Saturday, January 28, 2006
Hiring the right technical people.
Now that's a challenge and that is what I am going to talk about in this post.
Adam Scott in his book "The Dilbert Future" gives us a fair idea about what the future holds in store. He talks about "induh-viduals" i.e. stupid individuals. I think we are seeing more of these guys during our recruitment drive already, looks like the future is not really far away :)
Companies invest a fair amount of money in the hiring process. This involves preparing test papers, visiting places for hiring, identifying folks in the organization to help with the hiring process etc. There is a lot of hard work and pain, that goes in this process. Yet, you endup with the wrong set of people being hired in the organization.
Sometimes I wonder if the educational institutes are contributing towards the "Duhh" factor. The focus these days is on learning programming languages than more fundamental things like deep understanding of data structures or algorithms. There is a basic lack of analytical skills these days. As more educational institutes stress on teaching "cutting edge technology" [believe me there is no such thing], the result is more "induh-viduals".
The other day I asked a candidate to design a set of classes for linked list data structure and I found the candidate struggling with my rather trivial problem. I think folks these days are apprehensive towards these subjects, like "data structures", "algorithm design". To them, these seem as antique as "cobol" or "assembly" language.
I think part of the problem is due to less curiosity that candidates posses these days. They are not interested in knowing "what goes on under the hood". For example, most Java programmers would not know "when" and by "how much" does the vector grow. If I ask this, then the answer I would get these days is that "Java language designers would have done it in an efficient manner" :). Sometimes I wonder if they know the difference between "effective" and "efficient".
If you manage to mis-hire such an induh-vidual on your team, chances are that eventually good people on your team will move on. The simple reason is that the new induh-vidual turns out to be a liability on good people on your team, due to poor independent execution skills.
If in doubt, do not hire.
Please read what Joel thinks on this as well:
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/ThePerilsofJavaSchools.html
More later.....
- Paresh.
Adam Scott in his book "The Dilbert Future" gives us a fair idea about what the future holds in store. He talks about "induh-viduals" i.e. stupid individuals. I think we are seeing more of these guys during our recruitment drive already, looks like the future is not really far away :)
Companies invest a fair amount of money in the hiring process. This involves preparing test papers, visiting places for hiring, identifying folks in the organization to help with the hiring process etc. There is a lot of hard work and pain, that goes in this process. Yet, you endup with the wrong set of people being hired in the organization.
Sometimes I wonder if the educational institutes are contributing towards the "Duhh" factor. The focus these days is on learning programming languages than more fundamental things like deep understanding of data structures or algorithms. There is a basic lack of analytical skills these days. As more educational institutes stress on teaching "cutting edge technology" [believe me there is no such thing], the result is more "induh-viduals".
The other day I asked a candidate to design a set of classes for linked list data structure and I found the candidate struggling with my rather trivial problem. I think folks these days are apprehensive towards these subjects, like "data structures", "algorithm design". To them, these seem as antique as "cobol" or "assembly" language.
I think part of the problem is due to less curiosity that candidates posses these days. They are not interested in knowing "what goes on under the hood". For example, most Java programmers would not know "when" and by "how much" does the vector grow. If I ask this, then the answer I would get these days is that "Java language designers would have done it in an efficient manner" :). Sometimes I wonder if they know the difference between "effective" and "efficient".
If you manage to mis-hire such an induh-vidual on your team, chances are that eventually good people on your team will move on. The simple reason is that the new induh-vidual turns out to be a liability on good people on your team, due to poor independent execution skills.
If in doubt, do not hire.
Please read what Joel thinks on this as well:
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/ThePerilsofJavaSchools.html
More later.....
- Paresh.
Labels: hiring, management
Out of hibernation!
I seem to have been hibernating (with regards to blogging) for the past year 2005. You will see that my last post wishes you a happy new year 2005 and this post will wish you the same (and more) for this year 2006.
Actually hibernating seems a bit cold blooded and maybe I should re-phrase it to being dormant. Now that certainly sounds better (considered to lazy :))
Year 2006 is the year of the dog, according to the chinese calendar. I like dogs (as pets).
I came across these awesome essays written by Paul Graham:
http://www.paulgraham.com/articles.html
I would recommend reading through these, they are quite interesting and fun.
My manager recommended another book "Toyota Production System". It is an interesting book. But then couple of weeks back, I bought "The Dilbert Future" and it seems like the latter has been winning most of the battles for my reading time.
Hopefully this year I won't be lazy....oops! I mean dormant and there will be more posts on my blog.
- Paresh.
Actually hibernating seems a bit cold blooded and maybe I should re-phrase it to being dormant. Now that certainly sounds better (considered to lazy :))
Year 2006 is the year of the dog, according to the chinese calendar. I like dogs (as pets).
I came across these awesome essays written by Paul Graham:
http://www.paulgraham.com/articles.html
I would recommend reading through these, they are quite interesting and fun.
My manager recommended another book "Toyota Production System". It is an interesting book. But then couple of weeks back, I bought "The Dilbert Future" and it seems like the latter has been winning most of the battles for my reading time.
Hopefully this year I won't be lazy....oops! I mean dormant and there will be more posts on my blog.
- Paresh.
