I want to talk about what we’re doing to avoid boom-bust hiring cycles. Marc and I never wanted to do the hire-fire cycles that startups are known for. It’s a hard balance to strike when you’re out over your skis, so we’re going to go back to making hires that we can support on revenue. When someone is permanent member of the team, post-probation, I would like that to mean something real, for example, that we’re each willing to take a temporary pay cut if necessary to keep everyone employed, as we all did last year.
The flip side of that kind of mutual commitment is that we need to keep a high bar during onboarding, to make sure the right person is doing the right job. That we don’t yet have the privilege of “get good people and find them work” should be top of mind.
Over the past 3 years, I’ve terminated 4 people due to financial constraints. But in each case, there was also some type of lingering lack of fit issue that didn’t get addressed during onboarding. Keep in mind that someone can be fun to work with and talented–even helpful, but that might not be enough – there’s got to be a clear and real ROI:
And if there’s not a fit, we need to act as soon as it’s clear. So you’ll hear me and Erika working to get folks in a better shared understanding of 360s, not only for the benefit of the folks here now and getting them feedback, but also to develop the muscle for doing evaluations that aren’t predisposed to “niceness.” Respect is giving honest feedback, not only the pleasant feedback. Most people don’t like making other people uncomfortable, but we have to learn the skill of dealing with the discomfort of really being honest.
The upside of this approach is core team stability and ability to build up institutional memory and a strong culture. I look forward to your feedback.
Any missing highlights? Please share in Slack comments.
Looking out for icebergs: What are the risks on the horizon that we’re watching for and navigating around?
Kicking off with our NYSERDA CEN on our onboarding practices (EP)
Please note your reaction to this update in the Slack channel. It helps us to know what is resonating, what is unclear, etc. Thanks!
Giving observations as feedback! In my short tenure, my self-observations and observations of our group were, and I hope these comes across as constructive—with no need to mention names because we are a team! United we stand, divided we fall. These come from a place of care and respect: There were times when there were just too many cooks in the kitchen. We all had our sentiments on approach, but I learned that a great leader knows how to be a foot soldier when needed. We are all leaders, and I understand ambition just like anyone else, but we needed to focus more on tangible work. (And this is what I tell myself every day.- especially when I am high from insomnia and I’m just staring at my screen floating- a slap on a face and saying “tangible work” haha) If you are a QA and you were not test planning, creating test cases, thinking about edge cases, and testing outputs most of the time—why was that, and how could we fix it? If you are a coder, and you found yourself with less and less coding time, or your coding time was consistently interrupted (IE. and disclaimer this might just be me and my lack of experience, I am currently trying to learn more code, and I couldn’t even listen to music with lyrics while doing it, let alone handle multiple meetings in a day and then expect to code.)—why was that, and how could we fix it? The same goes for the rest of the roles we are here for. Being aware of our “whys,” thinking of solutions, and asking for help to drive those solutions are, in my opinion, crucial. otherwise we set ourselves to failure. There were times when we aimed for phases to deliver, and then switched that up to “good enough”, down to “need to ship now” ultimately ended up with lackluster results, and then blamed it on a lack of clear specifications at the beginning —when in reality (at least in my mind), the specs were provided. Maybe it wasn’t perfect but maybe it’s not a “lack of” but about truly understanding what our product does atm, and understanding that against the provided specs. I see this already being mitigated by the “measure twice, cut ones” approach the team is doing with the upcoming projects, so I’m excited for those. But we also need to look at other factors, like our availability, solvable blockers that we could fix etc. There were moments, and I experienced them, where being in a horizontal organization was used as an excuse to do what interested us most, rather than doing what needed to be done that has real ROI. For my personal example of this: when I joined, no one was using Zenhub, and it wasn’t clear if we were abandoning it and just focusing on doing everything in GitHub, or if a different tool made more sense. So I said, “Hey, we need a release board showing the work that needs to be evaluated, who is assigned to what, and what their status is.” I put out an advice process and we did it. It wasn’t perfect, but we were releasing, and there was visibility on what we were releasing, what was ready for me to work on, etc. (we’re improving this now on the daily.) I also suggested and created a release channel focused on what was moving and being evaluated as we pushed the release, calling out blockers, etc. Then I found myself hovering, thinking about more process improvements, and I realized—wait a minute, I’m QA, I need to do QA things. So I pulled myself out and reminded myself why you hired a Jeff. I also need to focus on the expertise I offer first, and then contribute where I can. I am not saying no to more responsibilities, but I had to ask myself, “Have I contributed in the areas I was hired for when I joined?” My answer was, not so much—so I need to do that to call myself a vital part of our team. I’ve seen QA treated as a bonus/ nice to have instead of a core requirement for our features Not gonna lie this was a blow in my need to be here-ness, if y’all are not using me as your consciences like why am I here. My feedback consistently stone walled, by “yeah but not that’s not really important right now, only 1 person is going to use it” broke me a little bit :sweat_smile: But why did I not push back harder to that? - that’s on me- so y’all are seeing that a lot more. I’m always spending time typing these essays Okay this one is just a joke- but I’m really sorry this is just how I do it. haha I hope we get to continue building something great out there in the small group that we have, I’ve seen it happen, just a group of can do, heads down people, shouting at each other (metaphorically), carrying each other when one is injured, and always just building better as we grow! :slightly_smiling_face: (edited)