
Tripling an Engineering Team in Six Months: Setting Up for Success - zacsky
https://www.zacsky.com/blog/2017/8/tripling-an-engineering-team-in-six-months-part-three-setting-up-for-success
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scarface74
If he was this successful at hiring, onboarding, and training new devs and
getting them up to speed, I must really suck. It took me close to two months
and around 14 interviews just to hire four people as contractors - for the
right person, I had the budget to give them a top of the market rate. I didn't
need the 10x developer just smart .Net developers.

You would be surprised at the number of developers with 10 years of experience
who couldn't do what was the equivalent of the FizzBuzz problem.
([http://wiki.c2.com/?FizzBuzzTest](http://wiki.c2.com/?FizzBuzzTest))

60-70% of the people I interviewed had never done automated testing - I've
been teaching them how.

~~~
linkmotif
How is it possible to fail fizzbuzz? I don't understand. Just read about it on
your link. Is there some trick I'm missing?

~~~
jogjayr
I failed fizzbuzz once in a phone interview. I was really nervous. I've since
gone on to have a reasonably successful career in software. It can happen.

~~~
linkmotif
Thank you for sharing.

How can one administer fizzbuzz over the phone?

~~~
jogjayr
In a Google doc. While you may say a Google doc is a suboptimal environment
for coding, it was literally fizzbuzz.

~~~
carlmr
Just do it in Python:

import fizzbuzz

fizzbuzz()

~~~
scarface74
If someone did that, I'm not sure whether I would give them brownie points for
not reinventing the wheel or demerits for being a smart ass.

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pbreit
I can't think of (m)any situations where tripling the size of a dev team in 6
months makes sense. Did it here?

~~~
trhway
some companies seems to do it before IPO/acquisition. Of course sustaining
such an inflated company post-event is another story.

In the title story :

>In 2016 we were acquired through a private investment consortium and given an
injection of funding in order to 'go faster'.

I'd not be surprised if the consortium would sell them for a nice profit soon.
Would look like a typical private equity operation.

~~~
codingdave
... on a 20 year old product. This was not a market-driven need, this was an
investor-driven push for profit. It is their company, so their call to make,
but it needs to be made clear that this was a calculated risk by the business
owners to make money, not a launch strategy for a new product.

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zacsky
In 2016, after being acquired by private investors, we were given the green
light to triple our engineering team as fast as possible. In this article
(part 3 of a 5 part series) I focus on all the preparations required before
starting to hire.

~~~
faitswulff
I skipped ahead to the 5th installment - how do you know if a hire was
successful past the first month of employment?

~~~
zacsky
A lot of the things I recommend doing in the first month are just repeatable
for the length of their employment. But there is a greater question I think
you are asking around how do you know when you made a good hire? That's a big
curly question probably worthy of a follow-up post.

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mooreds
I enjoyed all 5 parts of this in depth series.

Would be nice to have a 6th post about how the engineering team ended up being
organized, but all in all a great overview of the goals, techniques and
tactics needed to make a big hiring push.

~~~
zacsky
Thanks for your comment. Glad you enjoyed the series.

I did consider a 6th article looking at the longer term outcomes but decided
at the time to cut it. Might have to reconsider as there seems to be good
interest.

~~~
davidbanham
That's the bit I was interested in reading. The level of detail in the hiring
process turned out to be really good. The thing that got my attention about
the series, though, was "Ooh, I wonder how they handled communication and work
distribution among the organisation."

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pfarnsworth
Hiring is the easy part. Rampant scaling of engineers is easy to do, if you're
not paying careful attention to quality, or you're dumping cash and or
options/RSUs with the promise of riches (case in point: Uber sounds like they
overhired and then imploded).

How __successful __was your hiring? What was the performance ratings of the
people that you hired and how many met your expectations and how many didn 't?
What was the average tenure of those employees after this big hiring spurt?
Those are the more interesting pieces of information.

~~~
zacsky
Quality (for engineering skill AND attitude) was the top focus, salaries were
market rate, and there are no options/RSUs involved.

Thanks for the suggestions about the follow up to hiring and measuring
success. It seems most of the comments want to know more about this so I will
look at a follow-up post.

~~~
walshemj
Why no stock options did you increase the salary to account for this
difference?

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j_s
Does tripling mean going from 1 to 3 or from 100 to 300? I even skimmed the
article quickly but didn't see any reference to the scale here.

~~~
phonon
"40-50 over a few months"

