Notes on Hiring Developers You Have Not Met Yet
Written for engineering managers and technical founders who are about to add someone to a team that already exists — how to read a CV, what a useful interview actually tests, and what makes the first month work or not.
Nothing Published Here Yet
This is a new site and the blog is genuinely empty. We would rather show you that than fill the page with three placeholder titles that link nowhere, or with posts written to hold keywords rather than to be read.
The first pieces are being written from the same material we use internally: what separates a senior JavaScript developer from a mid-level one in a way you can test for, why technical interviews keep measuring the wrong thing, and what actually goes wrong in a developer’s first month on an unfamiliar codebase. When they are ready, they will appear here.
In the meantime, the vetting and hiring pages cover most of the same ground in more detail than a blog post would, and they are already written.
Four Subjects We Keep Coming Back To
Most of what goes wrong with a developer hire is decided before the person starts. These are the areas where the decisions are made.
Reading a CV Honestly
Which claims on a JavaScript CV mean something, which ones are a framework name attached to six weeks of exposure, and what to ask to tell them apart in under ten minutes.
Interviews That Test the Job
Why a puzzle with a known trick measures practice rather than ability, and what a debugging session on real broken code tells you that a whiteboard cannot.
The First Month
What onboarding has to cover before a new developer can be useful, how much of the first week belongs to your team rather than theirs, and the signals that tell you early it is going wrong.
Distributed Teams
How much overlap a role genuinely needs, what has to be written down when it is not available, and why most remote failures are process failures rather than people failures.
Skip the Reading. Send Us the Role.
Two or three vetted profiles within three business days, interviewed by you, with a replacement at no cost inside the first two weeks if the fit is wrong.