Titles, tenure, and paths don't matter

Welcome to Rework, a podcast by thirty seven signals about the better way to work and run your business. I'm Kimberly Rhodes, joined by the cofounders of thirty seven signals, Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hanssen. This week, I thought we'd talk a little bit about the hiring processes at thirty seven signals. We've talked about it in a couple of different episodes. But Jason just recently wrote something on his Hey World about how we look at years of evidence versus years of experience. So I thought we would jump in with that. I'll link it to in our show notes, one of the things that this write up ends with is titles, tenure, and paths don't matter. The work does. Always look at the work. It's the truth. So with that, Jason, I'm gonna have you kind of kick off. You'll talk us through what you were talking about there, and then we'll kind of share a little bit about what we've been doing here at thirty seven Signals. Sure. Well, we just went through a designer hiring round, and the programmers went through a programming hiring round. So we got hiring on our mind. And at the end of the day, it always comes down to work. Like, what is this person made at the end of the day? Of course, before that, you look at a few other things. You know, you look at their writing abilities. You maybe look at their history a little bit. What what kind of things have they done? But, ultimately, the deciding factor is always the work itself. It's always that, and it's always kind of a surprise, actually. Like, sometimes you think, like, this leading candidate is gonna be the finalist, and then it turns out someone else comes from behind with the work or, you know, whatever it might be. But there's usually a surprise at the end. And, you know, what we've tried to do David can speak more to this, but on the programmer, hiring round, we kinda cast a little bit of a wider net for work. On the designer hiring round, I think we let the last five or six people do a project for us or invited them to do a project for us. It's a week's worth of work. They all delivered the work, but three of them were, like, kind of instant nos. And at least one of those was, like, I think this person could maybe win the whole thing. Win is maybe the wrong way to to put it, but kinda not also. Like, you are kinda winning, frankly, like, you win win a job in a sense. You're competing for one. And then of the two finalists, the work was just outstanding. It was a really hard decision. But the work always at the end, just like that is the thing that made the difference. It was who had more creative range, who displayed more range, who thought …