Could you share any with us?

Probably I should have the top 10, not just one and I think all failures, I can categorize them into 2 large buckets. So bucket 1 is hiring too quickly and especially considering this economic cycle where we were for quite a long time, for the last maybe 10 years where everything appeared to be growing very quickly, so it was very a common situation when you join a product team and 1 of reasons why you were invited to be an engineering manager or tech team leader is to help the team grow. So basically it means you're spending a lot of time hiring and the focus is on the speed of hiring and a bit less on quality. So it means in practice very often, you just need to feel the headcount as soon as possible and the first bucket of such failures that I experienced quite a lot is hiring too quickly. So you are just trying to get as many smart hands on the table as possible and to keep the ball rolling and don't have the luxury of time to select the very often right people. Because there is competition and time pressure, it's not even a priority to focus on quality. So this is bucket number 1 and bucket number 2 I think when you're hiring too quickly is letting go too slowly, so not firing quickly enough and not letting people go. Again, it's related to this previous economic cycle I think but as an engineering manager, you are always afraid a bit to let people go because you think, oh now I need to rehire, now I need to backfill. So how do I do it? So it prevents you again to focus on quality and retaining the good people but who are good for this specific position at this specific time. And you're not letting people go quickly enough if it's needed. So there are 2 major buckets I would say I had.

Okay, and how to avoid them because if you are in that current situation that is very stressful and you need to hire as soon as possible because it's clashing and you need to start development. So how to do it? So of course quality is important but time is also very important, how to avoid it?

Yes, what helps me a bit with what I learned is to be very honest with the origin of a need. So very origin of the need is maybe your C level, your business owner, so someone who triggers this need to hire more, to get more, especially in engineering, to do things quicker just by coming to you, CTO, or CEO, saying, hey, get things done. We need more people hired, just get things done. So what helped me after some time I started being very honest in communicating risks. So if I hire lower quality, I would like to say what are specific risks we need just to be aware of and just let's have mitigation in place. So simple situation, I have a limited budget, I have limited time, and I need to hire a new product team to deliver X feature. So what do I do? I speed up the interview process. I hire maybe a bit more junior persons and I compromise on quality, which is fine, but there are associated risks. So probably my delivery quality will be lower. Maybe a high risk of rework. And maybe users will not be so happy with our new feature. So, it's totally fine to take those risks as long as we see them, understand them and accept that something will happen, right? For example, our quality will be lower and we agree on what we are going to mitigate that so, this is what I did with my previous CTO, we just talked through those risks, and I said okay, hey John Smith we can do that we can go quicker but these are the risks and this is what I'm going to do and I'm going to hire for example more people than I would do in a normal situation, just to distribute the risk of people leaving, when I would need at least two free very senior people who are going to mentor and coach junior guys and we need to accept the risk that quality of our work probably will be lower when you would expect in a normal situation. And if be very honest with this business owner and we agree together on how they are going to accept those risks then it's okay to go for lower quality hiring I think.

And from your experience, how does it usually go? Do managers, like C-level managers, and business owners accept the risk, or do they prefer to prolong the hiring process?

Almost always. It was okay, let's do it. Let's go for a bit risky, so time always wins, so always speed is king. Let's see how it changes because now the approach is changing across the whole industry but previously during tech it was speed the king.

Okay, okay, this is what I expected. Could you give any specific case, the example of when you had a not-very-successful hire and how did you deal with that?

Probably in every company where I joined I had at least a couple of unsuccessful hires and it's totally fine because first of all your recruitment process - it's always a space for an error, right? Your interviewing process cannot be ideal. So it's totally fine to have this buffer for an error at the same time. But there are some errors I regret of course so number 1 probably is hiring for passion instead of hiring for professionalism. And it attributes mostly to the most senior engineers I hired, I had at least couple of situations when I mixed up a person being passionate about what she or he is doing in his professional life and what that person is actually capable to deliver and let me just explain. I have usually one of stages during my recruitment process where I have an intro call, me and the candidate directly, and me as a hiring manager usually I just talk through about the approach to engineering, why you got into engineering, why you do what you do? Do you love what you are doing in your professional life? What do you enjoy, what you don't enjoy? So I'm trying to understand, do you have this fire for your profession actually. Which is sometimes important and sometimes I've had several situations when I see this fire in the eyes of a candidate and the person is very passionate about what he or she is is doing, either software development or infrastructure or just building stuff for users and I mix this up with being actually professional, actually being able to deliver and how to avoid this mistake - so instead of being such subjective, how I can sometimes become myself, I started inviting another person to such calls, I started inviting one more person who maybe has a bit different attitude and different priorities in what we are looking at the candidate, just to listen in. And that person has usually a bit different opinion for me to crosscheck myself. So it really helps just to ground my own optimism about the candidate a bit and level it down so it really helps, so I started inviting additional person.

Okay, this is a good one but passion is a very good advantage, right? You don't want to have a person who's not passionate about their job at all. Have you ever had a situation when there's a really good professional who has no passion at all for their job?

It's an interesting question because let's just remember that interviewing process is a theater, right? So it's like a game, and there are rules that you follow, if you follow rules very well, usually you go through multiple interviews with a very good success rate and we all understand that. So it means multiple people just get their roles well, they prepare well and they know very well how to play this game and go through the interviewing process and you can fake the passion. You can fake a lot of things. Or maybe not fake, I would say, play it out, right? So just emphasize specific attributes, what the hiring manager or other participants in the interview process expect from you in a specific stage, for example in a behavioral interview I would focus, would have top10 situations from my professional career pre-prepared in advance, and then I would just highlight them one by one, I would just pick them out as I rehearsed before. If I have an interview about teamwork, I would explore in advance who I'm going to talk to, and I would try and rehearse that as well. So you see, you can play by the rules and you can again go through an interview, the same applies to the passion thing, you can play a passionate candidate. So how I try to balance that out, I started looking less for passion and more for historical signals. It means, can we talk about your past, professional past, can we talk about your experience, and very specific situations? And assess them a bit more objectively, not how you behaved during the interview, not how I like you or I dislike you, but can they look at facts and numbers. What did you deliver as an engineer, and how did it help your businesses in terms of numbers? How did it help your teams in terms of team segment? So you see I'm trying to move from this interview performance to actual past professional performance as much as possible.

But what if a candidate is a junior person and has no experience or the past to show off?

Yes, very good question. So in practice, you have nothing to demonstrate yet, if you have limited professional experience because you just didn't have enough chance. So how do you assess future performance without having a signal from the past performance? So one of the practices I applied very widely is simulating that. So how do you simulate - you have a pet project together. You say, okay, so how do we try it out if we are going to be a good match for each other? Let's have a small project together, for two-three days, let's try working out, just try to pretend that you are our team member already. We allocate you to the existing team. We give you a real task or you join an existing real project. We pay you for it of course and you work with us for 2-3 days, maybe a week, and when at end of this week we meet again, we decide together how it was, so it's kind of a very limited signal of course, but it's much better than nothing. So usually one week is small enough to see the person in the real world, and see how they perform in a real team.

Yeah, I agree, just to check how the person is behaving basically in that environment, and with these tasks, because I remember one nice engineering candidate without almost any experience. And he was so passionate but you could feel that it was an honest passion to become the best developer in the world basically, and he delivered so well. We hired 2 people, one was him, a junior person, and another with years of experience. And the junior wrote the whole application by himself. He read of course many books and got a lot of help from other team members. So still I believe that passion is very important at work. But of course, it has to be honest, and sometimes during interviewing, it's not so easy to detect whether it's performance or honesty. And how about the personality when it comes to assessing candidates? How much do you look to the personal fit or match to the company's culture or team in comparison to their professionalism? What is most important for you and how do you allocate these criteria?

I think this team fit or personal fit should be driven by your overall approach - what you want as a business because it depends but there's no good answer to this question, like should you always do a team fit check or you shouldn't, for example, at my current place, where we work and create consumer products or enterprise products, the view is quite different from what I was used to before. So the view now is - you focus not on a team fit, you focus on team diversity and there is a very specific pragmatic reason why you do it. Of course, overall, team diversity has good outcomes for people's mental health, and internal team sentiment but from a business perspective, it has good outcomes as well. Just think about that, if you create consumer products for the global market, for multiple countries across the world. So you create for a diverse audience. And the same applies to enterprise products you create for multiple industries across the whole world. The best outcome you can achieve is with diversity - why? Because just imagine you do product discovery, you try to figure out what your customers and users want and need. So how do you represent these? What vision is needed? In the best way, you need a 360 view. How do we have a 360 view? You have very different people to look at this problem domain and try to describe it right? So then you want a very diverse team of engineers, of product managers, of designers, who represent very different views, points of view, and very different cultures as well, and it helps. Take another extreme - if you build a product for a very specialized domain, for a very specialized market, and especially if you have a small team, then having a monolithic culture. So all people are very similar in their cultural background, by their point of view. It helps to speed your delivery, understanding without words, right? You don't need to speak, you just understand each other very quickly, so you have a lot of internal, mental shortcuts when you are from the same culture and your team is not diverse. You're almost the same. So what you get - you get speed and focus, but you can create products that are very focused and very constrained as well. So, to summarize it depends on what you need and I think quite often we misinterpret but team fit is about how we feel within the team and you forget about this business element - what you get having a diverse team or having a non-diverse team, right? That's why I would apply a team fit filter during the recruitment process. Especially, depending on your business priorities, and it's very important to be very honest about what you do and what you don't do. Team fit is a good thing for the team's mental health as I mentioned it has its own benefits, in a team sentiment of course.

Yeah, but it should be a little bit more difficult to work in a diverse team than in a very much fitting team where everyone is almost the same. What differences do you see?

Exactly. So this is a kind of investment. You want to get a specific element in your delivery, which otherwise you would not have with a non-diverse team. So just imagine, your recruitment process should be different, right? Your retention process should be different because you should constantly maintain this balance of different cultural views, of different representatives from different domains of the world. So it's not just hiring, it's retaining as well. And when cultural norms within the team should become very different, so your culture of work is different, for example, now when you have a meeting and you are discussing which path we should take with this product feature. Should we go quick and dirty and deliver quicker or should we take more time and discover more and talk to users it may look like a simple decision. It can be driven just by numbers; at the same time, people from different cultures treat the time and sentiment of users differently, right? If you talk to someone from China, or if you talk to someone from Germany, or if you talk to someone in the UK, they may have a very different approach just because of how we perceive time. So having three of those persons in the room helps to have a balanced approach in this case. So how do you achieve this? It means your work culture should support this expression of diverse views; you should not treat people who for example are louder, and have stronger opinions differently compared to others. For example, you should allow every voice in the room to be heard, so it requires a very specific work culture. So it means recruiting for diversity is not enough. It's just 1 small step; retaining diversity - is what's difficult. And keeping these internal cultural norms functional, what I see is difficult, it's all about business investment. You should have people who are doing this. Who maintain those norms like HR professionals or educated managers as well. You should train people - all of them. Why we are doing that, is for them to understand and support this work culture, and compare to smaller companies where they don't need it so compared to a small product startup where you focus on speed, diversity is less important, because you are focusing on very specialized domain and industry when you spend all this time on the product, or you spend all this time on something else, on the engineering quality, so you see a various kind of investment tradeoff.

Of course, was it very difficult to adjust to this diverse environment and especially retain talents when the team is very diverse?

I think it's very difficult if you do it from scratch. Just imagine you have a growing company, maturing, evolving company and you reach some point when you understand that you're too large to ignore this diverse talent. So now you start thinking, how do I have representation across genders? How do I have proper representation across different cultures, different languages, and different points of view? So now you're trying to transform your existing organization, I think this is a very real, high upfront investment. So this is difficult, when it's all working the only investment you need to maintain is how you help to adjust new people who joined; so if I join a company that has this focus on cultural diversity then I need to invest some time internally, and it took me realistically when I joined Meta, it took me about I think three months to start getting a point, trying to see the results, so I'm quite a pragmatic person. So I always want to see the benefit of doing something, so it took me several months to see the actual benefit compared to my previous teams, the diverse point of view works and brings better outcomes in specific situations.

Have you ever had a situation when a person joined such a diverse team and couldn't stay because of differences or some other maybe cultural issues?

I didn't have it in my team directly, I've seen several cases in other teams, but you see, one part what you need to think about when you're thinking about diversifying your cultural representation especially is what controls you put in place. So as I said retaining this work culture is difficult and controls is not about reminding people. Reminding is not enough. You need to award good behavior and sometimes you need to punish bad behavior and punishing quotes I mean just saying ,come on, you need to be a bit more respectful is not enough. You should have proper HR controls in place if reminding doesn't work. It can go to disciplinary actions, it can go to termination in specific cases and people should be aware and those controls should work. Because just creating training cards, just saying how diversed we are is not enough. You should walk the talk right? You should actually keep the culture like that up to your standards, what you're talking about.

Yeah, and when it comes to interviewing or selecting candidates. So when you're looking for a cultural fit or team fit. It's pretty simple, right? So you identify what is the culture of your team or the company. And you go ahead. But when it comes to diversity especially it's a very organic process, right? It's changing all the time because some new people join and it's even more diverse. How do you prepare and how do you conduct interviewing, assessing diversity?

Again, interviewing is a game, right? So you can fake this approach to diversity as well. You can always say, oh yes, I'm a white dude, I like working with a woman in my product team, right? I always try to do it, I like working across different cultures - but it can be faked very easily because of it's words. What helps is again, justifying by experience doing that. So If I have some experience, actually working in diverse teams and I can explain this experience back by facts then it's much easier, right? So if I worked in previous companies, where it was a similar culture or I had experienced transforming from non-diverse to diverse, it's a bit easier, right? Otherwise, if you don't have such experience I think you just cannot prove it, until you land in such an environment and you can show that you can properly operate and deliver in such an environment I think every person who comes first into the diverse environment, to anyone, to white dude, to someone from Asia, from someone from Africa, someone from the US. For all this is a shock. It's just a fact because we live in our small bubbles and when you understand that the world is a puzzle and it's huge and it's very different compared to your bubble, it's a shock to anyone of us. Maybe it's sometimes not popular to talk about that. But we all know that it's a shock to understand how different we are, all of us, at the same time, how equal we are and every voice should be respected, to be heard right? Even if it's different. So it's always a shock, and it takes some time for any person to adjust. When you do it one time in your life, I think next time is so much easier.

But then this could be a little bit risky right? If a new team member is joining the team, having no experience working in a diverse team and this should be pretty often, then you're somehow risking whether this person could adapt or not.

That's true. So how do you do it? How I see we are doing in our current teams. So just imagine, I can tell you about my current teams, and what I'm working with, just to understand what diversity means. So we have boys and girls, so, gender representation. We have cultural representation in my current teams I have people from China, Singapore, Egypt, Russia, from Ukraine. So we have in each team five-six different countries and 2-3 different cultures, and when we have a new person coming to the same team, what helps that the team is diverse already, so basically you have nothing to compare against, right? You have nothing you haven't seen before. For example, let's imagine, I'm coming from Lithuania and this is the first diversity I've seen in my life, so I have nothing to compare with, what I had previously in Lithuania, because it's just totally different, right? So I cannot go and talk to three other Lithuanians in my team because there are no Lithuanians. I cannot go talk to white dudes on my team because maybe there are no white dudes. So you see, you cannot cluster anymore around the same culture you belong to, because there is no single major representation of your culture anymore, it's balanced already. So basically the only way forward for you is to adjust and to become part, so to blend in and it helps. So I think this is one of the principles we follow when we create a new team. We always try to create a team. Of course by skills, by experience, at the same time keeping that diversity enough for a new person to join and blend in immediately. Not to have any major cultural representation.

Okay, and when you mentioned blending in, what would be your tips out of your experience - how to do it or maybe how not to do it, what is the easiest path to blend in?

Yeah, what really helps me is being very curious, because not many of us visited all countries in the world and seen the whole planet. So probably a lot of us, we have very limited experience of different countries, different cultures, different everything, right? So meeting people from other parts of this nice world is amazing opportunity to be curious and to learn about them. What really helps me I start asking stupid questions. So what's your favorite food? Hey, let's have dinner together. Can you arrange a dinner out for a team and just bring us to your favorite restaurant and from your culture, right? And we just do a round about across the whole team and everyone brings to his favorite place and cuisine, and I talk about where do you go for vacation? It's very interesting. For example, if you talk to a girl from Egypt, it's very different comparing to where I go, so it's very easy to understand the culture if you talk about the real life. On the very basic level. Where we go for food, where we go for drink, where we go for vacation, in what way we enjoy life, right? Who they spend time with, so it's very interesting, because if you're curious person, it shapes your boundaries of understanding on how different we are together at the same time. How many common things we have together, right? Not just because we're working with the same company right now, but because how many common thoughts we have about politics, economy, our current work and you start valuing that much more.All the common things across you as well, so this is what really helps - what doesn't help is if you start comparing to your own culture, to how you did it at home. How you did previously -  comparison never works, because you are just different and there is no good or bad way to live your life as it appears, and when you compare you try to justify, why your way of leading your life, working is better in other culture, and I think it never helps.

Yeah I agree. And I think it's a really great transition or at least personal growth for every person, joining diverse team. Because you have to be open and to learn new things, and especially not compare to the things you are used to. You also mentioned that the top recruitment failures companies do is also letting people go not soon enough. Do you have an experience of yours by doing that?