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I read this as “Hiring is well 'ard” and thought Catherine Tate had found HN. I started looking for my first hire a few months ago, and it hasn't been easy. Bu

I read this as “Hiring is well 'ard” and thought Catherine Tate had found HN. I started looking for my first hire a few months ago, and it hasn't been easy. But in that time I've come across plenty of people that don't have the skills or experience I require… they do however have a lot of motivation. I'm currently helping three people learn the fundamentals of web development, and every day I'm surprised at how fast they pick things up. In-house training is the way forward for me.

YousefED 14y ago
Interesting, what was the base level experience of the three people you're training? I'm currently looking for a (mainly frontend) webdeveloper, and even finding an intern proves to be quite difficult so far.
- DirtyMonkey 14y ago
  The first guy was quite ‘techy’ to begin with and had dabbled in web development beforehand (PHP). The other two had absolutely no experience, surprisingly (for me) they have picked up things much faster – maybe because they have no prior notions or assumptions about how it all works but I'm not sure. They continuously mention how they can't believe how simple a lot of things are. Whereas the first guy seems to have already formed opinions about how difficult something is before actually trying it. He also procrastinates quite a bit (I believe it's because he thinks things are harder/bigger than they really are) – the challenge with him has been to break his misconceptions (“Git is difficult”, “The command line shouldn't be used” etc.) and to just get on with it. Oh and a bit off topic, but just to mention that one of the other ‘guys’ is a girl… and after a few months of seeing her code, I think every team should be comprised of as many women as there are men (and be more diverse in general). It might just be her, but she approaches some problems in a completely different way to the rest of the team and her perspective has saved us from banging our heads against the wall many times. She also notices things that the rest of us are oblivious to. One day I'll get around to writing a blog post about it, haha. In short, I would love to have the resources and time to train more people up from scratch – I never considered it before, it's all been positive so far. But, for most of the heavy lifting I'm still relying on either myself or freelancers. As for finding interns, I just asked around friends and family… it turns out there's a _lot_ of people that have thought about web development at some point but don't have a clue where to start – for some reason they thought they had to be good at maths or art. Edit: just to clarify, they aren't interns… at the moment it's sort of informal class. We have a project that we work on over weekends (and a little bit during the week) . At the rate they're going, I would hire them in 6 or so months though.

YousefED 14y ago

Interesting, what was the base level experience of the three people you're training? I'm currently looking for a (mainly frontend) webdeveloper, and even finding an intern proves to be quite difficult so far.

DirtyMonkey 14y ago
The first guy was quite ‘techy’ to begin with and had dabbled in web development beforehand (PHP). The other two had absolutely no experience, surprisingly (for me) they have picked up things much faster – maybe because they have no prior notions or assumptions about how it all works but I'm not sure. They continuously mention how they can't believe how simple a lot of things are. Whereas the first guy seems to have already formed opinions about how difficult something is before actually trying it. He also procrastinates quite a bit (I believe it's because he thinks things are harder/bigger than they really are) – the challenge with him has been to break his misconceptions (“Git is difficult”, “The command line shouldn't be used” etc.) and to just get on with it. Oh and a bit off topic, but just to mention that one of the other ‘guys’ is a girl… and after a few months of seeing her code, I think every team should be comprised of as many women as there are men (and be more diverse in general). It might just be her, but she approaches some problems in a completely different way to the rest of the team and her perspective has saved us from banging our heads against the wall many times. She also notices things that the rest of us are oblivious to. One day I'll get around to writing a blog post about it, haha. In short, I would love to have the resources and time to train more people up from scratch – I never considered it before, it's all been positive so far. But, for most of the heavy lifting I'm still relying on either myself or freelancers. As for finding interns, I just asked around friends and family… it turns out there's a _lot_ of people that have thought about web development at some point but don't have a clue where to start – for some reason they thought they had to be good at maths or art. Edit: just to clarify, they aren't interns… at the moment it's sort of informal class. We have a project that we work on over weekends (and a little bit during the week) . At the rate they're going, I would hire them in 6 or so months though.