Who would you employ?

Hi guys...

I will be retiring soon and we are looking at someone to replace me.

My question is if you were in the position to employ someone in your business what type of person would you be looking for to replace a retiree to take said retiree's place?

1) An amateur,(like me), who has little computer science knowledge but has experimented, has aptitude and is willing to learn and become one of your team...
2) A Semi-Pro, who has written code that is probably shareware and has some knowledge of computer science but probably lacking the qualifications, young with youth on his side.
3) An IT engineer with some level of qualifications but with limited programming knowledge and willing to learn.
4) A fully fledged Degree in Computer Sciences post graduate with little or no on hand experience of the real world but needs to start from somewhere.
5) Other of your choice..

TIA...

Really depends on the job, and the rest of the CV.

1) For ANY security relevant job, i'd require a 'state of the art' diploma - regarding security.
2) For any science relevant job, i'd require a semi pre - preferable with diploma - and some background on the science matter.
3) For any basic job, such as supporter (1st,2nd,3rd, or stuff like Lotus Notes admin) i'd hire any amateur over someone with a diploma.
4) For any manager kind position, i'd prefer either a MAS on IT, and practical experience - so he doesnt order things that are not possible, or management diploma with proven former IT background (not as manager!).

So in the sum, please be more specific with your question :stuck_out_tongue:

1 Like

Attitude and aptitude.
Everything else you can teach.
Most importantly, do you want to come back after two or three months and work as a highly paid consultant? :smiley:

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LOL!

I am happy being an amateur, once I am retired in October I do not intend to carry on in my profession, ([RF] Electronics Engineer).

I do intend to keep my mind alert coding as I really enjoy it and it is now my hobby of choice along with UNIX shell scripting. I have all but abandoned the other languages I have learnt.

As I am a licneced Amateur Radio callsign holder, I think I would prefer another Amateur Radio callsign holder to take my place as they are already interested in the subject and have also probably had practical experience in correcting their failures, building one-offs, testing, etc...

Raw qualifications are not my prime mover...

I am more on the side of jgt in this matter: you can teach almost everything except the "mental environment" to make the learning experience take place - which is why idiots are quite resistant to education. And i have to disagree with sea: diplomas tell something about a persons industriousness (there is no convincing translation for the german word "Flei�", but this would describe it best) but nothing about the learning capability.

I have no diploma at all in computer sciences or any related area (i am actually a musician) but still can hold my own in front of a keyboard, more or less. ;-))

I think a requirement for a prospective electronics engineer is a good command of some basic and intermediate math and the ability to quickly estimate orders of magnitude. I have often seen people using calculators for even the simplest calculation and not even flinch when results were way off because of typing errors. i.e. i would need some time to calculate "10 / 7" but i can immediately estimate it to be "1.5 or thereabouts". I simply know "15" to be wrong and ".15" to be wrong either. This is not a matter of relying on technology or not (i'd use a calculator too if i want a precise result), it is a matter of being willing to exert some mental effort for getting an (even limited) result.

Here is a test question, no tricks involved and the answer can easily be calculated once you know what to calculate. Take your time in solving it:

Suppose you have a melon, which weighs 100kg. 99% of it is water. Now, this melon lies in the sun for some time and some water evaporates, so now it is is down to a water content of 98%. How much does it weigh now?

Most will, without thinking, say "99 kg" or something near this value. But "99%" and "98%" are not from the same base, yes? Here is a hint: What would be 100% when 1kg is 2%, hmmm?

/PS: on second thoughts: knowing the limitations of ones knowledge is an even more critical skill. Suppose the following situation: places A and B are roughly 100km apart. You go with your car from A to B maintaining an average speed of 71.047 km/h. Question: how long will the drive take? One usually gets an answer "exact" down to the nanosecond, completely ignoring that "roughly 100km" hardly justifies anything more precise than quarter-hours.

bakunin

2 Likes

You missed the greatest point in my opinion, passion and love for the work being done.

It is the irrational thing that drives people. If you lack passion for the job you will do it poorly, no mater what is your education or skill set.

A must have is a sense of self-accomplishment or you will be a drone expecting month to month paycheck doing in best case, mediocre.

Unfortunately (in my opinion), tendency in IT is to fine grain till all it is left is powder ;)... causing a job to be done by more people then are required for it.
This is limiting and bounding to the people inside the process, making them drones.

3 Likes

I would employ someone from this board, preferably one with the handle wisecracker That candidate seems a perfect employee :wink:

But ignoring the blatant sycophancy and assuming that you wish to escape, I would humbly suggest you seek one who is:-

  • generally bright rather than qualified
  • open to ideas
  • old enough not to be GUI-only
  • doesn't have a fancy looking C.V., but has content over visuals
  • who can read manuals well
  • is not scared by problems and will ask for help

In larger companies, a good Personnel or H.R. department may well have puzzles that stretch the mind and allows you to observe the process. That may give you an insight too. Additionally, try to set some puzzles of your own, e.g. try to get them to describe the difference between truncate table table_name ; and delete from table_name ;

It might sound like passing the responsibility, but I have had too much experience of very qualified people who don't have a clue, and when you consider the cheating that is common in some places where some people may have obtained qualifications, they become worth even less, which I'm sure for some is a grave injustice.

Robin

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Hi rbatte1...

Ha ha, I am not that good, but I am flexible, I do learn quickly and I reckon I have jgt's quote of attitude and aptitude...

YES! I am not alone. In my industry the amount of poeple who have advanced qualifications that cannot do a basic electronics task. If a simple relay will do a task then these people will try and include some microprocessor and peripherals just to show how clever they are...

This doesn't work with me as I have been on the planet too long and done so much with electronics over my life span that I will always attempt to take the easy route.

Thanks so far to those that have responded, interesting to read your opinions...

Bazza...

I did that once... Designed this complicated digital circuit with clocks and counters and timers to measure pulse widths, and Basil takes one look at it, nods politely and tells me "that could work" -- and takes 5 seconds to scribble an equivalent analog circuit. It had one transistor -- just one -- and maybe 5 components total. I still don't entirely understand how it worked but it was important that it be a PNP transistor, the circuit had no NPN equivalent...

The Arduino is causing something of a renaissance for electronics, yet it's hard to shake the feeling something's been lost when nobody uses anything but the brute-force approach.

1 Like

Yes - it is the desired outcome.

In fact for some (in a historical sense short) time the IT business was ruled by the witch doctors and not the serfs. This time seems to be over by now and the business has become like any other business: compliance over accomplishment, processes over getting things done, covering ones ass instead of taking responsibility.

Drones are a great sort of human resource, because they are easily intimidated (pardon, make that: "easily managed") and because they are trained to have no innate creativity, responsibility or willingness to achieve anything the product of their work is well calculatable and hence easy to plan with. A witch doctor will easily outperform 10 drones, but when genius strikes he will outperform 1000 drones. You cannot plan with this, because you cannot foresee exactly when the stroke of genius happens. A drone will do every day the same amount of work - next to nil, but predictably so! If you need twice the work done, get twice as many drones.

Frederick Brooks, project leader for the development of OS/360 and OS/370 relates (in his book "The Mythical Man-Month") this project had up to 1500 coders. OS/370 was the predecessor of MVS, and todays z/OS. I bet these 1500 people were not complete drones (this was the seventies of the last century) but not very far from that.

Compare this to the staff that built UNIX at around the same time: a handful of very special individuals (truly witch-doctors of their trade), who did what 1500 people did there, even in less time. But take into account that IBM had a very very rigid dresscode back then and now imagine: what would Denis Ritchie have told some AT&T manager who insisted on DR coming to office in a proper suit, a tie and please get rid of that awful hippie look:

What, do you think, Denis Ritchie would have answered him? How often, do you think, Denis Ritchie was at the office at 8:00 o'clock sharp - not because his muse blessed him but because every employee is to show up at 8am sharp and leave office at 5pm?

Lets face it: the faceless, nameless, disinterested i-am-just-in-it-to-mark-time-towards-retirement's are the future of our business. The time of the witch-doctors is over and if there shows up some raw talent: for every flower sticking out of the grass there is the lawn mower making sure all are of equal height. If someone really accomplishes anything a lot of fulfillment focal points, compliance auditors, project leaders, staging managers and similar ilk will make sure the accomplishment will be ground down is ground down to be as shitty as the rest.

If for nothing else, then for "avoiding dependencies": serfs can easily be replaced and one is as good (or as bad) as the other. Individuals are like they are and once you have lsot one you cannot simply replace it with a "standard Class A individual fo subtype 7". This is why instead of skills, "certifications" are sought after. Back around 1995-2000, Microsoft introduced the "MCSE" certification and the BAA (the national agency for the unemployed in Germany) sent practically every unemployed person to this certfication for some time. Many of these people managed to become certified - but of course, lacking a background in IT, still were unable to work as systems administrators. From this time "MCSE" is said to stand for "Minesweeper Consultant, Solitaire Expert". (Actually there are some accomplished M$$ admins, but not in this group and the accomplished ones, more likely than not, shun people with a MCSE, who even mention the fact.)

I have sometimes been asked about a CATE certification (the IBM analogon), but i don't. I still hold seminars sometimes about AIX topics where CATEs show up.

But in a way, these were the human resources which were sought after: easily replaceable, easily intimidated and VERY docile. Tell an accomplished engineer too much bullshit and you will get some deserved answer - along with a letter of resignation in the wake of him seeking for greener pastures. Give a serf the same amount (or even more) of bullshit and he will duck.

Welcome to the brave new world, we're gonna be epsilons!

bakunin

3 Likes

The playing field is a little different now. They began in the era when being able to use a computer at all was a rare and expensive privilege and you had unquestioned full control over the machine. (At least, unquestioned by the machine.) I feel they knew they had some power over the future and tried to use it wisely. Now, even a homeless person is liable to carry greater computing power with them wherever they go, albeit only accessible in a peculiarly limited way; more availability and less control.

What used to need "witch doctors" now uses historians, since new tools aren't needed for common purposes and everyone keeps forgetting the old ones.

What the witch doctors are doing now, I'm less certain, but I bet they'll turn up sooner or later exactly where we weren't looking.

We shall see if managers are the future. Or project managers. Or coordinators. Or whatever...

A nice real life example how things are wrong today is, unfortunately, shown in 2011 by the death of two persons, Mr.Ritchie and Mr.Jobs.

Jobs died, he was glorified in the mainstream media as the god of everything done well.... Steve the modern Michelangelo..

Couple of days after Ritchie passed away. Coverage of that was in best case poor.
"One of the creators of C lang has died, now sports".

O tempora, o mores!

P.S I apologize for the offtopic.

Yes - as long as the other Steve provided the brushes, the colours, the canvas and drawings.

Steve Wozniak is truly one of the mentioned witch-doctors of technology, Jobs was just a glorified accountant.

bakunin

@ Corona688...

Germaium transistor by any chance? These did have some odd characteristic that is never divulged, especially if used in a blocking oscillator type config.

I have two Arduinos and Raspberry PIs and only ise them for basic I/O boards these days, if you remember I use one for AudioScope, using only one ADC, what a waste...

@ bakunin

Yup, Dennis Ritchie has/had done more for the computing world than anyone else.
His legacy is in just about everything we touch or use today. I still have my C book by Kernigan & Ritchie; (sp).
And Wozniak was a Wizard too....

Just ordinary silicon, possibly a 3906.

While many believe in only hiring someone with a degree, I prefer to look at the person. Does he or she have passion for what they do, have they started AND completed any kind of project. A project could be for business, or simply something fun or cool that he/she wanted to do.
Those are the best people to problem solve, and truly drive things forward.

~J