I have some real qualms about hiring in the technical professions.

What does it say about this industry that it interviews people by asking them to code contrived, arbitrary gimmick questions like the following on a whiteboard:

Given a 10 by 10 array of letter tiles with Scrabble &tm; values, what’s the highest-valued word we can generate from seven touching tiles"

while those who pass this winnowing blade, after hire, are the ones that are storing passwords in an unencrypted state.

There’s a cynical calculus in filtering for false positives in this fashion. I think that this process is prone to the “like me” bias and is rejecting many people who don’t match the dominant paradigm. It’s probably also part of what keeps the sector so non-diverse.

I think there’s a better way and it involves transparency and clarity.

While I’m not hiring for an engineering team, the idea of being more clear and transparent has a lot of resonance for my team which still has a strong technical component. I’m trying this out for my next hire at The Flatiron School.

I think if we transparently offer the following, we’ll set a groundwork of productive, fruitful discussions and ensure respect and humanity throughout the entire process.

1. Tell what you expect
2. Expect what you tell
3. Tell them what to expect

More on this after the jump.

Some organizations don’t know whether they want an engineering manager or a lead engineer.

I’ve seen this manifest as:

• Interviewing a would-be manager for their ability to code like a lead engineer
• Asking inwardly-focused, process-disinterested, high-output engineers to sprout the capacity to direct, nurture, and manage other humans

And, perhaps more pathologically, I interviewed at organizations where they knew they needed both, but interviewed aggressively in hopes of landing one and getting the other “for free” (with pay to match).

Doing any of these behaviors hurts the organization, the currently-staffed employees, and wastes enormous amounts of time.

Consider:

Why?

Given this simple matrix, it becomes very clear that miscasting the role, in either case, is catastrophic. Executives or upper-middle management should be aware of these pathologies. So, why do so many organizations get it wrong?