The Pragmatic Engineer
01:06:05 · Luca Ferrari
[01:06:05] S1: We always have favored hiring new graduates or inexperienced people. And there are two reasons for it. One is when you hire, there's a trade off between a few things, certainly talent and experience. And so the more you want to optimize for talent, the less experienced people will be on average and vice versa. Experience, we can provide a new hire with over time, particularly high quality experience being surrounded by great colleagues working on really challenging projects at a high pace. Talent, we cannot teach. And so given that we're so long term oriented, and we want to maximize our level of competence, success with a five, ten, twenty year view, we favor hiring individuals who are more talented, even if we have to be patient for a couple of years or how long is needed for them to ramp up in terms of experience. That means we need to invest heavily in training, coaching, but we eagerly do given the great benefits involved for not just by news firms, also the people we hire. The second reason is our approach, our culture are so unusual, and we only learn this over time as we interface more and more with the external world, that it's proven challenging for highly experienced individuals to adjust to them sufficiently quickly. So we do hire experienced people, but we now have a preference for inexperienced ones.
01:07:46 · Gergely Orosz, Luca Ferrari
[01:07:46] S0: Awesome. And when people join Bending Spoons, what does career goal look like? Do you have a concept of levels or titles or... Because again, you did mention that you do optimize, you have this principle of simplicity. I'm curious how career fits in here from a software engineer's perspective. [01:08:06] S1: Yeah, it's very simple relative to our understanding of what's standard out there. We don't have any titles. So if you're hired as a software engineer, you are always will be as long as that's what you do, called software engineer internally. And you can choose your own title for whatever external reasons you like, your CV, LinkedIn. We only ask that you don't do something that would embarrass us, like calling yourself the CTO if you're a new hire, something like that. But if you want to use senior staff, triple senior, of that is fine by us internally or just a software engineer. All managers are simply called leads. Super simple. We have a few levels, they're very few. The difference is pretty substantial. And so we don't try to resolve finer deltas in your contribution. And if you need very frequent, very specific adjustments, we're not a company for you. If you're happy to look at working at Bending Spoons with a multi year, very long term view and you're looking for big jumps when you've made big improvements, then that's great because we don't have to discuss every six months whether you have made a 5% improvement in your ability to contribute.
01:09:24 · Gergely Orosz
[01:09:24] S0: So I'm hearing, you know, a lot of things are just quite different to how most companies operate. And usually I find that a big difference that, you know, we can we can we could we could talk a lot more about the differences, but what I often find is these differences often come down to the people, because you can do certain things with a certain group of people. And I'm wondering what are the... What are traits that you're hiring for, and what does an engineer or software engineer who is thriving at the company look like? How would you describe them? Because I think this could help understand a little bit of what makes your culture possible.
01:09:59 · Luca Ferrari
[01:09:59] S1: That's a good point. Think, by the way, hiring primarily inexperienced individuals helps because they don't come with a baggage of how it's done. They will look at it from a blank slate. And I think it's also been helpful for us to not having had... And there are pros and cons, but we haven't had a whole lot of advisors early on, because we were a bit on the fringes of the technological empire as we were building Bending Spoons. And so we made a ton of mistakes we could have avoided, but also I think we did some things that in hindsight have been so powerful, simply because they seemed to make sense and we didn't know any better. As usual, pros and cons. Yeah, what we look for in people, I would say it's really simple on the face of it. We look for people who are very strong problem solvers, who can learn very quickly. People who have a strong sense of ownership, so they really want to own their objectives, their work. You don't have to check on them, they'll do their very best every single day. In fact, we have essentially zero process, no micromanaging. It's a really high autonomy environment with the good and the bad, depending on what you like. And third, I would say a trait we're really big on is team spirit. We have refrained from hiring or retaining brilliant people who had too high an opinion of themselves when that disrupted collaboration. Are a company where we trumps eye all the time, again, for better or worse. I think if those things are true of someone and they really want to... They see their role in an expansive horizontal way, they're not in this for just becoming the most expert Python programmer in the world, but they want to be a great three sixty degree engineer who understands business impact of what they do, who has an interest in that. Think that such a person will probably do really well at Bending Spoons and love it.
01:12:03 · Gergely Orosz, Luca Ferrari
[01:12:03] S0: Do I do I understand correctly that like, if I paraphrase it, you're hiring for things like drive motivation and like getting things on our like talent of being able to to get things and learn quickly. Does that kind of [01:12:16] S1: Yeah, I think drive, let's say reasoning, problem solving, learning ability for lack of a better term and collab... Collaborativeness too. I think that's very important. [01:12:25] S0: And collaborativeness. Yeah. Awesome. Thank you. So I'll I'll I'll close with this question. Why do you think no one else has attempted this really unconventional bold strategy of acquiring companies, improving their efficiency, turning into turning it into a better version and and looking at at the long term. Do you have an idea? Did someone try it that you're aware of or not really?
01:12:25 · Gergely Orosz, Luca Ferrari
[01:12:25] S0: And collaborativeness. Yeah. Awesome. Thank you. So I'll I'll I'll close with this question. Why do you think no one else has attempted this really unconventional bold strategy of acquiring companies, improving their efficiency, turning into turning it into a better version and and looking at at the long term. Do you have an idea? Did someone try it that you're aware of or not really? [01:12:52] S1: We're not aware of any company doing what we do. Well, I think it's... First of all, it's pretty difficult. We've been working at this for eleven years, so pretty hard. The platform we've built, company culture, the technologies, the know how, it's taken just a ridiculous amount of investment. So it's not like something someone would just set out to do and oh, I did it nice, you know. Even today sometimes I wonder if I had to redo it from scratch. I think even with infinite capital it would take me maybe not eleven years, but maybe six years. Like it's really hard to build a culture, an employer brand, and 50 plus technologies. Like it takes forever and it's not at all just about the money. So that part is just a big barrier to entry. I think it's probably the main reason Other than that, I don't know. But really the barrier to do it, it's hard. It's a lot of work. It takes a long time.