Building Great Software Engineering Teams: Recruiting, Hiring, and Managing Your Team from Startup to Success

Building Great Software Engineering Teams provides engineering leaders, startup founders, and CTOs concrete, industry-proven guidance and techniques for recruiting, hiring, and managing software engineers in a fast-paced, competitive environment.

With so much at stake, the challenge of scaling up a team can be intimidating. Engineering leaders in growing companies of all sizes need to know how to find great candidates, create effective interviewing and hiring processes, bring out the best in people and their work, provide meaningful career development, learn to spot warning signs in their team, and manage their people for long-term success.

Author Josh Tyler has spent nearly a decade building teams in high-growth startups, experimenting with every aspect of the task to see what works best. He draws on this experience to outline specific, detailed solutions augmented by instructive stories from his own experience.

In this book you’ll learn how to build your team, starting with your first hire and continuing through the stages of development as you manage your team for growth and success. Organized to cover each step of the process in the order you’ll likely face them, and highlighted by stories of success and failure, it provides an easy-to-understand recipe for creating your high-powered engineering team.

What you’ll learn

• Effective techniques for finding engineering candidates for your company, including how to make your company more attractive to prospective employees and tips for navigating the employment visa process
• How to leverage commonly overlooked resources for finding employees, such as hiring from other geographic regions and how to approach college recruiting
• How to successfully hire the best candidates, from first contact through making an offer and getting it accepted
• How to manage engineers for optimum morale and performance, foster confidence throughout your organization, and promote career development for your team members
• What to expect as you build an engineering team: common challenges, growing pains, and solutions
• How to use team-building skills to propel your career as individual contributor

Who this book is for

The primary audience is engineering leaders, startup founders, CTOs, and others tasked with building an engineering team to fulfill their company’s mission. The secondary audience is any engineering manager or senior engineer interested in learning more about how to hire or manage engineers effectively.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: The Challenge of Building an Engineering Team

Part I: Recruiting
Chapter 2: An Enlightened Approach to Recruiting
Chapter 3: Six Destructive Myths About Technical Recruiting
Chapter 4: Nine Steps to Recruiting Success

Part II: Hiring
Chapter 5: Hiring Is Hard
Chapter 6: The Myth of the Ninja Rockstar Developer
Chapter 7: The Hiring Decision Checklist
Chapter 8: Making Interviews Fun for Your Team
Chapter 9: Why We Don’t Allow Java in Job Interviews

Part III: Managing
Chapter 10: Do I Want to Be a Manager?
Chapter 11: A Manager’s Most Important Deliverable
Chapter 12: Technical vs. Management Tracks: Helping Your People Grow
Chapter 13: Tricks of the Trade for Engineering Managers

Appendix A: Career Advice for Software