[jacobian.org] making a compelling offer; meaasuring engineering team performance; why panel interviews don't work
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Hello from Mammoth Lakes, CA, where I’m getting ready to head out into the mountains for a couple of weeks. Please feel free to get in touch while I’m gone, but please don’t expect a response until early August. Thanks!
My posts
Here’s what I published on my blog recently:
📝 Making a Compelling Offer — in this economy?
An edited transcript of a talk I delivered at the CTOCraft Hiring MiniConf: How do you make a job offer that’ll be accepted when other companies are out there offering candidates over a million dollars? That’s not hyberbolic: I literally know someone who just recieved a seven figure offer … and turned it down. Want to know why? Read on…
📝 DORA Metrics: the Right Answer to measuring engineering team performance
“What metrics should I use to measure my engineering team’s performance?”
I get asked this question often enough to be worth an FAQ.
You might expect my answer to be “it depends” but no: I believe there’s a single right answer! More precisely, there’s an established set of metrics that are so good, so widely applicable, that they should be your starting point. They may not work, or you may want to augment them with other metrics, but they’ll work for the vast majority of teams. Unless and until you have evidence that they’re not working for your team, you should use these metrics.
These metrics are the so-called DORA metrics, and I wrote about what they are, and gave some examples of how to use them.
📝 Panel interviews don’t work
There’s a Right Way to conduct job interviews: one-on-one, with a single interviewer per interview session. If you need multiple interviewers (you probably do), schedule multiple sessions, each one-on-one. The alternate approach, panel interviews – having multiple interviewers in a session at once – is almost always a bad practice. It increases stress on the candidate, risks measuring the wrong things, and doesn’t lead to better results. Avoid panel interviews: they don’t work. Here’s why.