Comment by kator | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kator | Hacker News Reader

I have always focused on hiring for attitude and aptitude. If you have the attitude to learn, and the aptitude to grown your skills, then you'll do great at anything you're passionate about.

I literally hired a guy who was a part-time computer hobbyist but, a full time pool man. I told him "hey how would you like to spend 40 hours a week learning more about computers." Today he's working as a leader in his company's security group. He often thanks me for the job, and I always remind him "you did the work, all I did was give you the opportunity".

Sadly as stated in the thread linked, its hard when you have 10k applicants, to treat each as a potentially amazing member of the your team. I still try hard to look for that attitude and aptitude, and if a candidate demonstrates this in our dialog, I will do my best to find a path for them to connect with other opportunities if they're not a strong match for roles I'm filling on my teams.

What I know is we're born to this world knowing how to eat, breathe, cry, and a couple other things. The rest, all of it, we've learned on our way to this day. Just because the person in front of me didn't have the same path as me, doesn't mean they won't learn to have an incredible impact going forward. Searching for this potential and type of partnership at scale is hard. My heart wants to say it can be solved, but my calendar is an evil overlord that only allows me only so many hours a day to invest in growing my teams...

This is pretty much where I am at now. Attitude, open-mindedness and general ability to endure pain are what I look for.

I can teach 100% of the tech stack to a total noob in a matter of weeks. Trial by example is my lesson of choice these days. The good apprentice will absorb these like a dry sponge to water.

It also really helps that our tech stack is simple and fits on 1 computer. It is not bullshit abstraction either - You install 3 things on a fresh Win10 box to promote it to "Official Developer Machine" status. None of these things happens to be Docker or any other containerization tech, so even junior developers are expected to understand how the product runs on the bare metal/vm. Spoiler: It's 1 process & 1 service so they learn it fast.

Basically what I am trying to say is that your ability to consume non-PhD candidates is partially predicated upon how you've decided to run your tech business. If you (ab)use enterprise arch like message buses, event sourcing, et. al., you are going to find that it requires additional mountain ranges worth of background knowledge to understand how these things fit together. If your tech stack can be considered within the context of a single process, the margin of understanding becomes much more practical to work with in my experience.

Honestly, I almost prefer to start with a blank slate these days. Don't know how a computer works? Fucking fantastic! I can probably still get you productive in my simple C#/SQLite tech stack faster than if I had to de-program some web-scale zealot for the same purpose.

This is a fantastic comment, and it matches exactly the attitude that Anthony Bourdain wrote about in his book Kitchen Confidential, which I read in eighth grade and have thought about weekly ever since.

CTRL+F for "WHO COOKS" and read the whole section to see a professional chef say exactly the same thing you said about programming.

https://joeandjin.files.wordpress.com/2011/10/anthony-bourda...

This is a fantastic read. And, I totally agree - the parallels are quite obvious.

Great read.

> Trial by example is my lesson of choice these days.

That's an easy way to develop lessons, but seems like it would lead to a lot of cargo cult mechanisms. Especially once those people started teaching.

> your ability to consume non-PhD candidates is partially predicated upon how you've decided to run your tech business

I've found a PhD (without work experience) is a bad sign.

>. If you (ab)use enterprise arch like message buses, event sourcing, et. al., you are going to find that it requires additional mountain ranges worth of background knowledge to understand how these things fit together

I know I've hit the point several times where what I consider trivial is complex, but are message buses and events really that difficult? (And isn't event sourcing just one of the standard ways events are used?) Aren't buses covered in programming 101?

I took multiple CS classes at a top university* and I never heard about message buses or events...

Admittedly I was not a CS major and don't work in software engineering.

(To be honest, it being a top university probably decreased the probability that they would teach me practical/useful engineering practices like this. The programming classes I took were fairly focused on more theoretical concerns)

I had a similar experience. I didn't learn about message buses until I was working in a massive enterprise ecosystem.

It reminds me of a place I worked years ago that had their own unique and I would say simple tech and they did hire from the street. What was standing between you and that job was a rigorous two week U program. Daily classes taught a small group of prospects the ropes and at the end a small number of obvious people were hired. It was always pretty obvious. Some of the people hired were homemakers, blue collar workers, even a Cobol programmer.

Do you remember when the hired codebreakers for the war effort and they tested them with crosswords.

> Honestly, I almost prefer to start with a blank slate these days

This is about Technical Support training (not programming) and is from my recent experience.

When I was running a small customer service team on a Linux based product, and needed new staff, I thought that the best idea was to get people who had 'significant' experience in Linux.

That was until I discovered (from a bad hire) that people lied about their experience (resumes) and motivation (interview). This was an older guy - he wasn't motivated at all and treated me like a babysitter.. It wasn't about his age - he was just useless - and he had managed to fool me. That hire was my fault..

And although I utterly hate ageism (being 50+), I was turned off by this experience..

The next two I hired were younger guys (sorry ladies, no resumes submitted). Those two (somehow??) took to my particular style of training really well - and were able to take over all but the most advanced cases after 3-6 months of training on a bespoke php application. - one loved all the SQL I could throw at him - another loved getting deep into networking issues and how to solve them

Between us we were able to work through a ~200+ case backlog down to 0 by the time I left the company.

I am very proud of what these two guys put into their work (bash/shell/vi remote primary tools - all mostly alien to them to start with).

Not sure that I could do the same with training a programming role..

Staff (personal) motivation is the key I think..

It looks more like the hiring process for McDonalds...

You probably didn't mean it like that but "attitude, open-mindedness and general ability to endure pain" is the qualities that I would want a slave to have. There is no experience, inventiveness, leadership, autonomy, knowledge, logical thinking, initiative, problem solving, etc... here, even though there are qualities that matter to engineers. There are only qualities that matter when it comes to executing orders. I doesn't mean that they are undesirable, it is important to have people who stay enthusiastic even when they don't do as they please, but it is not all there is to a skilled job.

You want someone who learns by example, and from a blank slate. Yep, that's how you get a good burger flipper. But for a developer to quickly learn by example in all but the most simple projects, he needs a solid background. A programmer who knows 10 programming languages will pick up the 11th in no time at all, literally. One who knows zero will need more than a few weeks of looking at you to code competently.

You seem to be in a rare situation where you need a low-skilled developer. Most projects require either high skills or no one at all (automation).

Note that many people think they don't need skilled developers, until they realize the mess people have done. It is a common problem with off-shoring to countries with low labor cost, like India. People think they are going to save a lot of money until they realize that it is cheap for a reason. You can get quality work done in India if you pay the price, but too many people go there to not pay the price.

As for "web-scale zealots", you probably mean people who are on top of "mount stupid" in the Dunning-Kruger curve. Yep, they are the worst and you'd rather have a "blank slate". But if you think about it, since we all have that bias to some extent, the fresh people you have are walking towards mount stupid and will become worse, if you hire them when they are overconfident, they are passing it and becoming better.

You have a bright career as a LinkedIn influencer ahead of you.

>" You have a bright career as a LinkedIn influencer ahead of you. "

I am not sure exactly what you meant to say, but this came off as a bit snide (to me).

LinkedIn is full of completely farcical stories about recruiters who had the prescience to hire someone even though they were 30 seconds late for an interview or didn't wear a tie or hadn't graduated from an Ivy League school or some other such nonsense. And because of this HR drone's largesse, this person later did their job satisfactorily.

I honestly can't tell if the GP meant it in a snide way (like my example above) or as an honest compliment. It could be either, really.

What the person means here is that on Linkedin there are a lot of (usually staged) comments or videos of people that "saved the life of that person that had $X and nobody employed and (s)he is now the best $Y". These posts are highly shared and commented upon. I don't think the comment was mocking you really, it was just a funny parallel (hope I'm not wrong).

>"I don't think the comment was mocking you really"

I did not make the top-level comment.

definitely they weren't mocking you then!

Not trying to be snide to OP, but his/her anecdote does hit the typical Linkedin influencer plot beats which I find amusing:

  I literally hired a guy who was a part-time computer hobbyist but, a full time pool man.

  I told him "hey how would you like to spend 40 hours a week learning more about computers."

  Today he's working as a leader in his company's security group.

  He often thanks me for the job, and I always remind him "you did the work, all I did was give you the opportunity".

LOL I feel like they'd use even more line breaks than that.

Thanks for the insight, I agree with you.

What's hard is to interview for attitude and aptitude, and scaling that so other people know how to interview for those traits. Would you mind sharing some insight on what type of interview, green flags, things you are looking for, or process? Hopefully it's not only gut feeling :)

Focus on asking the candidate "why", and you're 50% there. Why did you choose X, why would you pick Y, why is Z better, why is W more expensive, why did K happen... The "what" are just conversation starters (unless severely incorrect or misguided, of course).

> What I know is we're born to this world knowing how to eat, breathe, cry, and a couple other things

Something I found interesting about having kids was the realisation that even some of those things had to be learnt to some extent. Babies have natural drives that lead them to feed, but they often still have trouble in the early days with breast feeding. Even the first breath doesn't always happen as automatically as you might think.

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