Step 1) Hack, Step 2) ?, Step 3) Profit

Hackathons

Bradley Herman

2 talks

Step 1) Hack, Step 2) ?, Step 3) Profit

by Bradley Herman

In his talk at RailsConf 2016, Bradley Herman discusses the innovative culture at Hired, emphasizing the company's unique approach to empowerment and creativity among engineers. The key theme of the talk revolves around the ways Hired fosters a productive and engaging work environment through practices like hackathons that encourage experimentation and collaboration among teams.

Key Points:
- Hired's Background: Initially a weekend project, Hired has transformed into a leading tech company that helps connect job seekers with employers in 16 cities across six countries.
- Company Culture: Herman highlights Hired's culture of trust and empowerment, which allows engineers to explore their creative ideas and develop solutions without the constraints of traditional product management processes.
- Hackathons: At Hired, hackathons have evolved into an integral part of the company’s innovation strategy. Unlike typical corporate hackathons, Hired’s format enables engineers to dedicate entire weeks to work on any project they choose, fostering ownership and rapid development.
- Agile Development: Hired operates with an agile development approach, balancing short-term innovation with long-term systemic improvements. This methodology allows for quick iterations and responses to user needs.
- Data-Informed Decisions: The transition from data-driven to data-informed product development helps ensure that engineering teams can build innovative features while a dedicated data science team measures outcomes without slowing down the development cycle.
- Case Studies and Examples: Herman provides several examples of significant features born from hack weeks, including enhanced search functionality using Elasticsearch, improvements in their chat ops system, and the implementation of a bias removal feature aimed at enhancing hiring fairness. He also cites the successful redesign of employer pages following user feedback.
- Collaboration Initiatives: Hired hosts Mega Week and Pairing with the Stars events, fostering collaboration across engineering and business teams, which has led to a stronger culture of mutual understanding and innovation.

Conclusions:
- Creativity and innovation are crucial for growth in tech companies, and allowing teams the freedom to experiment is foundational to Hired's success.
- The importance of interdepartmental collaboration is underscored, demonstrating the value of operational empathy as companies scale.
- Herman's insights offer a roadmap for other organizations to create a culture of innovation, emphasizing the need for trust, collaboration, and structured opportunities for creative exploration.

00:00:09.469 Let's go ahead and get started, even though my timer says to start in two and a half minutes. Those guys are cooler than me anyways.

00:00:15.929 Everybody, thanks for coming! I actually did not expect this many people to attend.

00:00:21.210 This is a sponsored track, and it's really just a soft talk, a very loosely prepared talk.

00:00:28.650 By the way, I finished it around three thirty this morning, and I gave up on trying to make my slides look cool.

00:00:35.760 That takes way longer than I thought it would. I'm just going to talk to you today about some of the things we do at Hired.

00:00:42.660 I think they make our culture really unique and enable us to build awesome things really quickly.

00:00:48.920 One of the things I've really admired since I joined Hired about a year and a half ago is our quick, agile process.

00:01:02.340 As of now, we're up to about 35 engineers with multiple project managers.

00:01:08.130 However, much of the cool stuff we've built has not come from product managers or board meetings; it has come from Hired trusting us, hiring great people, and allowing us to have fun.

00:01:19.680 I'll show you some of the cool things we've built, which just happened to be the weeks that we get for free at Hired.

00:01:30.240 I actually messed up on the name of this talk initially when I submitted my proposal because I didn't realize it was permanent.

00:01:43.229 If there are any South Park fans, the joke about the underpants gnomes applies here.

00:01:49.470 It's supposed to be Phase 1, Phase 2, Phase 3, but I said Step 1, Step 2, Step 3.

00:01:54.570 So if any of you are worried about semantics, I'm sorry. Next year, if my company pays for me to be up here again, I'll do it right.

00:02:00.689 So, who am I? Nobody really, I'm just another Rails engineer. If you saw my plenary earlier, I gave a little bit of background.

00:02:14.870 I've been doing web development and Rails for about 10 years now.

00:02:21.319 I've tried to give back a little bit to the community and I think I've done a couple cool things along the way.

00:02:38.900 So, has anybody here actually used Hired before? Sweet. I know you have; you hire people with it.

00:02:45.769 Telling is my former employer, and he still likes me somehow!

00:02:53.180 He's a nice guy; talk to him—he works for Bleacher Report, which is probably one of the biggest Rails sites in the world.

00:03:04.969 So, in my nine years with Rails, I started at a company called SageBit.

00:03:10.010 It was a little Rails shop in Indianapolis, Indiana.

00:03:17.239 I got exposed to Rails back when it was version 1.1.

00:03:24.409 The thing we were working on was essentially a way for people to chop up sports videos of their kids and share them on social media.

00:03:37.609 This was before it lasted very long, and really, the only cool thing we actually did was brew beer in the basement.

00:03:50.199 However, that experience got me exposed to Rails, and that's why I'm still here ten years later.

00:03:56.870 The next company I went to was a marketing design firm, where I changed it up a little bit.

00:04:10.040 I went from building Rails apps to just chopping up HTML for our designers in Dreamweaver.

00:04:19.430 It felt like a step backwards, so I quit pretty much as soon as I found a better job.

00:04:25.539 That job was at a company called IgoDigital. None of you have probably heard of it but, if you have, awesome!

00:04:31.990 We were responsible for all of the product recommendations back-end for Amazon.com at one point.

00:04:47.220 If you've shopped at major online retailers, you've likely used our software.

00:04:51.669 Eventually, IgoDigital was acquired by ExactTarget, which was later acquired by Salesforce.

00:05:03.400 I could have actually just stayed at IgoDigital and ended up in San Francisco, but instead I moved to San Francisco to work for StyleOwner.

00:05:19.090 StyleOwner was my first big move in my career. I was the first engineer there and didn't know what I was doing.

00:05:30.000 We basically worked out of someone's apartment and coffee shops for a couple years. We raised three million dollars, then flushed it down the toilet.

00:05:42.520 But I learned some stuff about building cool products at StyleOwner with very small teams.

00:05:55.990 I then moved on to Bleacher Report, which was acquired by Turner Sports just a couple days before I started.

00:06:08.770 While there, we were doing billions of page views per month with tens of millions of unique visitors.

00:06:21.430 Bleacher Report was on Rails 2.3, surprisingly, and still might be. But it was an awesome place to work.

00:06:34.030 I think that experience was my leveling up. I worked with an amazing team and learned what it meant to build something stable that could scale.

00:06:40.030 While I was at Bleacher Report, I was also starting my own company at night. A friend wanted to start a company that would deliver on-demand massage.

00:06:57.970 I wasn't particularly interested in that, but I really wanted to build something I was proud of. So, we started working on it.

00:07:10.030 We built it up and eventually raised $48 million, doing tens of thousands of massages per month in 26 cities across three countries.

00:07:21.699 What I loved most about working at Soothe was having a small team that I trusted, allowing us to work on whatever we felt like.

00:07:31.780 Because of this, we were able to build an amazing platform in our free time and turn it into a company. After Soothe, I went on to Hired.

00:07:45.580 I quickly became the face of Hired. You may have seen my face across the internet on articles that teach you how to breastfeed.

00:08:07.479 Hired is pretty awesome. As I said, multiple people here have used it, and I'm really proud of the culture we've built there.

00:08:14.080 When I first started, I ended up thrown onto the cultural committee because I like to party and drink, and they wanted a more fun office. Now, we've grown from around 50 people with 10 engineers to 35 engineers and about 240 employees.

00:08:44.290 Since I started, our valuation has increased roughly 30-fold. The reason we've been able to build something so cool is that we have awesome engineers, and the company trusts us to do whatever we want.

00:09:14.020 Initially, I thought I was joining a behemoth company that would force me to work on whatever and follow a strict process. However, we do have some structure; we're an agile development team for the most part.

00:09:40.350 In my first few months at Hired, I got introduced to what we call the Hired hackathon. Most of us have participated in hackathons of sorts.

00:10:04.750 There's a nice definition from Google: it's an event that lasts several days where a large number of people meet to engage in collaborative computer programming.

00:10:10.030 However, it often serves as a term for managers to get you to work overtime and be excited about it.

00:10:29.289 When I heard of the Hired hackathon, I thought it meant coming into work on a Friday night or Saturday to eat pizza and pretend to enjoy it. But that wasn't what we were doing.

00:10:52.140 What Hired actually did was take the concept of Google's 20% time and offload it to a full week or two weeks, where engineers could just work on whatever they wanted.

00:11:18.880 It was kind of empowering and awesome, and I never really experienced anything like this before.

00:11:41.250 At Hired, we were already an agile development team with one project manager and typical two-week sprints. There was a lot of innovation because there was very little hand-holding.

00:12:04.700 The engineering team was separated into a product cycle to support both candidate and employer sides.

00:12:12.000 While we followed an agile process for a while, eventually, as we got more engineers, we introduced a structure that didn't necessarily work out.

00:12:31.750 We decided to try something called the menu of opportunity. It allowed people to add things they thought were cool to a list and then pick whatever they wanted to build and test.

00:12:50.350 Those were parts of the process we took away that were actually awesome, but having 25 engineers with no direction didn't work out so well.

00:13:12.880 So, we returned to an agile process and decided to combine that with a hackathon model. Around the same time, we transitioned into data-informed product development.

00:13:32.530 Initially, it was actually data-driven product development, which sounds great, but data doesn't always tell the full story.

00:14:00.670 You don't always know how to measure properly, especially when building new things. Often, it can take longer to check if something you build will actually make a profit.

00:14:23.050 We eventually transitioned to data-informed product development, where we now have a full data science team that measures things for us.

00:14:36.030 This way, the engineers can build, and someone else analyzes results to see if it worked.

00:14:49.780 As we have grown into a company with thousands of users and hundreds of employees, we need to maintain discipline and long-term focus.

00:15:10.600 We want to continue iterating quickly and building cool products without worrying about product management cycles and board meetings.

00:15:34.400 From my experience over the last ten years, I've learned that an effective product organization balances short-term innovation with long-term investment.

00:15:55.010 In smaller teams, it's often challenging to do both, so one usually focuses on one aspect, but as you grow, you need to adapt.

00:16:08.180 So, we brought back the hack week, which is an opt-in week where engineers can literally do whatever they want.

00:16:16.580 You can build internal tools, product-facing features, and since we are an agile team, if you build something, you can deploy it to production in front of our users the same day.

00:16:33.180 It sounds scary—sometimes there are bugs—but it works well and enables our people to build features that may not otherwise be prioritized.

00:16:51.370 Heaton, who is actually sitting here, provided an excellent model for us. When he first started at Hired, he didn't jump into the codebase; he went to the business side and sat with people.

00:17:12.940 He understood their problems and watched their day-to-day work, which led him to build cool features that made their jobs easier.

00:17:27.610 We also decided to host our first business hack week on top of the engineering hack week.

00:17:42.860 This was led by Jeremy, one of our engineers turned product manager, who realized we needed uninterrupted time to create cool solutions.

00:17:51.170 We called for anyone in the company with ideas that weren't getting heard to pitch them, and then we’d team up to build and ship those ideas.

00:18:05.530 Everyone in the company got involved, loved it, and we built more new features in that week for our business teams than we had in the previous year.

00:18:19.600 Connecting people across teams worked well and allowed them to create amazing solutions.

00:18:35.000 We introduced another unique event called Mega Week, which happens twice a year. During this week, everyone from Hired around the world flies to our main office.

00:18:50.840 We have parties, motivational speeches, and activities that break down the barriers between engineering and business.

00:19:02.100 Often, there's a disconnect between these departments, and this initiative creates opportunities for collaboration.

00:19:19.550 We also created an event called Pairing with the Stars, where company members can sign up to pair program with an engineer for an hour.

00:19:36.460 People had different interests; some wanted to learn about our application, others wanted to build new features.

00:19:45.260 This exercise fostered collaboration and created an environment where cool stuff could be built quickly.

00:20:00.600 I sent out a survey to everyone in the company, and it was a universal success.

00:20:18.020 People rated it highly and expressed a desire for more opportunities to work with engineers to explore building innovative solutions.

00:20:34.270 These activities became essential as we scaled; connections built within small teams enable operational empathy.

00:20:52.130 Everyone loves building cool things, even those who don’t get to do it on a daily basis.

00:21:12.699 I want to share some amazing features we've built during our hack weeks.

00:21:30.370 One significant creation was our improved search functionality. This feature now powers our platform and involves a crucial underpinning that came out of our hack week.

00:21:50.630 An engineer named Andrew decided to tackle our search infrastructure by building it on Elasticsearch.

00:22:05.420 He rebuilt our entire search infrastructure in that week, creating a foundation for our company for years.

00:22:22.290 This allowed us to create powerful search features that some people might not even know we have.

00:22:35.360 Additionally, we implemented chat ops to manage everything through Slack, including our auto-scaling infrastructure and managing deploys.

00:22:46.780 This has improved our development process and allowed us to create features quickly.

00:22:59.480 Among other projects, we built a script to obfuscate sensitive candidate data during product demonstrations, ensuring we uphold our promises.

00:23:10.740 Our bias removal feature also emerged from hack weeks, aiming to understand and address how biases affect hiring.

00:23:25.530 We've begun to publish studies showing how this feature can alter marketability in hiring situations.

00:23:44.930 We've also developed a sophisticated ETL pipeline to manage our backend data science.

00:24:02.290 Everyone was actively involved in building little features that enhance user experience, leading to significant improvements.

00:24:17.539 Our efforts have driven considerable user engagement, with positive feedback flooding in about our improvements.

00:24:40.290 As we scaled, we recognized the importance of working cross-team with empathy, which can often diminish in larger organizations.

00:25:01.630 Pairing engineering and business teams fostered a collaborative spirit and led to innovative features that may not have been coded otherwise.

00:25:18.440 We've built employer pages that were redesigned during hack weeks after the previous experience faced criticism.

00:25:39.100 We also created several other features that had a profound impact, including coding challenge updates and improvements to our email framework.

00:25:57.090 If you'd like to check out some of our open-source contributions, visit github.com/hired to see our work.

00:26:05.320 The success of our hack weeks reflects the need for companies to adopt a culture of innovation and empower employees.

00:26:27.330 There was a recent quote about enabling small groups of smart people to innovate by trusting them.

00:26:50.540 In my opinion, this has been foundational to our success at Hired.

00:27:10.420 Implementing this culture requires hiring trustworthy and talented individuals that you believe in.

00:27:27.000 Encouraging collaboration among employees—the business team working with engineers and vice versa—leads to great outcomes.

00:27:45.820 Finally, establish and maintain a routine for innovation like hack weeks that fosters creativity and collaboration.

00:28:02.780 I hope that I provided some valuable ideas on what we've done and why it works.

00:28:11.140 If you have any questions, feel free to talk to me after this. Thank you for coming, everyone!

Bradley Herman

2 talks

RailsConf 2016