The Delusion of Internal Borders
Breaking Down the Silo as a Systemic Act
When I joined Shutterstock in 2017, I discovered that engineers with years of proven, high-impact work—people who’d shipped critical features, who understood the systems intimately—had to run the full external hiring gauntlet just to transfer to another team. Full-day interview loop. Whiteboard algorithms. The whole theater.
This wasn’t some edge case. It was policy. And it was insane.
More than that, though, it was a declaration of institutional distrust. Your track record, your context, your demonstrated value? Worthless the moment you wanted to move from Payments to Editor, or from Contributor Experience to Enterprise. The organization was treating its own people like strangers. Worse than strangers. Strangers at least get the benefit of the doubt. Internal candidates got skepticism.
This is depressingly common. It’s organizational self-harm disguised as rigor.
What This Actually Reveals
Requiring a full re-interview of someone you already employ is a diagnostic. It tells you several things about the organization, none of them good:
Teams don’t trust each other’s judgment. Team A doesn’t believe Team B’s assessment of an engineer is valid. Maybe Team B has low standards. Maybe they promote people for the wrong reasons. Maybe they just assess differently. Whatever the reason, there’s no federated trust. You’re not one engineering organization, you’re a collection of suspicious fiefdoms with internal borders.
There’s no calibrated standard for “good.” Without an organization-wide leveling framework and a consistent interview process, every team’s assessment is proprietary. Non-transferable. Each team is running its own private credentialing system, and nobody else accepts the credentials.
The organization can’t adapt. When moving talent internally is harder than hiring externally, you’ve created a brittle, static structure. Talent gets trapped in one area while another starves. Business priorities shift, but people can’t flow to where they’re needed because the friction is too high.
But here’s the core pathology: This practice is institutional contempt. It tells every employee that their contribution, their context, the trust they’ve built—none of it matters. You’ve spent three years shipping critical projects? Great. Now do a whiteboard algorithm so we can verify you know how to reverse a linked list. This isn’t a tax on morale. It’s an insult to professional identity. And it’s why your best people leave for companies that actually value their track record.
Imagine an engineer who has successfully shipped multiple critical projects over three years. Forcing them through a full-day interview, including basic algorithmic challenges, isn’t just a waste of time, it’s an act of institutional contempt.
What We Did: Engineering for a Borderless Organization
Fixing this required deliberate organizational re-engineering. The goal: create a single, trusted currency for talent assessment. Make every team’s judgment portable across the organization.
We built a standardized technical interview process and a robust leveling framework; transparent, consistently applied, calibrated across all teams. This wasn’t about bureaucracy. It was about writing down the rules so the game was fair.
The structural pieces:
A consistent set of interview domains (system design, domain expertise, behavioral competencies) led by functional representatives. Every interview, regardless of team, assessed against the same core competencies.
A codified career ladder with explicit behavioral expectations and impact definitions for each level. The difference between Senior and Staff wasn’t opinion anymore, it was documented, ratified standard.
Mandatory pre- and post-interview huddles. Brief, structured meetings where the panel aligned on what they were looking for and calibrated their assessments before making a decision. This forced consistency.
Comprehensive documentation for everyone: interviewers, candidates, hiring managers. Not red tape. Clarity.
For internal transfers: The loop focused on what was actually new—team-specific context, domain knowledge, mutual fit. It respected the engineer’s existing record. If you’d already proven you could code at a Senior level, we didn’t make you prove it again on a whiteboard.
Some team leads resisted. Predictable. They’d been operating autonomously, and this felt like a loss of control. We overcame it by involving them directly in the design and by showing them, with data, that a calibrated process would give them better hiring outcomes. Not just better for the organization, but better for their teams.
What This Actually Is: Lessons for the System Architect
Leadership is systems architecture. You’re engineering the conditions under which people can do their best work. That requires diagnosing pathologies and fixing them at the root.
Some takeaways:
Involvement neutralizes resistance. Engage stakeholders in designing the new system. Co-creation is more effective than mandate. People will accept constraints they helped create.
Structure enables agility, not prevents it. A standardized system isn’t a cage if you build in appropriate flexibility. Allow for team-specific needs, but never compromise the core principles: fairness, calibration, portability.
Systems are products. They need iteration, feedback loops, continuous improvement. The first version won’t be perfect. That’s fine. Ship it, learn, improve.
Narrative matters as much as mechanics. The best-designed system fails if people don’t understand why it exists. Explain the benefits, address the fears, show the positive outcomes. You’re not just implementing process, you’re changing culture.
As organizations scale, they have to evolve from implicit, trust-based networks to explicit, principle-based frameworks. You can’t run a 300-person engineering org on handshakes and vibes. But the goal isn’t just efficiency. It’s building a place where trust is the default, fairness is operational, and people feel valued enough to build careers instead of occupying jobs.
Dismantling internal borders isn’t about making transfers easier. It’s about replacing petty tribalism with actual organizational citizenship. That’s the work—architecting systems that treat people like the valuable assets they are, not like interchangeable resources that need constant re-verification.
When you get it right, people stay. They invest. They build. Because they’re working for an organization that actually believes in them.