In every case, as I’m sitting across from them in the interview, I focus on trying to see if the candidate exhibits the following five traits.

Happiness

Research shows that happy people are more productive at work. Happiness is also infectious, spreading to your coworkers, staff and customers. One of our core values at G Adventures is ‘Create Happiness and Community’ and it’d be hard to do this if the candidate can’t even fake happiness in the interview.

Happy people are also less likely to leave. Employees leaving are extremely expensive to the company with one study showing that the cost can be from 16% to 213% of their salary. When an employee leaves it can also be hard on their manager. They’ve spent 40+ hours a week together, often more time than they’ve spent with their families. This bond can be difficult for the manager and lead to burnout or worse.

I like to ask questions like “What are things that your current company does that you like?” and “What makes you happy?” to judge their happiness.

Curiosity

Curious people find better solutions to problems they’re working on, learn things faster and weed out inefficiencies with current processes. They ask more questions, getting to the bottom of issues or new requests faster than less curious people.

I believe that everyone is born curious. This curiosity is taught out of a lot of us via school and work where the correct answer is valued but finding out the why behind it isn’t.

I like to ask questions like “Can you explain a problem you encountered in the past and how you solved it”, “How do you go about learning new things?” and “What’s the next thing you’re interested in learning?” to see how curious they are.

Communication

Communication skills are extremely important. You could be the best engineer but if you can’t communicate why you’re doing something in a certain way to your coworkers your impact on the team will be limited.

The only question I ask that touches on communication is “Explain a time where you disagreed with a co-worker and how you came to a solution.” This will give me insight into how they communicate with others, especially when there’s conflict. For the most part, the entire interview process gives me an idea of how they communicate. I’d worry about hiring someone if they’re struggling with eye contact, fumbling with responses or giving short answers. One thing I’m conscious about here is how nervous they are. Some people shut down more than others when they’re really nervous.

Creativity

This is the hardest of the five traits to look for since creativity means something different to everyone. Creativity to me is the act of turning an idea into a reality. This can involve problem-solving, organization, planning and judgement which are all incredibly useful things for employees to have.

This question is one that I ask rather bluntly “Give me an example of your creativity.” I’m looking for examples from their past jobs or schooling as well as how they define creativity. If the person starts talking about their latest painting or poetry I’ll often nudge them back to how they showcased it at work to keep things focused.

Politeness

I’m not interested in hiring brilliant jerks. I know there’s some controversy over that term but at the end of the day if an employee can’t treat their coworkers with respect I don’t want them on the team. This conflict leads to discouragement and distrust with the hiring process and ultimately leads to other staff leaving.

As I mentioned above, I like to have the candidate talk about a time when they had a conflict with a co-worker. This shows me how they handle conflict, how they try to get their points across as well as how polite they are. I’m looking for the candidate to describe a time where they collaboratively improved a difficult situation through positive discussion, coaching, and problem-solving.

A big red flag for me is when the candidate speaks negatively about their past company or coworkers. I get it, there’s a reason you’re leaving your company but airing your dislikes in an interview is not the right time.

Obviously showcasing these traits doesn’t excuse a candidate from lacking a required skill but if it comes down to two comparable candidates I’ll select the one that’s stronger in one of the above traits every single time.

The post The Five Traits I Look For When Hiring appeared first on Procrastinating Developer.

Less Coding

By far the hardest thing for me to realize was that I needed to cut back the amount of coding that I did. There are only so many hours in a day and I was finding that I could either code or do other, more managerial things, without working a lot of overtime. This is something my boss kept mentioning to me and it was something I was extremely resistant to in the beginning. Since I’d been a developer for my entire career, and programming since I was 15, I thought the way I added value to the company was by writing more code.

It wasn’t until 18 months after I became a manager that I finally started realizing that I could provide value to the company by doing things other than coding. Things like investing my time in understanding my developers better, better planning out project timelines and figuring out where I wanted my team to head. These were all things I knew intellectually provided value but found very hard to feel accomplished with.

I still code every once in a while at work, especially when I need something out fast and all of my developers are focused on their own projects but it’s definitely something that I’ve had to cut back on. To make up for this I’ve found myself coding a lot more in the evenings for personal projects.

Focus on your People

Your developers are the most important people for your success. Without them, you can only accomplish what you could when you were a developer. With them, you can accomplish so much more.

As I got busier as a manager and more and more things started competing for my time I always made sure to make time for my developers. This included carving out time for one-on-ones, being on time for meetings and in general just being available whenever they needed to talk. This may seem like a no brainer but it can really improve your relationship with your developers when you show them basic things like this.

Each person requires a different type of leadership. Some will need more of a micromanagement style. Working closely with these developers to plan out what they’re working on will help them stay on track. I’ve found that more inexperienced developers generally fall under this style though I’ve also seen seasoned developers who required a more hands approach.

The reason you want to focus on your developers is that it’s extremely expensive when someone leaves. Not only do you lose all of the experience that the developer has accumulated you can also be in a position where you have to pay significantly more for the same experience if the market has been increasing lately. The best thing you can do to keep your developers is to respect them and pay them fairly.

Your Time is Precious

A concept that I struggled with at the beginning was that my time is worth a lot of money, both to myself and my company. While it’s a fairly simple concept, it just wasn’t something I thought about at the beginning. This means that things like meetings, events and other things that take up your time cost money. I finally understood this when I started saying no to meeting requests that didn’t make sense for me to be there. Most people like to include as many people in meetings as possible, regardless of whether or not everyone is required or not. Say no to meetings religiously to keep yourself on track.

The other thing I started doing was to schedule time for myself. When my days started getting busy I would schedule in my lunches, planning sessions and time to learn new things so that it didn’t get eaten up by meetings and other events. I remember one week early on where I had a meeting scheduled for every minute of the week and I barely ate anything. This leads very quickly to burn out. Schedule in an hour here and 30 minutes there for yourself.

Tooling

There’s a number of tools that I use every day to keep track of what my developers are working on. I’ll discuss three that I use every day.

Pen & Paper: One of the biggest changes I made over the past couple of years was switching from Evernote and/or Google Docs to a pen and paper for my note-taking. I found when I was using my computer my attention was never fully there. Using a pen and paper allows me to stay connected to the person I’m speaking with while still being able to take notes.

Trello (Referral Link): I spend a large portion of my time in Trello. Whenever there’s a feature request it goes straight into a card. When I want to see what people are currently working on I go straight to Trello. When I want to discuss with other managers a larger project, those comments go in Trello. It’s a fantastic tool for keeping track of features and bugs.

Github: Github is the best tool for storing code and also a great tool for conducting code reviews. I spend my time in Github going over various pull requests, ensuring that there’s a common style of code that’s carried across all of my developers. We use Trello Cards instead of Github Issues but that’s just a personal preference.

Grammarly: Since becoming a manager I’ve spent a significant amount of time writing. Writing emails, documentation, PR reviews, performance reviews and more. My writing, as you may have noticed here, isn’t always the best but Grammarly helps me out by suggesting fixes and improvements.

Rule of Five

I was recently reading Trello’s Blog where they discussed the “Rule of Five”. This concept is fairly simple: two tasks you’re currently working on, two tasks that are planned to work on next and one task that people might expect you to be working on, but you aren’t actually planning on doing.

This rule helps you from getting overwhelmed by the number of tasks on your plate by allowing you to focus on only a few things at a time. I’ve also found that this rule works wonders for your developers, allowing them to organize what they’re working on and making it easier for you to keep track of the progress of your team.

I hope everything I’ve written above can help developers turned managers from falling into the pitfalls I had. Let me know what tips and tricks you use in your transition.

The post From Developer to Manager appeared first on Procrastinating Developer.

After a brief conversation, I came to the conclusion that meetings are poisonous and should be removed from the social norm of the business world.

Meetings Kill Productivity

One of the biggest problems with meetings is that they kill productivity. Every time you have a meeting your mind has to switch contexts and focus on something other than what you were working on. When the meeting is over your mind has to switch back to what you were working on in the first place.

Every time you have to context switch you lose valuable time which could have been used to complete your tasks quicker.

Meetings Waste Time

Meetings, more often than not, waste the time of everyone attending. People start daydreaming, surfing the internet or working on other things as soon as the topic goes to anything that’s not directly related to their job. If the meeting has more than five people there is no way it can keep everyone’s attention.

Even when the meeting stays on topic, very little is accomplished. Decisions that can be made in the short time-span of the meeting can often be made without a meeting and harder decisions are generally impossible to reach with the consensus of a group.

Meetings Frustrate People

When was the last time you heard someone say “That meeting was great, I got a lot out of it”? People generally leave meetings frustrated and annoyed because they waste time, kill their productivity and get little done. Often meetings won’t go as scheduled and this leaves the employees even more frustrated. Thirty-minute meetings can quickly turn into hour-long meetings if the leader is disorganized or there isn’t a specific game plan laid out for the meeting.

Tips for Meetings (if you must have one)

30 minutes or less: Longer meetings don’t mean you get more done. Keep your meetings short and on point.
End the meeting early: Ending the meeting early will make people think it was productive.
No Laptops or Phones: These just provide distractions for people and take away from the purpose of the meeting.
Take Charge: The person who calls the meeting should take charge. When there’s not a leader people get off track unfocused.
5 People or Less: As soon as you have more than 5 people the meeting gets out of hand. Keeping it to less than 5 people means everyone can talk and discuss without stepping on one another’s toes.
Action Plan: Every meeting should end with an action plan. This action plan should have 3 items or less so people can quickly get them done.

Before you schedule your next meeting ask yourself “Is this meeting necessary”. If the answer is yes, make sure you follow the above tips to make sure you don’t waste everyone’s time.

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