In the wake of open source, traditional hiring practices seem like an unnecessarily risky way to hire new employees, especially for small teams where each hire can make it or break it. Why bet the composition of your collective on abstract indicators, hearsay, and a biased bio?
I remember my last interview a few years back for a technical position. I was hired on a shiny CV concocted on my own, a few e-mails back and forth, and a one-hour interview. That's it.
That bothered me even back then, especially since I kept hearing that this process was the norm. The effects of it were painfully clear: it's a lot easier to hire someone than to fire them, so most companies would just keep the outcome of their crap shoot, regardless of whether they rolled snake eyes or boxcars.
There had to be a better way, and, of course, now there is. Open source is a golden gift to the process of hiring technical people. It reduces the risk enormously by allowing you to sample candidates over a much longer period of time, using all the right variables:
- Quality of Work: Many programmers can talk the talk, but can't walk the walk in any direction I would be interested in tagging along for. With open source, you get the nitty-gritty specifics of the programming skills and practices exposed in high definition. Contrast this with the black and white distorted image from playing "how to build a linked list" at a whiteboard.
- Fit of Culture: Programming is all about decisions - lots and lots of them. Decisions are guided by your cultural vantage point, your values and ideals. It's possible to reverse-engineer a lot of cultural substance by back-tracing from specific decisions made in coding, testing, and community arguments. If there's no cultural fit, every decision will be a struggle.
- Assessment of Passion: By definition, involvement in open source requires at least some passion, otherwise why would you forgo laying on the beach, on the couch, or in your bed for all those hours spent crouched in front of your screen? But it can also be more specific and, along with the cultural fit, give you an indication of what it is that really makes a person tick.
- Capability for Completion: Also known as "gets stuff done" and is perhaps one of the most important qualities in a programmer. All the smarts, proper cultural leanings, and passion doesn't amount to valuable software if you can't get stuff done. And lots of programmers, unfortunately, can't. So look for the zeal to ship, get it out the door, and make the pragmatic trade-offs at the finish line. Open source offers a world of options to both deliver and linger.
- Degree of Humanity: Working with someone over a long period of time, during both stress and relaxation, highs and lows, allows you to know someone as a human. And filter out the stereotypical geeks with no manners or social skills.
This could also have been called "People I Wouldn't Hire, Part II (revisit Part I for a flame fest [
www.loudthinking.com/arc/000433.html]). I can't imagine hiring someone whom I didn't know through open source. I would consider it irresponsible to endanger the composition of 37signals by bringing someone on board in the same manner in which I have personally been hired a good number of times.
Which is, of course, also why we hired Jamis Buck at the beginning of the year. I was in awe of his ratings on the five qualities listed above by following his releases and his participation in the Ruby community.
Who cared about his GPA (or if he even went to college)? Or that he lived in Provo, Utah? Or how many years of experience he had programming? We didn't. It's simply unnecessary to rely on secondary factors when the work is available to extract values for the five variables listed above.
Open source gives companies a way out of the crap shoot, a competitive advantage in picking winners with a much higher rate of success than the guessing, interpolation, and charade of old.
At the same time, open source allows programmers a way to route around dressing up for a meeting with the bank in your Sunday suit. Stop optimizing the secondary factors and focus on what it's all supposed to be about: the craftsmanship.
