| Hiring people all too often focus on required skills like 'X years of experience with generic tech Y' and look for those buzzwords on the resume. But the real thing is, every company has its own processes and procedures, its own legacy and proprietary code, its own business and product goals in its industry, etc. That's where the real ramp-up comes in. 6-12 months is not a bad ramp-up target. Would you really rather have someone who knows new tech XYZ very well and can hit the ground running with no ramp-up, but breaks process, refuses to touch the legacy code, knows nothing about the industry, and builds things counterproductive to your business goals? Or would you rather have someone who doesn't know new tech XYZ at all and needs to ramp up, but will gladly pick it up while also learning and adopting your processes, legacy code, industry, and business goals, in order to contribute to the best of their ability? For that, you not only need to learn the new tech, but a whole lot more. Learning the new tech is the least of it. And industry/domain experience isn't perfect but is worth a lot. Yes, they should be able to meaningfully contribute fairly quickly, even with things that are new to them. It'll take a while to get really good though. But while they're ramping up on everything else anyway, why not let 'em ramp up on the tech? It's a relatively small thing in the big picture. |
It’s not an either/or someone with experience should be able to do both, at my current job and my prior two jobs, I was specifically hired because the manager was looking to bring on someone who could lead initiatives and was a subject matter expert.
Well my last two jobs prior to my current one - the current company I work for has quite a few people who know my specialty well…