Here’s our philosophy of what makes a good team member in One2N and how we evaluate it.
🎙️ Honest communication📈 Hire for slope, not y-intercept 🧘♂️ Long term mindset💪 Hire for strengths, rather than lack of weakness🤝 Interview to hire, not to reject
🎙️ Honest communication
During interviews, we typically ask you about your strengths, missing areas of exposure and your aspirations. If you don’t know something, say so instead of beating around the bush. We appreciate open and honest conversations about these areas. You can also expect honest and straight-to-the-point replies from us to your questions.
📈 Hire for slope, not y-intercept
The slope indicates how fast you can learn; the y-intercept means your current expertise. For us, how fast you learn is much more important than just how much you know. In the long run, a little bit of slope makes up for a lot of y-intercept.
John Ousterhout at Stanford uses this philosophy, and it resonates with us.
We value a continuous learning attitude and look for people constantly trying to be better than their past versions. We hire for the right intent rather than just the current skill. If the attitude is right, skill can be picked with exposure and time.
🧘♂️ Long term mindset
We don’t do short-term Resume-Driven-Development, where shiny new tech is used just for the sake of it. We look for thinkers who can design solutions that will outlive their time in the company.
At One2N, we solve problems where the product is already live, and the challenges are maintainability, scalability, and reliability of software systems. We cannot stop the world and do a big-bang rewrite. Hence we prefer using proven tech with predictable modes of failure. This requires a focus on rigorous engineering practices and commitment to craft.
💪 Hire for strengths, rather than lack of weakness
i.e. Hire someone strong in a few key areas like problem solving and collaboration, instead of someone average (not weak, but not strong either) in all areas.
We believe in hiring T or ∏ shaped individuals who can excel at one or two things while still having a broad understanding of others.
We understand that everyone is not good at everything, but the right people working together can complement each other by playing on their strengths.
Software engineering is fundamentally a team sport. We believe it’s better to have team members that are highly skilled in a few areas and those who complement each other instead of having all average Joes and Janes.
🤝 Interview to hire, not to reject
We interview with a hiring mindset, where we want to learn more about you, your strengths, aspirations, etc., instead of trying to find ways of not hiring you. We expect you to be really good at a few things and have a working knowledge of other areas.
We do this by asking you to describe how you solved interesting problems in your past work. We evaluate you on:
- how you think
- how you approach the situation (an unknown problem)
- how you deal with unknowns
- how you apply your past learnings
We don’t typically ask rote memorization questions that can be easily searched. Instead, we ask open-ended questions that have no right or wrong answers. We want to understand your opinions, your thought process, and the trade-offs you make in arriving at your solutions.
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