
Hire Literally Anyone - mji
http://arches.io/2016/01/hire-literally-anyone/
======
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.

~~~
sqldba
As a DBA I think if you have an installation of considerable size you really
absolutely need one of those high salaried people. The rest - sure have
juniors. But there is a reason people with a lot of experience demand a lot
and that's because all of the little things we know make up for a lot of
improvements and help when things go bad.

------
nomansland
I 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 having a CS degree. I think it's sort of ironic
that he manages to devalue the very same non-software engineering skills he
ostensibly says to value.

~~~
bobwaycott
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.

~~~
nomansland
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!)

------
sqldba
Wow, 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 doesn't like the terse and functional communication method
used by technical people; but if they can't handle technical people or
understand why we talk that way then they are the problem.

\- "we need to value non-code skills much more highly and explicitly." They
never explain why you want to hire janitors with mathematics intuition, or
brain surgeons who can also tap dance; but if you're a programmer then you
damn well better be extrovert! I don't care if you can code just give me a
nice conversation about sports and cars. Idiot.

\- "But resumes, interviews, the whole hiring process is set up to focus on
technical ability."

Actually a very tiny tiny portion of Silicon Valley hires on extreme
programming challenges. The 99.999% rest of companies all over the rest of the
world hire based on how much they like you in the interview - causing much
frustration for people who are highly skilled and eager and ready to go for
some job but got turned away because they were brogrammer enough.

\- "Hiring devs is really hard". What? How? Because there aren't enough?
Because of some other problem? Just stating shit out of the ether doesn't make
it true. A bit of introspection and elucidation would go a long way.

\- "Can't code? GTFO." If you were an engineer you'd be told to GTFO. If you
were a pilot you'd be told to GTFO. If you were a surgeon you'd be told to
GTFO. If you were an accountant you'd be told to GTFO.

The only places that don't tell you to GTFO are fast food and strip joints. I
can see the author holds IT skills in high esteem.

This article is a pile of shit.

~~~
abandonliberty
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 reread the first paragraph, because it AGREES with you:

"I have number of recent example of people . . . already SO strong on the non-
code aspects of programming . . . Problem solving, teamwork, self-teaching,
communication, attention to detail, organization, etc. "

Your other observations may have merit or they may be just as clouded as this
one, so you don't seem like a very reliable source here.

~~~
overgard
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.

------
uka
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 teachers. This is not realistic.
Basically - non technical people must work extra hours (not have a life) with
people who work full time training them to succeed. And the programming camps
do this - but most non technical people feel the effort is not worth it.

~~~
mdorazio
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.

~~~
uka
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.

------
wai1234
There 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 'discovered' that you can
actually train people to make them better. I saw one a few months back where
the 'secret' to using bootcampers turned out to be 'provide a guided program
to finish developing their abilities', as if no one ever heard of this before.

~~~
collyw
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".

~~~
jacalata
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.

------
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.

~~~
wai1234
Like most interviewers are skilled judges of 'culture'. This is why most tech
companies are filled with bros telling themselves how cool they are and how
they are changing the world. Utter BS.

------
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.

------
namenotrequired
I 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 more than that (marketing, data analysis, QA, etc). Once I finished my
studies my CTO asked me to become a developer - he knew I was dedicated to the
mission, knew just a little about coding but had the right personality for it.
Sadly, in the end they realised that they didn't have enough time to train me
and had to withdraw the offer.

I think it would be great if more CTOs made such offers, though in practice it
seems unlikely. Small companies are less likely to have the resources to train
and in larger companies perhaps the CTO is less likely to know community
managers and such well enough to make such offers.

~~~
dkarapetyan
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 workers amongst themselves which is again not
doing anyone any good.

~~~
namenotrequired
Just for the record, I do agree, but I don't think all companies realise this
(enough).

------
JohnTHaller
When I was starting out right out of school, the corporate bank I went to work
for had a 3 month program for recent grads to teach basic programming and
database design along with company coding rules. They had non-coders in this
program and started from scratch. Some of the folks in it with me were English
majors. It was very successful and everyone in the program I kept in touch
with went on to great careers. You interviewed for the company with round-
robin interviews where 6 different department heads would have a sit down
interview with you one at a time throughout a day. There was no coding
involved.

I personally did very well there, went on to a financial services startup of
all folks who'd left said bank and then branched out on my own doing web
applications for clients and building a successful open source project with
millions of users. I'm not sure if I'd get through the modern code-in-front-
of-us-at-a-whiteboard approach that all the tech companies seem to favor now-
a-days.

------
VeilEm
That's fine, you do that, but I do not want to be an engineer at your company.
I already have a junior engineer I'm working with and it's hard enough
spending hours a week making sure their PRs get fixed, every PR has 20 to 40
comments in it. With someone who doesn't even know how to code? Forget it.

~~~
sqldba
PR?

~~~
SloopJon
Pull request, I assume.

------
steven2012
It's a great idea but the reason why this won't work is because after you have
invested time to train them from nothing, they will leave for another company.

There is plenty of precedent for this, during the dotcom days and in India the
last 10 years.

~~~
traskjd
I'm reminded of the cliche posts I see on LinkedIn about this.

What happens if we invest in our people and they leave? What if we don't, and
they stay?

~~~
ChuckMcM
Exactly this, people leave for other reasons and generally it isn't because
you're investing in them. Sure it happens but it isn't the usual case in my
experience.

------
xiaoma
> _We represent ourselves as front-end devs instead of INTJ devs_

This is a good thing. INTJ and other Meyers-Briggs types have no basis in
science and they aren't related to what work a person can do for a business.

~~~
0xcde4c3db
A good rule of thumb is that if a model of humans asserts that we fit into an
enumerated set of "types", it's probably either substantially incomplete or
outright pseudoscience.

------
overgard
> We desperately need new paths to success and we desperately need to lower
> the barriers to entry. Our current approach is so black-and-white. Can you
> code? Here's $70k+. Can't code? GTFO.

Wait WHAT?! How is that bad? Who does this benefit other than people that want
to do a job that they're not actually qualified for? "Can you do this thing or
not" is a pretty fair test of if you deserve the job!

------
rhc2104
So here's an idea for a program:

An apprentice goes to a coding bootcamp, paid for by an company with a
$2,500/month stipend. Then, the apprentice would work for the company for
$2,500/month for one year, or otherwise the coding bootcamp tuition must be
repaid.

This would work out to a cost of about $55,000 for a year of labor.

That would be significantly cheaper than hiring a coding bootcamp grad, and
removes the economic risk from the apprentice. What if the market were to
soften? What if they ended up being one of the graduates that could not land a
job?

This offloads a lot of training to the bootcamp, which have job training as
their core competency. Other commenters have pointed out flaws with the system
proposed by the author.

In addition, it generally aligns incentives so that the apprentice is less
likely to leave right after the initial training. As part of the deal, the
coding bootcamp would help the apprentice with finding some other job, since
they have already committed to an employer. If they did renege on that part of
the deal, the employer only lost out on $7,500. And once the apprentice proves
their worth (in the event that they do), the employer could offer a market
salary that would start after the apprenticeship, along with a signing bonus
of about $20,000 or so. The apprentice would probably want that signing bonus
immediately, and sign that offer unless the candidate disliked the company.

If anyone wants to kickstart this concept, I think this would make a great
nonprofit. Figuring how to implement such a program would be a distraction for
the company, especially if they just wanted to dip their toes in the water
with one apprentice at first. The nonprofit would get $10,000 per apprentice,
and additional donations by companies could lead to higher priority in
selecting potential apprentices.

------
pakled_engineer
Isn't this what they do in Germany?
[http://tobi.lutke.com/blogs/news/11280301-the-apprentice-
pro...](http://tobi.lutke.com/blogs/news/11280301-the-apprentice-programmer)

~~~
eru
Do keep in mind that the author already knew some programming before he
started his apprenticeship:

"They did things differently than everyone else. Most of the company used an
esoteric programming environment called Rosie SQL - which seemed like death to
my Demo Szene honed sensibilities (Assembler, Pascal or bust!) - these guys
used Delphi."

MathWorks is doing a similar thing to

"The first 3 months in the cafeteria meant I quickly met everyone in the
company and learned what kind of coffee or tea they liked."

Mathworks starts everyone off in support, to make sure they know the products
and the customers.

------
xiaoma
I don't think the author's suggestion of hiring people to "just sit there and
watch/talk with (senior devs)" for 30k/year makes much economic sense.

Also the explicit discrimination based up on how represented applicants'
"communities" are being recommended ahead of looking at actual technical
skills is disturbing. I don't _think_ it's illegal, but I also don't think
it's good business or ethical.

Honestly, this kind of rule is how schools like Harvard keep low numbers of
Asians (or in the past, Jews).

------
zdw
While I agree with this, and have been training someone in this manner for a
while, it does put a drain on the trainer, and you have to take that into
account, as Fred Brooks wasn't wrong...

------
bluejekyll
> we need to value non-code skills much more highly and explicitly

Doesn't this, and most of the other stuff this is talking about really refer
to project managers and people managers?

------
thedevil
I'm a self-taught career changer and work for a team that has several new
developers transferred from other departments.

It works out surprisingly well. The 2-3 experienced devs and myself do the
harder development parts and the new developers are actually quite valuable as
they contribute plenty to the code but also often explain some of the business
considerations from other departments.

------
ap22213
Many people these days miss the fact that software projects fail for at least
10 different reasons. And, only one of those is sloppy code.

------
kbar13
one of the best ways for someone who wants to start coding is to join a
smaller technical company as customer support. You'll know the product
intimately and you'll know how to improve quality of life for users. If you're
motivated enough, start talking to engineers and contributing to the codebase
and you're on your way.

------
jondubois
Hiring non-technical people into technical roles is OK if you also have some
senior tech people to guide them.

You wouldn't want to have the inexperienced non-tech people making critical
engineering decisions. Software development is like building a house of cards
- If you want to build a tall structure, you have to start with a solid base.

------
clamstew
It seems makersquare's financial assistance works to solve the boot camp pain
point mentioned, and with a programming job salary after, it shouldn't be bad
paying it down.

[http://www.makersquare.com/financialservices](http://www.makersquare.com/financialservices)

------
nickthemagicman
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.

------
puredemo
"Hire anyone with decent standardized test scores," would be my baseline after
managing a large, technical support callcenter where many new hires were
simply not able to learn the (imho fairly rudimentary) modem troubleshooting
steps after weeks and months of on-the-job training and support.

The people who seemed the sharpest in the first two weeks of training usually
excelled, most others didn't. Some were simply unable to learn fairly basic
concepts. It mostly came down to raw intellect. I'm sure the same would be
true for aspiring developers.

~~~
rdudek
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.

~~~
puredemo
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?

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

Please don't ever do this.

~~~
puredemo
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/...](http://portal.scienceintheclassroom.org/sites/default/files/post-
files/science-2007-kuncel-1080-1.pdf)

~~~
wai1234
More and more colleges are NOT using them for admissions because they predict
NOTHING.

~~~
manigandham
Where's your source? The parent's source is about 8 years old but still
completely valid.

