July 4th, 2023 Hiring process without the dreaded hazing at a white-board. By Jeffrey M. Barber

Unlike many engineers, I love the white-board process since it is a dog and pony show for demonstrating exceptional fundamentals of computer science… And, I’m a beautiful and majestic unicorn, but the process only applies to less than five percent of people in a company. Big tech needs that process so that they have a stable population of people that can fight for promotions which creates the honey for the business. Since I’m neither big tech and don’t desire to place the chains of employment on people, I want a more ideal process.

First off, my company aims to have as few rules as possible. Ideally, there are no broad-reaching agreements. The only exception would be for client work where I accept some of my clients have a variety of agreements as the world can be a rough place, but I don’t need them. I don’t need to own people.

As my personal goal is to maximize freedom for both the people I work with and myself, I’m coming to the conclusion that employing employees is problematic. The paradox is that I have no problem paying people for good work, but committing them and myself to 2000 minimum hours of work is hard. A salary is a prison for both the company man and the company, and I’m not alone in this observation.

Slavery was never abolished, it was only extended to include all the colors. - Some old saying

This prison puts a lot of pressure for the jailers and the inmates. The employee puts themselves in a position of absolute dependence since there are enumerable agreements that make having durable income hard, and the company takes on non-trivial risks. Company loyalty is dead, and there is no golden watch promise; it’s a suckers game to be an employee for life. In an attempt to minimize risk, the company invents an kafka-esq interview process; this process is usually intense and not rooted in the reality of the task work for both good and bad reasons.

Instead of a typical interview process, I’m looking to de-risk the process by focusing on freelancers and part-time engineers with a gradient of options.

As an initial step, I am planning a simple two phase introduction. The first phase is a simple linter where people take a multiple choice test indicating that they have read the manual.. The second phase is to build something with Adama that is relatively small but demonstrates your interest. This work is compensated between $250 to $1000 depending on the complexity. I’m currently using upwork to manage these. I’ve had much success with this format, and you can see Mamy Tiana Rakotomalala’s chess post..

However, like life, this initial process is an evolution that I’m refining.

Since I’m not hiring full-time employees, I really am looking for three categories of people: grinders, builders, and operators.

Grinders are simply people that execute “fixed function tasks” or “atomic tasks” like:

  • Convert this image to HTML + Tailwind.CSS
  • Make an icon set for these $concepts
  • Make an image showing a wizard and a brain
  • Write an E2E acceptance test

This is where my focus has been, and I’ve had much success with upwork in this domain. I’m also looking for agencies that can manage a queue of atomic tasks.

Builders are people that I hope to trust building parts of Adama. The workflow here is to pull things from the roadmap which is open within the documentation. Each big item is a separate contract where the total fee is determined by my priority * my estimate. From there, it is a negotiation on milestones.

My expectation here is that senior people can estimate reasonable well and honestly, so I’m happy to do lump sum contracts. For juniors that are learning, I’ll engage on an hourly basis and monitor their progress and see if I’m happy or not.

Operators are people that I trust to help with production issues and supporting high-touch customers.

The core problem in life and business is trust, and I believe the process towards being an operator starts with being a grinder and builder. I believe writing code is a battle, and very few engineers trust leaders that haven’t been in the trenches. This was a nice aspect of Facebook where every employee had to go through bootcamp to learn the tools.

I fully expect to iterate on the roles as the above is my ideal evolves. However, I’m also thinking about to how to encourage people to contribute such that they are on track to become operators. I’d much rather hire a contributor that believes in the vision than a random engineer that was contracted.

So, I have things to think about.