Advice on Hiring Developers
There have been numerous blogs, advice, and studies on how to hire developers for your startup. It’s the single most important role for founders, CEO’s and CTO’s of a software company. The 2011 trend seems to favor hiring:
- Hackers who can get shit done and willing to learn anything
- Coders who are also secretly designers
- Coders who can move up and down the stack (front-end to back-end)
During the interview people like to evaluate:
- Portfolio > Resume/Corporate Experience
- Puzzles/Engineering Challenges
- Familiarity with languages/tools/software engineering practices
This is all great, and very helpful in determining great candidates. However, in my opinion the single most valuable criteria to determine is how well a developer can debug. The majority of time spent writing software is actually fixing bugs.
I want to know:
- What is your debugging process? Do you use debugging tools?
- Do you write test cases? How many? When is it overkill?
- Do you prioritize bugs over features? When?
- How do you communicate defects to customers or product management?
Fortunately we are living through a time where there are great hackers among us. Everyone is more than capable for being a candidate at your company. As an executive, it is your job to find the best ones. The best developers are the ones who don’t introduce bugs into the codebase, and can help eliminate bugs that exist.
