Hiring, managing, firing engineers

Hiring

• how to hire, what are the amounts
• sometimes it is hard to hire due to costs because non profit

Competing for different pools of engineers

• salary restrictions
• local and global markets is a variable.
• what motivates a developer - money might not be number one item, writing in code and tech, egos/leaders.

Some make an effort to get more women or people of color

• extracting women and women of color. people of color - a hard proposal
• harder to hire your first women or only person of color
• great people are willing to work for nonprofits, but need to widen the circle
• easier if the organization is open to remote work diversity
• in interviewing - you might need to ask women engineers different questions, to get them to take credit for stuff. The same questions might filter out women.

Sometimes gets applications from men who are under qualified and women who think they are overqualified.

• The expectations might be a different scale.
• Question - does this vary by culture? cultural or different socio economic divide.

Question - are the job postings exclusionary

• organizations might need to have pre-interview people to convince them to hire

Organizations might want to consider putting the nontech requirements first then the tech because fit matters.

• Hire ability to learn and track record of successes
• trying to hire curious, demonstrated tech ability.
• value focused hiring is interesting
• have the same people do the hiring
• have a rating scale for interviewing to be able to include the skills and the secret sauce/soft skills

Need to have a balanced team. Have a good combination of when to lead and when to do their work

• hiring in west africa - sometimes people will ask about religion
• how to navigate trust and societal norms

Managing Developers

• it is good to have the 9 - 5 churn code. helps with balance.
• want people with different communications styles
• this needs to especially happen in international orgs with remote work
• distributed teams and how to make decisions and how to work

Diversity challenge

some cultures varies. “increasing the gravity of tasks” - help the tendency to increase challenges

• how to tell people - what I want not how I want
• Culture matters a lot in hiring and managing
• remote teams - how to help people who fit in the hierarchy - in japan - got a local manager.
• understand culture, negotiate to
• what are people doing in NA
  • catered food, laundry, more hours a week - unexceptable
• how to schedule and know holidays
• have your remote people be connected and meet together, get people into the same room, shared experiences, more understanding

Global geek culture can be exclusive and exclusionary, it really depends

• general culture references may not be the same as work culture may not be aligned
• the technical work culture - training and tech engineering culture may be different
• the manager can lead to make the linkages and ask for explanations/references to help acclimatize folks

Gender and management

• what are the difference between an all male dev team and all gender teams.
• something freaks me out how to be in an all male shop
• what about dynamics when all the managers are men, what if it is antagonistic
• what is the patronizing line
• managers need to lead on this, a recognition on this
• change the discussion on how to build safe and collaborative space
• let culture build organicaly, how to make it explicit - a big effort, but this is benefical
• how to manage the tyranny of structurelessness
• recognize power structures, not enough to diversity the team
• what is the culture mode
• how to have the vibe discussions,

Rules - how to share tactics with people to make it a safe and healthier space

• how can you help a team - not just a code of conduct,
• how to steer things to make it better and more inclusive
• explicitly ask for people to give their input
• methodologies for meetings

Implicitly give credit, this is a power thing

• name it, credit it, prove it - engineers need to prove their voice is valuable

manager

• try to talk about values, personal traits to connect and build how people come to decisions, process mentoring