How do you Hire a Sr. Engineer that has much more experience than you?

Hey Dev.to,

I need your help! Our Sr. Engineer left and I'm in charge of running the technical interviews for the position we need to fill. It's daunting, to say the least, but also a good opportunity to lean on the community so that this may help someone in the future!

Here are some questions swirling around in my head:

• If you were tasked with hiring an engineer significantly more senior than you, how would you approach the interview?
• How do you assess their technical ability?
• Do you do pair programming?
• Or is it more important that you work well together and less about technical ability?

There's a whole different discussion on the interview process in general, but a few things that I want to accomplish with these interviews are:

• Being mindful of the candidates time(trying to keep the tech interview to an hour or less)
• Divulging the agenda up front, so that there are no surprises, or very few
• Talking through our engineering roadmap that I recently created with goals we're working towards
• Vet their technical and interpersonal skills
• Get a sense of their ego, or willingness to take direction from someone less experienced(at first anyway)
• Their interest in mentorship and leadership

I appreciate any insight that you may provide. Thanks a million!

Comments

[jonw]

Focus on reading the personality of the candidate for now. A solid personality almost invariably means a solid life-long learning attitude, which translates into skills that are forefront in industry.

You can have the best techologist with the worst personality, and he/she will do more damage than good.

It's a lot more difficult to find candidates with solid personalities than those with good tech skills.

As for vetting tech skills, you can't during the interview. Esp not in your position. But ask the candidate this:

"How do we know you're doing the right thing, technologically speaking?"

Ans: "Even if my managers don't know my tech stuff, I always install a workflow that conveniently and efficiently maintains 'full visibility'. Peer reviews will already spot my errors. In worst case, casual reviews of my recorded work months later can still call out my bluffs, even if my managers aren't entirely tech-savvy."

[Stephen Holdaway]

Really interesting question, Mike. Here's my two cents:

If you were tasked with hiring an engineer significantly more senior than you, how would you approach the interview?

I would approach this as an exploration of their experience rather than trying to measure skills or knowledge directly. Have a conversation about work they've found challenging, projects they've enjoyed, a problem that had them scratching their head recently and how they solved it, a piece of work they've found frustrating, what kind of work they try to avoid, how they've dealt with legacy code they ended up inheriting, how they've dealt with reviewing code that was problematic (and what was the problem), etc.

Discussing these kinds of things should help reveal what level the candidate is relative to you without needing to ask specific technical knowledge questions. Devs at any level will be able to answer all but the last two, but you'll find the experienced devs talk about much more complex and nuanced problems/topics. I'd also personally find an interview like this really fun fwiw.

Think of questions where the answer can be anywhere between printing "hello world" and landing a rocket on a barge in the middle of the ocean.

Or is it more important that you work well together and less about technical ability?

To some degree, yes - you should be able to establish if someone has more experience than you, but you probably can't objectively judge just how big that gap is outside of "they're where I want to be" and "I'm completely blown away".

[Ben Halpern]

If a decent amount of the interview asynchronously via some questionnaires over email, it will give you some more time to gather your thoughts and get outside feedback. This could take some of the pressure off the synchronous parts.

Come time to talk face-to-face, I’d say that if they can genuinely teach you something, they’ve shown a lot of technical and interpersonal skills, so maybe try to set them up with something to teach you.

Anyway, those are my first couple thoughts.

[Mike Etlinger]

Ben, thanks for your help.

I wish we had some time to async-ify our process, but when one finds solid candidates, it's in your best interest to move forward whether I feel like I'm ready or not.

This will be the 2nd interview, so it's always possible to come better prepared for the next one and hit on anything I may have missed. I think this process will make a fine blog post when I'm done =)

Cheers!