Hiring the Vice Minister of Yatta Yatta

Prologue

Towards the end of last year, Ralph was spending nearly 100% of his time attempting to manage the software team and 0% researching future technologies. He is a stud, technically, but as a manager, he’s too nice.

Ralph’s heart was in doing “research,” which is to say, “not have any specific deliverables, play with cool toys, get paid to think, and retain a window office.” My dream job.  Since he’d been with the company since its inception, he had that kind of leverage.

It was thus decided that a Vice Minister of Development would be hired to manage the engineering team and allow Ralph to wash his hands of managing people and finally transition into the exciting world of “research.”

As is company culture, a committee was assembled to concoct a job description for the Vice Minister of Development. Mercifully, I was not involved. However, the occasional descriptions left in the printer’s output tray, ripe for perusing, confirmed the position description evolved into a “save us from ourselves” role, half technical, half project management, half people management, half marketing, half sales, half operations, half accounting, and half custodian. A true committee-drafted position.

An executive recruiter — that is, one who works on a retainer plus some fraction of the hiree’s salary — was enlisted to do whatever executive recruiters do. Four candidates were identified. Our CEO and the Vice Ministers of S and M met with each to talk business machismo and golf techniques.

Because this was a Big Change for the engineering team, especially the concept that the new manager would actually Expect Them to Deliver the Stuff When They Promised, they were given an opportunity to meet the candidates in informal interviews. I missed out on those.

With that formality out of the way, the candidates brought in for a series of group-based interviews. As this was a serious undertaking, a pre-interview meeting held so everyone would be clear on the position description, to go over the results of reference checking and review internal comments from the informal interviews like “the candidate needs to floss more” or “iron death monkey handshake hurts.”

The interview format was set up as follows:

• Presentation on How To Be a Vice Minister of Development — what they were looking for was a description of their philosophy, style, and any observations they had based on their interviews with the staff. This was intended to be fifteen minutes of presentation and fifteen minutes of question and answers.
• A panel interview by the executive team.
• A panel interview by the technical team.
• Swimsuit competition and pie-eating contest.
  
• An half-hour, private meeting with the CEO to “close” the deal, if it was necessary.

I was asked to be a liaison to the “technical” team consisting of three, long-time developers and the support manager. We met to draft a set of questions to ask all the candidates. I guided the hidden agenda questions back towards the job description. We had a lengthy list, and only an hour with the candidate. I put together a spreadsheet so people could vote on their top three favorite questions and minimize some of the irrelevant crazy shit the support manager would dwell on.

The questioning fell into four categories:

• Business – Has the candidate successfully delivered a product? Does the guy know what a profit margin is?
• Artistic style – is the candidate an asshole? (If not, can he be one when necessary? — oh, wait, that’s what we really need.) Will he micromanage people?
• Technical – is the candidate an idiot? Can he answer the mystery question posed by the engineers?
• Weird shit from the Support Manager