Hiring Principles for Engineering Teams ✨
Three hiring strategy ideas for 2025.
Hi everyone! Last week’s article by Charity Majors is already the most popular Refactoring article of all time. You should check it out if you haven’t already: it’s a fantastic manifesto about what it means to create a great team.
One of the topics Charity touched on was hiring, which is exactly what we’ll discuss this week. I should rather say this month, because—brace yourselves—we are about to dive into a three-part series on what it means to hire well in 2025.
This will be a joint-effort by me, a lot of folks from the community, and my friend Dana Lawson, CTO of Netlify. We are going to cover:
✨ Hiring principles for 2025 — that’s today’s piece.
📋 How to write a great job post & onboard engineers well — Dana will jump in on this next week.
📞 How to interview engineers in the age of AI — a deep article with plenty of examples and real-world stories from people in the community.
But why are we doing this? And why now?
There is a famous article by Intercom that says: shipping is your company’s heartbeat. So, if your company is like a body, with a heart — what is hiring in this picture? To me, hiring is probably nutrition. You bring in elements that contribute to your body’s functioning.
(and sometimes you evacuate them 💩)
Just like with real world nutrition, there are multiple diets that lead to different team compositions and sizes, and no real consensus on what’s best. Trending diets have also changed a lot in recent years, influenced by things like Covid, remote, the end of ZIRP, AI, the pushback on DEI, and more.
So, how should you compose your team today, in 2025?
Often times, things are just confusing: should you hire more engineers? Do you really need them? Seniors or juniors? What about managers? Plus a whole herd of elephants in the room: should you hire more women? Is that guy too old to fit your team? And more.
I don’t pretend to have a unifying framework for all of this, but I do have a small set of ideas that have served me well over time, and I will talk about them today. These are:
🏁 Hiring as last resort — from hiring-first to hiring-last.
🪴 Making everyone learn — match everyone’s work to their level of experience.
🎨 Building a diverse team — taking the controversy head-on.
Let’s dive in 👇