Slashdot Mirror
Ask Slashdot: Is Tech Talent More Important Than Skill?
snydeq writes "Taming technology is sometimes more art than science, but the difference can sometimes be hard to discern, writes Deep End's Paul Venezia. 'You've probably come across colleagues who were extremely skilled at their jobs — system administrators who can bend a zsh shell to their every whim, or developers who can write lengthy functions that compile without a whimper the first time. You've probably also come across colleagues who were extremely talented — who could instantly visualize a new infrastructure addition and sketch it out to extreme detail on a whiteboard while they assembled it in their head, for example, or who could devise a new, elegant UI without breaking a sweat. The truly gifted among us exhibit both of those traits, but most fall into one category or another. There is a difference between skill and talent. Such is true in many vocations, of course, but IT can present a stark contrast between the two.'"Assuming Venezia is correct, which do you think is more important?
Hard work usually wins the day.
Stop learning! Only you can prevent esoterrorism.
I don't understand the difference. Who cares? If someone can get the job done, that's what counts.
Assuming Venezia is correct, which do you think is more important?
Whichever one I've got, with justification to follow.
The terms to use aren't "Talent" and "Skill" (those are pretty darn close to synonyms)... If you use those two terms, of COURSE you confuse yourself.
I believe in IT we would refer to the two people as a Coder vs. an Architect. And yes, one person is often better at one of those things than the other. And this sort split is virtually universal across professions; it's not special to IT in any way.
What is described is two different jobs.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Skill or talent!
Stupid. Stupid. Stupid.
This is essentially a false dichotomy. Creativity vs technical excellence.
Sure, you can have creativity without technical excellence. There's hordes of crappy garage bands out there that can attest to this.
You can also have technical excellence without creativity. Think about some of the ugliest, most painful-to-read code you have ever seen, but that happens to just work.
You do NOT prioritize one over the other (well, you can, but you're a dumbass of Jobsian proportions if you do).
Ideally, you want them to co-exist, harmoniously, in your people. Or, if that isn't happening, you make sure that they can interact amiably.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
I hire talent because I know I can teach skills.
Don't know source control? Let me teach you GIT.
Don't know shell scripting? Let me teach you Bash.
Build server? Jenkins
Build tool chain? Make/Ant/Maven/Grunt
Web server? Nginx/Apache
Reverse proxy and load balancing? Squid
Programming language? Java/C
Scripting language? Node/Python
Data modeling / schema? No/SQL
Design pattern? decorator, observer, module, factory
Don't know what to do with your new skills? Sorry, I can tell you what I want to do with your skills but what you want to do is up to you. If you can't think of anything then you're just a worker bee. You can work on contract but I won't hire you.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
OK, I have QA training in my background as well as programming skills, so apply appropriate amounts of salt: some of the most interesting blunders in design, and blunders in implementation, are exposed when a good technical writer tries to makes sense of what s/he sees, and fails. In the process of trying to teach others how it all works, all the warts, cracks, crocks, and kludges are exposed in all its glory. What doesn't make sense in a manual will most likely not make sense in the real world. Think of it as scaffolding for the mind. "According to the specification, when I do THIS then X is supposed to happen; instead Y happens." And so forth.
When I was in a large programming group in the 70s, I was the guy sitting at a Wang word processor, banging out design specs and cursing some of the square-heads that couldn't seem to design their way out of a paper bag. When my company decided they wanted to build their own replacement computer for one they had been buying for years, they turned to me to "reverse engineer" the computer -- including all the proprietary extensions and additions -- so the hardware group would have something to design to, and the SQA people to test the implementation against.
Actually, it's an old story in Engineering. When you try to explain something, you see holes that you were blind to for days, months, even years. It's an "Aha!" generator.
Is this whole story a troll? The false dichotomy proposed between the (poorly-labelled) attributes of "talent" and "skill" is disingenuous. The comparison between acquired knowledge (what the author refers to as "skill") and inductive reasoning about a proposed new piece of functionality/infrastructure/etc (referred to by as "talent" in this bizarre example) is contrived, and somewhat arbitrary. I almost never read or discuss Slashdot stories anymore, and this s a great example of the underlying problem. Now, all you kids get off my lawn, and leave me in peace.
"To hope's end I rode and to heart's breaking: Now for wrath, now for ruin and a red nightfall!"
Working hard and smart at the same time is normally a winning combination.
It's been aid that laziness is a popular characteristic of a good programmers. a programmer's JOB is to make the computer work for you. Hard work in programming sometimes means writing 18 different classes in one day, to handle 18 different columns. a better approach is to write one abstract class and a couple of subclasses that handle the different columns is polymorphically.
Many times I've deleted a hundred lines of code and replaced it with four lines that do the same task more reliably and more elegantly. My predecessor worked hard. I worked smart.
That said, reading a 1300 page book to learn HOW to do it in four lines was "hard work". I suspect programmers should listen to the old advice about sharpening the axe and spend a lot of their mental energy learning how to accomplish more faster, rather than producing more lines of code per day. The number of bugs is proportional to the number of lines of code, so the person who writes more lines per day really just creates more problems per day.
If you can optimize integer math, you can think big picture, and vice versa.
Actually, after interviewing literally thousands of software developers over my career, I can tell you that is absolutely NOT true...