Q. Tell me about the culture you’re trying to foster.

A. A little background about our origins as a company will help. Guidewire was founded in 2001, right after the tech crash and right after 9/11. It was a very contrarian time to start a company, so one of our earliest principles was that we have to embrace adversity. We have to embrace difficulty. We won’t be rewarded just for being insightful. We’re going to be rewarded for solving a difficult problem. And if it’s not difficult, it means that we’re not actually doing the right thing.

We wanted to create an enduring business with a very strong set of values. We chose integrity, rationality and collegiality. Integrity is: simply tell the truth. There’s such a temptation to exaggerate, because if you have enough time and wishful thinking, you can build anything. So we said first and foremost, tell the simple truth. There’s never any ambiguity. We’re either going to win honestly or we’re going to not win at all, and that’s the way it’s going to be.

No. 2 is rationality, which is to make decisions based on facts and logic. That seems so simple, and yet organizations really struggle to be rational. So every decision, to the maximum degree possible, will be informed by objective criteria, by facts and by logic. And that means that titles don’t matter, and gut instinct doesn’t matter. Even experience is of very limited value. The facts have to speak. That translates into one of our mantras, which is “no wishful thinking.”

The final one is collegiality, which means minimum hierarchy. We’re going to create a community of equal professionals. There are some kinds of businesses where it’s hard to do that, because you have to have people who do relatively low-level tasks and then people who just manage them. The beauty of the kind of software we build is that you can actually build a very equal and collegial community of professionals.

Q. How did you come up with those values?

A. There were six founders, which is pretty large for a founding group. We spent the first week just pondering these longer-term questions. We said we have to consecrate our principles in a document that we will refer to over and over. This will be our DNA and every new person who joins the company will read the document. We put a great deal of thought into this, thinking of it almost like a constitution that will guide our future actions.

Q. Let’s talk about hiring.

A. There’s nothing terribly radical about our hiring process. We focus a lot on references and we hire a lot by internal referral. But in the actual interview, the main thing is that we ask people questions that are deeply relevant to the task at hand. We don’t ask abstract brainteasers. We examine their ability to do the kind of engineering they’re going to do.

Q. And beyond the discussion about engineering, what questions would you ask?

A. I ask a lot of questions about motivation. In reviewing a person’s background, I care much more about what motivated the transitions in their career than the specific tasks they did. Why did you make the decision to go to this company at this point in time? Why did you leave after that? What brings you, at this moment, to be interested in working for us? If the answer is, “Guidewire seems like a great company, and I’d like to be part of it,” that’s not enough. What specific attributes of Guidewire interest you? There has to be a substantiated, thought-through explanation of how that connects to the candidate’s own motivations. There can be an economic component to that — that’s fine — but it has to be authentic. The biggest red flag for us is when we see multiple career transitions in a short period. There has to be an extraordinarily good explanation. We’re looking for people who want to be with us for a long time.

It’s also often a bad answer for me when people are trying to present every single career step as though it was this perfectly orchestrated narrative arc. That’s not the way life usually works.

Q. If you could ask somebody only a couple of questions in an interview, what would they be?

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/14/business/guidewires-chief-on-embracing-adversity.html?partner=rss&emc=rss