
Tips on Hiring Employees - ericabiz
http://www.erica.biz/2010/hiring-employees/
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tomjen3
Tip #0: Blast annoying popups in the face of your readers, then tell them that
you sold your company for a million.

>Tip #3: But They Still Are Your Employees I will fetch my boss a sandwich
exactly once - then I he can find another employee.

You want me fetch a sandwich - either I am hired as an admin or I have
significant equity.

>Tip #4: Make Sure They Give You Status Reports

You can read the log from my checkings if you want - any decent system should
be able to send you an email about this.

>Tip #5: Never Be The Only Interviewer >Tip #6: Always Hire for a Trial Period

Do so if you can get away with it - but given the choice between two different
employers, don't be surprised if a good portion of your prospects will choose
the other.

>Tip #9: Three Employees? Time for an Office That would depend on the
situation - but this seems like a good rule of tomb.

>Tip #10: How to Beat the Big Companies at Their Own Game Worth reading for
this point alone, except it doesn't say much that Joel had said. You are
properly better of reading his blog.

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davidw
> You can read the log from my checkings if you want

If I were a boss and wanted a quick update on how things were going, the last
thing I would want to do would be trawling through your git logs and diffs.

~~~
tomjen3
But that is exactly what I have been working on.

If you just want to see where we are going, look at the number of closed bugs,
burndown chart, etc.

~~~
davidw
Sometimes you need a brief, human-friendly report of the general state of
things. I suppose there are tools that can provide something similar, but
that's assuming that everyone uses them, which for some types of employee,
they certainly don't.

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niccolop
Personally, and I've learnt this the hard way, micromanagement is often a bad
idea. Perhaps rather than status reports once a day, because work becomes
piecemeal if this is done and not interesting. Instituting status reports once
a week is better. Firstly, because it will then actually give the employee the
opportunity to see their weekly body of work; and secondly, it will also be
more meaningful for seeing what has been done, as it will focus on results, as
opposed to: spoke to so and so for half an hour regarding xyz.

~~~
silverlake
"status report" is vague. Devs can maintain an internal blog where they just
post a few sentences about what they are doing, any problems, etc. Or run an
internal status.net server. It doesn't have to be onerous.

~~~
niccolop
Fair point. I suppose I was thinking about it from the perspective of a non-
dev worker. I can see the benefit of an internal blog.

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iuguy
I was expecting this to suck, but I thought it was actually a very good
article. I've had a lot of experience with all of the points listed (good and
bad!) and I wish I knew this years ago!

One point I would make about the 3 people in an office thing. Find out how
many of you would be in the office at the same time and consider renting
virtual office space unless you have domain specific needs that require your
own space. You can usually get a postal address, a certain number of hours or
days a month and all of your bits together for a lot less than a full office.

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Tichy
Depressing that you still need to have popup ads on your blog even if you have
made a million dollars.

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CWIZO
We are just in the process of hiring a new programmer, so this popped up in
just the right time. Tip #1 is very important and we are already very aware of
that one. Right now it's a 3 man shop, and I can't imagine working with
someone I can't grab a beer after work.

