The golden Three silver Four recruitment season is the most active time for job seekers, and developers spend a lot of time writing resumes, brushing questions, and preparing for interviews. It is also the busiest time for enterprises, with a large number of senior positions being released, hoping to solve the shortage of high-end talent through recruitment.

Eduards Sizovs is the founder of DevHub, a professional career consulting service for software engineers. He is also a well-known technology evangelist in Europe.

This post is from Eduards Sizovs’ blog with the title: Great Developers are Raised, Not Hired. In this article Eduards Sizovs explains how he hires the best developers. Instead of spending a lot of time on recruiting contests, he advises companies to build up their coaching skills by hiring new players who aren’t good enough but are enthusiastic and able to learn, and letting experienced developers mentor new players to grow into great talent.

The body of the

Every company in the market is looking for the best talent. Companies wait for “talent” to pop up somewhere, as if there were a secret talent factory somewhere. Companies feel that the ideal candidate will have all the necessary technical skills, will adapt quickly to the company culture and perform well with little or no supervision.

But there was a problem: the best developers I hired were far from ideal candidates. They lack the technical skills to test software and work in an agile team. They don’t believe in their own abilities and don’t think they can be very good leaders. They also don’t sound very convincing in job interviews. Some of them suffer from impostors and doubt their own abilities.

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The translator’s note:

Dunning-kruger Effect: The dunning-Kruger Effect, in which a person has an illusory sense of superiority, falsely believing that he or she is better than he or she really is.

Impostor Syndrome refers to a condition in which some people attribute their success to luck or timing rather than ability, even when they are excellent or achieve great success.

Broken toys are not welcome

Today, companies create absurdly complicated interview processes to filter out “not good enough” candidates. We rarely give candidates who are held back by bad companies and bad influences. We forget that it takes a certain amount of good luck to meet inspirational mentors or work in teams that encourage each other. Broken toys are not welcome.

A broken toy

We prefer to hire Rockstar who is confident and has a proven track record. The reason is simple — we didn’t create a working environment in which developers could develop professionally, develop good habits, and become Rockstar. Skilled developers do not have the time to mentor novice mentoring because they are too busy programming and architecture. Coaching is not part of our hiring and delivery process. Mentoring is not a buzzword, you can’t learn it on Coursera, it’s not visible on the tech radar.

The pond is empty

The company’s TA (Talent Acquisition) division spends millions on recruitment websites, popular websites and videos in an effort to find the best Talent. We search so frantically because companies are looking for the best engineers, not training them. Everyone was fishing, but there wasn’t much fish left. Recruiting more fishermen and paying high commissions didn’t help because the ponds were empty.

The state of hiring today

In the current market situation, every company needs to build mentoring capacity. The most experienced developers need to find time to nurture less experienced colleagues through pair programming, constant feedback, and career advice. We must suggest books, blogs, videos, and encourage colleagues to attend gatherings, conferences, and seminars.

Mentoring is not easy; It requires a lot of time commitment and excellent communication skills. We must encourage developers to improve their coaching skills. If you doubt whether you should invest your time in mentoring, I can assure you that mentoring is the best way to attract followers and burnish your authority and reputation. Your mentors will support you and carry you forward for the rest of your life.

Your mentor is your fan base

Diamonds are made by grinding

By building coaching skills on the job, you can hire new people, broken toys, impostors, and turn them into loyal, high-quality employees. Shifting the focus from assessment to coaching can simplify your interview process. Instead of testing candidates by asking tough questions, going through nine hell circles and trying to predict their future, hire growth-minded candidates and nurture them.

Are you going to throw this rock in the trash?

An unremarkable stone

The same stone was carefully cut and polished:

Now he’s a diamond

Someone looks like a primitive diamond of ordinary stone, cut it, polish it and look at it — you have a beautiful shining diamond. But the company’s hiring strategy is to find polished diamonds and throw the raw ones in the trash.

Instead of throwing away rough stones, we can learn to polish them. We can create an environment where passionate and capable people learn to be great developers.

Spend some of the money, effort, and time you would otherwise spend on hiring to improve the coaching skills of your best developers. Take your best developers out of the daily grind and give them time to mentor new people. They will build a workforce that exceeds your expectations.

• Adjust your interview process to give a chance to candidates who aren’t good enough but have a passion for learning and growing — they’re diamonds in the rough.
• Relax “hard requirements” in job advertisements to avoid filtering out impostors. Keep in mind that most women will only apply for positions for which they are 100% qualified.
• If you work for a large company and care about our careers, please consider setting up a boot camp for beginners.

Creating an environment where experienced developers mentor newcomers can give you an escape from the crazy hiring race. Hiring attitude, teaching technical skills. Great developers are made, not hired.

Be the company that says: we are hiring mentoring.

Translation postscript

Overhiring is a problem in China’s developer talent market. On the one hand, many students with shorter working years will spend most of their energy on interview skills, specializing in large interview question banks in order to get into the company they want. For technology enterprises, the human resources department does not know the specific recruitment demands of the technical department, and many potential developers are easily screened out by “hard criteria” in the recruitment process.

Eduards Sizovs’ idea is one way out of this dilemma. Perhaps the enterprise will inevitably hesitate, cultivate a good developer, how to do? For a developer, all other things being equal, a company that offers him specialized training is more attractive than one that doesn’t allow him to grow.

What’s more, mentoring is a kind of inheritance. Students who have been well tutored will often go out of their way to cultivate their students after they become good developers. Under this kind of inheritance, there will be more and more excellent developers in China.

CODING frees r&d managers from tedious and transactional work and leaves time to focus on and coach employees to become good developers. Click on the link to learn more.

Reference: www.youtube.com/watch?v=1i8… Sizovs.net/2019/04/10/…