I think we should do this with medicine as well.
Hire literally anyone and train them to slowly take on the tasks of a medical doctor. The theory and focused study that comes from a degree is really overrated. This would really help with the shortage of doctors as well.
Hire Literally Anyone
71–78 of 78 posts
Re: Hire Literally Anyone
#72Wow, what a crock of shit. How did this get to the top of HN? - It seems the author has some problem with technical people but they never state what the problem is. - The author identifies that technical people aren't strong on "Problem solving, teamwork, self-teaching, communication, attention to detail, organization, etc." What the shit? These are exactly what makes technical people so strong. Maybe the author does…
I read your post before the article so I expected something completely different. You're clearly reading this article through a very interesting lens. You claim that "The author identifies that technical people aren't strong on "Problem solving, teamwork, self-teaching, communication, attention to detail, organization, etc." What the shit? These are exactly what makes technical people so strong." You may want to rere…
I got the impression from the article, like the parent post, that the author thinks these skills are more prevalent outside of tech. Why else would he suggest hiring for this above all else? Does he think that it's impossible to get people that are BOTH good communicators and solid engineers? These people aren't unicorns! I'd say the vast majority of coders I've worked with are totally fine at soft skills.
If the author thinks that technical people can be equally strong in these people skills, then why are they advocating explicitly hiring non-technical people for the job? It's not like there's a scarcity of engineers that aren't total mouth-breathers. Just hire engineers that also happen to have good communication skills. You don't have to go to some absurd extreme of hiring incompetent people.
Re: Hire Literally Anyone
#73I like how he assumes that test engineering and project management are things you can just "fill someone's time with" until they learn something useful, like coding AND that someone will take 30k a year for. Really? In the valley, both test engineers and PMs for software eng projects are >90k/year positions. I've done both of those jobs and they've both required me already knowing how to code, writing code, and havin…
I find it pretty odd that you'd take a PM role that required you to write code and have a CS degree. It's definitely good if PMs understand the technologies they're working with , but requiring they know how to code, and actually code, as well as have a CS degree seems like an employer who is actually looking to hire a developer and get a PM for free. Or vice versa.
Specifically, regarding the PM role, I took a TPM role. I like it much more than devops/sre(no pages) or test engineering(not as tedious). To be sure, there is also a non-technical PM on my team, as well as devs who do the product coding. While the role could be abused in the way you are talking about, I suspect that's company dependant, in much the same way the devops role can be abused.
The coding work I'd put in the "internal tools/analysis" category, such as writing some scripts which makes sense of the non-technical PMs' spreadsheets, browser plugins which deal with a favorite but slightly broken tool, log analysis, writing dashboards, or lightweight ETL.
The "knowing how to code" comes in use since a fair amount of the work depends on being able to understand what the devs have actually submitted and if they are flat out BSing or not on status, if a particular pattern/integration/library/tool would be a good fit, or having meaningful conversations about testing, scope, and technical roadblocks. The CS degree is useful for having credibility with the devs(shared culture goes a long way in getting work out of people who don't report to you) and not just being another PM having sprints and scrums and pigs and chickens and swimlanes (oh my!)
Re: Hire Literally Anyone
#74I like how he assumes that test engineering and project management are things you can just "fill someone's time with" until they learn something useful, like coding AND that someone will take 30k a year for. Really? In the valley, both test engineers and PMs for software eng projects are >90k/year positions. I've done both of those jobs and they've both required me already knowing how to code, writing code, and havin…
> they've both required me already knowing how to code, writing code, and having a CS degree. All of this for only 90k, in silicon valley?
If you look on glassdoor, that's around the jr/entry level base salary for both positions, mid/senior level PM and test engineers both are more. Since the article's claim you that could get this work for 30k from someone on their way to learning how to code is extremely off for the entry level, I didn't bother with how wrong it is for the mid or senior levels.
Re: Hire Literally Anyone
#75I am a tech-recruiter and I work for different companies in Switzerland. I could place a guy who went from 5+ years in accounting into a coding career after he went to a 3 month Ruby bootcamp in Canada. It seems that coding bootcamps are less prevalent in Europe compared to North America. The company that hired him worked on a product that was accounting related, hence it was a perfect match. Disclaimer: If you look…
jsnell is right—that's excessive. HN threads are supposed to be conversations, not commercials. There's nothing wrong with telling a story or mentioning one's own work in context, but please don't do repetitive promotion.
Re: Hire Literally Anyone
#76I am a tech-recruiter and I work for different companies in Switzerland. I could place a guy who went from 5+ years in accounting into a coding career after he went to a 3 month Ruby bootcamp in Canada. It seems that coding bootcamps are less prevalent in Europe compared to North America. The company that hired him worked on a product that was accounting related, hence it was a perfect match. Disclaimer: If you look…
jsnell is right—that's excessive. HN threads are supposed to be conversations, not commercials. There's nothing wrong with telling a story or mentioning one's own work in context, but please don't do repetitive promotion.
I honestly try to add value to the HN discussion and I usually get upvotes. At the same time I often mention my recruiting thing. I agree that this post really went to far. Sorry this won't happen again.
Re: Hire Literally Anyone
#77I feel like many companies are afraid to do this because there's no guarantee their newly trained people will stay for so long as to make it worthwile. What if instead of "literally anyone" they trained non-technical colleagues that have already proven commitment? Anecdote: next to my Information Science studies, I worked as a community manager for a few years. This was at a small startup so I was in practice doing m…
That fear is unfounded and is a good example of short term thinking. My number one goal now is to make sure wherever I work the people I work with "level up" in some way. I'm going to be working with these people at other jobs and if they suck then I'm not doing anyone any favors. Having proper mentoring and training pipelines are indicators of a healthy company. The alternative is companies shuffling mediocre worker…
Just for the record, I do agree, but I don't think all companies realise this (enough).
Re: Hire Literally Anyone
#78There is no shortage of developers. There is a shortage of perfect developers that meet every preconceived notion of lazy companies that don't believe they have any responsibility to develop and grow people. There will always be a shortage of top performers in any field. If only top performers are acceptable to you, you will have a very tough time growing. I have to laugh when I see these posts where people have 'dis…
There is a shortage of cheap developers. In a Taxi in Dublin a year back and the taxi drive explained his friend couldn't find the staff. "Well he could, but they wanted too much money".
I turned down a job a year ago because the pay was 20% below expectations, and saw the company in the news a week later talking about the shortage of programmers.