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"Hire for aptitude, train for skills" is a very software development oriented view. Training on its own is difficult and most available employees outside of en

"Hire for aptitude, train for skills" is a very software development oriented view. Training on its own is difficult and most available employees outside of engineering don't have a habit of self teaching. I've done a lot better with experienced people in my hires in my profession.

ashtonkem 7y ago
Software is also weird when it comes to skills. While the total domain knowledge possible in software is absolutely massive, the set of baseline skills required to rapidly learn new domains and perform is surprisingly small. Any good programmer can learn a new language and a new portion of the stack within at least year, probably less, because the core skills of the profession are very very small. It’s not clear to me how common this is in human endeavors.
- jacquesm 7y ago
  That's dated. This used to be true, absolutely. But the size of various eco-systems is such that if you want to really master something now you have to invest a lot of time and if you bet on the wrong horse then you can lose a lot of time and effort for little return. Front end is especially brutal in this sense.
  - Aeolun 7y ago
    Anecdotally, I started out working with JS and React about 2 years ago, and while it was extremely easy to get started in terms of architecture and general coding (based on 10 previous years of experience with other languages), we’re also still dealing with bad decisions made because of idiosyncrasies in the language/libraries.
  - timw4mail 7y ago
    That's because "front-end development", especially with JavaScript frameworks, is a popularity driven hype cycle.
    - ashtonkem 7y ago
      That appears to have calmed down significantly in the past few years, with React in particular showing a level of stability and staying power in this space that I thought was impossible.
      - timw4mail 7y ago
        Not really, consider all the changes react has made recently. Then consider the cloud of companion libraries that also tend to follow trends.
  - ashtonkem 7y ago
    Nonsense. You can migrate a back end developer to the front end in far less time than it takes to train a new front end developer from scratch. The domain knowledge of front end specific tasks must be learned, sure, but the core fundamentals of how to program remain. You don’t suddenly forget how to actually program once you pick up JS, all jokes notwithstanding.
    - Scarblac 7y ago
      True for the programming part of front end development, not so much for the making things look good part.
      - ashtonkem 7y ago
        Having crossed over from a back end developer to a front-end developer at a design shop, it’s not that hard. Nowhere near as hard as learning to program the very first time. I think that a lot of the discussed differences between different portions of the “stack” is actually the narcissism of small differences [0]; they share more in common than we typically give them credit for. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcissism_of_small_differences https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcissism_of_small_difference...
      - kazinator 7y ago
        To make things look good on the Web, you just find something that you think looks good and steal what it's doing.
        TeMPOraL 7y ago
        And if you do it repeatedly, then suddenly one day you'll realize you can make good original work. The same is true about learning anything else. Personally, when I've been first starting programming, I learned a lot of useful programming techniques by stealing bits and pieces from videogames and demos whose source was available and incorporating them into my own attempts at writing a game engine.
  - nradov 7y ago
    Mastery is hardly needed for the bulk of software development work. Just like with the building trades, most coding can be done "good enough" with apprentice or journeyman skill levels as long as the team has a few masters to provide guidance and check the results.
    - ashtonkem 7y ago
      Also, the cost of mastery is probably too high for some markets and companies.
PaulDavisThe1st 7y ago
I suspect you live in the US. "Train for skills" is much more common in other countries, although less common than it used to be. Those experienced hires didn't get to be experienced at zero cost to anyone - other employers enabled them to become experienced. Be a good employer and do your part of the process: train for skills (so that someone else can hire those people too)
- projektfu 7y ago
  Sure, I'll just go ask my HR department to generate a training plan and hire a training department for my 9 person practice.
  - buckminster 7y ago
    You don't need an HR department to create a training plan, and you don't need a training department to deliver it. There are lots of businesses providing training courses.
- projektfu 7y ago
  Sorry about the other response. It was flippant like yours was, but two wrongs don't make a right. The real issue is that in many industries you don't just walk into a top job with no experience. If I'm hiring a technician, it's going to be someone with experience because in this profession they will have started as a kennel keeper, then moved up to assistant, then started doing more technical work, usually as they are in technician school, and then they will be able to work as a registered technician. Sometimes experience can be almost equivalent to having school, although there are a few things that an unlicensed/unregistered technician cannot legally do. All that experience is much more valuable than just the book learning, and you can't make up for it with a few months training.
  - PaulDavisThe1st 7y ago
    I certainly wasn't trying to be flippant. The approach you previously (something like "I need to get people who've already acquired the experience") is very common in the USA today, but less so in e.g. northern European countries. The approach you explicity describe here (the existence of a training/experience pathway) is something that you currently require to exist, but seem less willing to be the provider of. I understand that there are going to be employment situations where providing those training pathways is impossible (or almost impossible). But particularly in the USA, we've gone too far in the other direction: offloading the generation of "experienced" to other, unnamed and unidentified people and organizations, and then expecting to be able to reap what others have sown.
wpietri 7y ago
The author of that post isn't in software; he's a writer and editor. E.g., he founded Wired magazine, and runs Cool Tools: https://kk.org/cooltools/ https://kk.org/cooltools/
- projektfu 7y ago
  OK, so perhaps it extends to journalism. It's a sentiment I would have agreed with wholeheartedly when I was in software, and here in veterinary medicine I know that training is difficult, people with seemingly high aptitude often don't help you train them, and experience is a great measure of someone's ability.
  - wpietri 7y ago
    I think it makes more sense in the context of the full quote: "Experience is overrated. When hiring, hire for aptitude, train for skills. Most really amazing or great things are done by people doing them for the first time." He's pretty clearly talking about creative work here, where the goal is to make new things. Whereas the goal of most of medicine, presumably yours included, is to reliably do a known thing. If I'm going to have surgery, I'm going to find a surgeon who has done the procedure a large number of times, because there's a clear expected outcome, and a deviation from that likely means failure. A useful tool here might be the Cynefin framework: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cynefin_framework https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cynefin_framework You're talking about work that's mostly in the Obvious and Complicated buckets. He's talking about work in the Complex and Chaotic domains.
    - V-2 7y ago
      > He's pretty clearly talking about creative work here, where the goal is to make new things. Isn't it a tautology then? If the goal is to make something you haven't before, then obviously it's accomplished the first time round, by definition. And in a broader sense, is it really true? Are debuts usually the best art pieces?
      - wpietri 7y ago

ashtonkem 7y ago

Software is also weird when it comes to skills. While the total domain knowledge possible in software is absolutely massive, the set of baseline skills required to rapidly learn new domains and perform is surprisingly small. Any good programmer can learn a new language and a new portion of the stack within at least year, probably less, because the core skills of the profession are very very small. It’s not clear to me how common this is in human endeavors.

jacquesm 7y ago
That's dated. This used to be true, absolutely. But the size of various eco-systems is such that if you want to really master something now you have to invest a lot of time and if you bet on the wrong horse then you can lose a lot of time and effort for little return. Front end is especially brutal in this sense.
- Aeolun 7y ago
  Anecdotally, I started out working with JS and React about 2 years ago, and while it was extremely easy to get started in terms of architecture and general coding (based on 10 previous years of experience with other languages), we’re also still dealing with bad decisions made because of idiosyncrasies in the language/libraries.
- timw4mail 7y ago
  That's because "front-end development", especially with JavaScript frameworks, is a popularity driven hype cycle.
  - ashtonkem 7y ago
    That appears to have calmed down significantly in the past few years, with React in particular showing a level of stability and staying power in this space that I thought was impossible.
    - timw4mail 7y ago
      Not really, consider all the changes react has made recently. Then consider the cloud of companion libraries that also tend to follow trends.
- ashtonkem 7y ago
  Nonsense. You can migrate a back end developer to the front end in far less time than it takes to train a new front end developer from scratch. The domain knowledge of front end specific tasks must be learned, sure, but the core fundamentals of how to program remain. You don’t suddenly forget how to actually program once you pick up JS, all jokes notwithstanding.
  - Scarblac 7y ago
    True for the programming part of front end development, not so much for the making things look good part.
    - ashtonkem 7y ago
      Having crossed over from a back end developer to a front-end developer at a design shop, it’s not that hard. Nowhere near as hard as learning to program the very first time. I think that a lot of the discussed differences between different portions of the “stack” is actually the narcissism of small differences [0]; they share more in common than we typically give them credit for. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcissism_of_small_differences https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcissism_of_small_difference...
    - kazinator 7y ago
      To make things look good on the Web, you just find something that you think looks good and steal what it's doing.
      - TeMPOraL 7y ago
        And if you do it repeatedly, then suddenly one day you'll realize you can make good original work. The same is true about learning anything else. Personally, when I've been first starting programming, I learned a lot of useful programming techniques by stealing bits and pieces from videogames and demos whose source was available and incorporating them into my own attempts at writing a game engine.
- nradov 7y ago
  Mastery is hardly needed for the bulk of software development work. Just like with the building trades, most coding can be done "good enough" with apprentice or journeyman skill levels as long as the team has a few masters to provide guidance and check the results.
  - ashtonkem 7y ago
    Also, the cost of mastery is probably too high for some markets and companies.

PaulDavisThe1st 7y ago

I suspect you live in the US. "Train for skills" is much more common in other countries, although less common than it used to be. Those experienced hires didn't get to be experienced at zero cost to anyone - other employers enabled them to become experienced. Be a good employer and do your part of the process: train for skills (so that someone else can hire those people too)

projektfu 7y ago
Sure, I'll just go ask my HR department to generate a training plan and hire a training department for my 9 person practice.
- buckminster 7y ago
  You don't need an HR department to create a training plan, and you don't need a training department to deliver it. There are lots of businesses providing training courses.
projektfu 7y ago
Sorry about the other response. It was flippant like yours was, but two wrongs don't make a right. The real issue is that in many industries you don't just walk into a top job with no experience. If I'm hiring a technician, it's going to be someone with experience because in this profession they will have started as a kennel keeper, then moved up to assistant, then started doing more technical work, usually as they are in technician school, and then they will be able to work as a registered technician. Sometimes experience can be almost equivalent to having school, although there are a few things that an unlicensed/unregistered technician cannot legally do. All that experience is much more valuable than just the book learning, and you can't make up for it with a few months training.
- PaulDavisThe1st 7y ago
  I certainly wasn't trying to be flippant. The approach you previously (something like "I need to get people who've already acquired the experience") is very common in the USA today, but less so in e.g. northern European countries. The approach you explicity describe here (the existence of a training/experience pathway) is something that you currently require to exist, but seem less willing to be the provider of. I understand that there are going to be employment situations where providing those training pathways is impossible (or almost impossible). But particularly in the USA, we've gone too far in the other direction: offloading the generation of "experienced" to other, unnamed and unidentified people and organizations, and then expecting to be able to reap what others have sown.

wpietri 7y ago

The author of that post isn't in software; he's a writer and editor. E.g., he founded Wired magazine, and runs Cool Tools: https://kk.org/cooltools/ https://kk.org/cooltools/

projektfu 7y ago
OK, so perhaps it extends to journalism. It's a sentiment I would have agreed with wholeheartedly when I was in software, and here in veterinary medicine I know that training is difficult, people with seemingly high aptitude often don't help you train them, and experience is a great measure of someone's ability.
- wpietri 7y ago
  I think it makes more sense in the context of the full quote: "Experience is overrated. When hiring, hire for aptitude, train for skills. Most really amazing or great things are done by people doing them for the first time." He's pretty clearly talking about creative work here, where the goal is to make new things. Whereas the goal of most of medicine, presumably yours included, is to reliably do a known thing. If I'm going to have surgery, I'm going to find a surgeon who has done the procedure a large number of times, because there's a clear expected outcome, and a deviation from that likely means failure. A useful tool here might be the Cynefin framework: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cynefin_framework https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cynefin_framework You're talking about work that's mostly in the Obvious and Complicated buckets. He's talking about work in the Complex and Chaotic domains.
  - V-2 7y ago
    > He's pretty clearly talking about creative work here, where the goal is to make new things. Isn't it a tautology then? If the goal is to make something you haven't before, then obviously it's accomplished the first time round, by definition. And in a broader sense, is it really true? Are debuts usually the best art pieces?
    - wpietri 7y ago