When Hiring Your Database Team – Do Not Settle!


One of the unwritten qualifications of a great business intelligence or database team lead are interviewing skills.  Finding the right business intelligence pro can often be a slow process that frequently results in upper management demanding you “just pick someone!”.  Do not give in!  This recent interview with Digg founder and angel investor Kevin Rose emphasizes this point:

Nick Bilton: Another quick question, what – when you start these new startups that you’re about to get funding for, what do you – what lessons will you take from Digg that things went wrong or right that you can apply to these new products?

Kevin Rose: Yeah, absolutely. The first and foremost is that in the early days of Digg when we started bringing on employees, we were growing so fast from a traffic standpoint that our solution to problems was throwing warm bodies at the problem. So we needed more coders, so we’re just bringing coders as fast as possible, hiring, hiring, hiring. And all of a sudden, I woke up one day and I looked around and there is 20, 30, 40 people around you. I don’t know these people, I didn’t interview this people. We got in a lot of some B and C grade talents. You get some B and C grade developers and they bring their C and D grade friends in and then all of a sudden you have a big challenge when it comes to getting rid of those people and bringing in new talent…You live or die by the quality of your talent that you bring in.

Database professionals are hard to find and senior DB developers or architects are in extremely short supply.  The result of this is that in virtually every company I’ve worked for there is always a background task of interviewing potential candidates for DB openings.  Finding the right person for your team is a critical decision that will profoundly affect your team.

The full transcript from This Week In Tech #293 is here.


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