Comment by Sodman | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Sodman | Hacker News Reader

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I get that it's still a candidates market (especially for strong candidates like OP who can get 11 offers from 13 full attempts), but the spreadsheet of questions you should be asking a company linked in TFA has some eyebrow raising notes and unreasonable expectations imho.

For example - there's a big pushback that any hiring manager worried about a candidate who don't have required skills they could learn in 6-12 months is "quibbling". Is this a generally held belief? In the startup space in particular, most folks I interview frequently have consistent < 2 year stints at most if not all of their prior companies. Expecting a 12 month ramp-up time on a particular piece of technology needed to do the job would be an immediate no-hire from me. If I personally joined a company and couldn't meaningfully contribute for the first year, I would consider that a complete failure and expect to be let go. Do other people feel differently? Perhaps this expectation is more applicable to larger companies than startups?

When I was doing Linux driver dev, it was expected new hires would take 8-12 months to ramp up and start to contribute (usually not well at first).

When I asked the Mesa devs how long ramp-up was I was told around 12-18 months.

When I was working on ChromeOS we expected about 6 months of ramp.

I guess it’s just different projects and jobs at companies. I would never hold my breath to find a candidate that had experience in any of the above.

Hiring people all too often focus on required skills like 'X years of experience with generic tech Y' and look for those buzzwords on the resume.

But the real thing is, every company has its own processes and procedures, its own legacy and proprietary code, its own business and product goals in its industry, etc. That's where the real ramp-up comes in. 6-12 months is not a bad ramp-up target.

Would you really rather have someone who knows new tech XYZ very well and can hit the ground running with no ramp-up, but breaks process, refuses to touch the legacy code, knows nothing about the industry, and builds things counterproductive to your business goals?

Or would you rather have someone who doesn't know new tech XYZ at all and needs to ramp up, but will gladly pick it up while also learning and adopting your processes, legacy code, industry, and business goals, in order to contribute to the best of their ability?

For that, you not only need to learn the new tech, but a whole lot more. Learning the new tech is the least of it. And industry/domain experience isn't perfect but is worth a lot.

Yes, they should be able to meaningfully contribute fairly quickly, even with things that are new to them. It'll take a while to get really good though. But while they're ramping up on everything else anyway, why not let 'em ramp up on the tech? It's a relatively small thing in the big picture.

> Would you really rather have someone who knows new tech XYZ very well and can hit the ground running with no ramp-up, but breaks process, refuses to touch the legacy code, knows nothing about the industry, and builds things counterproductive to your business goals?

It’s not an either/or someone with experience should be able to do both, at my current job and my prior two jobs, I was specifically hired because the manager was looking to bring on someone who could lead initiatives and was a subject matter expert.

Well my last two jobs prior to my current one - the current company I work for has quite a few people who know my specialty well…

If you are doing Front-End dev pushing React Components, I think you should ramp-up from Week 1. Some other comment here mentioned this though: some fields it's not possible. If you are doing drivers, kernel, ebpf, or say you are programming Bitcoin main node; you probably need to read a lot before you are able to make any contribution.

This is why we can’t have nice things. Every company wants to make minimum investment in hires and hires want to jump to get paid as much as possible. Game theory playing out.

Months? Try weeks and even then you should be able to pick up basic things in a week or two.

I think there’s a difference between contributing, and being actually productive.

A candidate can get started on our stack fairly quickly, but it’d take months for them to understand the greater context.

It's not a candidates' market at all. I've submitted over 250 applications and have zero offers.

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