How To Hire Better Engineers: Ignore School Degrees And Past Projects

Programmers in New York at a Google hackathon . (AP Photo/Mark Lennihan)

For most, the process of evaluating and hiring an engineer is something of an inexact art. Companies try to insert their own quantitative measures into the process, but they’re often misguided or not implemented with consistency. I know as I’ve been guilty of this myself.

Whether through luck or some thread of worthy evaluation, I have managed to hire talented and hardworking developers, but I’ve also made mistakes that, in hindsight, likely could have been prevented with a better process in place.

So what should that process look like? How do you properly evaluate an engineer’s readiness to contribute to your team and what you’re building?

It’s not easy. And it consumes time and energy; Sequoia Capital estimates that it takes the average startup 990 hours to hire 12 engineers.

Some founders find the exercise so difficult that they only hire people they know, at least to start. Max Levchin, the technical co-founder at PayPal and one of the most respected technical minds in Silicon Valley, built most of the early engineering team at PayPal out of his classmates at the University of Illinois.

Conducting technical interviews isn’t a straight-forward process. Many teams look for the wrong things, creating a bevy of false positives and false negatives, which leads to hiring candidates who won’t meet a company’s standards while also letting great candidates fall through the cracks.

But there are rules that companies and startups can incorporate to make their process more dependable. FundersClub did a deep dive on this with the help of Ammon Bartram, co-founder at Triplebyte, a Y Combinator company that evaluates engineers and recommends them for hiring at its client companies.

Triplebyte has been working on this problem for more than a year. It has five full-time interviewers who have now conducted more than 1,000 interviews with engineers as the company continues to hone its own regimented process.

The in-depth guide to interviewing engineers is here. For an overview, continue below.