Comment by Cookingboy | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Cookingboy | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Then you are the one being short-sighted here. A good engineer is a good engineer is a good engineer, someone with great learning aptitude is a great asset for any company. Say you hire someone for today's task, but next year the technology changes and the guy you hired is horrible at learning new things. What do you do? Do you fire him and hire someone for next year's task? What if the old technology still requires backward support, do you keep the old guy on payroll as well? What if the same thing happens the year after next?

You don't want people to learn on your time? That's incredibly short sighted. Real engineering is about learning all the time, whether it's taking a formal training session or just reading a long post on StackOverflow. If you don't want to pay your engineer to learn things then you simply don't care about the engineering quality of your company and all you care about is short term payroll bottom-line.

I feel sorry for the engineers who work under you.

Of course I'm looking for people who can learn. I'm looking for people who will jump onto Stack Overflow and Google before spending a week reinventing the wheel. I'm looking for someone who writes in a dozen languages (like human languages, someone who knows a couple can pick up more very easily).

But I don't want people learning the "right now" skill on my time.

If I need a PHP developer right now, then I'm going to hire someone who knows it right now. I'll preference someone with C skills and I'll preference someone who participates in an open source project. And I'll preference someone who reads Hacker News. And I'll preference someone who has a great profile on Stack Overflow. And I'll preference someone who attends or presents at conferences.

But if they don't know PHP, they're not going to be learning it on my time as I need someone who knows it right now.

There's no need to feel sorry for my team. The things you read on a Hacker News comment reply aren't the entirety of working for me. Maybe you'll be sitting across the desk from me one day and you'll get to work with an awesome team of talented engineers. Carefully selected.

A lot of engineers will gladly work overtime or at home to pick up a skill. Often you don't start a new job for a few weeks or month.

And any good engineer can work blind on a new technology and still produce decent results. If a great engineer with no knowledge of PHP is required to build a PHP website they can sit down with a PHP book open on their desk and crank it out. They fact that they're mentally superior to other engineers (whose expertise on a narrow subject might be better) and know programming inherently better means there's a good chance their output on something they don't know could be comparable to the PHP coder.

The best managers always build skills in teams. It's part of compensation. Every engineer views bullet points on resumes as a form of income. "If they don't know PHP, they're not going to be learning it on my time" means that you're going to be paying higher salaries with higher turnover and much higher recruiting costs. And if that's not true then something scarier is true: you're actually hiring low-quality engineers who don't realize you're a bad manager with a bad team (or who have no other options than to pimp out their 8 years of SharePoint 2003 experience).

Maybe you wouldn't have such an urgent need to hire experts in narrow subjects if you had staffed your team with intelligent quick learners in the first place! Tip: next time you need an expert in subject X try telling your best engineer: hey I have a project coming up for an X project and I'd like you to play a key part, so can you study up on that as it'd really impress me.

"Maybe you'll be sitting across the desk from me one day and you'll get to work with an awesome team of talented engineers. Carefully selected."

What an arrogant prick.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com