Comment by mrottenkolber | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mrottenkolber | Hacker News Reader

What I take away from the HN/Startup/Recruiting drama:

* Companies don't know how find good people (they think they know how to attract them, but honestly, how can they tell? They don't notice the ones they fail to attract, which I'd argue is most people)

* Companies are unable to produce (e.g. educate) good people

* They want to solve their failures by increasing the search space of people

I have no sympathy at all here. If you want good people you have to pick them up early and educate them. A startup however wants great people now, and they are supposed to be a great match by pure chance. This is classic irrational dream-thinking. You have to be pretty proud of yourself to expect all the good things will come to you just like that.

I suggest an alternative (my) approach, I call it the "secret elite ninja clan" approach:

1. Find out what skills are required in your industry.

2. Become a good at teaching these skills.

3. Find a pupil (as motivated as possible, no skills required)

4. Educate that pupil until a) they are as good as you are or better / b) they loose interest and leave you

5. Make money by utilizing the resulting skills. Also test your pupil's new talents.

6. Make pupil a partner if possible, return to step 1.

Also important: If you meet someone, figure out how that person can generate value, don't get cornered by your expectations. Improvise, diversify.

I am currently with my third pupil (first two were not motivated enough) and she seems to have it in her blood. I think if we keep up we can "grow" a pretty good company of really good people in a decade or so. Of course, there won't be a CEO, or a product, just really good hourly rates.

> Companies are unable to produce (e.g. educate) good people

It's really nice to hear someone say this. I've been out of the tech industry for a while (went back to school) and it is hard to put my finger on it but it feels like there is a trend to shift training and mentorship costs from companies to prospective employees. An example: Data science boot camps. Take smart, highly skilled and educated people, pay them nothing for 1-3m to teach them the concrete skills companies are hiring for, and split the cost savings with the company for hires.

You are basically saying that programming is not engineering but a (highly technical) craft and the best way to foster talent in it is to utilize the age old master/apprentice relationship? If so I agree.

Universities do give the necessary theoretical muscles for a lots of things but they surely do not prepare for the craftmanship aspects (beyond informal cultural indoctrination, if any).

I wonder if there could be any feasible structured approach to merge the academic and ninja-craftmanship paths to learning :)

I never really did academia so I wouldn't know. To be honest, I think the age of academia is over. I have more against these institutions than I see value in them. I say get rid of them, we can do better.

Why can't we teach "theoretical muscle" outside of universities? Wait, was the purpose of universities to maintain the state's control of education? Have they been putting thoughts in chains? Kept science away from the masses? I am highly critical... ;)

I suppose one of the values academia has is providing a garden for information from past generations to persist and be understood. The stuff that got invented in the early industrial revolution could have been produced in the antique greece. Or perhaps wollops of it was - we will not know because what passed for academia then were basically a bunch of mystery cults who guarded their insights with murderous zeal (pythagoreans etc).*

In the pre-internet age, without international academia, there would have been no community with whom to share discoveries so they would benefit all. Einstein would have been a historical nobody without people to understand him, etc.

So to me, you will have to suggest other at least somewhat curated and open mechanisms for living information to persist. Perhaps internet and mans curiosity alone is sufficient to provide this but I don't know...

*From what I remember from one popular historical source or another

Academia moves too slow in adapting to innovation, at least in terms of practice oriented fields like engineering. It's well suited to teach and progress theory but horrible in terms of preparing practitioners.

Good point. I think the slowness of the system is one of its inherent values and not flaws just as long as the slowness does not turn into stagnation.

There already is a name for it - the Cravath System, it's the approach taken by the best law firms.

http://www.cravath.com/cravathsystem/

Nice to be validated by a third party. :)

I've done exactly what you've suggested (and I would be confident enough to say I've done it successfully).

However, two flaws with your suggestions: time and risk. Increasing the search space of people eliminates/reduces both of these.

How much time and risk is doing it this way worth?

I will argue that the presented approach is the "right thing" (reap what you sow) and increasing the search space is the "wrong thing" (why should US companies get more than their 5% of programming talent?).

I don't want US companies to have more talent than the US population can produce. I actually consider their requests stealing. It's not theirs to take. If they can't produce their own talent then they should perish by their own merits.

That being said, I don't believe in the 95/5% figure proposed by Graham. I think everybody can be a valuable partner given enough motivation.

I also think that they are not looking for talent but for slaves. It's really just imperialism in disguise.

You touch on why I don't like increased immigration, which is the stealing aspect. The problem is you take prospective entrepreneurs and great developers from other nations and slave them to US companies at threat of deportation. It is hard to be anything but a wage slave in that environment, which is exactly what companies want, and while the outside developers might have a grass is greener effect going on, is really not in their best interests. There are a lot of places to go if your home country is shit, and you can make a much better deal than an h1b.

Perhaps you feel the same way about labor movement within the US? Have you ever moved from one county, or one US state to another for educational or career opportunities? If someone was to move from Virginia to California, would that be a case of California 'stealing'from Virginia? I think it is, in the mechanical sense of virginia loses talent and taxes, and California gains it: surely what matters though, is that the right of humans to engage in the 'pursuit of happiness' should outweigh the right of a state (including nation states) to restrict such movement.

If you accept that idea, you can still argue that the obligations of a nation state are to promote the wellbeing of its own citizens above that of non citizens, but we shouldn't pretend that the barriers we put up are some noble effort to prevent 'stealing' from poor countries: people own the right to their lives and labor, not their state or government of origin.

Someone else can always offer 20% more than you if they use you to train. This may work on the small scale where you build lasting relationships, but on the scale of large companies? You'd rapidly gain a reputation of being a springboard, and not a place people join to do their best work.

20% more of what? How am I used to "train"?

I'd argue we'd gain a reputation of being really good, and that we improve together. That's not something you can buy. It might not be obvious, but while creating a great agency, this also implies creating a great workplace of my own. So if I feel like abandoning ship I know I have to change something.

Also, what's better than building lasting relationships? I'd stay "small scale" awesome anytime over being just another asset of a "large company".

I'd argue that we live in a time where you don't have to be "centralized large" anymore to achieve big things. Rather we should figure out how to do even better with loose organization paradigms.

McKinsey et al have built incredibly successful franchises by being "springboards", and one of their most powerful assets is their alumni network.

Addendum to #3: Motivation is necessary but not sufficient in software development; it is one of the professions that really does have minimum cognitive capability and working memory requirements, which current research shows to be highly nonplastic via education or training. Genes matter.

> current research shows to be highly nonplastic via education or training

I'd be very interested to see what you're referring to. Citation needed.

edit: The only thing I can thing I can think of that you might be referring to is the recent meta-study of the impact of practice on performance:

http://pss.sagepub.com/content/early/2014/06/30/095679761453...

I don't have access to the full article so I don't know if they looked at programmers specifically. (Anyone?) They found that, depending on the activity, practice accounted for about 0-25% of the performance. (Depending on where programmers fall in that range, if excellent programmers are 1000x more productive, I'd take deliberate practice for 250x, Alex.)

However, the assumption that, if practice as measured in these studies isn't the answer, then talent is, is obviously false. Quoting this response piece by Alfie Kohn:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2014/07/...

"That’s not necessarily true, however. The question posed by Macnamara and her colleagues was appropriately open-ended: “We have empirical evidence that deliberate practice, while important, …does not largely account for individual differences in performance. The question now is what else matters.” And there are many possible answers. One is how early in life you were introduced to the activity — which, as the researchers explain, appears to have effects that go beyond how many years of practice you booked. Others include how open you are to collaborating and learning from others, and how much you enjoy the activity."

I recommend the entire article.

Regarding the first article, they discovered 9331 studies that studied the impact of practice on performance, and narrowed it down to 157 studies based on their criteria. The breakdown in terms of genre, number of studies, total number of participants, and % of variance in performance capable of being explained by deliberate practice was:

Music 28 1,259: 21%

Games 11 1,291: 26%

Sports 60 2,633: 18%

Professions 7 321: 1%

Education 51 5631: 4%

So not programmers specifically. I didn't read the paper very thoroughly and examine their methodology (perhaps their criteria were such that they were allowed to cherrypick results), but it seems to me that the professions category seems to suffer from particularly low sample size.

It's important to note that under deliberate practice, they did not include starting age. To explain the other ~80% of variance, they proposed starting age, general intelligence and working memory capacity. Pm me if you would like to see the article.

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