[LRUG] What do people want to do with their career?

[Tim Cowlishaw]

On Thu, Mar 22, 2012 at 9:41 AM, Jon Wood <jon at blankpad.net> wrote:
> We're following what you've called "the Eden way" at Hubbub. Anyone half
> competent can learn a new language and its accompanying frameworks given a
> month or so to get up to speed, but someone without the mindset and passion
> for building software is never going to be a great developer.

This is very interesting - I share this view, and a while ago, when we
were recruiting at Likely, Henry and I wrote a job ad that I thought
reflected this - we explicitly said that while we use certain
technologies at the moment, we're mainly after smart people with
certain more general skills, and aren't too fussed about your
technical background (in my view, one of the marks of being a good
Software Engineer is being able to pick up new languages and
technologies and be productive in them quickly). However, we didn't
get a huge amount of response to it, compared to other more
conventional "yellow-belt welter-weight rails ninja" jobs ads we've
run more recently, which was surprising, as in many respects it was
exactly the job ad I would have wanted to see had I been looking at
that point.

This raises a question - I (and I assume most/all others in this
thread, and on the list in general, as we're selecting for people who
want to discuss such things) share the view above, but is there a
large (and silent) set of devs who have a specific set of technical
skills, and a set of companies who want to recruit them to use those
skills, but neither have any real interest in the craft of building
great software in the more abstract sense, and does this mean that
we're outliers for objecting to the "5+ years senior rails experience"
recruitment paradigm, as it serves the majority of the market pretty
well?

Cheers,

Tim