Tag: management
Malcom Gladwell's book Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking is a really interesting study in decision making and how the availability of information impacts the accuracy of those decisions. Over the last couple of years, I've occasionally mulled over how this could be applied to technical hiring. From my…
In early 2015, we decided to revamp the Ettus Research R&D hiring process. We had a lot of candidates coming through the pipeline, all the way through an on-site interview, that we would ultimately decide weren't a good fit. Additionally, it wasn't uncommon for interviewers to finish interviews…
I've recently found myself discussing what it means to be an experienced or senior engineer with a number of different groups. What's interesting about those two terms is that I don't think they connote what the speaker usually intends. Being experienced is neither necessary nor sufficient to be good, or…
I recently stumbled across a declassified field manual first published by the Office of Strategic Services (the precursor to the CIA) in 1944. The manual describes simple methods that everyday citizens can use to sabotage and demoralize the enemy's war effort. It's a relatively short field manual, and you can…
As a company grows, protecting the time of its employees becomes a perplexing problem. Bizarrely, almost everyone I know that isn't at a start-up doesn't seem to have enough time at work to actually do work. Their schedules become filled with staff meetings, project update meetings, hiring meetings, planning meetings,…
The tech sector's hiring process has become something of a hot topic in the last few years. For the most part, everyone seems to agree that the current methods of technical hiring are ineffective and generally bad for both the prospective employee and employer. A lot of established companies are…
I read a lot of resumes as the R&D manager for Ettus Research. After several years of staring at job applications, my biggest take-away is that most engineers are terrible at writing resumes and cover letters. This is not a great situation for the candidate, nor the employer.…
"Employees with more experience deserve more compensation." Chances are that you work at a company where this is an axiom of salary planning. It seems to be an assumed truth in most workplaces, and new workers just entering the labor force have probably been socialized to the idea since they…
With a booming tech market and rapidly growing salaries for the best tech talent, I have seen a lot of discussion around the topics of employee hiring, retention, and compensation. Specifically, a lot of companies are trying to figure out how to still hire the best talent while not really…
Within the last year, our engineering team transitioned from using Redmine for all of our issue tracking to using the GitHub Issue Tracking system. We had previously moved all of our repository hosting to GitHub, so the transition made sense; it gives us an easy way to link commits, source…
Gallup's "Strengths Based" programs have made a mint for the company, and have become extremely popular at a lot of major companies - including mine, National Instruments. Generally, I really like the principles of the program. The fundamental idea is that people will perform better if you focus on their…