Hiring

I asked 14 engineers their career goals this week. More than half said management or team lead within two years. One candidate (currently supervising two junior developers) told me his goal was to lead a large engineering team within two years. I get the instinct. Management looks like progress. Bigger title, more authority, cleaner…

A candidate told me about the day his manager wanted to push a feature straight to production. Tight deadline. Skip the review. Skip the tests. Get it live. He didn’t say no. He came back with a feature flag, a controlled rollout that would let them test with a limited group of users before…

Six months ago we made AI use mandatory for every engineer at Ara Pay. Not encouraged. Mandatory. So I started asking every candidate the same question: how do you actually use AI day to day? Most talk about Copilot autocomplete. Some mention generating scaffolding or writing tests faster. That’s fine. But occasionally someone answers…

I asked 19 engineers in 5 days what their biggest professional strength was. Twelve said ownership. After the twelfth time I stopped keeping count. But I started listening more carefully to what came after the word. One candidate described a production deployment that had loaded incorrect data. He worked overnight, pushed a clean release,…