recorded this on friday morning pursuant to a conversation with @fasterandworse.com on the state of hiring technical roles ("technical" in the broadest sense, ie you have to know how things work and how to do things other than delegate) but only just had the opportunity to post: youtu.be/mUTbhG1z1N4
nice one, man. enjoy that coffee haha
tl;dw: • if you're looking, find the person who would be your boss and ask them what it'd take to work with them • if you're hiring, maybe focus more on preventing toxic hires than fine-grained skills/experience • start by not incentivizing lying on one's résumé to get past keyword filters
(said conversation) bsky.app/profile/dori...
Preventing toxic hires reminded me, I was on a hiring committee for a library IT role with lots of industry candidates one of whom commented that there were a lot of questions abt collaboration and communication but fewer technical questions than expected...
Which was good noticing... but they did not seem to process that insight into the realization that this was intentional and those things were on our hiring rubric so they should be highlighting their experience or skill communicating and collaborating with colleagues
But hiring in this space looks very different than industry, I know so maybe they had never been asked about *how* they work before 🤷🏼♀️
collaboration is a weird thing too because more collaboration is not necessarily always better (brooks' law &c); did anybody have notably sophisticated remarks about the nature of collaboration?
our context is relationship based, sometimes political, and the 'customer' is often a direct colleague, and this team in particular has a non hierarchical approach to their decision making So we were looking for answers that showed an understanding of the work as part of a process made of people
The best answer I recall was about building a relationship with a known to be grouchy old-timer w/ the institutional power to kill projects he didn't like, to understand his expertise and perspective and demonstrate competency before a big ask