4 ms·

I'm gonna share my unsolicited opinion: if you're hiring, you want someone who is ready to do "it". He may or may not have done "it" before, and may not do "it"

I'm gonna share my unsolicited opinion: if you're hiring, you want someone who is ready to do "it". He may or may not have done "it" before, and may not do "it" exactly as you had planned, but he has foundational core competencies, motivation, and the cooperative responsibility taking attitude to accomplish the key parts of "it" as best as you can foresee "it". If you LITERALLY need "it" done as "it" has been done before in an exactly specifiable way, you probably should contract it out. Not hire.

TimPC 5y ago
Hiring for someone who has done it before is very common at the Principal and Staff Engineer level. As people get more senior in their careers there is more demand for specific skills and expertise not less. Contracting out is its own can of worms and can introduce as many problems as it solves. Exact specifiable way typically means 30 details to iron out later even when both sides mean well and those details are usually problematic.
wofo 5y ago
I have had the luck of working with this kind of trust from a company and it is a great experience. It can even work as a contractor. Case in point: for my current project I was hired to port a library from Rust to Java, but since the original library was not mature enough I ended up writing an independent implementation of what the original library was intended to do: a fake MySQL server that lets you handle user requests with custom logic. I had never dreamed of things unfolding that way! Learned a lot and still enjoying it.
- wpietri 5y ago
  Could you say more about the project? I'm curious what motivated making a fake MySQL server.
  - wofo 5y ago
    They are creating a BI platform and wanted it to integrate seamlessly with other existing BI tools. If you pretend to be a MySQL server, you can integrate it with almost anything. There is a high chance we will end up open sourcing the library :)
    - wpietri 4y ago
      That's very cool! Good luck with the project.

TimPC 5y ago

Hiring for someone who has done it before is very common at the Principal and Staff Engineer level. As people get more senior in their careers there is more demand for specific skills and expertise not less. Contracting out is its own can of worms and can introduce as many problems as it solves. Exact specifiable way typically means 30 details to iron out later even when both sides mean well and those details are usually problematic.

wofo 5y ago

I have had the luck of working with this kind of trust from a company and it is a great experience. It can even work as a contractor. Case in point: for my current project I was hired to port a library from Rust to Java, but since the original library was not mature enough I ended up writing an independent implementation of what the original library was intended to do: a fake MySQL server that lets you handle user requests with custom logic. I had never dreamed of things unfolding that way! Learned a lot and still enjoying it.

wpietri 5y ago
Could you say more about the project? I'm curious what motivated making a fake MySQL server.
- wofo 5y ago
  They are creating a BI platform and wanted it to integrate seamlessly with other existing BI tools. If you pretend to be a MySQL server, you can integrate it with almost anything. There is a high chance we will end up open sourcing the library :)
  - wpietri 4y ago
    That's very cool! Good luck with the project.