Hire only Fully Formed Adults

Sometimes an article or blog post resonates with you deeply. 

The Netflix HR slides did for me.

One of my first roles was as a Program Manager at a start-up that built enterprise network and systems management software. 

I was employee #11 in the Sydney office, and I somehow ended up doing most of the hiring over those formative years. In hind-sight, it was ridiculous to have a 22 year old kid doing the interviewing for all the dev and test roles, but we didn’t know better, and hey – that’s why start-ups sometimes succeed when you don’t expect them to. They don’t listen when you tell them it shouldn’t be done.

Looking back – I was purely hiring on “cultural fit”.

Essentially; Was the person someone that you would be excited to work with. That was the test.

We certainly made mistakes and we probably had a few too many “brilliant jerks”, but they were still some of the best years of my career.

Because when you surround your staff with awesome people - it's a great place to work.

Being a scrum-master isn’t difficult

That phrase is probably considered blasphemy, but I guess it’s a case of perspective. My wife tells me  “brain surgery isn’t rocket science” J.

Over the last few years I’ve seen a lot of people (testers and BA's in particular) move into scrum master and iteration manager roles.

When you look at the criteria , it’s really not that difficult. A CSM certification is essentially bought. You spend a few thousand dollars on a 2 day course, and BAM – you’re a Certified Scrum Master.

When I was at Pillar, we were anti-certification for that reason. You also wouldn’t have seen scrum-master or agile coach on any job description either. From a mercenary perspective, it’s coaches that are usually the first ones cut when budgets get tight – but also because it’s only a small portion of the role that our delivery leads played.

So what makes a good scrum-master?

You're going to hate the answer.

The best scrum masters are those that are masters of the intangibles. It’s not whether they run the agile ceremonies. It’s how they run it. It’s how their team interacts. It's the vibe on the floor.

The best scrum masters are like good shepherds. They are keen observers. They protect the flock. They make sure the team are moving in the same direction and don’t go wandering off. 

Most of the time – you won’t notice them as they go about their work.

You will notice if the role in't being fulfilled.

Do you need a dedicated person?

Sometimes.

With new immature teams, bring in the experience.

Once the teams are established and humming, It's rare that i've seen enough work to keep it as a single person in the designated role. A lot of places have a scrum-master that looks after a few teams, or someone within the team playing the role. If you decide to do this - be careful of having the Tech lead/Dev Manager fulfil the responsibilities. That takes it back to a manager/team-member relationship and can affect the dynamics. It's too easy to slip back into a directorial position.

Remember - we're looking for self managing teams.

Leadership refined

One of my favorite questions to ask when I was interviewing with companies was why they switched or wanted to switch to Agile. What problems were they trying to solve?

At one of the interviews the Program Director that was interviewing me answered:

“It gave me visibility so I could micro-manage the teams better. The teams need that sort of oversight.”

I didn’t take that role.

Good agile teams are self-managing. They take initiative; they learn from mistakes, they unblock themselves without requiring intervention. It’s a far cry from being micro-managed. In fact – I’ve seen situations where the teams were successful in spite of poor management.

Unfortunately that success just reinforces the bad managers behavior.

The concept of agile scares a lot of mid-level managers.  Some got to their positions with a very direct management style.

If you’re at an organization that still has an “old boys club”, It is usually one of the toughest things to change when trying to do an agile transformation.

If someone has been rewarded and promoted throughout their career for behaviors that are now disruptive to the team and productivity – How do you change those behaviors?

Being able to guide them through their new roles and responsibilities will be crucial to your success, as they will likely be the loudest and vehement detractors if you don’t get them onside. Despite my dislike of mechanical agile, I find that being very prescriptive helps with the transition for these personalities.

It’s easy to assume bad intent when you run into these situations – but think of it a different way. Do they have the necessary skills? Do they know how to lead and manage any other way?

You may find it’s not a problem of motivation – it’s a problem of skill, and all skills can be learned. Even sailing.

Selling yourself

So what should you focus on to make yourself marketable?

Make sure you cover these 3 areas:

1. Relevance
2. Differentiators
3.  It’s not about you – It’s about them.

1.     Relevance: I recognized fairly early that my 11 year stint at Symantec was more of a hindrance than a help as it monopolized my industry experience. Most of the roles I was applying for were in the Finance, Digital Media and Telco industries, which I had no background with. You can combat that by highlighting the parts of your career that are relevant and doing your industry and company research before the interview.

Make use of the cover letter and make sure it highlights in point form the specific skills they are looking for in the advertisement. Most recruiters do a 5 second scan looking for keywords – so make sure you tailor it for each role. Keep it short and to the point.

2.      Differentiators: What makes you different from the other candidates that are applying for this role? Make sure you’re clear on that and get that across in an interview. What I noticed was that there were quite a few candidates floating out there with agile experience, but mostly as part of a team or as a scrum-master. There were very few that had taken a large organization through that agile journey and transformation and could draw on that experience for their future employer. So make sure you take time to identify what sets you apart from the field.

3.     It’s not about you: At the end of the day, the role is open because they have a need to fill / a problem to solve. Find out what that is. 

      

Use Questions like:

a.     Can you tell me why this role hasn’t been filled internally?

b.     What are the main challenges I’d face when I start this role? (it’s always nice to get them picturing you already in  the job J )

c.      What are you trying to solve with this position?

d.     What keeps you up at night? (If you're meeting the hiring manager, you can be fairly sure they are having problems they need help with)

As they respond to the questions, make it a discussion and tie it back to how you’ve solved such problems using examples from previous roles.

Usually, the Job description as advertised is basically a checklist that needs to be met before an interview will be granted. What’s really going to get you the job is how well you can sell yourself as the answer to the hiring managers problems.

Good luck.

Hunting

We’re taking a slight segue here and going to cover some topics around finding a job.

Having recently relocated home to Sydney Australia after 6 years in the US,  I found myself back on the job market in an entirely different economy.

Some very basic observations after a few weeks of job hunting:

1. Pay attention to when the financial year ends in your job market. Traditionally, Australian companies finish their financial year at the end of June. In the US, it was usually Dec. Either way, the quarter leading up to it is usually slow as companies crack down on budget to hit numbers.

Note: Unless your looking at public sector roles. In that case, it’s sometimes “Use it or lose it” and you will see government departments spending up big in the last quarter.

2. Despite the first point, there are always positions available. Even when it’s “slow” the companies that are hiring are serious about it.

3. Surprisingly – It’s not about the technology. With more and more software development moving off-shore, I found my Project Management background of much more interest to companies then my background managing technical development teams.

4. Linkedin, despite being the predominant networking and recruiting tool in the US,  plays a cursory supporting role in Australia. Use SEEK. That’s what everyone else does.

5. Recruiters are a necessary evil. Almost all companies have PSA’s (Preferred Supplier Agreements) these days, which means they work exclusively with a handful of recruiters. Whilst there are some organizations that will only recruit directly, your chances of getting your resume into a company are much higher if you get it into as many recruiters hands as possible.  Remember – they only have a handful of jobs each that they are trying to fill, so only working with  a few does not get your resume out there.

You can complain about the fees (particularly if you’re looking at contract work) but at the end of the day – They are paid on commission, and you are a commodity that is being sold.

Very early in my career, I spent a year moonlighting as an IT recruiter. It was during the dot com boom at the end of the 1990’s, and it was much less structured.  If you had a very good candidate, it was easy to become their advocate and reverse market them to companies you thought were interested.

With the increased prevalence of PSA’s, that’s increasingly rare. The recruiter’s customer is the Organization. Not the candidate. You’ll see their behaviors change if you get to 2^nd interview stage.  Your best mate will suddenly become a bit more insistent. They will push you to take the role, even if it’s not the best one for you. Which should be expected – they only get paid on placements.

6. It’s not about compromise.  Luckily, I don’t have children to support, so there was no urgency to accept a role that didn’t tick all the boxes. Be careful of falling into the trap of having to choose between a good job and crap pay, vs a crap job and good pay.

That’s a suckers choice.

If you're patient – you’ll find roles where you won’t have to make that decision.

So what was my experience like?

Despite it being the end of financial year, and dire warnings about the GFC,  surprisingly good.  I kept a log of my 2 week search so I could keep all the agencies/jobs/companies straight and the numbers ended up:

• Applied for twelve roles
• Interviewed with Agencies for Six
• Interviewed with Organizations for five
• Second interviews at four
• Offers received for three of them within 2 weeks.

That was much better than any of us expected. Friends, recruiters and myself included.

In the next post, we’ll cover how to make yourself more marketable.

How is your physical environment affecting your productivity?

We'd just moved the group downstairs to an open plan team area. They had spent the last 4 years in cubicle farms and we'd unceremoniously kicked them out and thrown them into a massive room with a few trestle tables and whiteboards covering the walls. Now that I reflect on it, they probably expected the white walls to be padded.

There were two of us standing near the storyboard surveying the room, and my colleague quipped "Wow, It's so quiet in here you can hear the waterfall".

Which reinforced several things to me:

Just because you do certain things it doesn't make you agile. Having a daily stand-up, a story board and an open plan environment are not by themselves agile. It's the behaviors that those techniques encourage that is important. Be careful of falling into the mechanical agile trap. 

So what is it about having an open plan environment that supports an agile implementation?

1. Communication boundaries are reduced. This seems obvious, but the very tools that have made communication more efficient can be mental barriers to open communication and collaboration. Not picking up the phone, Not leaving the cubicle, knocking on the closed office door, writing the email instead of having the conversation. These are all relatively minor barriers that inhibit the flow of shared information. In an open floor plan you can share information and make decisions faster because everyone is right there.

2. Learning through Osmosis: I've lost count of the amount of invaluable things I learnt purely by overhearing conversations around me. Useful things. Hearing a developer walk a tester through changes or a Product owner sitting with a Tester as they describe use cases. As a project manager - that's all invaluable.

3. Transparency: There literally is nowhere to hide. You can see everything that's going on.

There are obviously cons as well when not implemented correctly. For some people it's really hard to get into the "flow" because it's hard to concentrate, I find that most people usually adapt within a few iterations and get used to working in such environments. 

A warning though - make sure the teams you have seated near each other make sense. They had once moved our development team next to the first level support team for another product. There was very little useful cross pollination going on and everyones productivity was impacted. 

There's a much better article here:

http://www.logigear.com/magazine/agile/proposal-for-an-open-work-space/