SlackerManager agrees with me in his How do you hire great people?. I said Hire for Intangibles; You Can Teach Technical Skills.
It's a person's attitude, passion, and ability to work with other people that counts.
SlackerManager agrees with me in his How do you hire great people?. I said Hire for Intangibles; You Can Teach Technical Skills.
It's a person's attitude, passion, and ability to work with other people that counts.
You can teach specific technical skills. That said, programming requires a certain mindset or wiring in the brain only about 5% or so of the population possesses, and I have seen too many people who do not have that mindset yet go into programming because it pays well, with the predictable result that they suck at it and are miserable working in that line. In the interviewing you need to make sure the candidate has at least that kind of analytic mindset, usually by watching them solve real-world problems (not trick problems like Microsoft is alleged to do).
Good testers similarly all have a slightly different approach than coders, less analytical and more exploratory “what if I do that, will it break?”, that is unfortunately very hard to test for.
In my experience people can be taught specific technical skills but have a hard time understanding technology in the big picture. These same people are able to perform their basic job duties, but down the line their work ends up causing more problems due to their lack of understanding and knowledge. To me it is like trying to teach someone without an engineering degree how to design a bridge. Yes, many people with the oportunity to build a bridge will have a strong passion, and attitude and given the resources, this person will build a bridge but eventually the bridge will crack under stress. After all, if this person wanted to build bridges for a living, he/she would have studied engineering and gained the skills prior to building the bridge.
It really frustrates me when I get a new coworker with less than par tech skills and end up redoing this persons work or hand holding them the entire time because they were allowed on-the job training even though they did not struggle threw a Computer Science degree in college or work to build up their tech skills in their personal time. I also find that these people have to be continually trained as opposed to the people who understand technology, show an interest in it, and use their passion and attitude to advance their skills in their personal time.