The Soft Side of Hard Skills

What's critical obviously is recruiting and hiring really great talent. You're only as good as your talent. And tell me a little bit about what do you value more, pure raw engineering talent or domain expertise? And how does, you know, how does your sort of recruiting process work and how you reconcile those two items?

This is a great question. I honestly would probably say Neither one is the most important for us when hiring. Raw engineering talent is important, but not the most important thing. I think we— and we actually have some posts on our blog about our hiring process. We would much rather see, understand how someone thinks. And constructing technical interviews is a topic that I'm sure if you wanted to, you'd get a panel up here and take like 3 hours discussing the merits of. But There are so many dimensions of building software, shipping software as part of a team that whiteboard interviews simply don't capture. I will call out Stripe as another example of a really great company that does their engineering interviews in a slightly different way where they accept that, and we accept that software engineering is about reading code probably more than about writing code. It's about pairing with someone, to talk through a problem. It's about understanding the architecture of the problem and especially for us, for a product engineer, we want them to be thinking about what the experience is for the user. We're a small startup. We're allowed, right now we're still at a stage where we are able to embrace people who aren't just, you know, give me a spec and I'll execute on it. We love people who can be given a technical problem but make those trade-offs and make those decisions based on what they think the best user experience is. And so it's, you know, domain expertise is something that can be learned. Again, as a developer tool, we have the additional leg up of lots of people come in naturally with domain expertise because they've had to deal with production incidents on the job. And raw engineering talent is something that engineering ladders can address and ideally is already happening on the job. But it's the, there's an element of curiosity and openness and kind of acceptance that you have different skill set than I do, but we can work together and pair and build something awesome. That is, I think, what gets us much more excited about an engineering candidate.