There are two sides to this: Either you have another skill that they need, or th...

eli_gottlieb · on Nov 25, 2012

I got competent with Rails in 1 month. It would have taken less time if my boss hadn't had to run away for a week and a half and leave me with tutorial/study work rather than real meat I could cut my teeth on.

EDIT: Actually, I want to tell more of this story to emphasize what you can do with a reasonably competent employee willing to learn.

At the time, I was hired as a temporary contractor for 3-4 months. I had basically most of 1 month to get to basic competence with Rails, and it was supposed to be less. Then I started getting real work thrown at me. By the end of 3 months, I had justified my pay and my employers had no more temporary work to throw at me. They offered to hire as a full-time salaried employee, but by then I had a plan for grad-school and research.

That was at the end of June. Midway through November, my friend who originally recommended me to that employer messages me on Facebook. He tells a bit of an ironic story, one point of which is that he himself is now using and expanding-on the code I wrote in those two-point-something months. Apparently it's holding up pretty decently, and the team is able to ship product.

All this because the proprietor of the firm figured he could hire someone smart with a good work-ethic for a while and give him time to get competent with Rails rather than go unicorn hunting.

maigret · on Nov 25, 2012

Usually there are two skills to have to ship a software project:

- Knowing and using the basic underlying technologies (languages, but also concepts, like machine learning, databases, UI skills or so on)

- Knowing the specific codebase and process for those projects (how the build works, what are the components, what they do, etc).

True, someone knowing the first skillset has an advantage, but a talented person will have no problem doing the second one much faster. For an hire, I would rather factor in the long term. It's about sane finance management and ROI, actually. For any given pool of candidates, you are considerably reducing the chance you hit a talented people, if you interview only 10% of all candidates just based on their previous base skills.