(With 🙏 to Joe Beda, whose brilliant idea for a blog post this was. Thanks for letting me borrow it!)
Interviewing is hard and it sucks.
In theory, it really shouldn’t be. You’re a highly paid professional and your skills are in high demand. This ought to be a meeting between equals to mutually explore what a longer-term relationship might look like. Why take the outcome personally? There are at least as many reasons for you to decide not to join a company as for the company to decide not to hire you, right?
In reality, of course, all the situational cues and incentives line up to make you feel like the whole thing is a referendum on whether or not you personally are Good Enough (smart enough, senior enough, skilled enough, cool enough) to join their fancy club.
People stay at shitty jobs far, far longer than they ought to, just because interviews can be so genuinely crushing to your spirit and sense of self. Even when they aren’t the worst, it can leave a lasting sting when they decline to hire you.
But there is an important asymmetry here. By not hiring someone, I very rarely 
mean it as a rejection of that person. (Not unless they were, like, mean to the office manager, or directed all their technical questions to the male interviewers.) On the contrary, I generally hold the people we decline to hire — or have had to let go! — in extremely high opinion.
So if someone interviews at Honeycomb, I do not want them to walk away feeling stung, hurt, or bad about themselves. I would like them to walk away feeling good about themselves and our interactions, even if one or both of us are disappointed by the outcome. I want them to feel the same way about themselves as I feel about them, especially since there’s a high likelihood that I may want to work with them in the future.
So here are the real, honest-to-god most common reasons why I don’t hire someone.
1. Scarcity
If you’ve worked at a Google or Facebook before, you may have a certain mental model of how hiring works. You ask the candidate a bunch of questions, and if they do well enough, you hire them. This could not be more different from early stage startup hiring, which is defined in every way by scarcity.
I only have a few precious slots to fill this year, and every single one of them is tied to one or more key company initiatives or goals, without which we may fail as a company. Emily and I spend hours obsessively discussing what the profile we are looking for is, what the smallest possible set of key strengths and skills that this hire must have, inter-team and intra-team dynamics and what elements are missing or need to be bolstered from the team as it stands. And at the end of the day, there are not nearly as many slots to fill as there are awesome people we’d like to hire. Not even close. Having to choose between several differently wonderful people can be *excruciating*.
2. Diversity.
No, not that kind. (Yes, we care about cultivating a diverse team and support that goal through our recruiting and hiring processes, but it’s not a factor in our hiring decisions.) I mean your level, stage in your career, educational background, professional background, trajectory, areas of focus and strengths. We are trying to build radical new tools for sociotechnical systems; tools that are friendly, intuitive, and accessible to every engineer (and engineering-adjacent profession) in the world.
How well do you think we’re going to do at our goal if the people building it are all ex-Facebook, ex-MIT senior engineers? If everyone has the exact same reference points and professional training, we will all have the same blind spots. Even if our team looks like a fucking Benetton ad.
3. We are assembling a team, not hiring individuals.
We spend at least as much time hashing out what the subtle needs of the team are right 
now as talking about the individual candidate. Maybe what we need is a senior candidate who loves mentoring with her whole heart, or a language polyglot who can help unify the look and feel of our integrations across ten different languages and platforms. Or maybe we have plenty of accomplished mentors, but the team is really lacking someone with expertise in query profiling and db tuning, and we expect this to be a big source of pain in the coming year. Maybe we realize we have nobody on the team who is interested in management, and we are definitely going to need someone to grow into or be hired on as a manager a year or two from now.
There is no value judgment or hierarchy attached to any of these skills or particulars. We simply need what we need, and you are who you are.
4. I am not confident that we can make you successful in this role at this time.
We rarely turn people down for purely technical reasons, because technical skills can be learned. But there can be some combination of your skills, past experience, geographical location, time zone, experience with working remotely, etc — that just gives us pause. If we cast forward a year, do we think you are going to be joyfully humming along and enjoying yourself, working more-or-less independently and collaboratively? If we can’t convince ourselves this is true, for whatever reasons, we are unlikely to hire you. (But we would love to talk with you again someday.)
5. The team needs someone operating at a different level.
Don’t assume this always means “you aren’t senior enough”. We have had to turn down people at least as often for being too senior as not senior enough. An organization can only absorb so many principal and senior engineers; there just isn’t enough high-level strategic work to go around. I believe happy, healthy teams are comprised of a range of levels — you need more junior folks asking naive questions that give senior folks the opportunity to explain themselves and catch their dumb mistakes. You need there to be at least one sweet child who is just so completely stoked to build their very first login page.
A team staffed with nothing but extremely senior developers will be a dysfunctional, bored and contentious team where no one is really growing up or being challenged as they should.
6. We don’t have the kind of work you need or want.
The first time we tried hiring junior developers, we ran into this problem hardcore. We simply didn’t have enough entry-level work for them to do. Everything was frustratingly complex and hard for them, so they weren’t able to operate independently, and we couldn’t spare an engineer to pair with them full time.
This also manifests in other ways. Like, lots of SREs and data engineers would LOVE to work at honeycomb. But we don’t have enough ops engineering work or data problems to keep them busy full time. (Well — that’s not precisely true. They could probably keep busy. But it wouldn’t be aligned with our core needs as a business, which makes them premature optimizations we cannot afford.)
7. Communication skills.
We select highly for communication skills. The core of our technical interview involves improving and extending a piece of code, then bringing it in the next day to discuss it with your peers. We believe that if you can explain what you did and why, you can definitely do the work, and the reverse is not necessarily true. We also believe that communication skills are at the foundation of a team’s ability to learn from its mistakes and improve as a unit. We value high-performing teams, therefore we select for those skills.
There are many excellent engineers who are not good communicators, or who do not value communication the way we do, and while we may respect you very much, it’s not a great fit for our team.
8. You don’t actually want to work at a startup.
“I really want to work at a startup. Also the things that are really important to me are: work/life balance, predictability, high salary, gold benefits, stability, working from 10 to 5 on the dot, knowing what i’ll be working on for the next month, not having things change unexpectedly, never being on call, never needing to think or care about work out of hours …”
To be clear, it is not a red flag if you care about work/life balance. We care about that too — who the hell doesn’t? But startups are inherently more chaotic and unpredictable, and roles are more fluid and dynamic, and I want to make sure your expectations are aligned with reality.
9. You just want to work for women.
I hate it when I’m interviewing someone and I ask why they’re interested in Honeycomb, 
and they enthusiastically say “Because it was founded by women!”, and I wait for the rest of it, but that’s all there is. That’s it? Nothing interests you about the problem, the competitive space, the people, the customers … nothing?? It’s fine if the leadership team is what first caught your eye. But it’s kind of insulting to just stop there. Just imagine if somebody asked you out on a date “because you’re a woman”. Low. Fucking. Bar.
10. I truly want you to be happy.
I have no interest in making a hard sell to people who are dubious about Honeycomb. I don’t want to hire people who can capably do the job, but whose hearts are really elsewhere doing other things, or who barely tolerate going to work every day. I want to join with people who see their labor as an extension of themselves, who see work as an important part of their life’s project. I only want you to work here if it’s what’s best for you.
11. I’m not perfect.
We have made the wrong decision before, and will do so again. >_<
In conclusion…
As a candidate, it is tempting to feel like you will get the job if you are awesome enough, therefore if you do not get the job it must be because you were insufficiently awesome. But that is not how hiring works — not for highly constrained startups, anyway.
If we brought you in for an interview, we already think you’re awesome. Period. Now we’re just trying to figure out if you narrowly intersect the skill sets we are lacking that we need to succeed this year.
If you could be a fly on the wall, listening to us talk about you, the phrase you would hear over and over is not “how good are they?”, but “what will they need to be successful? can we provide the support they need?” We know this is as much of a referendum on us as it is on you. And we are not perfect.
charity.
being “promoted” from manager to senior manager, director to senior director, all the way up to VP and so forth. Almost everyone’s instinct is to say “climb the org chart”, but we’ll talk about why you should be critical of this instinct.
Even if they do, you still have to own your own career development. If learning to be a good engineer was sort of like getting your bachelor’s, learning to be a good manager is like getting your PhD — much more custom to who you are.
Commit to it like a proper career change. Seek out new peers, find new heroes. Bring fresh eyes and a beginner’s mindset. Ask lots of questions. Re-examine every one of your patterns and habits and priorities: do they still serve you? your team?
There is an enormous demand for technical engineering leaders — far more demand than supply. The most common hackaround is to pair a people manager (who can speak the language and knows the concepts, but stopped engineering ages ago) with a tech lead, and make them collaborate to co-lead the team. This unwieldy setup often works pretty well.
invest in your practice and renew your education. Again: this is simply the price of admission. You need to renew your technical abilities, your habits of mind, and your visceral senses around creating and maintaining systems. There is no way to do this besides doing it. If management isn’t a promotion, then returning to hands-on work isn’t a demotion, either. Right?
It’s totally normal not to know who you want to be, or have some passionate end goal. It’s great to live your life and work your work and keep an eye out for interesting opportunities, and see what resonates. It’s awesome when you get asked to step up and opportunistically build on your successes.
I hear a version of this everywhere I’ve gone for the past year or two. It’s crazy how often I’ve seen it. I’ve been meaning to write my answer up for ages, and here it (finally) is.
What data store has a data model that is easiest for them to fit to their needs? Which language is fastest for I/O throughput? What are they already proficient in? What you need to do is start building your muscles for optimizing globally. Not in isolation of other considerations, but in conjunction with them. It will always be a balancing act between optimizing locally for the problem at hand and optimizing globally for operability and general sanity.
widely respected by engineers.
would take to rewrite everything and move the whole stack on to the Golden Stack. (It’s probably impossible and/or would take years, but that’s okay.) Next, look for the quick wins or swollen, inflamed pain points.
and people will come and go, because change is the only constant. So you need to bake some flex into your system. How are you going to handle the need for changes to the Golden Path? Monthly discussions? An email list? Quarterly meetings with a formal agenda? I’ve seen people do all of these and more, it doesn’t really matter afaict.
have a career ladder? Are your decision-making processes mysterious to anyone who isn’t a manager? Don’t assume what’s obvious to you is obvious to others; you have to ask around.
willing to do the work? Or “resolved” one way.. then reversed by doing? Doing ends debates. Doing proves theories. Doing is powerful. (And “doing” doesn’t only mean “write code”.)
and challenge every system and hierarchy. But these are sharp, powerful rocks that can polish great teams. Though they do require a strong manager, to channel their energy towards productive dialogue and improvement and keep them from pissing off the whole team.
public, etc.
But if you let all the power drift over to the engineering managers, pretty soon it doesn’t look so great to be an engineer. Now you have people becoming managers for all the wrong reasons, or everyone saying they want to be a manager, or engineers just tuning out and turning in their homework (or quitting). We all want autonomy and impact, we all crave a seat at the table. You need to work harder to save those seats for non-managers.
team, and invest in those relationships.
sn’t contribute to our goals. Ensure redundancy/coverage of critical areas.
And the best technical leaders in the world are often the ones who do both. Back and forth. Like a pendulum.
into components. They need to be able to size up a junior engineer’s ability and craft a meaningful assignment, one that pushes their boundaries without crushing them … then do the same for another twenty contributors. This is management work, from the slightly shifted perspective of “Get Thing X Done” not “care for these people”.
information. A lot of things seem ridiculous, or pointless or inefficient from the perspective of a leaf node. .
