Hiring Engineers: A Manager's Playbook

Hiring is one of the highest-leverage things you will do as an engineering manager. A single great hire compounds over years. A single bad hire - or more precisely, a bad hiring process that lets the wrong person through while filtering out the right ones; costs you more than you think. Not just in time and salary, but in team morale, velocity, and the invisible tax of managing a poor fit. Most engineering hiring processes are broken in ways that managers do not fully recognise until they have been on the other side of them. I have sat in hiring debriefs where five engineers gave five different verdicts on the same candidate and nobody could articulate why they felt the way they did. I have seen candidates with brilliant portfolios fail whiteboard tests that had nothing to do with the actual job. I have watched great engineers get filtered out because they had a quiet interview style and the interviewer mistook silence for incompetence. The goal of this article is to help you build a p