About This Guide

Author’s Note and Credits

How to Hire a Rock Star Engineer is a collection of best practices for interviewing great software developers.

This guide and its predecessors have helped engineering teams small and large, early-stage and established, improve their hiring results. And while I can confidently tell you that I’ve found it useful in actual practice, you should of course form your own opinions. (If you’ve got a better way, I encourage you to improve on what I’ve written and share it with the rest of us.)

I’m a some-time software engineer, engineering manager, and occasional startup executive with a bit of experience. I created my first version of this guide in 2005. But its roots are much older.

Macromedia’s then-VP of Engineering Joe Dunn introduced me to the “How to Hire a Rock Star” concept in the late 90’s, around the time I was transitioning into engineering management. Sadly, I didn’t keep a copy, and Joe’s document seems to have been lost in that earlier millennium.

My attempt to recreate the guide was based partly on (hazy) memories of Joe’s document, but also drew on the collective wisdom of the many outstanding engineering teams, managers, technical recruiters, and HR professionals I’ve worked with throughout the years.

So while the title of this work can be attributed to Joe, the ideas in it come from a wide range of sources—before, at, and after Macromedia. And any interpretation, mangling, and (likely) outright misrepresentation of their ideas here is entirely my own fault.

(Joe has since informed me that his version was loosely based on something he’d encountered at a former company. It seems likely that variations on this theme have been circulating within the tech industry—and been spontaneously rediscovered—for decades.)

The guide been updated a few times since 2005, primarily to freshen the technologies used as (recently-trendy) counterexamples in the philosophy section.

For this update I’m calling “v3” I’ve completely restructured it for web consumption, converted it to an easily-forked-and-adapted format, and released it on GitHub under a Creative Commons license. I hope you’ll find it a helpful starting point to use with your own team.

March, 2013

Make Your Own!

What you’re reading here is one take on how to hire the best engineers. You may have your own ideas on the subject. Great!

This guide is meant to be adapted for your company, team, and circumstances. It’s released under a permissive license and maintained as forkable, editable, trackable source code.

To make your own version:

  1. Get yourself a copy of Sphinx
  2. Fork the How to Hire a Rock Star source on GitHub
  3. Edit away
  4. Run make dirhtml to build the updated html

(Sphinx offers several other output formats, too—see the Sphinx docs.)

License

How to Hire a Rock Star Engineer
Copyright © 2005-2013, Mike Edmunds
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a

You are welcome to use, distribute, and adapt this guide under the terms of the license.

Adaptations should indicate that they are based on “How to Hire a Rock Star Engineer” by Mike Edmunds. Please provide a link back to this site.

(This license was deliberately selected to encourage maximal reuse of this guide. Commercial use is permitted. And though you’re welcome to re-share any changes you or your organization may make, you can also keep those changes proprietary if you’d prefer.)