

Myths Of Building A Great Mobile Team - samiq
http://techcrunch.com/2010/12/11/the-5-myths-of-building-a-great-mobile-team/

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kls
_Avoid a “specialist” culture at your company_

While I agree with the fact that an organization should be generalist heavy.
There are some areas that I think there is no substitute for specialist,
security and HCI are two areas that we rely on specialist to helm the
direction, there is so much domain knowledge in both that it is money well
spent to carry specialist in these areas. It looks like the author implied
this by using the word culture, but I felt that it is probably worth expanding
on so that the avoidance would not be taken to the extreem by a reader.

~~~
eladgil
Agreed.

But would you want to hire a mobile HCI specialist? Or someone who is great at
consumer HCI and will apply that understand to mobile within mobile design
constraints?

My personal bias would be to hire the consumer HCI specialist and have them
work on / learn mobile.

~~~
kls
Yep, I agree someone that know's the principal of HCI to any problem set. In
the technical world, were things move so quick they have to be able to adapt
to new technology. I see HCI as a discipline unto itself and would not see the
value in such fine grain specialization, like mobile HCI specialist. But I
don't see HCI as a generalist.

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wallflower
> Don't hire "mobile engineers"

A large media company rejected a friend of mine who only had less than one
year iOS experience (but had already collaborated on a couple successful
apps). Their rejection reason was they were looking for engineers with 2+ yrs
of iOS experience. Some of my friends meet their baseline requirements and
they are not hirable (busy with client projects). What this company's HR
department fails to understand is it easier to hire someone who has a solid
non-mobile background and has been doing it for fun, on-the-side than to hire
a mythical 2-yr iOS experience developer. I've gotten all of my contracts
because of two big things: my personal connections and my portfolio of iOS
apps. What pointy-haired bosses seem to fail to understand is the portfolio is
the benchmark for performance and experience. Btw - I have exactly one year of
iOS experience and have worked on four apps.

~~~
stevenwei
Requiring 2 years of iOS experience is hilarious considering the platform has
barely been around for 2 years.

However, the iOS SDK is large enough that I'd be skeptical of candidates
without a reasonable amount of experience. There are a lot of areas to learn
and a lot of gotchas that will only be understood after building (and
maintaining) a real world app. For example, with Core Data, the rabbit hole
gets really deep really quickly.

I wholly agree that the best measure of an iOS developer is the apps they've
actually shipped.

~~~
wallflower
Yes, CoreData is a focus of experience in itself. CoreData apparently was
based off of what was in WebObjects?

It looks like the iPhone SDK was officially released on March 6, 2008. I think
I could be a brutal interviewer with my one year. For example, tell me how you
would design a CoreData-based app with a table showing how far you were from a
list of addresses (that you had lat/long for). There are a lot of gotchas
(background thread, if you wanted distance-based section headers...) that
could only be learned by hands-on coding. There is only so much you can learn
from a book or lecture - at some point you are going to need to dive in - so
you yourself could give a talk on what was left out...

I think even "simple" stuff like how to implement a loading view could quickly
ferret out the doers from the pretenders. And the next level would be asking
how they would create custom UITableViewCells. And so on... But the important
thing, is there are some pretenders who want to become doers - those are the
ppl I think you want - and the ones that big companies can't identify. The
programmers who love problem solving, who love figuring things out.

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ardit33
I think it is ok advice:

What he means, is don't hire mobile engineers that have worked at big telco
provider (samsung,motorola, or carriers). It is well known that these
companies just don't have good talent. I'd rather work with a good generalist,
than a crappy mobile developer. But, a good mobile developer will run circles
around a generalist.

"b. Don’t hire “mobile” Product Managers (PMs)" Again, same thing. He equals
'mobile pm' to somebody that has worked in crappy telco related companies.

That's not true. There have been plenty of mobile companies that are not telco
related. Even before iPhone came to change the landscape, there were plenty of
companies that were both mobile and consumer focused.

..

"For example, on the early Google mobile team we had a PhD student from Yale
with no industry experience, an expert on enterprise Java from BEA, and a
research scientist at Google. These people helped form a formidable core for
mobile engineering at Google."

Ah, this explains why the Android api seems like something that came from the
desktop. It has everything thrown into it, even the kitchen sink. Comparing to
the iPhone sdk, it is clumsy. Also, this probably explains a lot of the
usability problems Android has in general.

The sad fact is that developing for the android is twice as expensive, and
produces less good looking application than the iPhone.

Perhaps this guy should have hired mobile engineers?

~~~
Zev
_What he means, is don't hire mobile engineers that have worked at big telco
provider (samsung,motorola, or carriers). It is well known that these
companies just don't have good talent._

If your main reason for not hiring someone is "They worked for Nokia," then
I'm not quite sure what to say, besides that it doesn't seem to be a very good
reason not to hire someone.

Of course, I've never worked for any of the aforementioned companies. That
being said, I know some very smart people who have (and continue to do so).
People who I'd be happy to work with, if the chance ever came up at the right
time.

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jfb
These don't seem too dissimilar to the myths of hiring for small teams in
general, actually.

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bialecki
This first comment about hiring great generalists rather than people who know
mobile development has been echoed countless times and it's amazing how often
people make that mistake. The most recent example I can think of is from Kevin
Rose who said the same thing about how they needed PHP people at Digg until
PHP wasn't good enough or they switched languages. Lesson learned: just hire
great engineers, even if they code in ColdFusion or something terrible.

