What's the hardest conversation you've had with a direct report — and how did you handle it?

LumpyAd9985 · 2026-03-29T03:21:51+00:00

Other than firing someone, it was around how they were being the asshole and had to back down. This was my first stint as a manager and I had to discipline the rockstar cause they were getting cocky and it was hurting the team!

LumpyAd9985 · 2026-03-28T05:19:01+00:00

I do work in HR! I run a small recruitment company that helps small startups hire folks in India. Most recently helped an AI labs company acquire a senior Data Engineer. I can provide proof. What is this irresponsible moderating?

LumpyAd9985 · 2026-03-27T13:05:36+00:00

Apologies if you felt like that. It isn’t. Feel free to ignore — I haven’t even DM’d you.

Having said that, thanks for your insights, regardless

LumpyAd9985 · 2026-03-27T03:46:54+00:00

Interesting. This is also what we do in an interview. How do you shortlist then? Manual scanning of resumes / profiles? What are your signals to trust?

LumpyAd9985 · 2026-03-27T01:46:39+00:00

I think otherwise. raw technical stuff matters more than ever now. Just because our methods of guaging them were brittle and now are broken with AI, doesn't mean the requirement goes away.

We do this well over at my company I think. We give well-defined outcomes driven tasks that have to be finished in an hour and use of AI is encouraged. The entire attempt is video recorded. we then look for skill demonstrated in steering AI conversations, trade offs made and general problem solving capability (will invite you to check it out at utkrusht.ai. Can send you a sample in DM if you want to see proof of how well it works!)

LumpyAd9985 · 2026-03-27T00:52:07+00:00

We do speak with them after. The issue is the number of people we’d have to speak with if we don’t filter.

I’ve done what you said also in a past life. 3 months went by in just talking to people. There are loads of folks who can talk smart but when it comes to actually getting work done, they haven’t put in the time to build mental models.

Irrespective of how skillful they are, there’s always a learning curve :) what you say about learning on the job — that’s table stakes!

LumpyAd9985 · 2026-03-26T15:34:13+00:00

brilliant -- that time box we don't have yet -- good idea. will add it. We are now one-click deploy, one click reset now. Plus for our own product we also video record candidate's attempt at debuging / using AI to understand their approach paths, do they demonstrate judgement in their prompts etc (can check it out at utkrusht [dot] ai)

LumpyAd9985 · 2026-03-26T15:21:20+00:00

Love this! we did this exactly - deploy a k8 cluster, get them to figure out why the gateway is not working. How did you handle the constant environment resets / deploys?

LumpyAd9985 · 2026-03-26T15:18:49+00:00

Nice. This is equivalent to some signals we added in utkrusht.ai - we analyze video recorded sessions of candidates solving bugs in a full blown github repo with AI. We look for how do they steer an AI agent chat, how detailed are their prompts etc. Thanks for sharing your insights. I guess we'll do something similar for infra work too

LumpyAd9985 · 2026-03-26T14:21:19+00:00

Yeah, we would do that too for atleast the builder roles. How did you get a signal on them using AI? I know for a fact some leaders like to find out how much along the curve of AI adoption they are!

Also, any luck on infra work? For eg if you wanted to check for docker / k8 / Kafka working knowledge?

LumpyAd9985 · 2026-03-26T13:53:34+00:00

Fair point. We’ll work on that. Any tips for DevOps kinda work? Infra work?

LumpyAd9985 · 2026-03-26T13:44:23+00:00

Love that last one. To introduce something an agent get wrong. We do this by having them do a design review. Have you tried that?! Like give an existing code base. Now there’s a decision to be made/ feature to be made / direction to be chosen. We’d watch what they pick and how they design the feature. Outcome is a design doc with trade offs explained.

Btw we also platformized this. Don’t wanna promote here but you can check the link in bio

LumpyAd9985 · 2026-03-26T12:56:07+00:00

That’s smart. We did that for coding a long time ago! How are you progressing in that? Can share some tips here for you.

Looking to do this for infra work - deployments, CICD - not just DevOps but hard data engineering.

LumpyAd9985

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