Dr. Strangehire or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Hiring Process

An epic tale of remotely hiring remote working programmers in remote places…

I work for a company that takes full advantage of office-less technology.

We are all remote workers — not internationally remote, but remote enough that we only meet every few months. The rest of our communication is purely digital: email, MS Teams, Zoom, etc.

Despite the many forecasts of doom and gloom, the current health/economic crisis has been relatively kind to us. Our product has found a few new customers and we’ve lost a few competitors. Everyone in the company is upbeat and focusing on scaling up our operations.

With these greater ambitions comes the need to expand the development team, and that my dear friends is the topic of this article. The challenges and conclusions I’m about to list are solely my own and the people mentioned below are not necessarily real people. All of the interviews and the consequent work were conducted online.

1. Hiring Attempt One — Cheap and Cheerful, and Junior

I started off thinking that I could pursue a strategy in which I would employ truly junior developers and give them an intense course of online training. That training was literally going to entail keeping them connected to me and glued to their computer screens seven hours a day, as well as letting them carry out real work tasks under close supervision.

My inspiration came from an experiment conducted by Richard Dennis and William Eckhardt in 1983. Their premise was that anyone could be taught to trade on the stock market by simply following a set of rules. Okay, that is probably not directly comparable, but it was what pushed me in the direction of this initial strategy.

For this to work, I had to find reasonably bright people that were at the same time keen on computer programming and capable of concentrating for long periods of time without getting tired and/or losing interest.

The idea was to try and cram huge amounts of practical knowledge into their heads, and get them building and breaking software applications straight away.

Houston, we have a problem

The results of this strategy were lacklustre, to put it mildly. I ended up hiring and then firing three people. It was an expensive and wasteful exercise, and I felt sorry for both myself and the other people involved.

So why was this strategy such a dismal failure?

The exercise showed that all three hires lacked the requisite capacity for intense study. Also, it appears that I have a unique ability to avoid frequent bathroom breaks (a consequence of endless cups of tea) and my internet access has a unique and stubborn capacity to remain connected for hours on end…

None of the three had the right mindset but they all did prove to be blessed with an infinite capacity to comprehend absolutely nothing!

They never showed any signs of being able to operate independently, and they never showed any real interest in the company.

The final straw was that they refused to be held accountable for their work or take on the responsibility for completing assigned tasks. In other words, they didn’t have an honest relationship with the job.

2. Hiring Attempt Two — A More Senior Approach

Reviewing the results of my first attempted strategy, I concluded that the only reason I had employed those three people was that they were cheap hires. I also blamed luck but then, I was running out of excuses…

I talked myself into trying someone at a more senior programmer level, expecting that the dedication, knowledge, motivation and focus would also be at a higher level.

The technical test was conducted strictly as a scientific experiment. I organised guided walks through the real codebase. I asked them to navigate the terrain, and watched as they collided with random modules, plummeted into chasms between various services, and uniformly failed to identify things by their real names. I introduced small errors but found these to be just a step too far in what again proved to be a futile endeavour.

At this level of scrutiny, I really didn’t have to flip a coin to help me make the decisions.

The second part of the assessment was to try and figure out if any personality traits would make the candidate unsuitable. I applied myself hard to weed out programmers on an ego- trip, anyone with a God complex, and those riding high on the fumes of software dogma.

Failure is not an option… except for this one

The result? One person hired and… one fired. Yes, the same one. The reason?

They didn’t want to do the real work. The work was prototyping all day but they ‘prototyped’ in complete secrecy. They cultivated the impression that the ‘alchemy’ being undertaken was too ‘sacred’ to be shared with anyone else on the team. Teamwork was simply a fictitious notion and mysterious elitism was the Sorcerer’s Key to success!

Oh, and then there was the needless and incessant quarrelling over technologies. Sigh…

3. Hiring Attempt Three — Interview WAY More People, Win a LONG Probation Period, Find Those with REAL PASSION and NO EGO

At this point, I had recovered from the effects of the first failure and felt almost energised by the catastrophic lack of success in the second attempt.

‘I’ll just “work harder” my way out of it’, I told myself.
So, I ordered more CVs, many more CVs. Yea verily, mountains of CVs!

To start with, I read them ‘con gusto’ and enthusiastically arranged Zoom meetings. Allowing room for some interesting interviews to spill into a second hour, I decided that five was the right number of interviews per day.

Seventy per cent of the interviewees came from free international portals and 30% came from agencies.

In the meantime, the HR office was fighting hard to extend the probation period and verify in no uncertain terms our right to a rebate. Sometimes it worked. When it didn’t, we simply wouldn’t work with that agency.

In terms of the volumes of CVs sent our way, the free portals worked well. There was a phenomenal response from faraway places, and some truly illustrious CVs found their way across seas and oceans.

Stars in their own eyes

Reviewing these submissions, however, was a harsh and brutal experience. Most of the applicants fell victim to their own misrepresentation. On top of that, salary expectations tended to be totally unrealistic.

Fortunately, the sheer number of applications meant that we were still able to sort some quality resumes from the larger pile of dross, leaving us with a suitable number of shortlisted candidates.

Light at the end of the tunnel

After so many bitter failures, I had decided to enhance my usual interview process by adding a difficult and time-consuming task, to be undertaken by candidates at their own leisure.

This enhancement proved crucial and turned out to be a useful indicator of a candidate’s future dedication to the job!

A month later, all of the chosen candidates have started working for us. They’ve been hired initially as contractors, to be taken on full-time should they graduate from the probation period.

Here’s hoping we won’t have to suffer through Hiring Attempt Four!