Treating Devs Like Human Beings | A Conversation with Kelly Vaughn, Jean Hsu & Lena Reinhard

**Conor Bronsdon** (0:00)
Jean, let's start with you. What do you find so rewarding about this subject matter?

**Jean Hsu** (0:04)
I was drawn to it, despite its clickbaity title, because I feel like-

**Conor Bronsdon** (0:08)
I feel called out, I'm so sorry, but I feel called out here.

**Jean Hsu** (0:11)
I know, every time, I checked in this morning on Range, which is where I work, and I put an eye-rolly emoji after saying I was going to be recording this panel, because it's just like, I mean, to me, it's so obvious, right? You should obviously treat your developers like human beings, but I think it is one of the biggest gaps in the industry, still, and so it's obviously not obvious to some people, or just like people are not given the training or skills to do it effectively.

**Conor Bronsdon** (0:42)
When times are tough, engineering leaders need as much help as they can get.
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Hey everyone, welcome to Interact and our next panel, Treating Devs Like Human Beings. I'm your panel moderator, Conor Bronsdon, cohost of the Dev Interrupted Podcast, and I'm joined by three incredible humans today.
It's a topic that we hear about again and again from the best leaders in the business, the need to treat developers as the creative, insightful problem solvers and builders that they are. Sometimes among all the sprints, the pressure to ship faster, tools to measure lines of code written, it seems like we as an industry kind of forget the simple fact that developers are knowledge workers, not robots. And we have to remind each other of that. We all have thoughts and feelings, needs and wants, and it's our collective job as an industry to remember that. It's the right thing to do. It's crucial to retaining top talent and to create an incredible developer experience that makes your company stand out and perform better. So to help us remember, it's my pleasure to introduce our panel of participants. With us today are Jean Hsu, VP of Engineering at Range. Jean, welcome in.

**Jean Hsu** (2:17)
Thank you. Thanks for having me.

**Conor Bronsdon** (2:19)
Where are you joining us from today?

**Jean Hsu** (2:20)
I'm in Berkeley, California.
It's just a little bit outside of San Francisco. Awesome.

**Conor Bronsdon** (2:25)
Great to have you here. Then we also have Kelly Vaughn. She's an Engineering Manager at Spot AI, and you've probably seen her on Twitter.

**Kelly Vaughn** (2:32)
Yes, it's great to be here.

**Conor Bronsdon** (2:34)
Kelly and Jean, I have to say, I love the bookshelves in your backgrounds, by the way. I'm regretting not putting mine in the shot.

**Kelly Vaughn** (2:41)
My office has turned into an article showroom.

**Conor Bronsdon** (2:44)
I like that.
Then last but definitely not least, we have Lena Reinhard. She's an Engineering Leadership Coach, Consultant, and Trainer, and she's also been an Engineering Leader at multiple successful organizations, and she's joining us from Italy today. Hi, Lena.

**Lena Reinhard** (2:59)
I don't have a bookshelf, but I have a pews box in case anyone is interested. It's so great to be here.

**Conor Bronsdon** (3:06)
It's wonderful having you here. Thank you so much, all of you, for joining us. Our goal today is to have a little fun, might even say a human conversation. I know, terrible jokes. I want to kick off this panel by doing something a little different.
When we were talking before this conversation, maybe a hot take came up when we're talking to Kelly. Kelly, you said that you question whether or not engineers should be required to code in an interview.
What's your take?

**Kelly Vaughn** (3:34)
Yeah, I love starting on a hot take, by the way. This is a great way to kick this off. Yeah, this is one of those hills I'll die on. I'm a strong proponent of not having a coding exercise in a technical interview.
Reason being, most of the time, we're hiring engineers who are not absolutely brand new. They've been coding at other companies before. They have plenty of production building experience. So I am not here to see exactly how you code, especially live. First off, we're not standing behind each other, watching each other code, so that's not a thing.