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Discussion on: You're not worth hiring unless...

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johnhalbert profile image
John Halbert

At my company, the exec in charge of our software regularly says: "I don't want to pay someone to learn", then asks for something that doesn't exist, or for us to use some technology no one has ever used previously. I haven't decided if he doesn't think about what he's saying, knows what he's saying but is fine being contradictory if it suits him for the moment or to make a point, or is maybe just a bit dense.

It's like this everywhere. I think software on some levels is fundamentally broken. It's at the center of most tech, which is an area of business that sees continuous innovation, yet we still see job postings listing a laundry list of skills that match the company's entire stack, none of which everyone at the company understands entirely. It's just a farse. No one really knows what they're doing I don't think.

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Sean McCrohan

Ability and motivation to learn is one of the most important thing I look for in a dev. I don't care if you can write a bubble sort. I care if you can dive into my existing code base, understand it, and make positive contributions.

I pay people to learn every day. What I don't want to do is pay people to NOT learn.

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db325 profile image
db325 • Edited

I love this. I have when I hear,"oh we want someone with x years using this language." That says to me that you're stupid because any dev knows that you can pick up another language. It's the concepts.. The reasons behind doing things a certain way.. Not syntax. And don't ask me to do something you don't do regularly it haven't done in a while just to try and trip me up. Furthermore, no coder codes completely from memory. WE ALL USE GOOGLE! So if I can't solve the problem like I would in the real world, don't ask me. What really gets me is the frameworks. Any developer with a solid understanding of JavaScript should be able to move between angular,Vue,and react. These are all just wrappers that abstract away a lot of common tasks. But again it's the concepts and what's going on in the background... How data is sent, processed, and stored, protocols etc, These things never change

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John Halbert

Yep, and I bet your software team appreciates it and does a good job because of your approach.

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Tsigie

My company encourage us to learn and to educate teammate. I love it because I am learning some thing new every and will to transfer my knowledge to other teammates. They also move us to different teams for us to learn different stacks what ever each team is using. I think it is a great idea an positive outcome.

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Omri Gabay

You're right with the "noone knows what they're doing" part