One of the most important tenets for the success of tech companies is hiring the best talent. And yet our industry sucks terribly at it. Years from now, we’ll look back at how we used to interview developers and realize we were judging a guitarist on just the music theory than an actual audition of a Guns ‘n Roses solo.
That, of course, is ridiculous. And yet, it is so commonplace in the industry today.
Extrapolation of skills leads to bad decisions.
Extending the guitarist analogy, let’s say you need to hire a Ruby on Rails guy for your team. When interviewing people, you’d be off making a better decision if you had a way to easily measure how good someone is at Ruby on Rails, as compared to measuring how good they are at Ruby and extrapolating that to their proficiency in Ruby.
So, if someone’s an 8 in their Ruby skills, you’d be better knowing if they are precisely 5 at Ruby on Rails than assuming they must be 8-ish at it. While you might get lucky most of the times, data always helps you make better hiring decisions. And we all know the cost of making just one bad hire now, don’t we?
Sanket is co-founder and CTO of DoSelect. He has studied computer science and engineering from NIT Jamshedpur, which is where he started his first startup from the college dorm as a sophomore. He brings immense expertise in systems architecture and user experience design. Sanket is also a prolific speaker in the open-source developer community, having spoken at more than 50 events across the country till date on technology and entrepreneurship.
