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Kieran Gill

Collaboration

The following is from our Candidate Evaluation Framework series.

Job descriptions are often full of well-meaning platitudes that don’t say much. Instead, we’re sharing the real hiring rubric our team uses. We hope this gives you a clearer, more honest view of what we value — and whether we’re the kind of team you’d like to join.

If this resonates with you, I encourage you to apply. We’re building the most accessible and highest quality healthcare clinic for children.

Force multiplier

A force multiplier is someone who enables a group of engineers to produce higher-quality work more efficiently.

A good candidate has experience up-leveling a team. This can include individual mentorship, presentations, implementing a process or technology to make people more productive, etc.

Senior engineers identify and work on problems the team can’t solve themselves: work that distracts other engineers, P0 bugs, work that is outside the skillset of other engineers, and so on. This does not mean taking away projects from other engineers that are fun or good growth opportunities.

Our CTO is a great example of doing this correctly. He prototyped Turbo when the team had no experience with the framework and then gave the team room to complete it. He took on the burden of scheduling in order to avoid distracting the teams from other high-priority work.

What great looks like

  • They identified an opportunity for growth in an engineer and worked with them to improve it.
  • They implemented a technical solution to improve a pain point and did the work to onboard the team. An example may be an engineer who implemented CI/CD for her team. She then wrote documentation on how to set up CI/CD and help other teams get started.
  • They identified an organization-wide weakness and wrote documentation, did presentations, and did outreach to educate people.
  • Engineers that live out the advice in A series of ever-bigger problems.

Collaboration

It takes a team to ship a great product. Despite engineers being referred to as “ICs”, there is nothing ‘individual’ about their work. Most non-trivial work is a product of multiple departments: product management, design, engineering, sales, ops, marketing, etc.

Collaborative engineers are those who can effectively work with other departments to bring a project to life.

Great collaborators aren’t concerned with being right, they’re concerned with getting it right. This is a matter of being open to other opinions. Bouncing ideas off another engineer often leads to higher-quality solutions.

Collaborative engineers are helpful to others. When they’re helpful, they’re nice about it. They show patience and kindness. Junior and mid-level engineers especially appreciate patience. It’s easy for a snarky and flippant senior engineer to damage their confidence.

Potential issues

  • Candidates who speak of their accomplishments in terms of “me” or “I”.
  • Engineers who bash other peers. They are eager to blame others for their mistakes or undermine someone’s contributions. It’s especially toxic for engineers in leadership roles to belittle their peers in front of someone more junior. On the other hand, critiquing in private and praising in public leads to a healthier work environment.

Cross-functional collaboration

Engineering is in constant collaboration with Product. You can find our PM’s perspective on great engineering partners here.

In short, our PMs love:

  • Proactive communicators.
  • Guidance (they’ll often use the word “pushback”!) on their ideas. This often comes in the form of alternative low-cost solutions to their problems.
  • Interest in the team’s goals and company’s mission.
  • High-quality and timely delivery on projects.

PM responses to “What does your ideal engineering partner look like?”

Sejal

My ideal engineering partner is highly engaged and is a collaborative team member. I like to share ideas that are early and rough for engineering to respond to or provide pushback on. The ideal engineering partner is excited to see things throughout the product lifecycle from discovery, ideation, refinement, etc and not just work off of mostly finalized PRDs. These engineering partners are also great because they can offer early pushback on things to up level product thinking and consider a wider range of innovative solutions.

Steph

Technical thought partner, able to critique and critically think through product and strategy ideas, identifying potential obstacles, opportunities, and solutions. Builds team culture of learning and growth through their interactions with others by asking questions, raising concerns, and sharing wins/learnings. Strong communicator, able to articulate tradeoffs and decision points, proactive in seeking feedback and sharing roadblocks.

Jamie

Communication - They are thoughtful, thorough, proactive communicators who understand how to get a point across with different stakeholders. They ask the right questions, and adjust to the context.

Delivery - They aim to deliver high quality at low cost, and know how to make the right trade offs in the moment. They bring novel ideas to the table. They do what they say they are going to do.

Growth - They are continuously growing themselves and their team. They make others around them better engineers, PMs, designers, etc.

We’re hiring full-stack engineers.

If you’re interested in helping us build the most accessible and highest quality healthcare clinic for children, consider joining us. Go here to learn more about the role.

This article is from our Candidate Evaluation Framework series. To learn more about our ideal engineering candidate, go here.