Graham McNicoll

Hiring has always been the most critical part of building a company, and it takes a thoughtful process and a lot of time. Hiring for engineers, in particular, has fundamentally changed in the last year. You may notice the effects now when you review a new feature and ask where X is- and X seems like something that should be obvious. "Oh, we didn't think of that." Well, why didn't you think of that? That exchange is what good hiring comes down to now. The code was fine. AI bangs that part out in five minutes. What was missing was product taste, judgment, or product intuition, for lack of better words. And in large part, taste is driven by empathy. Can you put yourself in the shoes of your users? Can you articulate what the user needs enough to tell an AI? A lot of people just want to get the ball over the net first, as my grandmother would say. Very few stop and ask, what would a home run look like here? What is the best version of this experience? And with AI, you have to ask. You say, "hey, could we build it like this instead", and it says "absolutely". The difference between a single, or hitting a home run is usually just minutes these days- but you have to ask. AI is not going to volunteer that. Someone on the team has to have the taste to ask. So when I interview engineers now, I ask about the pain their users were facing. I ask what they would have done differently. Ask them to help you brainstorm how you would make a product better. Some people light up and have good ideas to improve the product. What you want are the types of engineers who notice something off in the product, proactively mock (or build) a better version, and then ask the team, "What do you think of this?" What you want to avoid are the engineers who just want to be told what to build. In this new world, I don't think there is room for that second type of engineer anymore.