Hiring & prioritisation of efforts

[j12b]

I’ve only been here 4 weeks, but it’s clear to see that we’ve grown at an incredible pace over the past 12 months. One of the key challenges for any growing organisation is to define the pace and focus of new hires - you need to grow fast enough to build, but not so fast that you change the culture/principles.

We have a fairly traditional “tech company” hiring process. We define work needs, we advertise jobs, we find candidates, we interview them, we trial them and they become core contributors. PeopleOps has been discussing hiring/recruitment a lot since I joined, specifically how we can move away from that traditional hiring model, to one that closer mirrors how we operate now, and how we’ll operate as a DAO in the future. We’re working to implement changes (some huge, some small) to our process now to test new methods of acquiring brilliant contributors - while the process may vary, the end goal is the same: find, attract and retain amazing contributors to help us succeed in our vision.

But right now, there’s also a pragmatism to our approach - there is work that needs to be done, and one way of meeting that need is to follow a traditional hiring model (whilst we develop the other methods).

Last week I met with Nabil, Jarrad and Carl to review the list of “open roles” that we have. We went through each one and tried to define (from their viewpoint) the urgency and criticality of each role we have posted. You can find that list and ranking here.

Prioritisation is important, as it allows the recruiting team to really concentrate on the most impactful and important needs of the organisation. At the same time, I know that no-one really wants to see that their team’s role has been marked as low urgency or importance.

In the medium term, I would like to implement a system where the PeopleOps team could be directed on prioritization of roles by some sort of community voting. But for now, asking Jarrad, Carl and Nabil for their view is a good starting point. Please take some time to review the list - we would welcome discussion around the prioritisation of roles, and the urgency of roles here.

[hester]

In general, these priorities make sense from where I’m standing. Some sidenotes though.

• I can’t judge the SWE positions well. If any of them are crucial to fixing the Wall of Shame, I think they deserve a critical label over other roles. For example, I believe moving away from Infura was a pretty major item on the Wall of Shame. This could mean that the NIM Developer position deserves a higher priority. I honestly don’t know:)
• Slight question mark on the ‘critical’ label of the Copy Writer position. With all the work that’s already been done over the past 8 months, I would actually imagine a Social Media Manager with experience in experimenting with content could add more value.

[adam]

A nice activity could be figuring out the bus factor for teams or some specific areas. Personally, I am glad we have marked “DevOps” role as critical.

[igor]

From my point of view, we will really get much help with hiring a mobile developer. Not a ClojureScript person, but someone with native Android (and iOS) background.

We sometime lag behind on tasks that require some native-related tasks.

The perfect candidate will have experience with both iOS and Android (and CI process in mobile).
But if we want to choose between platforms, then Android looks more important to me.

[oskarth]

I agree with @igor, and this is something that has come up a bit in the past. Especially Android would be useful for performance stuff, but also deeper knowledge of native code, which is useful for things like TouchID etc.

I’d process replacing one of the Clojure roles with this being a medium or high priority. Unless people strongly disagree, Igor and I can start a JD.