A conversation with a Waterloo founder made me rethink how we hire
Was at a BBQ in Kitchener last month and got talking to a guy who runs a small fintech startup. He told me he stopped looking for people with 5 years of startup experience and started hiring folks from totally different fields. Said his best hire was a chef who organized the kitchen like a dev pipeline. That hit different because I've been filtering resumes for the same old keywords forever. Maybe the magic isn't in the resume, it's in how someone thinks. Has anyone else tried hiring outside the usual pool and seen it work?
A chef running a kitchen like a dev pipeline is wild to me. I spent four years cooking on a line before I got into tech and I never once thought about it that way, but now that he says it, the ticket rail is basically a task board and the expo station is your PM calling out priorities. What gets me is the timing part, because a good line cook knows when to drop fries so they land with the burger, and that's the same gut feel a solid engineer has for sequencing deploys. The resume filter thing is real too, I watched my old company toss people for not having the right keywords and then wonder why every hire thought the same way. Your mileage may vary depending on the role, but I'd bet money that the chef works out better than some kid who just learned the startup buzzwords.