Hacker News Reader

This is a fantastic comment, and it matches exactly the attitude that Anthony Bourdain wrote about in his book Kitchen Confidential, which I read in eighth grade and have thought about weekly ever since.

CTRL+F for "WHO COOKS" and read the whole section to see a professional chef say exactly the same thing you said about programming.

https://joeandjin.files.wordpress.com/2011/10/anthony-bourda...

This is a fantastic read. And, I totally agree - the parallels are quite obvious.

Great read.

> Honestly, I almost prefer to start with a blank slate these days

This is about Technical Support training (not programming) and is from my recent experience.

When I was running a small customer service team on a Linux based product, and needed new staff, I thought that the best idea was to get people who had 'significant' experience in Linux.

That was until I discovered (from a bad hire) that people lied about their experience (resumes) and motivation (interview). This was an older guy - he wasn't motivated at all and treated me like a babysitter.. It wasn't about his age - he was just useless - and he had managed to fool me. That hire was my fault..

And although I utterly hate ageism (being 50+), I was turned off by this experience..

The next two I hired were younger guys (sorry ladies, no resumes submitted). Those two (somehow??) took to my particular style of training really well - and were able to take over all but the most advanced cases after 3-6 months of training on a bespoke php application. - one loved all the SQL I could throw at him - another loved getting deep into networking issues and how to solve them

Between us we were able to work through a ~200+ case backlog down to 0 by the time I left the company.

I am very proud of what these two guys put into their work (bash/shell/vi remote primary tools - all mostly alien to them to start with).

Not sure that I could do the same with training a programming role..

Staff (personal) motivation is the key I think..

It reminds me of a place I worked years ago that had their own unique and I would say simple tech and they did hire from the street. What was standing between you and that job was a rigorous two week U program. Daily classes taught a small group of prospects the ropes and at the end a small number of obvious people were hired. It was always pretty obvious. Some of the people hired were homemakers, blue collar workers, even a Cobol programmer.

Do you remember when the hired codebreakers for the war effort and they tested them with crosswords.

> Trial by example is my lesson of choice these days.

That's an easy way to develop lessons, but seems like it would lead to a lot of cargo cult mechanisms. Especially once those people started teaching.

> your ability to consume non-PhD candidates is partially predicated upon how you've decided to run your tech business

I've found a PhD (without work experience) is a bad sign.

>. If you (ab)use enterprise arch like message buses, event sourcing, et. al., you are going to find that it requires additional mountain ranges worth of background knowledge to understand how these things fit together

I know I've hit the point several times where what I consider trivial is complex, but are message buses and events really that difficult? (And isn't event sourcing just one of the standard ways events are used?) Aren't buses covered in programming 101?

I took multiple CS classes at a top university* and I never heard about message buses or events...

Admittedly I was not a CS major and don't work in software engineering.

(To be honest, it being a top university probably decreased the probability that they would teach me practical/useful engineering practices like this. The programming classes I took were fairly focused on more theoretical concerns)

I had a similar experience. I didn't learn about message buses until I was working in a massive enterprise ecosystem.

It looks more like the hiring process for McDonalds...

You probably didn't mean it like that but "attitude, open-mindedness and general ability to endure pain" is the qualities that I would want a slave to have. There is no experience, inventiveness, leadership, autonomy, knowledge, logical thinking, initiative, problem solving, etc... here, even though there are qualities that matter to engineers. There are only qualities that matter when it comes to executing orders. I doesn't mean that they are undesirable, it is important to have people who stay enthusiastic even when they don't do as they please, but it is not all there is to a skilled job.

You want someone who learns by example, and from a blank slate. Yep, that's how you get a good burger flipper. But for a developer to quickly learn by example in all but the most simple projects, he needs a solid background. A programmer who knows 10 programming languages will pick up the 11th in no time at all, literally. One who knows zero will need more than a few weeks of looking at you to code competently.

You seem to be in a rare situation where you need a low-skilled developer. Most projects require either high skills or no one at all (automation).

Note that many people think they don't need skilled developers, until they realize the mess people have done. It is a common problem with off-shoring to countries with low labor cost, like India. People think they are going to save a lot of money until they realize that it is cheap for a reason. You can get quality work done in India if you pay the price, but too many people go there to not pay the price.

As for "web-scale zealots", you probably mean people who are on top of "mount stupid" in the Dunning-Kruger curve. Yep, they are the worst and you'd rather have a "blank slate". But if you think about it, since we all have that bias to some extent, the fresh people you have are walking towards mount stupid and will become worse, if you hire them when they are overconfident, they are passing it and becoming better.