Hiring Engineers That Won't Ruin Your Life

I gave this talk to the Clemson MBA students. The slides are rather sparse, but it served as a cursory introduction to how to hire quality engineers.

Transcript

1. hiring Engineers (and choosing a tech stack) that won’t ruin your life!
2. SUPEr quick: hey! i’m mason stewart @masondesu
3. SUPEr quick: hey! i’m mason stewart I work at @zaarly
4. SUPEr quick: hey! i’m mason stewart I enjoy belgian beer
5. SUPEr quick: hey! i usually look like this on the internet
6. so, what are engineers? or rather, what do they do?
7. front end? back end? data engineers? sys ops?
8. what to look for in an engineer... Github account
9. what to look for in an engineer... Github account regular public Activity log
10. what to look for in an engineer... Github account regular public Activity log examples of their work
11. what to look for in an engineer... Github account regular public Activity log examples of their work test them!
12. what to look for in an engineer... test them with projecteuler.net If we list all the natural numbers below 10 that are multiples of 3 or 5, we get 3, 5, 6 and 9. The sum of these multiples is 23. Find the sum of all the multiples of 3 or 5 below 1000.
13. Bottom line: talk is cheap. a github activity log and couple of problems solved on a whiteboard are worth 1000x more than a resume.
14. one last thing: you need to learn to write code.
15. you don’t have to dedicate your life to learning to programming but having a firm grasp of it will prevent much sorrow.
16. thanks! :)