that the candidate has run off the rails and needs help?
• What does it take to get them back on track?

Asking these questions and then just listening will provide extremely important insight into how to manage your new hire well.

Hiring Well #

Hiring well means finding the candidates who are good fits for your organization, and who have large upside potential, and then managing them effectively. It’s all very simple on paper, but not so in practice. I believe that adopting the approaches sketched out above will help you do it better.