hiring
How should software engineers be interviewed?
Finding people and judging them: referrals, open calls, contests, and reading the work rather than the CV.
FilterEveryone, all time158 from 64 people
- EM
Elon Musk quoted
Founded SpaceX in 2002
Their wordsUsing Grok @Bot is like hiring a super smart, hard-working person for peanuts
- GO
Gergely Orosz quoted
Writes The Pragmatic Engineer
Their wordsa) referrals became more important tho. Warm ones; “worked with this person and they’re gold” type of ones. It’s how eg AI labs hire a lot
- JP
Josh Puckett quoted
Designer, advisor and investor
Their wordsElders should use their access and resources to connect, refer, sponsor, and otherwise hold the door open rather than just offering advice from the other side.
- DH
David Heinemeier Hansson quoted
Creator of Ruby on Rails, CTO of 37signals
Their wordsIt's far more akin to hiring a bunch of extremely intelligent and capable coworkers with whom you might occasionally disagree.
- 2 days earlier
- GO
Gergely Orosz quoted
Their wordsRIP all-remote video interview hiring processes, hello onsite rounds
- 2 days earlier
- DM
Danny Martinez quoted
Co-founder and CEO of Decimals
Their wordsThe way I kind of simplified my mind is like do you want a designer that knows how to use claw code because there's plenty of those or you want somebody who trained as an engineer, has background as an engineer that can design for themselves. Those are two very different profiles, but the same nomenclature gets used to like identify them.
↗Danny Martinez - Thriving in today’s design job marketyoutube.com 1st of 19 in this recording
- DM
Danny Martinez quoted
Their wordsI think the the general theme that comes back is I want someone that is a tinkerer, you know, is using the latest tools, is reimagining what it means to be a designer.
↗Danny Martinez - Thriving in today’s design job marketyoutube.com 2nd of 19 in this recording
- DM
Danny Martinez quoted
Our readingBeing ex-FAANG used to carry a lot more weight; it is still some signal that you can interview well.
Their wordsI think there was a world before where you know being exfang being it had a lot more weight to it. I'm not saying it's not important at all anymore because it's I guess still some signal that you can interview well
↗Danny Martinez - Thriving in today’s design job marketyoutube.com 5th of 19 in this recording
- DM
Danny Martinez quoted
Their wordsI think people's biases go towards like hey you know if they've been at fang for like 5 10 years then have they really been at the forefront have they really been pushing have they really been tinkering
↗Danny Martinez - Thriving in today’s design job marketyoutube.com 6th of 19 in this recording
- DM
Danny Martinez quoted
Their wordsI think kind of what's happening is that in this old world, it was more about the credentials and the resume. And I'm not saying that stuff has completely gone away or it doesn't matter at all, but the waiting of it is way below where it where it ever has been.
↗Danny Martinez - Thriving in today’s design job marketyoutube.com 7th of 19 in this recording
- DM
Danny Martinez quoted
Their wordsif you're applying for a jobs, if you're doing it cold, you better have something to prove. You better have some writing out there or something that you've done that shows rather than tells
↗Danny Martinez - Thriving in today’s design job marketyoutube.com 8th of 19 in this recording
- DM
Danny Martinez quoted
Their wordsFor me, it's such a green flag. If you can put your thinking into writing and I can get through it and not think that it was written by Claude, that is green flag.
↗Danny Martinez - Thriving in today’s design job marketyoutube.com 9th of 19 in this recording
- DM
Danny Martinez quoted
Their wordsthat I think is the most valuable thing that you can do as a hiring manager is understand how someone thinks.
↗Danny Martinez - Thriving in today’s design job marketyoutube.com 10th of 19 in this recording
- DM
Danny Martinez quoted
Their wordsMy take on it is I don't think it necessarily rules you out as a good designer, but I think I and I stick to this. You have one chance to create a first impression. You don't get a second chance to create a first impression. And if you're one of 50 and somebody's scrolling through quickly and the first thing that they get is a Figma link or a dribble, even if it's amazing work, you're already having to overcome that like initial impression that it's created.
↗Danny Martinez - Thriving in today’s design job marketyoutube.com 11th of 19 in this recording
- DM
Danny Martinez quoted
Their wordsif you feel like your portfolio can be oneshotted or that it looks very familiar to someone else's portfolio that's going to put hiring managers off.
↗Danny Martinez - Thriving in today’s design job marketyoutube.com 12th of 19 in this recording
- DM
Danny Martinez quoted
Their wordsyou kind of need to snap out of that and you need to realize that you're competing for this person. If they're good, they're probably going to have their pick of offers.
↗Danny Martinez - Thriving in today’s design job marketyoutube.com 14th of 19 in this recording
- DM
Danny Martinez quoted
Their wordsThere is nothing valuable that you get from giving me 8 n 45 minute interviews with different people that are all asking me different variations of the same question.
↗Danny Martinez - Thriving in today’s design job marketyoutube.com 15th of 19 in this recording
- DM
Danny Martinez quoted
Their wordsMost companies do the recruiter screen first, but I don't I just don't think that's the right way of doing it because you are putting somebody who is not a designer and you're getting them to do a screen for a design job.
↗Danny Martinez - Thriving in today’s design job marketyoutube.com 16th of 19 in this recording
- DM
Danny Martinez quoted
Their wordsYou're not hiring me to be a politician. You're not hiring me to be a spokesperson. You are hiring a designer. And so just get into the design work.
↗Danny Martinez - Thriving in today’s design job marketyoutube.com 17th of 19 in this recording
- DM
Danny Martinez quoted
Their wordshey we need to create the perfect algorithm that finds a match between a resume and a job description. A year into this what I have actually realized is that those two artifacts are really really not worth the paper that they've written on.
↗Danny Martinez - Thriving in today’s design job marketyoutube.com 19th of 19 in this recording
- 5 days earlier
- PB
Paul Bloom quoted
Psychologist at the University of Toronto and professor emeritus at Yale
Their wordsBeing proficient in statistics will make you more appealing to employers in tech, consulting, and other fields.
↗Some non-obvious advice for psych graduate studentssmallpotatoes.paulbloom.net 2nd of 3 in this piece
- 1 day earlier
- GT
Geoff Teehan quoted
Chief Design Officer at Lightspark
Their wordsif I hire all the same archetype, like we all care about the same things, that's great. It's really great, but like no one's going to really improve as much as maybe you want. Plus, you're going to have gaps.
↗Geoff Teehan - Navigating change as a designeryoutube.com 9th of 15 in this recording
- 3 days earlier
- DL
Daniel Lemire quoted
Computer science professor who works on fast data processing
Their wordsThe purpose of the academic output is to sort people out for jobs.
↗AI is breaking the academic sorting machinelemire.me 1st of 3 in this piece
- DL
Daniel Lemire quoted
Their wordsIf you hold a PhD today, your chance of having a tenure-track or tenured position is about 10% and falling.
↗AI is breaking the academic sorting machinelemire.me 2nd of 3 in this piece
- PS
Peter Sellis quoted
Former head of product at Discord
Their wordsI think it's like essential to be able to create an organization that can adopt that type of talent.
↗90 minutes of unfiltered product advice from Snap and Discord’s product chief | Peter Sellisyoutube.com 2nd of 18 in this recording
- PS
Peter Sellis quoted
Our readingOne way to gauge a candidate's taste is to ask about the things they built and never shipped.
Their wordsone way you can kind of like get at somebody's taste is uh when you're interviewing them is just ask them about some of the things they built that they never shipped.
↗90 minutes of unfiltered product advice from Snap and Discord’s product chief | Peter Sellisyoutube.com 10th of 18 in this recording
- 5 days earlier
- NF
Nev Flynn quoted
Head of Design at ElevenLabs
Their wordspeople maybe think we should hire another generalist, you know, because it's obvious, but I think worth lobbying and worth making the case for these types of people because you can do just you can do marvelous things.
↗Nev Flynn - Bringing artful expression into enterprise designyoutube.com 2nd of 20 in this recording
- NS
Noah Smith quoted
Economics writer; author of the Noahpinion newsletter
Their wordscompanies that adopt AI more end up hiring MORE entry-level workers
- 4 days earlier
- DT
Derek Thompson quoted
Writer and podcaster; co-author of Abundance with Ezra…
Their wordsArtificial intelligence has unleashed a torrent of cheating on campus and created chaos in the job application process, as both students and employers use large language models: the former, to write hundreds of AI-assisted applications; the latter, to screen those AI-written applications with AI-written filters, thus removing from the process of finding a first job those procedural frictions sometimes known as "people."
↗Why Harvard's Dean 'Encourages' Students to Use AIderekthompson.org 2nd of 2 in this piece
- 1 day earlier
- TY
Tamar Yehoshua quoted
Chief Product and AI Officer at Atlassian
startupsdesignproduct management
Their wordsAnd the AI builder job is real. There are startups that are not hiring PMs or not hiring designers. They are hiring builders.
↗Roles aren't converging—they're expanding | Tamar Yehoshua (Atlassian CPO) (Lenny & Friends Summit, San Francisco, 10 September 2026)youtube.com 1st of 13 in this recording