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The Software Engineer Interview Solution — A Proposal
A member of your team has just left for another opportunity 😢. While you and your team are excited for them, you also realize you have a backlog of user stories with looming deadlines. It’s time to hire.
You believe you need a warm body capable of producing code to maintain your team’s average output. You’re not totally wrong. I would argue that in order to continually improve your team, maintain engagement and create great products — what you really need is a person who can increase its average technical ability. A bar-raiser.
This bar-raising developer will ideally offer more or deeper technical expertise and/or skills that will be needed in the near future. Your current team gets the benefit of this person’s knowledge and offers this new member an opportunity to mentor others in a meaningful way and learn from them as well.
Now, how do you determine what constitutes a bar-raising candidate?
A LeetCode style interview just won’t cut it here. You may get the best damn competitive programmer in your local area only to realize they aren’t actually that good at what your team really does — create UI focused web apps. Or social media networks that tear at the very fabric of society. Or whatever.
