Taste, talent, and how 37signals hires designers

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So what we're actually doing now is we're um it's been challenging to find people who can fit right in at that high level. So we're actually doing now is we're searching for some juniors um and we want to bring people along. So find incredibly talented junior people who of course wouldn't be able to fit in at a senior level or lead level initially but have the potential to do so. So we're actually going in a different direction. Before we were only looking for people who are at a high level. Now we're looking for people who have high potential and that's actually been quite exciting. We're we're in the process of hiring right now. Um so that that's that's been challenging. Um although I think just the way we we're going about it was the challenging thing. There's a million zillion amazing programmers. I think we're just looking for the cream of the crop in a way that that was very difficult to do and I think there's another way to do it. So we're changing

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our methods there. We just put a call for design for for a new product designer and we got some extraordinarily good candidates. So that's been a bit easier to hire for. Jason, you should know that that AI is getting rid of junior developers. Yeah, I've heard about that. I don't don't believe it. Look, if you if you love making software, um you know, and I think a lot of people do. Um AI is not going to do it for you. Um there's things it can do with you and there's code it can absolutely write for you in a sense, but you still have to have the idea. You still have to see it. You have to guide it. You have to work with it. Um, and maybe at some point that will not be true. Um, but I I'm not so sure. Um, I think it's going to become a better and better and better companion. It's going

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to do more and more and more of the busy work, but I think if you want to make software at some point, you're going to have to know how how it works because I think it's just like anything, if you don't understand the fundamental materials, it's very difficult to build with those materials. And AI is still writing code. It's still writing like code in a language that you can write. And if you don't understand what it's doing and you don't understand what it's writing, I don't think you're gonna be able to make things as well as you could as if you did understand that. So, I think that you want to be a programmer still. There's going to be lots of people who want to program still. Um, and they'll just maybe be better at it with AI, but I don't think AI is going to replace really honestly that many people yet. But I think it at some point it could. But right now, I think it's just a great aid. It's a great helper.

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And in fact, it just makes everyone more efficient in a sense. So you can get more out of a junior programmer. You can get a more return on a junior programmer than you could have before. That's a great thing. What's your take on a players? I mean, you're now reviewing applications. Like when you say cream de la crop, like what is that to you? Yeah. Well, it depends on the job. So I I've typically hire designer. I'm on the design side of things. So I don't hire programmers, but I'll hire designers. To me, ultimately, what we're looking for, first of all, you have to have the basic skills, of course, like you have to be, let's just say, you have to have a good aesthetic. You have to be able to work within the the tools. tools. You have to write your own HTML and CSS. You've got to do all that stuff. Okay, let's assume that you're there's lots and lots and lots of people who are good at that. We're looking for taste. We're looking for for the ability to communicate. We're looking for the ability to riff and come up with new ideas on the fly.

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We're looking for someone who's an organized thinker um who can present things and knows what matters and what doesn't. So, it's a lot of nuance stuff. So, what we do in the end is we give the last few candidates a project to do for us for a week and we pay them for that week and they all do the same project. they do it independently and then we look at the work and the work reveals everything. It reveals like what was did this person think was important? What did this person think mattered and didn't matter? Um how much energy they spent on certain areas of the screen that they're designing. For example, the latest assignment was kind of rework the base camp home screen in the app, not on the marketing site, but in the app where we currently just have a grid of products or grid of projects. like what what else could this be if it wasn't just a destination to bounce off from but a place to come back to? What else could it be? And and so we have this