After a few years at a startup I started slipping two of my own questions into the interview plans I was handed, regardless of why I was on the interview team:
- Tell me about a time in the absence of working process or tooling that you built something.
- Tell me how you measured its success.
I started asking because I kept seeing a certain kind of failure pattern: Well equipped, bright people with plenty of success behind them who were hitting our environment and either bursting into flame or quietly failing out.
Maybe because we were a startup and had strong imposter syndrome/yes-we-work-for-a-corporation-but-not-like-that streak, there was a "we're looking for people who've done it at scale" trope loose in the building, and I think that fuzzed some people's radars. It fuzzed mine. I'd never really "done it at scale," and didn't really know what "scale" would look like: I'd worked in everything from 12-person to 1,500-person businesses, a high school, a university, and the Army, but hadn't done a ton of
building.
Unexamined, "done it at scale" was a pretty poor guideline because it started becoming obvious that there are people who started their careers somewhere "at scale," and there are people who got "to scale" through the sweat of their own brows, and those are very different paths.
So I started asking my questions: What have you built, and how have you known it worked?
I can't claim any science. I was on a
lot of interview panels over ten years. For a while the platform engineers liked having me paired with a UX designer to get into collaborative skills. For a while we were on a hiring jag in marketing (six people to 20 in four months). For a while I was hiring writers, hiring project managers, hiring developers, hiring network engineers, hiring managers of those things, interviewing prospective VPs of engineering, interviewing prospective HR business partners, hiring a security engineer, and probably more I've forgotten about.
When you're just one on a panel, you just get your vote at the end of the cycle. After I decided "did you build" was the thing that mattered to me, I began to pretty reliably vote down the people without a convincing story regardless of the brief I was given by the hiring team. Yes, I'd mention if they passed the competencies I was told to look for, but then I'd mention the building thing and say "so I have to qualify my 'yes.'"
But anecdotally, no, non-builders didn't do well if they got in the door. And some kinds of builders didn't either, because there are different kinds of builders:
Some do well given a crude axe, a week's supply of jerky, and access to a stream. Some do better given a well appointed shop and some power tools. I lost a power tools person someone else had hired—and I probably would have—and that sucked because it was such an accident of timing. If she'd arrived after we'd been through the IPO readiness year, it could've been fine.
But yesterday, confronted with a patch of process brownfield like you'll find in an old-young company I realized there's another kind of builder who sort of embodies Bakunin's "the urge for destruction is also a creative urge!"
It's not all greenfield and pristine woodland. Geriatric startups are full of tragic opportunity. It pays to have an analytical mindset, enough patience to track down what else is implicated if you decide to grab a hacksaw and cut that thing out, and to know when you're going to need to just go in the basement and tear out handfuls of wire while you're listening for a scream to come from the attic.
Personally, I'm not sure I'm a temperamental embodiment of that builder archetype. Or rather, I've got some of the traits (respect for failed attempts, patience) but not some of the others (like the willingness to flip into impatience and start smashing).
Something to think about and work on.
