Building an exceptional talent pipeline
We recently ran an event for leaders in tech and HR about how to find and grow world-class software developers
We know that top talent tends to gravitate towards top companies. And we also know that the issue with software engineering is that if you want really great software engineers, they can be really, really expensive.
In a recent event, we explored the Makers Pathway, a service that helps you find and grow world-class software developers for your tech team in a cost-efficient way. Below are key points from each of the speakers.
Kay Lack, Head of Training at Makers — “The O-Ring Theory of Software Development”
“Why do top tech companies have such strange recruitment practices? Why does Netflix, for instance, ask people to leave at the first sign of underperformance and why does Amazon bring people in from totally outside the hiring team and give them veto rights of every hire?
I believe we can trace this back to a theory by Nobel prize-winning economist, Michael Kramer.
He proposed a theory called the O-ring theory of economic development. At the core of this theory is the observation that complex modern products of industry can become totally sabotaged by the failure of even one small component.
Every component has to be up to scratch. And so every person working on it has to be doing great work. Even if that job seems relatively unimportant in the grand scale.
Another example of this is cooking. You might have experienced the problem of accidentally over-salting your food. And there’s very little you can do about that other than just start again. So when a team of top chefs, every single one depends on the work of every other to be top-notch.
Likewise with software. I worked on a software team. I would regularly be amazed to open up the contributors' list and see people I’d never met. Perhaps people who no one at the organization still rendered, but occasionally while fixing a confusing bark, I would encounter problems in their work that I would then have to go back and fix.
Now, of course, this happens with even the best engineers sometimes, but the point is since each element of a software product relies on many others, each engineer also relies heavily on many other engineers doing a good job from this idea, Kramer derived a simple formula for product quality.
Netflix is renowned as a high talent organization, and it’s not that way by accident after losing a third of their staff and the dot com crash, they made it their mission to retain only the very best. And so they asked people to leave freely and easily.
Now, this is not a good approach for many organizations. This would be quite disruptive in the normal company. On the other hand, they have this practice of what they call ‘bar-raisers’. And these are interviewers brought in from outside the hiring team, outside the team that is hiring to be part of every hiring process.
They ensure that every new hire is better than 50% of people in the organization in similar roles. And they have veto rights over any and all hiring decisions.
And this approach is somewhat more practical for the average company, although certainly not without some challenges. This is what we do at Makers with Pathway. We help you raise the bar and your engineering teams with brilliant junior talent.
We do this by finding incredible people who want to make the jump to a new career. These are people who’ve done amazing things already, but who employers won’t hire for such a small reason as the fact they don’t have tech skills yet — of course, we can give them those.
We’ve had media talent agents, a movie director who worked with Idris Elba, educational psychologists, startup founders, business owners, refugees, aerospace engineers… far more than I can name in this talk.
We work with them for three months and see how they thrive in computing, challenge them and give them strong engineering values to ensure they are always delivering high-quality work. We then select the ones who are really good fit for a given company and send them to your teams. We only send great people.
And so you’ll know that your team is always choosing from a top-notch pool. They then work for us on contract to you for the first year after which you can hire them permanently. And this co-branding helps you beef up your employment offer with the high standard of training that we’re known for.
These candidates — they’re excited to work with us, which makes them excited to work for you. Throughout this first year, we provide them with professional coaching to help them navigate any challenging situations in the workplace and raising them with you to help you increase the trumps of retention. We provide bar-raising technical coaching and mentorship to ensure that they keep their standards high, no matter what engineering environment they might enter.”
Martin Aspeli, Partner & Neil Brown, Partner, Deloitte — Case Study of the Pathway in action
“I have a real kind of pet peeve — when people in our teams to say, you know, ‘We’ll only hire senior people. We should just go out and pay top dollar, get the really experienced engineers in this case.’ I think that is a fundamentally flawed approach.
I think junior engineers are incredibly valuable. There are a lot of jobs that are best done by junior people, maybe because they’re a bit more repeatable maybe because to a senior engineer, they might be a bit less interesting.
I think the problem with giving slightly less interesting jobs to selecting more senior people is that they tend to over-engineer the answer, and that’s not necessarily a good thing.
Reflecting on why Makers Pathway has worked and grown for us, I think there are a couple of reasons.
One is a strong cultural alignment. One of the things I find really valuable with the makers: they’ve got good values, they’re good human beings and they’ve learned some important things that aren’t technical, but about how to be a good member of a team or a professional organization and how to think about all the factors that are important — like diversity, inclusion, respect, those kinds of things. So that really matters.
The second thing is some really good skills. To be honest, the most important skill that a software engineer can have in 2020 is how to use stack overflow really well. It’s a website that has all the answers to programming problems and you just need to know how to search it. And that’s not entirely true, but the point is that I think it’s the ability to help yourself and help yourself effectively and be a good use of your senior’s time.
So ask intelligent questions at the appropriate time. So not too many, not too few is actually one of the most important skills that the junior person can have because it’s how they build stuff themselves to become better faster.”
Aleksandra Pawlik, Junior Software Engineer at Alfa Financial Software: “Changing Careers on the Pathway”
“I graduated with a Masters degree in anthropology and also with a degree in journalism and social communication. I always wanted to be a war correspondent and pursue that dream.
I wanted to tell the stories of people who have been through difficult times. I went on to travel to Afghanistan and I started working in a local radio station.
But then I decided that rather than write about the world, I would prefer to actually change it. That was very idealistic.
I was my early twenties. I started working in non-governmental organizations. One of those projects that I worked on in those early days, was a hackathon of sorts, where programmers from Kabul would be paired up with media outlets and they would develop solutions for press agency or for a radio station or for a station in Kabul.
That was actually the first time I’d seen programmers at work, collaborating, and solving problems. It was super refreshing.
I want to build those systems — providing better tech for aid makes people more secure, and that will be my way of contributing to the greater good. So instead of going on another evaluation for Pakistan, I actually closed on my laptop and opened it again this time, but this is when I basically joined Makers to learn how to code. And that was the start of a truly great adventure.
I really enjoyed was the process of coding itself. Obviously, I take great satisfaction from solving problems, especially when there is teamwork and there is someone to share that satisfaction with. I have really enjoyed the moments when we would put our brains together and build an app or develop a programming language.
I personally have been extremely lucky — for the Makers pathway, I found employment in Alfa financial software. Alfa is possibly the best company to work for — no offence, Deloitte — I’m serious.
So basically they have given me an extensive Java training from the start, and they gave me access to a mentoring process every day, or whenever I need it. And open fields to ask all the questions I needed to ask to do my job well.
Also, I had access to 12 other makers that are already in Alfa, which basically gave a great feeling of the fantastic network that was already built for me through this incredible experience that we have together.
