[ryanmcbride]

Can I ask how you know how much expertise, self-learning ability, attitude, and flexibility to juggle diverse tasks a person has before they work for you? How you're able to tell how they _really_ work versus how they happened to do on the day you interviewed them? I'd also love you hear you how prevent allowing unconscious bias to slip into your evaluation of this person when you're deciding how much money to give them.

[mal10c]

Yeah that's a good question and like most things in life, things aren't black and white. In terms of unconscious bias, I'm not sure how to answer that. I look for talent, professionalism, and attitude. That's it.

In terms of what a person can do vs how they happened to interview - that's a fun challenge. I tend to be extremely honest with a candidate, letting him know exactly who we are, what we do, and what types of challenges to expect. As I'm talking through that, I can usually tell if they have that engineering spark. If I really have a tough time trying to decide if they know their stuff, I'll draw a problem on the board and see if they can solve it - usually a problem we've recently solved ourselves. I also call references, which sort of helps. Hiring is a gamble and fortunately in my case, it tends to work out. It's rare, but every so often I misread someone and find out after they start that they aren't as far along as I thought. When that happens, I provide them with a mentor or offer to be one myself - or I relearn their skillset and then write proposals that highlight their abilities. In the extremely rare cases an employee can't/won't grow, I'll have an honest and polite conversation with them and then part ways.

When an employee starts here, they join a "work family." We look out for one another and push each other to learn. I tend to focus on my employees interests and skillset, then design customer solutions around those. That has worked really well for decades now and customers keep coming back!