Engineering Hiring at HappyFunCorp: How We Find a Wider Kind of “The Right People”

Every winning partnership we’ve built began when we found individuals with the enthusiasm, creativity, and frequently unexpected perspectives that produce exceptional results. To paraphrase Jim Collins’ evergreen business strategy book Good to Great, you need the “right people on the bus” to get to where you want to go.

As we head into 2022 with teams expanding, jobs on the board, and our industry rapidly diversifying, here’s a short tour of how HFC’s technical hiring team thinks about coding tests, the importance of emotional intelligence, and how we find portable experience in unlikely places. In short: How we invite people onto the bus.

The core of HFC’s hiring philosophy is being open-minded and curious about who the “right people” actually are: who shares our values on doing innovative, thoughtful work while bringing approaches that expand what’s possible — and make HFC a more fun, connected place to be.

Adding something special to our team looks slightly different in every role: design, product, QA, or project management. But it’s most visible in how we search for new engineers and HFC’s approach to the technical interview.

“It’s a pretty straightforward one,” CTO Jon Evans says, when characterizing the screener he uses to get acquainted with candidates’ skills as engineering hiring manager. He refers to it as the engineering skills test. “Ninety minutes of coding time, loosely based on a Vernor Vinge novel: can you do some basic coding that’s pretty aligned with what people do on a day-to-day basis?”

It’s a short problem conceptualized in-house to be significantly more lightweight and, as Evans puts it, more revelatory than the canonical Google or Amazon exam. The question he’s looking to answer: not if people can code against a specific benchmark or style, but how they think about solving problems — and how that might mesh with HFC’s broad and shifting portfolio of projects.

“You get a good sense of someone from just looking at their code,” Evans says. “How they think about structured problems, at least. People express themselves more in that stage of the process more than they think they’re doing.”

How someone tackles new challenges is deeply relevant at HFC. It’s also why an increasing number of HFCers are people who started in other fields and have already made their skills portable: Ph.Ds in Music Theory, aeronautical engineers, architects, and novelists who’ve moved into tech.

“We’ve had a [good track record] with people who have had rich life experiences,” says COO and co-founder Will Schenk. “It doesn’t even need to be computer [experience], necessarily. We’ve had a lot of luck with people who come from the music industry or the music world; there’s something similar […] around patterns and pattern-thinking, and that can map up well into the types of things we deal with here.”

It was important to design the hiring process to target problem-solving generally to keep those non-traditional backgrounds — and the perspectives Director of People Lauren Griffin describes as “rounder” — in the pool.

“If they’re coming from a wildly different career,” Schenk says — he himself started in mathematics and philosophy — “it’s the soft skills that are actually the hardest, so if they can reapply them into this world, they can learn the details.”

Evans sees the emphasis on non-coding skills as part of thinking about how software engineers organize their work, communicate, and move as part of a team. “I think there are two sides to the job,” Evans says. “One is just writing code […] and that’s are you a good coder, and the other is are you a good engineer?”

The skills test pairs up with an hour-long discussion about experience, skillsets, and goals, to look at the rest of the skills that engineers need to thrive in high-performing teams. “Being a good coder is partially necessary,” he explains, “but it’s not sufficient.”

He looks out for engineers who think about the whole of a project, and act to make it better — an essential for a remote-first work environment centred on proactive collaboration. “They have opinions! They might not be strongly held opinions, but they have opinions about what they should be doing. They’re willing to nudge back and say: ‘Okay, but in the big picture does this really make sense?’ or fill in some of the details on things like implementation themselves rather than working it out from other people.”

Likewise, Griffin considers the unique interpersonal skills that let people take ownership — and support each other’s better ideas — to be the most crucial. She pins down emotional intelligence as the most important skill HFCers can have across every role. “High EQ is really important. A lot of companies say that, but you have to have it here to be successful.”

That ability to build good relationships with both people and processes is part of how Evans identifies which applicants might be happy working in HFC’s fully-remote, low-hierarchy environment — which Griffin describes as “professional, but informal”).

And it’s why he doesn’t entirely mind a piece of sample code that doesn’t quite work out, if the solution-based thinking was interesting, innovative — or took ownership of the problem in a proactive way. “It doesn’t necessarily mean we’re not interested.”

So, the best advice we’d give people scanning our job postings? Be yourself. It’s more about how you answer a problem than the answer you necessarily get. And especially if you’ve taken a non-traditional path into tech, don’t rule yourself out.

As Schenk puts it: “None of the tests or certifications or degrees or whatever are meaningfully correlated with how well [prospective team members] will do. If someone recommends them, that’s the best bet, but you don’t really know what someone’s going to do. […] There’s no way to predict it other [than] to create the most conducive environment for someone to thrive.”

Most importantly — all three agree — the core of how HFC hires is about always centering applicants as people, not inputs.

“HFC has a good way of finding ways of making people work who get filtered out of a more rigid environment, where they have a recruiting process that is more milestone-based or keyword-based, or name brand degree-based, or whatever it is,” Schenk concludes. “That’s not a very good predictor of how people perform.

“If you can find people who are sort of unnaturally overlooked, you can make a good experience for people: they get the opportunity; we get to watch people blossom. That can work. If all they need to learn is the computer part and they’ve got the harder things, we can make that work.”