December 8th, 2023 Hiring Thoughts Redux, Embrace the White Board? By Jeffrey M. Barber

I’ve had more thoughts on hiring since writing embarking on my monastic journey. At core, I’m a dirty hippy that wants a freer world. Ultimately, when I think about hiring, I’m struggling with my ideals and reality. Is it possible to find a good balance? How will I handle the founder’s dilemma?

Within my own personality, there is a split between a “code grandpa” that loves coding for the sake of it and working with others to bend reality. However, there is also a competitive and ambitious warlord that wants to win whatever game I’m playing. This is the duality of man.

The warlord within will easily cause myself to work hard and push my limits to ultimately conquer lands and amass wealth. The “code grandpa” asks “are there better ways?” and “is there a better way?” and recognizes the importance of building a sustainable team rather than treating people like resources.

The split between these roles is an exceptional challenge at the beginning, and the responsible decision is to embrace the warlord to create the empire to fund the engineering growth via the “code grandpa”. An alternative and personal model would be to accept the awkward role of becoming a professor, but I’m not a fan of the university system for a litany of reasons. There is no perfect path, and there is just a stream of decisions that have to be made.

The first decision is a reflection on the dreaded whiteboard and l33t code challenge. Do we need it? Well, my opinion is that it never really reflects the reality, but I’ve also never really needed to prepare for them. Seriously, I kind of just walked into big tech because the whiteboard questions were just not that hard. Perhaps, this is because I have a proper computer science education and a tremendous memory? Or, it could be due to the fact I’ve been coding since elementary school. or, perhaps, I was just born into the matrix and breathe the language of the machine… I don’t know, but it’s a mistake to assume Big Tech is dumb in how it hires.

Fundamentally, the whiteboard is just an IQ and stress test.

But this is why it is leveraged because the younger you are implies higher uncertainty. At core, big tech has to be in the “build” side rather than “buy” side when it comes to tech as the demands require invention. The moment you choose to build, you also must “grow” resources rather than “buy” resources from the open market. Buzzword bingo doesn’t make sense for big tech which is why their pipelines start at the “best” universities. Searching google for internal tech isn’t going to help you at big tech (but learning how to talk to people will), so it’s just a bet to play the numbers game, and it’s not personal.

For this reason, I believe this is appropriate for the young, and I plan on incorporating an extremely hard white board process with hazing process for young engineers that want to become rich. If your young, then your goal should be to just get rich. My hippy-dippy philosophy breaks down for the young because they need to be working hard and building useful skills and stockpile resources.

Simply put, the younger you are, the more energy you should spend on building your mind, investing in yourself, and stockpiling resources.

For the old war dogs like myself, I want to open a different path which requires a commitment of faith. I’m open to giving people chances with finite contracts since the older you get, the more you want to leverage your time. I want a place where old war machines can be like “ok, I’ll get this body of work done exceptionally well, train your staff on the operations, and then I’m off to the beach for three months”.

There is nothing wrong with balancing your earning power with time to explore living, and it shouldn’t be such a dramatic cliff. Perhaps, this just doesn’t work, but I do believe it is worth experimenting with.

There are many logistic and “human resource” challenges with such an approach because the world and the state almost demands that I not only embrace being a warlord but also a slaver. There are many tremendous road bumps with hiring because the relationship is dramatically asymmetric. The state (i.e. caeser) wants more employees and jobs because that drives tax revenue, so all incentives and disincentives are in alignment for putting people to work at their maximal capacity. Seriously, the world is not interested in having free people that are content and don’t consume to feed the bottomless pit within their soul.

If anything, the world wants more people to widen their pit of despair to consume more.

So, for the old war machines, the whiteboard isn’t an exactly ideal process. The core question then is centered around relevance prior experience. Where ever you are, there are you.

The older you are, the best strategy is leveraging your experience and skills towards relevant endeavors

The older I get, the more I realize there are more things that I just have to accept. I am where I am. As an example, I had a great manager which could absorb the firehose of my brain, so I never really needed to learn to manage expectations that well. It then reasons that the older I am, the more discomfort that I’ll have to put up with and seeking comfort only weakens me as I fail to get good signal of my own limits.

For some of my limits, I can take them on and power through the issues. However, many more of my limits are solvable only by hiring hence why I’m thinking about this holistically.

Technology is, in many ways, a cruel field to embark upon as there is shockingly little stability over time. The cruelty of the field manifests when we trust businesses with our careers since the days of the gold watch are well in the rear view mirror. The company man is no more. Our tools and frameworks are driven by populism, and it can feel like we are building sand castles. This is then compounded by the political silliness of the current age which is a distraction from the craft.

I believe the solution to hiring the old war machines is building a community to work together to rehab each other from the sheer trauma of this field. Ultimately, the rehab starts with remembering that software is about people. People want software for a reason, and all entrepreneurial success derives from understanding demand.

This is where the hiring process starts with building products for people, and I’ll have more thoughts as I make progress building community.