Years ago, the company I was working at decided to drop any technology different than Ruby on Rails. It makes sense given it was the root technology. The problem, for me, was that we were advertising ourselves as eComm experts and by then neither Solidus nor Spree were relevant on the market like Magento, Shopify, Demandware or even Vtex.
This presented a bigger issue for me, doing so meant letting go of people as they were working on these technologies.
I raised my hand, asking to build an e-commerce unit: take care of the clients we already had on those platforms and keep the path open for new technologies. So I became e-commerce director.
For one platform we already had a partner, for the other, the plan was to find one but I proposed to hire someone instead.
Someone I had seen work
I’ll call him Steady.
I had worked with Steady before, on other projects, and he had shown aptitude and attitude. He left the company at some point, and we stayed in touch and helped each other here and there, as peers. Outside the company he was recognized in the platform’s community.
“I want to hire him”, the board said yes.
Reputation put him on my radar. The call was easy because I had seen his work, and I wasn’t the only one vouching for him.
He guided the client and the team. He coached people on the platform, and taught them well. He also helped with other e-commerce work.
Suddenly, the client started to disappear. We needed product data, images, specs but it was absent, and at the same time more demanding.
More than once I had to jump into the calls. Steady’s detailed report was all I needed, but in the call he was the one leading.
“Do you want me to take care of the call?” I asked. “No. Step in only if needed.” “Ok”, I agreed. I trusted this guy, not blindly or because of our friendship. I trusted him because he had shown professionalism and high quality work before.
I don’t remember anything else he said in those calls. I remember his face: calm, eyes half closed, very relaxed. He spoke slowly, never in a hurry. The client could get desperate; Steady would breathe, take a moment, and answer with the documented facts.
That’s not on a CV.
We ended the deal with that client anyway. Then another client on the same platform came in, and with the people we already had, the unit went from losing money to a profit. A small one, but a profit.
Someone I had heard of
Later, at another company, a different CV crossed my desk. A very impressive one.
- Great references from known companies, and big achievements.
- Books written.
- Talks. Recognized in several places, supposedly.
The role was team lead. I’ll call the person what the profile promised: the super engineer.
I didn’t interview the candidate or make the decision; I only saw the CV.
And you know … something felt off.
The dates fit. The achievements didn’t quite. I remember the feeling more than the specifics: small inconsistencies here and there.
Telling a story, I get it; details drift. A CV is supposed to be the hard verified data.
I checked what I could:
- Mentions outside the CV: none I could find.
- The book: couldn’t find it. To be fair, I didn’t search much.
- GitHub: very poor.
To me, the CV looked fake. That was my read, from the outside.
I raised my hand:
“Ey, I don’t think this is the right person for this role”
Nobody acted on it.
Supa Friend, a colleague, did interview the candidate and rated them poorly too. The answer he got was roughly: “ah yes, we’ll look into it.”
The hire went through.
I remember a quick chat about it: “Did you verify the CV?” “No, but during the interview, the super engineer was unable to answer some questions, doubts, ramblings, no answer…” “then?” “I don’t know, I was the only one asking deeper and deeper questions, like if I was the only one assessing fit to the role; the rest was already charmed” “well… we’ll see”
The first questions
About five months in, the super engineer’s team still didn’t know when they would be delivering the project. Then, I was assigned to help with the first of three pending service integrations.
My first questions were about the service’s documentation and how they ran it locally. No answer about the docs. No idea how to run it locally.
Then, how they tested it on staging. Not a trivial question: staging had restricted access for security, and some services couldn’t reach parts of it unless you configure them properly. The super engineer didn’t have it clear. I asked:
- Was it configured with Terraform?
- Did it need a specific environment?
- How was it being done, at all?
From what I can recall, the answer was:
“Ah yes, it’s that, you know, we have a script and, well, I run it over ssh and from there we see and so on.”
In Mexico we call that cantinflear: talking a lot and saying nothing. Lots of doubt, no confidence in what was being said.
I helped refactor and finish that first integration. The other two turned out to be configuration and extension of it, so I finished them quickly. The team owned them; I was there as an engineer to support, and they shipped to production.
Seen vs heard of
Both had reputation, and both went straight into a role that mattered. Only one had people who had seen the work.
The difference wasn’t the CV. I had seen one of them work. The other was known only by a public profile.
And with the second one, the people who tried to look past the profile weren’t heard.
A CV and a referral are both claims. What matters is whether the person making it has seen the work. Steady’s came from people who had worked with him. The super engineer’s came from the super engineer.
That doesn’t make referrals the answer. They mostly don’t bring more skill; they bring people who stay. (Burks et al., 2015)
My own reading:
A referral is worth what the referrer is worth. If I had been the wrong referrer, hiring Steady would have been just connections.
As for the CV, it was never great proof. A 2022 meta-analysis found that years of experience, a line every CV has, barely predict job performance (.07). A work sample test, actually watching someone do the work, predicts it far better (.33). (Sackett et al., 2022)
Books, talks, references. They tell you someone has been heard of.
A CV tells you what someone says they did. Someone who has seen them work can tell you if it’s true.