I see you want to hire talent to work on platform engineering, or maybe internal developer tooling, or perhaps developer experience. Maybe you just need more kickass force multipliers on your team. Whatever it is, you’re solving for the overall generally intangible but admirable goal of “making life better for devs” and “creating exponential leverage”. That’s awesome; you’ve got one hell of a challenge ahead of you.
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This role is extremely difficult to hire for. In my opinion, and in my experience, these roles have been the most difficult role in the company to hire for outside of senior leadership, and the most likely to fail; if there ever was a role that burns people out, it’s this one.
Come along with Hazel as we draw on her experiences building “cost-center” organizations that punch above their weight, creating healthy outlier teams that redefine the bar for excellence, and diagnosing hiccups that may occur along the way.
Key takeaways:
- The hiring pipeline and interview loop — Identifying systems thinkers without scaring them away
- Timing, politics, and the meta strategies of justifying cost-center engineering headcount
- Getting to zero from negative — On-boarding rapidly when the role requires deep context
- Avoiding mismatched expectations
