When giving a performance's reviews, one idea I used to pitch to somebody with the potential to be an even better developer in the future is that we all have the same tools in the company to improve ourselves.
Everybody has access to the same documentation, to the same in-house training programs, to the same software, to everybody's code, to basically the same people to ask questions and to learn from... and what's set the difference between someone progressing in his or her line of work and someone stuck is the personality each developer has.
This is something that bothers me in the sense that it makes me feel I'm losing control of any recruiting process I might been part of, or any "technical coaching" I'm giving.
Because while it might sounds as a "motivational speech" during the performance's review, let's do not lose sight of the timeline here. If we get to that point saying is more about personality than hard skills, then it was also more about personality a few months ago during the interview process.
What if interviews are all about luck and not about us evaluating correctly the hard skills of a candidate?
Sometimes it feels like it doesn't matter if I really really prepare for an interview, or if I improve my tricks to get to really really know the candidate's hard skills, because it feels like it all goes down to about how lucky we are as a company when we take our chances with a candidate by saying "Yes, come work with us". Does it happens to you?
I remember joking about this issue by proposing something like open the company's door, let 20 candidates join us, and we'll see how they perform during a month... and by the end lets "fire all the personalities" that didn't succeed.
Let's not waste more time with interviews and technical exercises! Everybody is welcome for a month, and we'll decide later who can stay.
Yep, that would be a fun disaster to watch. But again, this is sometimes what I'm experiencing with the whole recruiting process, and also I stand corrected by saying it's not really a feeling but an actual fact because we truly accepted people with serious doubts about their hard skills that in a short time became great developers, and we also let in promising ninja developers that resulted in a total fiasco.
So, what's the next step?
I don't know.
I'm struggling with this problem and this is more of a sharing my concerns post than a post with an outstanding solution at the end. But let's do some brainstorming in order to get some action items to work on later.
Probably the first idea is that we suck at interviewing because we don't have the skills or the tools to really get to know the candidate's hard skills pass the personality and what that person is selling during the interview.
We should improve the exercises we're giving, enhance the questions we're asking, and have a clear understanding of which hard skills we are looking for and to what degree of knowledge we're aiming for those identified skills.
Before that face to face technical interview, it seems like it's necessary to improve the first informal interview to rule out the personalities we do not want. Because, don't get me wrong, we do want people objective-oriented and willing to learn everything... but that's not the only things we want to depend from.
So, it seems like this last thing is more mandatory not to solve our main problem here but to avoid a different one.
When the process fails again (meaning when we bet for a candidate and things goes wrong again) we should be doing an analysis of what happened and we should be having metrics about failing and succeeding process in order to identify what's working and what's not.
The goal here is not to all say "Oh, we fail again, let's try again one more time" but more about getting the reasons behind the process that didn't go as expected, and getting hints about how to make it better.
I still do not know for sure how to solve this, but I get myself some ideas to sleep on it and I hope you too.
