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I tend to use "conceptional skills" to describe someone's ability to understand a complex system. When hiring - especially for roles like "technical product man

by fhd2 2y ago

I tend to use "conceptional skills" to describe someone's ability to understand a complex system. When hiring - especially for roles like "technical product manager", I could care less about "coding experience". CS education is a plus for sure, 1-2 years coding too. But beyond that, I feel the conceptual skills are far more relevant. How much modelling can someone do in their head? How quickly? How honed is that ability in them? Sounds like your university trained your conceptual skills, that's awesome. Other people train them through other means, consciously or not. Hiring even developers with lots of experience but low conceptual skills has mostly been a disaster for me in the past. The same goes for "technical something" roles. Programming experience can be a bit of a red herring for those actually. For the most part, my "technical" interviews go into conceptual skills and motivations. That's the stuff I really need to know to decide whether to hire someone. Some language/tool/framework, they can learn quickly, given conceptual skills, motivation and _some_ programming experience. (Disclaimer: I primarily hire generalists as FTEs. For specialist skills, I prefer to hire freelancers temporarily, where I focus on what exactly they can do today.)

shalmanese 2y ago
To me, the two ideas are slightly orthogonal. Conceptual skills are cross-domain applicable and is a good measure of your ability to gain new technical skills whereas "technical" in the context I'm using it refers purely to your ability to pierce abstractions in the domain you're working in. eg: I would be confident stepping in as a technical manager in a software team but if I were to work in eg, aerospace, I'd still have strong conceptual skills but I'd be distinctly non-technical. There's a pretty shallow set of abstraction layers beyond which, I just don't have the education. If I were to go back to school for aerospace engineering, I'm sure my strong conceptual foundation would mean I could master the material 4x faster than anyone else but it would still be a lot of grinding work doing the math and using the software and building prototypes and testing so I could learn. And like, at this stage in my life, the ROI simply cannot pencil out, which is why it's so important to build the foundation when you're young. I'd say almost every strong non-technical manager is strong on the basis of their strong conceptual skills but that still makes them a non-technical manager and there is a distinct difference.
- fhd2 2y ago
  True! I'd still argue when people want something like a "technical product manager", it often means "someone who can dive into the details of some complex system", at least from what I've seen. Hiring someone who did some programming a few years ago isn't necessarily going to give them that.

by fhd2 2y ago

shalmanese 2y ago

To me, the two ideas are slightly orthogonal. Conceptual skills are cross-domain applicable and is a good measure of your ability to gain new technical skills whereas "technical" in the context I'm using it refers purely to your ability to pierce abstractions in the domain you're working in. eg: I would be confident stepping in as a technical manager in a software team but if I were to work in eg, aerospace, I'd still have strong conceptual skills but I'd be distinctly non-technical. There's a pretty shallow set of abstraction layers beyond which, I just don't have the education. If I were to go back to school for aerospace engineering, I'm sure my strong conceptual foundation would mean I could master the material 4x faster than anyone else but it would still be a lot of grinding work doing the math and using the software and building prototypes and testing so I could learn. And like, at this stage in my life, the ROI simply cannot pencil out, which is why it's so important to build the foundation when you're young. I'd say almost every strong non-technical manager is strong on the basis of their strong conceptual skills but that still makes them a non-technical manager and there is a distinct difference.

fhd2 2y ago
True! I'd still argue when people want something like a "technical product manager", it often means "someone who can dive into the details of some complex system", at least from what I've seen. Hiring someone who did some programming a few years ago isn't necessarily going to give them that.