I'm unlikely to write a book, but here are a few more tidbits that come to mind.
Re the above -- I don't mean to imply that any of this is malicious or even conscious on anyone's behalf. I suspect it is for a few people, but I bet most people could pass a lie detector test that they care about their OKRs and the OKRs of their reports. They really, really believe it. But they don't act it. Our brains are really good at fooling us! I used to think that corporate politics is a consequence of malevolent actors. That might be true to some degree, but mostly politics just arises. People overtly profess whatever they need to overtly profess, and then go on to covertly follow emergent incentives. Lots of misunderstandings happen that way -- if you confront them about a violation of an agreement (say, during performance reviews), they'll be genuinely surprised and will invent really good reasons for everything (other than the obvious one, of course). It's basically watching Elephant In The Brain[1] play out right in front of your eyes.
Every manager wants to grow their team so they can split it into multiple teams so they can say they ran a group.
When there is a lot of money involved, people self-select into your company who view their jobs as basically to extract as much money as possible. This is especially true at the higher rungs. VP of marketing? Nope, professional money extractor. VP of engineering? Nope, professional money extractor too. You might think -- don't hire them. You can't! It doesn't matter how good the founders are, these people have spent their entire lifetimes perfecting their veneer. At that level they're the best in the world at it. Doesn't matter how good the founders are, they'll self select some of these people who will slip past their psychology. You might think -- fire them. Not so easy! They're good at embedding themselves into the org, they're good at slipping past the founders's radars, and they're high up so half their job is recruiting. They'll have dozens of cronies running around your company within a month or two.
From the founders's perspective the org is basically an overactive genie. It will do what you say, but not what you mean. Want to increase sales in two quarters? No problem, sales increased. Oh, and we also subtly destroyed our customers's trust. Once the steaks are high, founders basically have to treat their org as an adversarial agent. You might think -- but a good founder will notice! Doesn't matter how good you are -- you've selected world class politicians that are good at getting past your exact psychological makeup. Anthropic principle!
There's lots of stuff like this that you'd never think of in a million years, but is super-obvious once you've experienced it. And amazingly, in spite of all of this (or maybe because of it?) everything still works!
I notice a lot of these answers focus on the technical or coding challenge. As a hiring manager, that's critical, but technical competency only accounts for about a third of the qualities my team is evaluating in a candidate.
I've given this question a lot of thought over the last couple years as I've lead teams that have needed to get organized and expand quickly. Here's my summary taken from a Google Slides presentation I put together titled "Hiring in a Time of Cargo Culturalism".
It starts with Principles and Guidelines:
- Hiring cycles will be structured and as short as possible.
- When we start a hiring cycle, we will finish it by hiring the most qualified applicant who accepts our offer.
- Every applicant will receive a response within 48 hours and be updated on the status of their application at each step asap.
- The hiring process will be as transparent as possible.
- Objective and fair-minded measures will displace biased and bigoted ones.
- Every applicant will appreciate their experience, even the rejected ones.
- The process will be agile and adapt over time to improve and meet the specific needs of the organization.
- Onboarding will begin with hiring.
Then an outline of my team's current Methodology:
- A thoughtful and literate job posting will accurately describe the job and foreshadow the company culture.
- Simple challenges and honeypots will filter serious candidates from the applicant bots.
- At the end of every step, we will inform the applicant what comes next. Courteous templated responses will be promptly delivered.
- Two interviews. No more than three. The coding challenge will represent a genuine work sample. It will be no more than one or two hours.
- Candidates will be evaluated using a simple quantitative assessment of core competencies (see Ch. 21 of Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow).
- Final decision will be a collective decision of the hiring team.
- After hiring cycle is complete, hiring team will hold a retrospective.
I've hired over a dozen developers this year. They haven't all been homeruns but no strikeouts either. A few singles or walks. A lot of solid doubles. And that's mostly what my company needs.
Re the above -- I don't mean to imply that any of this is malicious or even conscious on anyone's behalf. I suspect it is for a few people, but I bet most people could pass a lie detector test that they care about their OKRs and the OKRs of their reports. They really, really believe it. But they don't act it. Our brains are really good at fooling us! I used to think that corporate politics is a consequence of malevolent actors. That might be true to some degree, but mostly politics just arises. People overtly profess whatever they need to overtly profess, and then go on to covertly follow emergent incentives. Lots of misunderstandings happen that way -- if you confront them about a violation of an agreement (say, during performance reviews), they'll be genuinely surprised and will invent really good reasons for everything (other than the obvious one, of course). It's basically watching Elephant In The Brain[1] play out right in front of your eyes.
Every manager wants to grow their team so they can split it into multiple teams so they can say they ran a group.
When there is a lot of money involved, people self-select into your company who view their jobs as basically to extract as much money as possible. This is especially true at the higher rungs. VP of marketing? Nope, professional money extractor. VP of engineering? Nope, professional money extractor too. You might think -- don't hire them. You can't! It doesn't matter how good the founders are, these people have spent their entire lifetimes perfecting their veneer. At that level they're the best in the world at it. Doesn't matter how good the founders are, they'll self select some of these people who will slip past their psychology. You might think -- fire them. Not so easy! They're good at embedding themselves into the org, they're good at slipping past the founders's radars, and they're high up so half their job is recruiting. They'll have dozens of cronies running around your company within a month or two.
From the founders's perspective the org is basically an overactive genie. It will do what you say, but not what you mean. Want to increase sales in two quarters? No problem, sales increased. Oh, and we also subtly destroyed our customers's trust. Once the steaks are high, founders basically have to treat their org as an adversarial agent. You might think -- but a good founder will notice! Doesn't matter how good you are -- you've selected world class politicians that are good at getting past your exact psychological makeup. Anthropic principle!
There's lots of stuff like this that you'd never think of in a million years, but is super-obvious once you've experienced it. And amazingly, in spite of all of this (or maybe because of it?) everything still works!
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Elephant-Brain-Hidden-Motives-Everyda...