Design your hiring process to find the right people to strengthen your teams' weaknesses, rather than trying to find the best people. Instead of "how can we find the smartest people?" think about "how can we find the people who will make our team stronger?"
How to Hire
Most companies approach hiring with faulty assumptions and poor practices. They believe talent is fixed rather than contextual. They fail to create real partnerships between internal recruiters and hiring managers. And they rely too much on salary surveys and rigid compensation formulas. The author shares what she learned about making and keeping great hires during her 14 years as the chief talent officer at Netflix. The process requires probing beneath the surface of people and their résumés; engaging managers in every aspect of hiring; ensuring that recruiters deeply understand the business and are not viewed as support staff; adopting a mindset in which you’re always recruiting; and coming up with compensation that suits the performance you need and the future you aspire to. These lessons may be especially relevant to fast-growing tech-based firms, whose rapid innovation means a continual need for new talent. But organizations of all types can benefit from taking a fresh look at their hiring and compensation practices.
In Praise of “Normal” Engineers
Software engineer Charity Majors challenges the "10x engineer" myth, arguing that true productivity lies in team performance, not individual brilliance. She encourages building workplaces where "normal" engineers can thrive. Are we focusing too much on hiring "the best" instead of the right people?
“We only hire the best”
How many times have you heard a company claim that they only hire the best? The top of the top. The crème de la crème. Most of them, by sheer necessity of math, are delusional. There just aren’t th…
We Hire the Best, Just Like Everyone Else
One of the most common pieces of advice you’ll get as a startup is this: Only hire the best. The quality of the people that work at your company will be one of the biggest factors in your success – or failure. I’ve heard this advice over and over
Reasons to hire inexperienced engineers
There are many reasons to consider hiring inexperienced software engineers into your team, beyond the commonly discussed factors of cost and social responsibility. Hire to maximise team effectiveness; not to maximise team size. Adding more people increases the communication and synchronisation overhead in the team. Growing a team has rapidly diminishing returns. However, adding the... Read more »
Opinion | Why Some Teams Are Smarter Than Others (Published 2015)
It’s about listening, empathy and having more women.
AI makes weak engineers less harmful
Like other kinds of puzzle-solving, software engineering ability is strongly heavy-tailed. The strongest engineers produce way more useful output than the average, and the weakest engineers often are actively net-negative: instead of moving projects along, they create problems that their colleagues have to spend time solving. That’s why many tech companies try to build a small, ludicrously well-paid team instead of a large team of more average engineers, and why so far this seems to be a winning strategy.
Home
Research, expert perspectives, and product announcements from Atlassian on how teams can work smarter with AI. Subscribe for monthly insights on the future of teamwork.
What Google Learned From Its Quest to Build the Perfect Team (Published 2016)
New research reveals surprising truths about why some work groups thrive and others falter.
Inside Automattic’s remote hiring process
How can Automattic consistently hire the best people without ever having a single voice conversation? Let’s face it, hiring is tough. When you ask startup founders what their biggest challenge is, …
Review: Team Topologies
Many organizations are struggling with their business agility transformation. One of the reasons is the way they have organized their teams. The focus was probably on efficiency and if these teams …
Habits of High-Functioning Teams
I often struggle to explain what it means to be part of a high-functioning software team. Sure, there are mountains of literature, and an entire genre of LinkedIn thought leadership that professes all kinds of guidelines and heuristics about what makes teams work, but in my experience, it’s hard to internalize these ideas and follow someone else’s model if you’ve never seen what good looks like.
The One Method I've Used to Eliminate Bad Tech Hires - Mattermark
Let’s be real. Interviews are a terrible way to hire tech candidates. Here’s why paying candidates to solve problems works.
The 2e Advantage: A Systemic Guide for Understanding & Unlocking Twice-Exceptional Talent in the Modern Workplace
In today's competitive landscape, overlooking talent is a critical error. Twice-exceptional (2e) and neurodivergent individuals represent a significant pool of often untapped potential, possessing unique strengths alongside specific challenges.
The most successful developers share more than they take - Stack Overflow
After interviewing several developers, a pattern started to become clear: great developers share a lot. This takes different forms for different people, but is very often a blog. But for many top developers, their sharing mindset came before their success, and was the direct cause of it, not the result of it.
