Experience is overrated. Most breakthrough accomplishments were done by people doing them for the first time. Therefore when hiring hire for aptitude and attitude and then train for skills. – from Excellent Advice for Living
I like this advice. It’s what I’ve tended to do when I have been a hiring manager. I look for people that have potential, can learn, and fit with the team. Not necessarily think or are the same, but they will grow with us. I think aptitude and attitude matter more than experience often.
There are exceptions. Sometimes we need skills and help in a certain area, and experience can be important. In those cases, I need someone that can teach others and is willing to do so. I still want aptitude and attitude, because even an experienced person will need to grow and learn (and get along).
The other trait I find important is curiosity. I need someone that wants to learn more.
I’ve been posting New Words on Fridays from a book I was reading, however, a friend thought they were a little depressing. They should be as they are obscure sorrows. I like them because they make me think.
To counter-balance those, I’m adding in thoughts on advice, mostly from Kevin Kelley’s book. You can read all these posts under the advice tag.
Voice of the DBA 
Ayup, I used to say I could always teach the skills I needed the person to have, but not the attitude.
Granted, this isn’t entirely true, if I wanted to hire a senior DBA, they needed senior level experience, but if there were gaps in their knowledge, that could b fixed, assuming they were interested.
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Agreed. Need some willingness to learn and apply effort, but I’d rather have someone that wants to learn than someone who thinks they know everything. Even at the senior level, I might expect more, but I still need them to work with others
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Nothing worse than someone’s LI profile that starts off “Seasoned IT professional with 25 years experience in…”.
Is it really 25 years of experience? Or is it one year of experience repeated 25 times?
Said differently, do I want someone who learned _data_ and does things as though they were living in Y2K, or someone that knows more about the latest trends, tech, etc… _including_ what is merely this week’s marketing hype? Do I want somebody who does ETL using SSIS or somebody who understands streaming tech, medallion arch, ELT, and a little python?
Or somebody with 25 years of Sr SQL DBA skills or someone with 5 years of experience spread across ora, sql server, and pgres?
I did a talk a year ago for some tech grad students at a ivy league school. Kid asks me, “how do I get a start in the industry and get your skillsets and compete with you and your years of experience?” That is framing the problem incorrectly. I’m an old fart who still clings to a lot of old baggage and biases. I’m deathly afraid of the younger generation that can learn all of these cool skills which are taking off. It’s hard to keep up when you grew up only understand punch cards, reel-to-reel tapes, and cobol. The world is caring less about what was popular and hot 5 years ago and is caring more about “how fast can you learn whatever new thing is going to be dreamed up this year.”
An analog is companies that ask me (I work for MSFT) “what is the roadmap of whatever and how do we prepare for what is coming next so we can keep our competitive advantage?” Answer: “When you find out, please let me know. Until then, stay curious and learn new things.”
I think it’s Phil Phactor that once said, “I’d rather hire somebody that understands 10% of how sql server works than someone who misunderstands 100% of it” … and that tends to be what happens UH LOT with certain folks with decades of experience (yeah, that’s a gross generalization…but anecdotally, it’s something I see way too much and it keeps organizations/teams/co-workers from _evolving_).
I found the best candidates for a “data developer” role (data scientist, sql developer, bi analyst, etc) understand data structures inside and out. I’m not talking about clustered indexes and heaps and star schemas…I mean folks that understand how to manipulate data structures to add value and can explain those concepts in generic conceptual terms…vectors, dictionaries, b trees, panel data. I can throw these folks into C#, SQL, NoSQL, python, Excel…and they’ll _excel_.
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Nice comment. I tend to agree. I find a lot of people just don’t know how to be curious and experimental.
I’ll admit I have a little of that with AI, but I’m trying to get better
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