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Is there a way for the Grinders to absorb most of the time spent recruiting and hiring junior engineers and attempting to level them up to productivity, rather than draining productivity from Continuous Learners?

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Excellent question. There's a couple things that make this difficult.

1. The ability for management and HR to separate these two categories when assigning interviewing they may often have the same title.

2. Another is that the impact on grinders for recruiting and hiring still eats away at their productivity and may even be a detriment. I know from my experience at Amazon there were engineers spending in excess of 15 hours a week between interviews, pre-briefs, written feedback and debriefs.

3. While there are examples of Grinders who thrive leveling up juniors often they are worse than continuous learners at both identifying talented candidates and at mentoring them in general.

4. Anecdotally, the most marginal grinders are also the ones who engage in the most gatekeeping both in hiring and tribal knowledge.

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