author’s Articles

Insights & Stories by Sachin Gupta

From hiring pipelines to collaboration rituals, Sachin Gupta maps out ways to design intentional, high-performing organizations—one post at a time.

DEI Hiring

Tech Hiring Post-COVID: Key Shifts and Strategies

I’m writing this from a newly locked-down chilly California; reflecting on 2020 and all that it has taught us. Nikola Tesla, whom many tech enthusiasts worship, is supposed to have said “our virtues and failures are inseparable, like force and matter.” Just as how hardship and learning are intrinsically intertwined.

For businesses, 2020’s learnings have mostly centered around ‘our people’. First up, the people who make up our loyal client base and whom we are grateful for. Next, the dependable teams who stood by us through pay cuts, layoffs, and policy changes. This focus on ‘people’ has also had a very sharp impact on the HR-tech industry -- in a way, it’s been a culmination of all the innovations that have made up this decade of AI and automation-led hiring. Distilling this impact in a page is hard, but the Christmas decorations are calling so I’ll do my best.

There are four phrases we’ve all heard often this year. I think they’d do well for an abridged guide to 2020, and what they’ve taught me about tech hiring. Let's begin.

1. ‘Can You Hear Me?’

The last year of this decade has literally Zoom-ed past us. *Insert wise chuckle*.Zoom fatigue has been real, but so has this incessant need to stay connected. I cannot recall another moment in my living years when checking up on your neighbors, colleagues, and the alley cat was the coolest thing to do. We’ve cared more than we ever did in 2020.As I have learned from my conversations with many hiring managers, this ‘connectedness’ has its pitfalls when it comes to working. Burnout has been a beast, and so wellness breaks, carer’s leave, and flexi-work hours have become our biggest allies. As we saw in our ‘State of Developer Recruitment 2020’ report, companies have changed their EVPs (Employee Value Propositions) to reflect how they’ve been looking after their employees. To me, this phrase isn’t just about a work call gone wrong. It’s also a siren call for businesses to become more empathetic and ‘hear’ their employees out. I take that as a big positive. All industries; and especially the tech world with its love for deadlines, could do with some more empathy.

2. Cookathons, Marathons, And Almost Everything-athon

I love cake, but the constant smell of #quarantinecooking on my Instagram has been giving me nightmares lately. I get why; when the world outside was going to pieces it was but natural that we gravitate internally, towards all that we hold dear.For some, it was cooking, for others a new-found fascination with running on empty beaches. Developers took the extra time on their hands to find their own version of #QuarantineandChill by upgrading their coding skills. Customer needs have changed, and businesses now need developers who can enable transformation with ease. With COVID and the need to augment traditional human interaction with technology solutions, sharp coding skills have become necessary. Upskilling is also going to be an ongoing theme for the future, and companies looking to build healthy tech teams better include this on the list.

This year, we’ve seen the HackerEarth developer community grow 1.6x to 5 million skill-seekers. Our Slack channel has been abuzz with AMAs, webinars, podcasts and so much more. We thought conducting virtual hackathons wouldn’t be the same, but instead, we saw a lot of developer love pour in for our online events. From India’s first hackathon aimed at helping the LGBTQ+ community to hacking COVID, we found enthusiastic participants for every challenge. We helped companies organize virtual hackathons to keep their tech teams perked up and beat the WFH monotone. The demand for hackathons for boosting internal engagement and upskilling has grown tremendously this year, providing new - and exciting - options for the HackerEarth team as well.

3. Stop The Count

This election chant, and its inherent divisiveness and biased nature, has defined the US in 2020. The aftershocks spilled over global boundaries and gave us a new lens to filter our actions. George Floyd, BLM, and a notable CEO apologizing publicly for his insensitive comments, all forced us to take stock of our own unconscious biases.

Tech hiring is famously riddled with biases. Developers from non-Ivy league colleges face a lack of opportunities due to their academic background. The percentage of African-American employees in tech remains low, even in the big companies (2.9% at Salesforce, 3.8% at Facebook, 4.4% at Slack, 4.5% at Microsoft, and 6% at Twitter), and this number decreases further when we look at those in leadership roles.

The conversation around bias is always painful. Acknowledging that we might unintentionally harbor prejudices can be life-changing, but it is here that we honestly mustn’t stop the count. Whether it is our dislike of face tattoos or people with pink hair, these prejudices need to be packed up and buried in a deep, dark grave.

Also Read: 7 Types Of Hiring Bias And How To Avoid Them

It heartens me to know that many tech recruiters are showing these biases the door. They have, in fact, prioritized diversity and geographically-unspecific hiring during this year and adopted tools to help achieve this. In Q3 2020, for instance, we saw a massive adoption of our developer assessments platform which assists in skill-based hiring. The use of our technical interview solution FaceCode, with its blind hiring feature, also increased dramatically. Overall, we have experienced a 250% YoY increase in remote assessments, and a 4,000% YoY increase in remote interviews conducted via FaceCode (Q3 2019 vs. Q3 2020).

4. The New Normal

Ah yes! The war cry of all those fed up with the pandemic. Hate it as much as you want, our personal lives will carry the imprint of COVID for years to come. Sanitizers will have a dedicated place at the altar even post-COVID.Professionally, too, the “new normal” will be colored by the remnants of 2020. The empathy we talked of before means that companies would not be forcing apprehensive employees to return to workplaces anytime soon. Remote working and hiring will be the norm, putting a bigger spotlight on skills than before.What this has taught us in tech hiring is that it doesn’t matter where a developer works from, or what’s their academic pedigree. What’s most important is how skilled a developer is, and how quickly they can pivot and adapt to changing business needs. Our survey shows that recruiters are prioritizing geography-unspecific hiring to bring talented developers on board. Most businesses have contingency plans, but a ‘what if’ year like 2020 can throw all that on its head. A 5-star resume will not help you in such circumstances. The right set of skills always will.

To Borrow From The Great Tesla, Again.

“As I review the events of my past life I realize how subtle are the influences that shape our destinies.”If years could be weighed, 2020 would be a metric ton of unexpected left curves, adaptability, and finding the silver lining behind everything. If a year could make you spiritual, 2020 was the one tailor-made for it.Five Christmases from now, the year the world stopped might feel like a distant memory. The subtleties of 2020 will, however, continue to shape our collective destinies for a long while. For those of us in the tech world, it presents a unique opportunity to make electricity out of hatred (Tesla 3.0), and light up the coding hallways with boughs of holly, and hope.

Happy 2021.

DEI Hiring

Through The Looking Glass: Hiring For ‘Cultural Fit’ In A Remote World

Two of the most famous characters from Lewis Carol’s Through the Looking Glass are the twins, Tweedledum and Tweedledee. When Alice encounters them, they ridiculously mirror each other’s actions and words. Each brother frequently says “contrariwise” as if he’s about to disagree with his counterpart, only to invertedly say the same thing. Unfortunately, far too many companies end up with teams that look and act in much the same way.

Every organization would say they want to hire according to merit. The problem is that many people unconsciously evaluate merit in a self-validating way. The most successful candidate will often mirror the traits and experiences of the hiring manager. This is what Kellogg School of Management professor Lauren Rivera calls the 'Looking Glass Merit.'When companies hire for ‘cultural fit,’ they’re doing the same thing on an organizational level. This doesn’t mean companies should abandon hiring people that embody a set of core values or soft skills. However, in 2020, we shouldn’t be hiring people who look and act identically. Here’s why:

1. Monolithic Company Culture is Less Important During WFH

As many organizations grapple with staying remote at least through Q3 2021, the future of building a company culture is in flux. This Fast Company article argues that work culture is now driven at an individual level rather than from the top-down. The new reality for organizations is that remote work culture, like everything online, is moving towards personalization and specialization.

Generally speaking, this means that online communities trend towards fragmentation and align around increasingly specific interests. Think of the hyper-specialized communities on Reddit such as this subreddit where people only post pictures of birds with photoshopped human arms.

In the context of remote work, this means that community building will naturally align around smaller, less generalized interests. As Britany Stewart, COO of BURST Oral Care explained in a webinar with Volition Capital, Slack channels work best if they are focused on highly specific themes. BURST has a channel dedicated to parents working from home that has fostered a small, but highly engaged subcommunity. As organizations think about hiring for cultural fit in this context, employees no longer need to fit into a monolithic organizational culture. In fact, their diversity rather than their similarities could actually make the organization more culturally dynamic.

2. Diversity of Thought Reflects Success

A full range of diversity and inclusion (D&I) initiatives should be at the heart of any hiring strategy. Cisco Systems has adopted what they call a ‘full spectrum’ diversity approach, where, in addition to racial, ethnic, and gender diversity, they also target a diversity of thought and background.

Deloitte explains that “a complex problem typically requires input from six different mental frameworks,” and no one is good at all six. Teams full of different cognitive styles and personalities will not only view problems from every angle, they’ll also solve them faster according to research in HBR. If you have a team of only analytical thinkers, a creative thinker might be the best possible addition.Sometimes, this can cause conflict; unlike Tweedledum and Tweedledee who could never actually come to blows. The crux is to build an environment where reasonable conflict is used to pressure test ideas. The goal shouldn’t be to hire someone who will get along with your team; the goal should be to hire someone who will push your team to look at more problems in more ways.

3. Skill-based Hiring is on the Rise

If you want a more equitable and productive hiring process, you need to focus on skills — especially in tech roles. This is something that’s even starting to happen at the highest level of government.

A recent executive order from the White House resoundingly endorsed skill-based hiring. It reduced minimum education requirements for federal jobs, stating: “degree-based hiring is especially likely to exclude qualified candidates for jobs related to emerging technologies and those with weak connections between educational attainment and the skills or competencies required to perform them.”

Malcolm Gladwell’s book, David and Goliath, calls overestimating the value of an Ivy League degree “Elite Institutional Cognitive Disorder” (EICD). Gladwell blames this disorder on many poor hiring decisions. He instead advocates for hiring on the basis of skill, arguing that performance relative to one’s peers is the best predictor of success.

Grades are one method. Increasingly, online assessments that can evaluate the most relevant skills for any given position have gained traction. In fact, our recent Developer Survey found that 70% of student developers make use of online competitive coding platforms to upskill themselves for the job market.

Through the Looking Glass

Regardless of your company culture before COVID-19, that culture is probably very different today. This doesn’t mean that organizations shouldn’t continue promoting community-building activities and certain values that are unique to them. It does mean that the value of finding a Tweedledum or Tweedledee employee who simply fits in has never been less important.Instead of trying to find someone who reflects everything you like about yourself or your company, step back through the looking glass and find someone who pushes your remote work culture to be different and better.

Hackathons

Enough About Millennials. Are You Ready For Generation Z?

A HackerEarth guide to hiring and retaining early-talent developers

Millennials have been the hot topic of discussion for a long time in the workforce. However, studies suggest that Generation Z (aka Gen Z) will make up 24% of the workforce in 2020.

As millennials inch closer to middle age, Gen Z is expected to replace them quickly.

Born between 1996 to 2001, Gen Z is the demographic cohort succeeding millennials (born between 1981-1995). They are true digital natives; they have always been exposed to the internet, advanced tech, smartphones, social media, and virtual reality. What this generation looks for in a job and a working lifestyle is significantly different from the generations that came before them. Hence, the same recruitment strategies are not going to work when hiring and retaining Gen Z.

We have created this guide to help companies catch the attention of Gen Z or early-talent developers. Read on to find out how you can attract, hire, and retain Gen Z candidates.

1. Gen Z are tech-savvy

What does this mean for you?

a) Build an online presence: A study revealed that Gen Z spends more time on social media than millennials, at 2 hours 55 minutes per day. Gen Z-ers use social media to engage with their favorite companies, access new career tools, and stay up-to-date with global events. It is important for businesses to build an online presence. This includes regular updates on all social media channels, engaging with followers and subscribers, and the likes.

b) Create a seamless digital candidate experience: Gen Z candidates are very selective. For employers, this means creating a seamless digital candidate experience for attracting top early-talent developers. You need to create a positive brand recall with this generation in the long-term. This is where pre-employment assessment tools come into play. As an employer, you can leverage these tools to:

Let candidates code from anywhere in an environment of their choice. They do not need to travel long distances to give interviews, code on whiteboards, or get rejected based on a phone conversation during the screening process.
Conduct unbiased interviews. This means that all the candidates are asked the same set of questions. Interviewers need not know the specifics of each candidate such as gender, age, ethnicity, etc. This assures the candidate that the hiring decision will be fair and they will be benchmarked based on merit.
Invest in the latest and most cutting edge tools. Most hiring managers and senior recruiters tend to be veterans in the industry. They might be used to traditional assessment methods which have worked great in the past and may have in fact even springboarded their own personal career graph. A sense of familiarity could be a major reason why they tend to slip up on upgrading to the latest tools and software out there. This is a rookie mistake, however, for a veteran to be making. Instead, they should take into account the coding platforms that the current generation of recruits are comfortable with and well-versed in, and employ the same.
Give all applicants an equal shot. Irrespective of your final decision, candidates should feel that they have had a fair shot at showcasing their skills. This can be done through an engaging process of developer assessment without any human bias.

c) Know where to look for them: As stated earlier, Gen Z talent spends a lot of time surfing the internet. The following are a few resources that you can tap into to hire quality Gen Z candidates:

LinkedIn Talent Solutions can help you leverage the magic of data-driven recruiting to get the best developers you can.
Using free ads and participating in group discussions can be effective in increasing the visibility of your brand among early-talent developers and foster a relationship with them.
As focal points of online interaction, social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Google+, and Instagram can help you promote your company and culture through existing employees, cut through the noise, and find niche networks using eye-catching ads, videos, anecdotes, photos, and hashtags.
GitHub: GitHub is an online project-hosting service site where developers share their open-source projects.
Stack Overflow: Stack Overflow is an online community for programmers to learn, share their knowledge, and advance their careers.
Reddit: Reddit is an online community where users submit content, such as text posts or direct links, in very specific “subreddits.”
Quora: Quora is a Q&A site that facilitates social interactions and interesting conversations with Gen Z-ers.
Glassdoor: A promising tool for recruiting, Glassdoor exerts a huge social influence on Gen Z candidates.
Hackathons: External hackathons are amazing places to network with exceptional early-talent developers and industry experts.

2.Gen Z has an entrepreneurial mindset, driven by security

What does this mean for you?

a) Adopt an open mindset: Gen Z-ers grew up in a digital world with online tutorials and self-learning tools. They know that paying exorbitant tuition fees for in-person classes is not the only way to upskill.

Gone are the days where learning how to code was reserved only for a few. As an employer, you need to have a more open mindset toward learning and consider new ways to evaluate the skills of candidates while hiring Gen Z-ers.

Think — does your new position really require a university degree? Focus on skills more than pedigree and provide plenty of upskilling opportunities to keep this generation engaged.

b) Emphasize job security: Thousands of people in the US lost their jobs due to the Great Recession in 2008, which paralyzed the economy. Gen. Z-ers were still young children when this happened. They may have watched their elders take massive financial hits, lose their jobs, and struggle to make ends meet. So, it’s not surprising that this generation wants and needs more job security.

To facilitate the same, this generation is also more likely to have a side job to diversify their income. This means that, as an employer, you need to:

Support them to have other sources of income apart from work.
Provide benefits that include the appropriate payment and the best health care benefits that you can obtain.
Raise the bar; ask them to lead a technical project without micromanaging. However, communicate that you are available if they need anything.

c) Focus on learning and growth opportunities: Studies reveal that 40% of Gen Z professionals are staying in their current role due to opportunities to learn and grow. Hence, showing your company is invested in learning and development is a good way to win them over.

You need to create an environment that keeps them on their toes and allows for multiple avenues to upgrade themselves.It is also important that you talk candidly about their career path and help them understand the growth opportunities available. This will build trust and help them envision a long-term trajectory at your company.

3.Gen Z is more informed about bias than you think

What does this mean for you?

Highlight and promote your diversity and inclusion efforts: Gen Z has grown up in a society shaped by discussions around diversity and inclusion, technology, gender equality, and much more. They are much more informed about bias than those before them.

Highlight your organization’s commitment to diversity and inclusion on your career site. Also, include a note about it in every job description. If your company organizes events and activities that celebrate employee differences, ensure that you let the world know about them. If you have a blog series that focuses on diversity and inclusion in tech, make noise on social media.

You can feature quotes and photos of diverse people on your printed and online company materials. Make sure to include your own employees and customers. Positive branding like this could mean great and diverse hires for your organization.

In Conclusion

It might seem like hiring Gen Z is akin to threading a fine needle with one eye shut. Every generation builds on the knowledge of their ancestors. They are hard workers with well-planned career goals, looking for a guide and mentor to help them navigate the corporate world. The crux to hiring and retaining this demography lies in understanding the values they adhere to and providing them a workplace that upholds the same.

Hopefully, this guide will help you in achieving this.

This piece was originally published in TechHR Series.

Tech Assessment

Technical interview tips - Beyond FizzBuzz Test

It may sound preposterous, but most candidates can’t even write basic code. Let’s not even get into the world of the FizzBuzz test. Some interviewers dismiss these tests, while others, aware of how many candidates can’t pass the simplest programming assessments, find it extremely suitable.

Ultimately, the idea is to quickly filter out technically inept candidates by asking some basic technical questions, thus saving time and effort. The best way to do this is by using an automated online tool.

Though the first screening round removes many irrelevant candidates, it’s a small part of the process. The next step—interviewing—is often broken. Getting candidates into a room, asking them riddles and brainteasers, and making them write bubble sort on a whiteboard is neither accurate nor fair for assessing a software engineer.

This method gained popularity with companies like Microsoft and Google. However, times have changed. Laszlo Bock, Former SVP of People Operations at Google, admitted that “Brainteasers are a complete waste of time.” Google concluded from internal studies that interview performance had zero correlation with job performance.

Typical tech hiring process

Technical interview tips to hire a developer effectively

What kind of developers does your company need? Those with excellent technical ability, who can work well with teams, and get results. Rorie Devine, interim CEO, suggests a resume screen, an “attitude” phone screen, and an “aptitude” phone screen before the face-to-face round. While many are moving away from resumes as indicators of skill, others still follow traditional methods.

According to Stack Overflow:

35% of developers want to be better prepared and informed of who they’ll be speaking with.
20% value flexibility in interview scheduling.
47% want to be introduced to the team during interviews.
37% would like to see the workspace during their interview.
Developers appreciate upfront honesty about expectations (including salary), punctuality, and organization.
They want timely communication about interview decisions.

No one really enjoys interviews—developers included. Add creativity and logic to your interview process to make it better.

Insights from Jeff Atwood

Hiring Tools

HackerEarth, 3 years and a new logo

Few people know of it, but Vivek and I had started working on HackerEarth even before we graduated from college. To be specific we were working on MyCareerStack, but few things that we did during that time laid the foundation for HackerEarth.

I graduated and moved to Bangalore in July 2012 to work at Google. 3 months later, we were accepted in GSF Accelerator and started HackerEarth officially in November of 2012.

From the start we have been a very design focused company, our design might not have been very savvy, but it has always been functional and simple!

I have often seen this, a lot of startups invest significantly in branding, even before they launch. We, on the other hand, have been very different. For the last 3 years, we have been consciously putting off the topic of branding and having a logo for HackerEarth.

Of course, when you start, you need to have a logo, it goes in all the startup competitions where you apply, it goes on your very first visiting card, it goes on the T-shirt that you decide to wear everyday to office and it goes on your laptop. We had one too.

Doesn't require machine learning to understand this logo. We took the company name, chose a nice font and put it on a background color we liked. The logo is really simple, but it served its purpose, people recognize this.

Up-till now, we have consciously shied away from creating a logo and hence creating an identity. The less significant reason is that creating a logo takes a lot of thought, and hence a lot of time. And when you are running fast with a lean team, one tends to pass over frivolities as long as things are functional.

However the actual reason is, the last 3 years have been about soul searching. When we started, back in 2012, we knew what we wanted to do, but we didn't know it enough to have a clear identity. During this time, we have had our share of learnings, pivots, discoveries and changes.

Today I am happy to say we finally have the right amount of understanding to come up with our identity. And it might seem ironic but it's no different from what me and Vivek started with. We knew we were building a platform for developers and we knew developers love to code. These two things have been core of everything we have done at HackerEarth, and nothing symbolizes that better than our brand new logo

We have made a couple of changes to our identity, we dropped the camel case (it always gave a little corporatish look), did away with the standard font, created a new custom font which is a little more casual, a bit more fun and conceptualized the 'h' that embodies the spirit of a programmer - code.

If you didn't get what I mean see this

Logo of HackerEarth - A hub of Programmers, Coders and Hackers

Let's drill this down a little deeper. 'h' represents the term hacker, which is not only first half of our name, but represents who this community is for. Hackers are doers, hackers love to build things, hackers look up to a challenge and hackers strive to be better every day. And each and every HackerEarth user is a passionate hacker.

And the little underline of 'h' is nothing other than the familiar blinking cursor of your console. It's the same cursor that you have grown comfortable and which probably in some way defines you. This logo represents the playground of a hacker.

The logo is an attempt to say what HackerEarth truly is, we are a platform for hackers and like each and every one of you, we are passionate about writing code, writing better code and being a better programmer every single day.

Tech Tutorials

Celebrating 10 years of Django!

Django started life a decade ago in Lawrence, Kansas, and the Python framework is now widely used in some of the biggest products all over the world like Instagram, Disqus, Pinterest etc.

HackerEarth too started its humble beginning with Django framework 3 years ago, and we are proud to say that we have built an amazing product on Django that today serves millions of requests and hundreds of thousands of users.

Django has been critical in enabling us to build a product that is loved by tons of people all over the world. Completion of 10 years of Django is an important milestone for every Python/Django developer. At HackerEarth, we too want to celebrate this and contribute to the Django community. In this spirit, we are organizing India's first ever Django hackathon. The focus of the hackathon is firmly on the community that has helped this framework grow. We are inviting passionate Python/Django developers to take part in this hackathon and contribute towards Django by building new packages and hacking on its core modules.

It will be a 24 hour hackathon, where some of the best Django developers in India will hack on their creative ideas, in an energetic environment with delicious food, Table Tennis and Foosball (in case you love to play), and of course, cool prizes to be won!

It is an offline hackathon that will be conducted at HackerEarth Office, Bangalore on 22nd August 2015 starting at 12:00 noon and ending at 12:00 noon on 23rd August 2015.

If you are excited to know more visit this link: https://www.hackerearth.com/djangothon/

We're proud to be hosting this hackathon, and would like to take this opportunity to say a big 'Happy Birthday Django!'.

So, what are you waiting for? Now is your time to request an invite and contribute towards Django community.

Visit Djangothon to confirm your seat at the hackathon.