Building Strong Dev Teams: Beyond Code Tests and Into Culture, Trust, and Fit
“Every act of creation begins with an act of destruction” – Pablo Picasso.
My standard ‘build a to-do list’ interview process was bringing in the wrong people. It took a missed project milestone for me to realize that I wasn’t just hiring developers—I was building cohesive development teams that would either thrive or collapse based on my leadership.
The secret to exceptional software teams isn’t just who you bring in—it’s creating the right environment for them to thrive. For most of my career, I’ve been either leading or part of software development teams, and what I learned is this: the best teams are made of individually productive developers who are exceptional teammates.
The Hiring: Design Your Process Around Reality.
If you’re leading a dev team, one of the most impactful things you can do is refine your developer hiring process. Don’t fall into the trap of generic coding tests—build interviews around the actual engineering work your team does daily.
Are they joining a startup where they’ll need to move fast? A legacy codebase with heavy support and debugging? Or a scaling org where structure matters?
Aligning hiring to real context is critical to managing software teams well.
The point is simple: design your interview around the actual work they’ll be doing.
Real-World Example
I took over a four-year-old project drowning in tech debt. Our interviews had tested for greenfield creativity, but what we needed was code comprehension and stability.
Yet our interview process was the standard ‘build a to-do list app’ take-home assignment. While that wasn’t inherently bad, we were hiring people who were great at building things quickly and creatively—but that’s not what this project needed. Our project was mid-cycle and needed stabilization, not new features.
Photo by Joel Muniz on Unsplash
So I built a code reading test. Why? Because developers were spending 50%+ of their time understanding old systems—not crafting new ones. This shift in the developer hiring process directly improved team fit, delivery, and morale.
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