[ruby-talk:23474] Re: Bruce Eckel's opinion of Ruby

On Friday 26 October 2001 08:26, you wrote:
> > The issue is that there are programmers who, regardless of training, lack
> > the initiative and gumption to do complex tasks on their own without
> > significant inputs from myself or my team members.
>
> Of course there are.  But I think that you are ardently opposed
> to recognizing the distinction between them and someone who can be a
> valuable addition with training.

Please do not make slanderous assumptions about what I propose or oppose. 

I will freely admit that I am a proponent of pointing people towards TFM and 
saying RTFM rather than of spending enormous amounts of my time teaching them 
the ins and outs of a programming language. But that's because I expect to be 
working with professionals. Professionals do not need to be led by the nose 
to learn what they need to learn to do their job. I focus upon the important 
parts in training that aren't in the FM -- the goals, objectives, and overall 
design of the current project, the corporate standards for source control, 
source formatting, etc., the location of the source archives, etc. As far as 
the details of the programming language or database or the particular 
hardware we're trying to control or etc., I created an internal web site that 
has all those details gathered into one place, as well as a 'corporate 
standards' section on our internal web site detailing variable naming and 
formatting conventions, source tree tagging conventions, etc. Part of 
orientation is to guide the new hire to this web site. And no, I don't mind 
questions. What I do mind is writing somebody's program for them because they 
don't have the initiative to RTFM prior to asking questions. 

When I am recommending somebody to be hired I look at two things: 1) does he 
have a large enough range of education and experience to learn new things 
quickly and a track record of doing so (there's a bit of and/or there), and 
2) does he pass the "attitude test" -- i.e., does he demonstrate enthusiasm 
for learning new things and the initiative to learn about them on their own. 
In today's world of open source operating systems you can apply test #1 even 
to new college grads.  I don't care if the guy knows Python (or Ruby) if he 
has demonstrated flexibility and initiative in the past. I will freely admit 
that I am not much of a proponent of formal training courses on things like 
programming languages, maybe because I've learned some two dozen odd 
languages in my lifetime (some of them VERY odd :-) without having ever taken 
a programming language course (note: I do have a degree in CS, and do prefer 
to hire people who have a degree in CS, but a degree in computer science, as 
versus a degree in Information Technology, is a SCIENCE degree, aimed at 
giving the necessary theoretical background to contribute to the field, and 
does not contain courses like "COBOL 101" or "Java 101").  

I freely admit that I am biased against those who do not show enthusiasm for 
learning new things. Thus one of my interview questions is, "How many 
computers do you have at home?". If the answer is "None", then the interview 
is over for me -- this demonstrates that the person is unwilling to do what's 
necessary to expand his skills and knowledge. If the answer is "One" or more, 
the next question is "How many operating systems are you running at home?". 
If the answer is "One", I have misgivings, because this may show a lack of 
imagination and initiative, and will probably probe closer. If the answer is 
"Two" or more, I'll ask questions to make sure the person is not lying (I've 
run most operating systems that most people could run at home), and feel a 
lot better about hiring that person, because he has shown that he's willing 
to take initiative and do something besides run the software that God (or 
Microsoft, is there a difference?) has handed down from upon high. 

The goal is to hire talent, not skills. Skills can be learned. Talent cannot. 
Or as a basketball coach might put it, "You can't teach height." This is 
nothing new to me. You can go to Slashdot and do a search for my name and 
find that I was saying this same thing three years ago, most often in threads 
about a so-called "programmer shortage" (which actually turns out to be an HR 
Droid Filter problem, where the HR Droids filter out the kinds of people I 
would want to hire because they don't happen to have the particular skill set 
on some checklist). 

-- 
Eric Lee Green          GnuPG public key at http://badtux.org/eric/eric.gpg
           mailto:[e-mail]  Web: http://www.badtux.org
             You do not save freedom by destroying freedom