The argument about what hiring or training focus is "the best" is a little silly, it seems to me, because different companies so obviously have different requir

The argument about what hiring or training focus is "the best" is a little silly, it seems to me, because different companies so obviously have different requirements. Take Google, as a prototypical high-tech firm, and Getronics, as a prototypical business automation consultancy of the kind that tends to put hackers to sleep but that is quite profitable nonetheless. Google tries to do things that are sufficiently technologically ahead that it will take competitors years to catch up. They'll work on problems before anybody realized they had them, and do things that might seem ridiculously speculative from the perspective of a Getronics executive, like statistical machine translation. Their hiring and and training seems to focus largely on finding, retaining, and developing intelligent generalists, and specialists in esoteric fields where there is no such thing as certification programs. Getronics, on the other hand, deals with big business clients who are often satisfied with rather run-off-the-mill technology, as long as it's delivered predictably and uniformly. (Of course, that's harder than it sounds.) A typical big job for Getronics might be to help some organization upgrade from a mainframe with terminals to a SQL server with PCs, without interrupting operations. There's nothing particularly innovative about it (it's been done thousands of times before), and it will likely be tolerated if the resulting solution is a little clumsy, but it had better not go wrong. Getronics has a long and detailed internal training program, and they like people with very specific experience. They have people who are specialists in, say, office printing systems, and who know all the little quirks you'll run into when you move from Novell print servers to Microsoft print servers. If you work there for a number of years, you progress through a system of internal certifications and ranks that begins to approach those of a military organization. For Google to behave like Getronics or vice versa would probably be silly. If I held shares in these companies, I'd probably want them both to continue hiring and training much the way they do now, even though they're worlds apart in the ways they do it.