Before I was hired by Maxwell Health back in May of 2018, I was in full job search mode but only for the second time as a developer. Many of my interviews with other companies focused solely on technical questions, or even worse, coding exercises on a whiteboard with little dialogue, which in my opinion is not the optimal way to measure a developer’s skill set. When I interviewed at Maxwell Health, there were technical questions of course, but the coding portion focused on a peer programming exercise.

When I joined Maxwell Health in 2014, I was interviewed by our entire product team: a co-founder, our 2 engineers, and our designer. Even as our team grew to ~10 engineers, we all participated in every engineer interview. This was important to us because we had one scrum team, so we’d all be working directly with a new colleague. Eventually, our engineering team grew large enough that it became impossible to have everyone interview a candidate.

When I read Jez Humble’s book Continuous Delivery a few years ago, I felt like I was being watched. I thought Jez had been monitoring us and watching us struggle with deployments. In 2015, Maxwell Health released once a week. It was a coordinated affair and rife with what we discovered were anti-patterns. We would deploy off-hours, we coordinated deployments between teams, and each environment had its own build. If things went wrong, we would try to fix forward.