[xxpor]

Of course you're right about the ramp up speed, but if you can't trust the person to figure it out: you don't want to hire them regardless.

As time goes on, I've become more and more convinced the skill to really look for in hiring is knowing how to learn. I think I've always thought this implicitly, but as I've been forced to articulate why someone someone is doing well or not, it's become more conscious.

Even if you use 100% popular languages/frameworks/infrastructure, what you do will always be new and proprietary in some (unless it's an explicit open source project that the new hire has already worked on, which is a pretty rare situation in the scheme of things). So there will always be new stuff to learn. Does the person know how to diagnose an issue when they get an error that they can't Google? For a lot of folks, even with years of experience, the answer turns out to be no.

[goodpoint]

> Of course you're right about the ramp up speed, but if you can't trust the person to figure it out: you don't want to hire them regardless.

Spot on. That's why you hire people that can learn and think - not robots.