Hiring Technical People

Technical Ability is No Guarantee of Success

I just read Most Likely to Succeed: How do we hire when we can’t tell who’s right for the job? by Malcolm Gladwell. He talks about how a football recruiter agonized over his decisions:

…“This guy threw lasers, he could throw under tight spots, he had the arm strength, he had the size, he had the intelligence.” Shonka got as misty as a two-hundred-and-eighty-pound ex-linebacker in a black tracksuit can get. “He’s a concert pianist, you know? I really—I mean, I really—liked Joey.” And yet Harrington’s career consisted of a failed stint with the Detroit Lions and a slide into obscurity. Shonka looked back at the screen, where the young man he felt might be the best quarterback in the country was marching his team up and down the field. “How will that ability translate to the National Football League?” He shook his head slowly. “Shoot.”This is the quarterback problem. There are certain jobs where almost nothing you can learn about candidates before they start predicts how they’ll do once they’re hired. So how do we know whom to choose in cases like that?”

That’s the same problem as in technical teams, which is why we try to use auditions. But even an audition alone in front of one person or with a whiteboard is no guarantee of on-the-job success.

Read the whole article, because Gladwell relates this problem to the teacher problem: how do we detect great teachers: it’s not their degrees or strictly technical competence in their field–it’s more about how they engage everyone in the room and how they give feedback (and take feedback, although that’s just implied in the article).

Does that sound familiar to you? Working in a technical team partly about technical competence, because that’s how you get in. But that’s not how you stay in or become successful. You become successful in a job because you know how to help a team to evaluate and make a good decisions, to take and give feedback to peers, to use good judgement. These interpersonal skills are key to becoming successful in a technical job.

You can still be successful technically if you’re not superb at these interpersonal skills. But you can’t manage anything well unless you master enough of these (and other interpersonal) skills. Pay attention to your interpersonal skills in addition to your technical skills.

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2 comments June 25th, 2009

How Technical Does a Project Manager Have to Be?

I’m in Israel this week, teaching project management. In one class, a student asked, “How technical does a PM have to be?” The inevitable answer: it depends.

A project manager needs to understand the dynamics behind the work of the project. I was teaching software (and hardware) project management today. A PM for a software project needs to understand: how people gather and rank requirements, how to ask if the design is done, how to evaluate technical risks as well as schedule risks, what it means to have a configuration management system and how to effectively use it, and the results to expect from testers. The PM needs to be able to select from the varied review activities to choose the review activities for this project. This doesn’t mean a PM needs to know how to do these things in detail, but the PM needs to know how to organize the activities of the project so that all of these things happen.

In addition, the PM needs to rapidly gain an understanding of the domain, specifically problem-space and the architecture part of the solution-space. If you don’t know what problem(s) you’re trying to solve with the project, how can you know when the project is done? And, if you don’t know the architecture, you can’t understand the technical risks. You may not understand all the technical risks, but without understanding the architecture, you don’t even know what questions to ask.

Note that there’s nothing about reading or writing code (or tests) in here. While being a developer or tester may help someone learn the dynamics of software projects, being a good developer or tester does not imply that you will be a good PM. The functional skills are different.

Certainly, a PM can be more technical than this. I don’t see how an effective PM can be less technical than this.

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2 comments December 7th, 2004