4 ms·

I have always focused on hiring for attitude and aptitude. If you have the attitude to learn, and the aptitude to grown your skills, then you'll do great at any

by kator 5y ago

I have always focused on hiring for attitude and aptitude. If you have the attitude to learn, and the aptitude to grown your skills, then you'll do great at anything you're passionate about. I literally hired a guy who was a part-time computer hobbyist but, a full time pool man. I told him "hey how would you like to spend 40 hours a week learning more about computers." Today he's working as a leader in his company's security group. He often thanks me for the job, and I always remind him "you did the work, all I did was give you the opportunity". Sadly as stated in the thread linked, its hard when you have 10k applicants, to treat each as a potentially amazing member of the your team. I still try hard to look for that attitude and aptitude, and if a candidate demonstrates this in our dialog, I will do my best to find a path for them to connect with other opportunities if they're not a strong match for roles I'm filling on my teams. What I know is we're born to this world knowing how to eat, breathe, cry, and a couple other things. The rest, all of it, we've learned on our way to this day. Just because the person in front of me didn't have the same path as me, doesn't mean they won't learn to have an incredible impact going forward. Searching for this potential and type of partnership at scale is hard. My heart wants to say it can be solved, but my calendar is an evil overlord that only allows me only so many hours a day to invest in growing my teams...

jstx1 5y ago
You have a bright career as a LinkedIn influencer ahead of you.
- nickff 5y ago
  >" You have a bright career as a LinkedIn influencer ahead of you. " I am not sure exactly what you meant to say, but this came off as a bit snide (to me).
  - pc86 5y ago
    LinkedIn is full of completely farcical stories about recruiters who had the prescience to hire someone even though they were 30 seconds late for an interview or didn't wear a tie or hadn't graduated from an Ivy League school or some other such nonsense. And because of this HR drone's largesse, this person later did their job satisfactorily. I honestly can't tell if the GP meant it in a snide way (like my example above) or as an honest compliment. It could be either, really.
  - ta988 5y ago
    What the person means here is that on Linkedin there are a lot of (usually staged) comments or videos of people that "saved the life of that person that had $X and nobody employed and (s)he is now the best $Y". These posts are highly shared and commented upon. I don't think the comment was mocking you really, it was just a funny parallel (hope I'm not wrong).
    - nickff 5y ago
      >"I don't think the comment was mocking you really" I did not make the top-level comment.
      - bryanrasmussen 5y ago
        definitely they weren't mocking you then!
- cozos 5y ago
  Not trying to be snide to OP, but his/her anecdote does hit the typical Linkedin influencer plot beats which I find amusing: I literally hired a guy who was a part-time computer hobbyist but, a full time pool man. I told him "hey how would you like to spend 40 hours a week learning more about computers." Today he's working as a leader in his company's security group. He often thanks me for the job, and I always remind him "you did the work, all I did was give you the opportunity".
  - LAC-Tech 5y ago
    LOL I feel like they'd use even more line breaks than that.
bob1029 5y ago
This is pretty much where I am at now. Attitude, open-mindedness and general ability to endure pain are what I look for. I can teach 100% of the tech stack to a total noob in a matter of weeks. Trial by example is my lesson of choice these days. The good apprentice will absorb these like a dry sponge to water. It also really helps that our tech stack is simple and fits on 1 computer. It is not bullshit abstraction either - You install 3 things on a fresh Win10 box to promote it to "Official Developer Machine" status. None of these things happens to be Docker or any other containerization tech, so even junior developers are expected to understand how the product runs on the bare metal/vm. Spoiler: It's 1 process & 1 service so they learn it fast. Basically what I am trying to say is that your ability to consume non-PhD candidates is partially predicated upon how you've decided to run your tech business. If you (ab)use enterprise arch like message buses, event sourcing, et. al., you are going to find that it requires additional mountain ranges worth of background knowledge to understand how these things fit together. If your tech stack can be considered within the context of a single process, the margin of understanding becomes much more practical to work with in my experience. Honestly, I almost prefer to start with a blank slate these days. Don't know how a computer works? Fucking fantastic! I can probably still get you productive in my simple C#/SQLite tech stack faster than if I had to de-program some web-scale zealot for the same purpose.
- quacked 5y ago
  This is a fantastic comment, and it matches exactly the attitude that Anthony Bourdain wrote about in his book Kitchen Confidential, which I read in eighth grade and have thought about weekly ever since. CTRL+F for "WHO COOKS" and read the whole section to see a professional chef say exactly the same thing you said about programming. https://joeandjin.files.wordpress.com/2011/10/anthony-bourdain-kitchen-confidential.pdf https://joeandjin.files.wordpress.com/2011/10/anthony-bourda...
  - bob1029 5y ago
    This is a fantastic read. And, I totally agree - the parallels are quite obvious.
  - musiccog 5y ago
rigel_kentaurus 5y ago
Thanks for the insight, I agree with you. What's hard is to interview for attitude and aptitude, and scaling that so other people know how to interview for those traits. Would you mind sharing some insight on what type of interview, green flags, things you are looking for, or process? Hopefully it's not only gut feeling :)
- Jare 5y ago
  Focus on asking the candidate "why", and you're 50% there. Why did you choose X, why would you pick Y, why is Z better, why is W more expensive, why did K happen... The "what" are just conversation starters (unless severely incorrect or misguided, of course).
noneeeed 5y ago
> What I know is we're born to this world knowing how to eat, breathe, cry, and a couple other things Something I found interesting about having kids was the realisation that even some of those things had to be learnt to some extent. Babies have natural drives that lead them to feed, but they often still have trouble in the early days with breast feeding. Even the first breath doesn't always happen as automatically as you might think.

by kator 5y ago

jstx1 5y ago

You have a bright career as a LinkedIn influencer ahead of you.

nickff 5y ago
>" You have a bright career as a LinkedIn influencer ahead of you. " I am not sure exactly what you meant to say, but this came off as a bit snide (to me).
- pc86 5y ago
  LinkedIn is full of completely farcical stories about recruiters who had the prescience to hire someone even though they were 30 seconds late for an interview or didn't wear a tie or hadn't graduated from an Ivy League school or some other such nonsense. And because of this HR drone's largesse, this person later did their job satisfactorily. I honestly can't tell if the GP meant it in a snide way (like my example above) or as an honest compliment. It could be either, really.
- ta988 5y ago
  What the person means here is that on Linkedin there are a lot of (usually staged) comments or videos of people that "saved the life of that person that had $X and nobody employed and (s)he is now the best $Y". These posts are highly shared and commented upon. I don't think the comment was mocking you really, it was just a funny parallel (hope I'm not wrong).
  - nickff 5y ago
    >"I don't think the comment was mocking you really" I did not make the top-level comment.
    - bryanrasmussen 5y ago
      definitely they weren't mocking you then!
cozos 5y ago
Not trying to be snide to OP, but his/her anecdote does hit the typical Linkedin influencer plot beats which I find amusing: I literally hired a guy who was a part-time computer hobbyist but, a full time pool man. I told him "hey how would you like to spend 40 hours a week learning more about computers." Today he's working as a leader in his company's security group. He often thanks me for the job, and I always remind him "you did the work, all I did was give you the opportunity".
- LAC-Tech 5y ago
  LOL I feel like they'd use even more line breaks than that.

bob1029 5y ago

This is pretty much where I am at now. Attitude, open-mindedness and general ability to endure pain are what I look for. I can teach 100% of the tech stack to a total noob in a matter of weeks. Trial by example is my lesson of choice these days. The good apprentice will absorb these like a dry sponge to water. It also really helps that our tech stack is simple and fits on 1 computer. It is not bullshit abstraction either - You install 3 things on a fresh Win10 box to promote it to "Official Developer Machine" status. None of these things happens to be Docker or any other containerization tech, so even junior developers are expected to understand how the product runs on the bare metal/vm. Spoiler: It's 1 process & 1 service so they learn it fast. Basically what I am trying to say is that your ability to consume non-PhD candidates is partially predicated upon how you've decided to run your tech business. If you (ab)use enterprise arch like message buses, event sourcing, et. al., you are going to find that it requires additional mountain ranges worth of background knowledge to understand how these things fit together. If your tech stack can be considered within the context of a single process, the margin of understanding becomes much more practical to work with in my experience. Honestly, I almost prefer to start with a blank slate these days. Don't know how a computer works? Fucking fantastic! I can probably still get you productive in my simple C#/SQLite tech stack faster than if I had to de-program some web-scale zealot for the same purpose.

quacked 5y ago
This is a fantastic comment, and it matches exactly the attitude that Anthony Bourdain wrote about in his book Kitchen Confidential, which I read in eighth grade and have thought about weekly ever since. CTRL+F for "WHO COOKS" and read the whole section to see a professional chef say exactly the same thing you said about programming. https://joeandjin.files.wordpress.com/2011/10/anthony-bourdain-kitchen-confidential.pdf https://joeandjin.files.wordpress.com/2011/10/anthony-bourda...
- bob1029 5y ago
  This is a fantastic read. And, I totally agree - the parallels are quite obvious.
- musiccog 5y ago

rigel_kentaurus 5y ago

Thanks for the insight, I agree with you. What's hard is to interview for attitude and aptitude, and scaling that so other people know how to interview for those traits. Would you mind sharing some insight on what type of interview, green flags, things you are looking for, or process? Hopefully it's not only gut feeling :)

Jare 5y ago
Focus on asking the candidate "why", and you're 50% there. Why did you choose X, why would you pick Y, why is Z better, why is W more expensive, why did K happen... The "what" are just conversation starters (unless severely incorrect or misguided, of course).

noneeeed 5y ago

> What I know is we're born to this world knowing how to eat, breathe, cry, and a couple other things Something I found interesting about having kids was the realisation that even some of those things had to be learnt to some extent. Babies have natural drives that lead them to feed, but they often still have trouble in the early days with breast feeding. Even the first breath doesn't always happen as automatically as you might think.