KnownSense

The hobbyist coder and the wage scrounger.

Many years ago, I got booted out of a computer center at my university. It didn’t feel good. The reasoning the university staff gave me wasn’t satisfactory either. Apparently I wasn’t allowed to use the computers if it wasn’t on my course syllabus. That didn’t stop me though, I went at night. Institutional attitudes towards learning have not changed one bit in all those years. Now, I see laments by HR teams all over that say only x% of graduates are employable.

I call bullshit. It’s because you don’t know what you want or that you overlook the types that might help you change. The hiring types in many firms are horrendous at identifying the right types today. You should read though a couple of job requirements online and tell me if you are inspired by the insipid job descriptions.

Makes me think how I go about hiring people. I know everybody has a method and one man’s method is another’s madness. My method? I check for passion. I always speak to candidates to figure out if they have any hobbies that were not part of the syllabus. If yes, I go ahead and listen to check for passion. The types that didn’t work out for me have been the too-studious types, the donation payers, the ones with degrees they accumulated because it paid well, and the ones that didn’t do a thing beyond their prescribed text books. They are good at impressing the boss with their PPTs but faced with an innovative problem, have failed.

I’ve been able to split coder applicants into two types as well: the hobbyist coder and the wage scrounger — and I can tell you these distinct attitudes make a difference. Manging the hobbyists has been difficult especially if you are a largish company with expansive bureaucracies, documentation, repeated testing and process overloads. Hobbyists thrived on problems, looked to optimize obsessively, cracked silly gripes, created new workflows, and generated new ideas. The downside always has been retaining them. I’ve always understood why they quit.

The wage scroungers are the guys who get your mundane work done, but it’s difficult to get them to innovate. Don’t expect doodles of bulbs on the white board. If you have a transactional process, hire them. They crave the mundane, and irritating politics and credit whoring seems to be their only respite. They tend to rise fast and they aren’t the types that quit easily. Consequently, you will find them warming chairs at decision making levels in companies. Companies that don’t innovate. I sometimes think that the reason why Indian firms aren’t known to create products are for the same reason that you have the hobby/wage divide — a lack of passion.

Even worse, firms tend to push out the mould breakers, problem solvers, and the thinkers more often than not. Organizational structures do not support these personality types well. In a monoculture of ideas it is easy to end up being weed.

Anyways, assuming you are working in a monoculture someplace, I hope you are writing down your ideas, and working on it in the meanwhile. Scrounge for now while you ideate. Jump someday, but dump those PPTs.

For anyone in HR reading this, give those outlier candidates a chance, you might discover a thing or two about how simple creative ideas can transform a workplace. Also, write better job descriptions.