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Hire Literally Anyone

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Re: Hire Literally Anyone

#11

Post by Spooky23 »

"Growing" people is totally doable.

I worked at a company that couldn't find DBAs in the late 90s for a reasonable salary. They would pluck kids too smart for call center work and put them in database apprenticeships. They deal with support cases, do drudge work fixing data problems cause by one of the applications, investigate chargebacks, etc. 4/6 that worked for me are all high end tech folks now.

Another example was a .gov stuck with secretaries rendered obsolete by MS Office. They offered training and transitioned many to IT roles, mostly in training, sysadmin and business analyst roles. Most of them did great, one I knew 15 years ago as a junior training person is now a director of a big erp implementation.

Re: Hire Literally Anyone

#12

Post by jacalata »

Microsoft used to have a one year program for new grads that hadn't taken CS, called TAP. I knew some good devs who came out of that, its a real shame they scrapped it.

Re: Hire Literally Anyone

#14

Post by mdorazio »

uka wrote: post #7

Teaching people to develop software is hard. It requires commitment. In the framework author is describing if those people want to succeed they will not be able to do it part time while doing non-technical work for you. Also rubber ducking with the actual developer takes a lot of developer's time (and it's hard) - so the organization will take a big productivity hit if developers work half time as programming teacher…

I'll offer a counter-argument that teaching non-technical skills is at least as hard as teaching basic development skills. You just generally get more years of "free passes" to develop non-technical skills (ex., negotiation, conflict resolution, self-management, etc.) on the job than you do if you're expected to be productive doing technical work.

I've taught non-developers to produce, or at least understand, basic code typically in a few weeks while they were working on other stuff as well, but teaching developers to be good managers has always been much more difficult in comparison. I think it's easy to assume that since a lot of people aren't interested in writing code, it's fundamentally difficult to learn.

Re: Hire Literally Anyone

#15

Post by clarle »

puredemo wrote: post #9
rdudek wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't count on it. I failed out of college due to my inability to take and pass tests, yet at work, I'm being promoted constantly to higher ranks due to my productivity.

Considering I managed literally thousands of agents over a period of years, you would statistically be an extremely rare exception to a rather well-examined trend. Did you ever take the SAT / ACT?

Standardized testing doesn't measure the same skills needed to be successful at creative work.

Please don't ever do this.

Re: Hire Literally Anyone

#16

Post by mahyarm »

1. The industry interviews this through 'culture fits'. Personality is not something your can put on a resume very well, it comes out in culture interviews. You need to pass personality and a technical bars in most interviews.

2. We already hire 'anyone' by hiring people from 3 month coding boot camps which are usually pretty cheap in price and time compared to college. Passing a coding boot camp or showing self developed apps & their source code I feel is the reasonable compromise for hiring 'anyone'. There is a segment of the population where programming is not for them and learning to pass fizz buzz equivalents is a lot more work for them than others.

Re: Hire Literally Anyone

#17

Post by puredemo »

clarle wrote: post #15
puredemo wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Considering I managed literally thousands of agents over a period of years, you would statistically be an extremely rare exception to a rather well-examined trend. Did you ever take the SAT / ACT?

Standardized testing doesn't measure the same skills needed to be successful at creative work. Please don't ever do this.

Sure, that's why every college relies on them for admissions, not to mention everyone taking the GRE / MCAT for grad school.

Are applied sciences grad programs not "creative work" in your mind? Standardized tests statistically predict success within those programs.

http://portal.scienceintheclassroom.org/sites/default/files/...

Re: Hire Literally Anyone

#19

Post by popmystack »

mahyarm wrote: post #16

1. The industry interviews this through 'culture fits'. Personality is not something your can put on a resume very well, it comes out in culture interviews. You need to pass personality and a technical bars in most interviews. 2. We already hire 'anyone' by hiring people from 3 month coding boot camps which are usually pretty cheap in price and time compared to college. Passing a coding boot camp or showing self deve…

>We already hire 'anyone' by hiring people from 3 month coding boot camps

Oh my.

Re: Hire Literally Anyone

#20

Post by uka »

mdorazio wrote: post #14
uka wrote: post #7

Teaching people to develop software is hard. It requires commitment. In the framework author is describing if those people want to succeed they will not be able to do it part time while doing non-technical work for you. Also rubber ducking with the actual developer takes a lot of developer's time (and it's hard) - so the organization will take a big productivity hit if developers work half time as programming teacher…

I'll offer a counter-argument that teaching non-technical skills is at least as hard as teaching basic development skills. You just generally get more years of "free passes" to develop non-technical skills (ex., negotiation, conflict resolution, self-management, etc.) on the job than you do if you're expected to be productive doing technical work. I've taught non-developers to produce, or at least understand, basic c…

Well - I consider teaching non-technical skills even harder. That fact does not make teaching programming easy. Author is trying to solve problem of developer shortage. There is a huge gap between "being able to produce basic code" and being a developer that can solve a class of problems by him / herself.

I mentored few non-developers into becoming full time developers - but it took a year of their full time commitment to achieve the level where they could get hired as a developer and continue to develop their skills themselves.

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