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Or, how about instead of trying to find the bestest Javascript ninja, you take a promising engineer and, I don't know, teach them? Whatever you might think, web

Or, how about instead of trying to find the bestest Javascript ninja, you take a promising engineer and, I don't know, teach them? Whatever you might think, web technologies are NOT very difficult to learn. Most start-ups work on pretty trivial problems. People in the start-up crowd seem to believe that the smartest people on the planet are building web start-ups. Think again.

marcuswestin 14y ago
We did plenty of that as well :)
at-fates-hands 14y ago
The other great part of teaching someone is you can usually get decent talent at a lower cost, and they can learn your process and standards. I've been in a few places where devs come in and they feel like they own the place and everybody should get in line with how they code the process they feel is right.
deleted 14y ago
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warbee 14y ago
I studied Religious Studies in college, but have always loved coding (started with Basic, Pascal, C, into others) in my free time. One of my favorite jobs early on was where the lead of the department took the time to teach the department perl. It helped frame some of the basics of web-app development for me, and ultimately helped to pave the way to exploring other technologies. Having since moved to the bay area, I feel like this sentiment is shared, but hardly practiced. I've interviewed at a few startups, and can answer the typical fizz-buzz-baz problem. However, I feel like that potential is overlooked for someone that can hit the ground running. (Granted, there's probably a slew of other reasons for not getting an offer). Overall, would love to be mentored and am pursuing such a relationship now with my current employer.
nir 14y ago
Well said. Seems like companies are starting believe their own job ads, searching for Ninjas and Rock Stars and obsessing about hiring processes. We're not doing brain surgery, and we're not flying to the moon. The JS frameworks mentioned in the article can be learned on the job in a matter of weeks by any reasonably competent and motivated programmer, days by a good one.
ryguytilidie 14y ago
This has always been the weird thing for me. I'm ex-facebook so when I get hired companies will often say "wow you know a bunch of facebook people, lets hire them" not realizing they are both insanely expensive and insanely in demand. I've always said, why not instead of hiring engineers who work at Facebook or Google, maybe beat them at their own game and instead go for the same crop of people they are hiring? Brilliant college kids who are excited to work for you and can learn from your team and develop into the great engineer you want.
- seanmcdirmid 14y ago
  Wow you know a lot of CMU/MIT/stanford kids, lets hire them Not that easy.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
rayiner 14y ago
I don't think it's a matter of attitude, it's a matter of scale. Training entry-level people properly takes scale. You need procedures, systems, and institutional knowledge. You need to be able to "write off" time spent learning. Startups don't have, nor can they afford, any of these things. If you look at professions that train fresh graduates systematically (everything from finance to accounting to medicine) you'll note that there is an "assembly line" quality to the process. What's lamentable is big, established engineering companies that don't train their people.
- zem 14y ago
  nope, i did this in a startup with three engineers and no budget to hire rockstars. i hired four entry-level engineers, selecting strongly for people who could learn quickly and readily adopt the best practices i wanted to train into them. it worked out very well indeed, at the cost of another two hours per day of my time for roughly six weeks. as part of the bargain, they were willing to put in extra hours learning ruby and posix apis in their own time to keep up with the training schedule.

marcuswestin 14y ago

We did plenty of that as well :)

at-fates-hands 14y ago

The other great part of teaching someone is you can usually get decent talent at a lower cost, and they can learn your process and standards. I've been in a few places where devs come in and they feel like they own the place and everybody should get in line with how they code the process they feel is right.

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

warbee 14y ago

I studied Religious Studies in college, but have always loved coding (started with Basic, Pascal, C, into others) in my free time. One of my favorite jobs early on was where the lead of the department took the time to teach the department perl. It helped frame some of the basics of web-app development for me, and ultimately helped to pave the way to exploring other technologies. Having since moved to the bay area, I feel like this sentiment is shared, but hardly practiced. I've interviewed at a few startups, and can answer the typical fizz-buzz-baz problem. However, I feel like that potential is overlooked for someone that can hit the ground running. (Granted, there's probably a slew of other reasons for not getting an offer). Overall, would love to be mentored and am pursuing such a relationship now with my current employer.

nir 14y ago

Well said. Seems like companies are starting believe their own job ads, searching for Ninjas and Rock Stars and obsessing about hiring processes. We're not doing brain surgery, and we're not flying to the moon. The JS frameworks mentioned in the article can be learned on the job in a matter of weeks by any reasonably competent and motivated programmer, days by a good one.

ryguytilidie 14y ago

This has always been the weird thing for me. I'm ex-facebook so when I get hired companies will often say "wow you know a bunch of facebook people, lets hire them" not realizing they are both insanely expensive and insanely in demand. I've always said, why not instead of hiring engineers who work at Facebook or Google, maybe beat them at their own game and instead go for the same crop of people they are hiring? Brilliant college kids who are excited to work for you and can learn from your team and develop into the great engineer you want.

seanmcdirmid 14y ago
Wow you know a lot of CMU/MIT/stanford kids, lets hire them Not that easy.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]

rayiner 14y ago

I don't think it's a matter of attitude, it's a matter of scale. Training entry-level people properly takes scale. You need procedures, systems, and institutional knowledge. You need to be able to "write off" time spent learning. Startups don't have, nor can they afford, any of these things. If you look at professions that train fresh graduates systematically (everything from finance to accounting to medicine) you'll note that there is an "assembly line" quality to the process. What's lamentable is big, established engineering companies that don't train their people.

zem 14y ago
nope, i did this in a startup with three engineers and no budget to hire rockstars. i hired four entry-level engineers, selecting strongly for people who could learn quickly and readily adopt the best practices i wanted to train into them. it worked out very well indeed, at the cost of another two hours per day of my time for roughly six weeks. as part of the bargain, they were willing to put in extra hours learning ruby and posix apis in their own time to keep up with the training schedule.