Hacker News Reader

Comment by vanderZwan | Hacker News Reader

"When you are learning, you are not producing"

I beg your pardon?

You are reading the docs, asking peers, trying to Google things while an already learned employee could have finished what you are working on.

Edit: obviously it's not literally either 100% production and 0% learning or 100% learning and 0% production. This doesn't even have to sum to a fixed "100%" value. The point is that learning has it non-ignoreable cost.

A majority of my value as an engineer stems from the fact that, in general, I can learn new things extremely rapidly. "Learning" is what I sell, and business is pretty decent.

Obviously the more learning is necessary (and on good jobs it is) the more it makes sense for a company to minimize its cost, hence going for fast learning folks.

If a company hires for learning ability then it is a good prognostic for your learning on the job. Conversely if the job ad specifies software versions to the third dot and years of experience going longer than a technology exists then you might not learn too much there.

Your value = f(your actual knowledge, your learning potential);

with some other arguments as motivation, coding efficiency, communcation skill, etc.

It doesn't matter how good you think you are or how much you think you already know - but if you are not learning something new every day, you're already behind the times.

The thing with this industry is that it's moving ever faster. So rather than hiring an expert now, based only on the fact they are an expert is a short sighted gain.

You should actually be hiring people who want to learn, who learn fast and who iterate and innovate on what they just learnt.

Learning is not a destination, it's a process you should actively participate in every day.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com