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Comment by S4M | Hacker News Reader

I am a big believer that companies underestimate people's ability to learn, but what you describe works well if the company is stable and has little growth - a perfectly fine situation to be in - but I think the majority of startups don't have this kind of stability, and need someone who has the right skills now for whatever they need (building a new service, scaling the backend, tweaking the frontend, porting their product to mobile, etc.), so they can't really afford to do that long term mentoring.

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I dunno from web stuff, really, but none of that sounds like rocket surgery ( because I don't know what I am talking about, you see - this always makes everything easier ). Of the list, "scaling the backend" sounds the riskiest because the tools landscape is very fragmented.

Then again, a person with whom I went to college is a recognized expert on Oracle performance. I find it keenly interesting that such a role even exists.

I look at startup-ey, Webby looking job postings and it's like the qualified people drew to several consecutive inside straights just to have the right buzzwords on their resume. And it's a different set of inside straights than it was six months ago. And it's different yet from firm to firm.

See there how easy it is when you don't know what you're talking about? :)

That's probably true for a lot of startups. If you have problems scaling your $language services right now, then you need somebody who can scale $language services.

OTOH, I recently had an interview at a company who have quite a bit of groth and scaling problems right now (but probably not Silicon Valley level), and they still said: "We constantly have to learn new things, so the most important thing a candidate has to have is they have to enjoy learning new things".

AND: there are quite a lot of companies who are in the stable / profitable / predictable growth category and could afford to train/develop their people - But don't.

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