Hiring at the seam
The problems worth solving in this company are almost all in the gap between two job descriptions. That makes hiring strange.
Ahmed AlSharif Co-founder and CTO 2 min read
Here is a thing I did not expect when we started. The hardest interview question we ask has nothing to do with the role.
We ask people what they did the last time the layer beneath them was wrong.
Most engineers have a story. A driver that reported memory it did not have. A kernel that was fast in the benchmark and slow in the loop. A thermal design that was fine until the second machine went in beside it. What separates people is what happened next.
Two kinds of answer
The first kind is a workaround. Something was wrong, so a layer was added on top to hide it, and the thing shipped. This is a completely reasonable answer. Most of the industry runs on it, and there are weeks when we run on it too.
The second kind of answer is that they went and looked. They read the driver. They put a probe on the board. They found out why, and then they either fixed it or they wrote down exactly what was broken so that somebody else could. These are the people we want, and they are not concentrated in any one discipline.
The efficiency only appears when the layers are designed together, which means it only appears when the people are.
Why this matters more here than elsewhere
If you build only software, the hardware is a given and working around it is the job. If you build only hardware, you ship the board and the drivers are somebody else’s problem. We do not have either excuse. The thermal envelope, the firmware, the scheduler and the serving engine are all ours, and every one of them can quietly waste what the others worked for.
That is why the seams matter so much. It is also why our team looks odd on paper. There are people here whose title says systems software who spend real time in front of a thermal camera, and hardware engineers who read scheduler traces. Nobody assigned that. It is just where the problems were.
If the description of your last role covered everything you actually did, we are probably not the right fit. If it covered about half, we should talk.