I have had some fantastic interviews lately. [Valimail application]
What are the 3 most important qualities in an engineering manager?
Humility: None of us knows everything. We have different life experiences, different professional viewpoints. This is why we work in teams: we amplify each other's strengths, and shore up our more tenuous parts.
Curiosity: Take that humility and go ask questions to learn things. Learn how to ask questions in ways that establish and sustain trusting relationships.
Inclusivity: Be curious: meet people where they are, personally, professionally, culturally. Ask open questions. Understand the systemic biases people experience, be respectful of them, and understand how you can improve your own understanding and engagement. (Also, it’s not their job to educate you. Go do the reading.)
Describe a time when you advocated for a change that was important to your team. What was it? Why was it so important, and how did you approach it? Was it successful- why or why not?
At one small company, our hiring process had interviewers recording their notes in Greenhouse, but then nobody heard anything until the hiring manager made a decision. This skipped a step that I’ve found to be absolutely crucial, which is to get the interviewers together with the recruiter and hiring manager to go through each interviewer’s feedback.
This is not the full list of things you get out of that step, but some:
- Interviewers can hear how they all conducted the interview, and there’s a lot of teaching and learning to be done.
- You get verbal details that interviewers didn’t include in the writeup.
- Patterns can emerge from hearing all the feedback in context of all the other feedback: interviewers often discount yellow flags as being an anomaly of their own mood or what have you, but then someone says "lack of humility" and others chime in with "oh, I noticed that too" and suddenly you’ve gone from Hire to a very very important No-Hire.
I explained all this to the VP, who eventually let me try it, and it did everything I told them it would, so it stuck. =)