Building great software requires great software developers. So, exactly how do you find and hire great engineers? This book shows you how to do just that, from figuring out what kind of engineers you want to hire, all the way through making an offer and getting newly hired engineers off to a productive start.

This book is intended for technical managers who hire software engineers, but if you interview candidates for software engineering positions, or if you will be interviewing for software engineering positions, you may find interesting and valuable pointers here as well. Beginners can benefit from this book, and experienced hiring managers (and programmers looking to be hired) will find useful insights as well.

The book starts with an introduction, followed by three chapters on each of three main topics: defining what kind of engineers you want, the interview process, and making hiring decisions. The chapters are relatively independent, so you can go straight to a particular step in the hiring process. For example, individuals who do phone screening or onsite interviews can read just those sections.

Three main principles underlie the author’s approach to hiring: take an engineering approach to the hiring process, base your hiring decisions on evidence, and, most importantly, treat candidates as customers. The approach is pragmatic, and McCuller suggests taking the parts that work for you and adapting them as needed.

All aspects of interviewing and hiring are touched on, with many details and examples, such as a sample phone screen and an example question plan. The author makes many interesting recommendations that you might not have thought of. For example, he suggests keeping a spreadsheet to track how many candidates make it to each stage of the interview process and how long it takes them to get to that stage. This allows you to estimate how many candidates you need to start through the hiring process and how long it will take to hire finalists. Other suggestions include writing a new job description for each job (and how to do it), and putting together a guide to send to candidates before the interview that details the hiring process and what the candidate should expect. This is part of treating candidates as customers and giving them the best experience possible. An example candidate guide is included in an appendix.

The book even covers topics such as training interviewers and phone screeners with useful practice interviews and having new interviewers shadow or listen in on interviews. The author shows how to develop, test, and calibrate interview questions, and provides two examples of coding questions, on computing the Fibonacci function and computing the depth of a binary tree. However, most interviewers and their software developer interviewees will have seen these before.

There were only a few places where I found the discussion a bit generic and lacking in specifics, such as in chapter 3 where the author describes the candidate pipeline. The only significant omission I noticed was the lack of a discussion about hiring new college graduates. Sources for newly graduated candidates can be quite different than for experienced hires, but the book makes no mention of career fairs on campus, the university placement office, and on-campus interviews. In my experience, phone screening new graduates is not the same either, nor is reading and evaluating new graduates’ resumes. None of these topics were discussed. Perhaps the author does not believe a crack development team can contain new graduates. If so, it would be interesting to hear why. I have found one of the best ways to get excellent engineers on your team is to hire qualified recent college graduates and help them grow and develop into great software engineers. There are even some advantages with new graduates. You can mold their practices and attitudes toward doing software engineering the right way, as you see it.

A brief index is included. A few references appear in the text, but there is no bibliography of recommended follow-up reading or places to go for further information.

If you hire software developers or interview them, you will find some useful techniques and suggestions in this book, regardless of your level of experience. This is a useful and pragmatic guide for everyone involved in the hiring process.

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