A bunch of my clients are having trouble filling their positions. They can’t find a bazillion years of Java or .Net or something else.
There is a relative candidate shortage, compared to the candidate glut of a few years ago. But of people start looking for attitude and general problem solving ability and ability to collaborate, they won’t need to look for technical skills. See what Anton says he’s looking for.
You can send someone to a class and they can learn a particular tool. If you then buddy that person with someone else, you’ve got a great coaching/mentoring relationship, and the new person will be up to speed quickly.
But if you don’t hire for the more intangible things, such as initiative or teamwork or problem solving, you won’t find the right people who can make a huge difference in your organization.
October 19th, 2007
Last week, I was in Eindhoven, in the Netherlands. I arrived Sunday afternoon, and my host took me to the Van Abbemuseum, a museum of contemporary art. It was great.I geeked out in the elevator, however. We started at the top floor and went down to the bottom. The elevator had musical accompaniment. A high-pitched voice started at the top and went down to a lower-pitched voice as we descended the floors. I thought this was great, and when I couldn’t hear a break in recording between floors, I decided we’d try a few more combinations. (Luckily, my host had a great sense of humor and wasn’t upset by this :-)We tried a few more combinations of starting at different floors and going up and down so I could reverse engineer the algorithm. I think I understood it. (I’m not sufficiently literate with music description to describe it, sorry.)This kind of curiosity is necessary for developers and testers. I suspect that what we label geekiness is more often curiosity.
Labels: qualities
March 11th, 2007