Every day we read about mass layoffs by huge companies. But on the flip side, how do you hire a good technical engineer in the age of AI?
I was involved in candidates’ interviews while working at AWS. I helped numerous founders to screen and hire candidates for different technical and management roles. Later on, I worked with those new hires and saw firsthand if those people were a good fit for roles, for teams, for tasks we had envisioned with the founders when we prepared for the hiring process.
Hire for attitude. What does it even mean?
Hard skills are, or at least used to be, easy to measure. But how can you define someone’s attitude within a half-hour conversation?
When I conduct an interview, I look for open-minded and proactive traits. An open-minded engineer is someone who is not afraid to ask questions, who is curious about the problem at hand, and who is willing to learn new things (even during the hiring interview). When someone is not afraid to ask questions during the job interview, they won’t be afraid to ask questions during project meetings, which greatly increases the chances of successful delivery. A proactive engineer challenges assumptions for a given task if they are not aligned with the overall business objective. Challenging requirements is a good signal, but I always follow up with questions to understand the reasoning behind the pushback and ask the candidate to update the task description to provide a greater business outcome.
When hiring for more senior roles, it is crucial to confirm that the candidate has a broad business understanding and an end-to-end technical solution design perspective. That person must be able to draw relations between business objectives and the underlying infrastructure.
AI can generate source code faster than any human. So the importance of active coding is not as significant as it used to be. We should focus our attention during the hiring process to verify candidates’ abilities to understand, analyze and suggest improvements to an AI-generated codebase. They still need to understand the foundational concepts of solution design and development, good security practices, and scalable infrastructure design. But remembering the exact syntax is no longer crucial.
My biggest hiring mistake was to hire someone with very high technical skills, but a personality that was not aligned with the overall team spirit. I knew that during the hiring, but under time pressure, I chose to accept that person. That decision ended up costing me in several different ways, including the overall team motivation decline, performance decline, and growing confusion. That was a tough, but very important lesson for me.
I’m not claiming that I do not make hiring mistakes anymore, but I’m way more careful not to ignore nuanced signals I spot during the interview.
👉 Feel free to reach out if you can use my assistance in verifying your key candidates, both for technical and management roles.