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Comment by gruseom | Hacker News Reader

If only there was some way of teaching people new skills

It's the other way around. If those farmboys you postulate don't have the initiative and aptitude to take up hacking, they're unlikely to be a great addition to a software team. The last thing you need is someone passively waiting to be told what to do and taught how to do it.

It would be great to be proven wrong about this, but I've seen lots of examples of it being a problem and not one counterexample.

If mainstream culture changes to one in which the idea of doing this work and being excited by it and making things with it becomes widespread, then one might see significant growth in the talent pool. If more creative sparks are flying around, the chance of one of your farmboys catching fire is greater. But that's a longer-term process. To become good at this stuff, people don't need training - they need inspiration.

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In my experience most companies aren't interested in "initiative and aptitude". They are generally unwilling to look at people without a few years of experience already.

I moved to NYC and started job-hunting in early 2011. I didn't have a background in software development but I had programmed in VBA for 18 months (pricing insurance), used R for my statistics masters degree project and had been dabbling in Python for around 5 years (all self-taught).

Through direct applications, headhunters and networking at various meetup events I hunted for tech and tech/finance jobs for about eight months. While things would sometimes look promising, if usually came down to "we're really looking for someone with a bit more experience in X". I did manage to find some freelance work (for a Python/Django web startup) but they decided that rather than another backend programmer they needed someone who could do frontend development and system administration...

After leaving NYC my sister got a call, "is your brother still looking for a job in New York?", and I ended up back here working as an accountant. I didn't have any experience in accounting either (though I had taken some classes in the past) but my new boss was happy to bring me in on a three month contract and see how things worked out (I got a permanent offer after a month and a half).

Yeah. I think the answer there is: fuck those companies. The sooner we start new ones that get this right, the fewer their days are numbered.

But you may have missed my point by a couple degrees. It wasn't that companies should look at initiative and aptitude directly. It's that those are the things that drive you to acquire the skills that make you good. Then you can prove that you're good.

How exactly to prove you're good, or for companies to tell who's good, is a billion (trillion?) dollar question that's in flux right now. But clearly it has more to do with showing work and less with weak proxies like years of experience (which may be years of doing things badly) or resumes (a skill uncorrelated if not inversely correlated with good programming). Since startups are starved for good hackers, somebody's going to figure this out, gain a huge edge, and pave the way for the rest.

In the meantime, training/retraining programs are not going to increase the talent pool much. Something fresh like Hacker School might, though.

Edit: in my opinion the eventual answer is going to be found by reasoning backward from Christopher Alexander's great question, "What feels more alive?" But obviously that isn't much help to someone in the situation you describe right now. So how did it work out? Do you like accounting or would you rather be programming?

Thanks for the reply. I get your point that the initiative and aptitude are the starting point, but as you mentioned, looking for "proof" of ability is very tricky, particularly for people without much experience. Of course had I known I would be unemployed for 6+ months at the offset I could have planned a project that ticked lots of boxes (Django frontend, NumpPy, SQLAlchemy, PyMongo etc. etc.). I love the idea of Hacker School and wish I'd known about it at the time, I'm sure it would have helped me build a portfolio of work. While I did have some side projects I'd spend a lot of time learning to match a job spec or recruiters recommendations only to find the interviewer fixating on something else, other times I'd be strung along ("we'll be looking to hire in a month or so, why not brush up on X in the meantime?") and then the job would disappear (cash-flow issues, change in priorities, new CTO decides to scrap Python and rewrite in node.js ;)

Ultimately I'd rather be programming. My current job is OK and I'll stick at it for now, I owe my boss for taking a chance on me and they'd struggle if I left before the end of the year (we are a small team and in the middle of switching accounting systems and finalizing an acquisition). I do like the fact that I get exposed to a range of business issues, as my previous job in the insurance industry was a little more technical but very narrow in scope. Long-term it probably doesn't suit me (though it might be different at another company), I've automated some tasks in Access/VBA but there is a line between finance and IT (partially outsourced or contractors) and I'm expected to use systems rather than improve them. At least I can at least work on some longer-term programing projects in my free time, but it's frustrating to be left thinking "maybe next year", rather than living in the moment!

There is one way in which you are at an advantage. You're gaining domain knowledge, and a programmer with domain knowledge has definitely leveled up. Assuming of course that you would enjoy writing software for said domain.

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