Insight certainty 4/5 debate potential 3/5

Rejecting international engineers for lacking English fluency was a colossal mistake

Pat Poels · Engineering Your Own "Luck": The 3 Key Rules of Building Globally Distributed Teams with Eventbrite · Jun 25, 2019 · at 16:39

Pat Poels, former VP of Engineering at Eventbrite, reflects on hiring biases and lessons learned when building distributed engineering teams in non-English speaking markets.

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“Over the course of the first two years doing hiring in Mendoza, we let, we did not hire probably three, maybe even four great engineers purely because they didn't speak English very well. And this was a colossal mistake.”

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More from Pat Poels

Opinion
Poels: Building engineering teams outside San Francisco beats centralizing
“What I'm here to tell you today is that it's not only possible to build world class, great development teams in places outside of San Francisco, but in actuality, it's better.”
Pat Poels Jun 25, 2019 ▶ 1:56 Engineering Your Own "Luck": The 3 Key Rules of Building Globally Distributed Teams with Eventbrite
What-if
Eventbrite would never have IPO'd without its Nashville engineering hub
“Without the work happening in Nashville, IPO never happens for us. Just full stop. We never have an IPO if we didn't get ourselves to a place where our books could close regularly and consistently.”
Pat Poels Jun 25, 2019 ▶ 24:19 Engineering Your Own "Luck": The 3 Key Rules of Building Globally Distributed Teams with Eventbrite
Insight
Assigning minor tasks to remote engineering hubs destroys morale and recruiting
“The outcome of giving your distributed teams work that's less important is you will not have distributed teams who are excited to come to work. You won't be able to have them attract other great engineers in market.”
Pat Poels Jun 25, 2019 ▶ 22:27 Engineering Your Own "Luck": The 3 Key Rules of Building Globally Distributed Teams with Eventbrite
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Eventbrite achieved Google-level hiring advantages by empowering its regional hubs
“The reward for giving them that trust and autonomy has been, we are the place to work for engineers in both Mendoza and Nashville full stop. We are the best place to work and it's known by everybody that advantage that Google used to have over us. In San Franc…”
Pat Poels Jun 25, 2019 ▶ 27:46 Engineering Your Own "Luck": The 3 Key Rules of Building Globally Distributed Teams with Eventbrite
Assertion Supported
Eventbrite found a top-ten Rails contributor in a Mendoza startup
“The engineer that I met was, he was one of the top 10 contributors to the rails project lifetime. And he actually hadn't done any contributing for more than a year, but I look up the list of people who contributed to rails and he was like number nine lifetime.”
Pat Poels Jun 25, 2019 ▶ 9:30 Engineering Your Own "Luck": The 3 Key Rules of Building Globally Distributed Teams with Eventbrite
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Poels: Mendoza engineering salaries are roughly 30% of San Francisco levels
“First off, the salaries in Mendoza are roughly 30% what they are in San Francisco.”
Pat Poels Jun 25, 2019 ▶ 14:04 Engineering Your Own "Luck": The 3 Key Rules of Building Globally Distributed Teams with Eventbrite
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