In my experience, this works for only a very small minority of people. Most everyone else is lacking self-teaching skills or motivation to teach themselves enough to be hireable.
As a self-taught developer, I struggled with accepting that people like me are a minority.
For a long time I could not wrap my mind around why people did not put in the effort to learn new skills on their own. Eventually I realized that the reason is simple: they can't. Like you say, they either don't have the self-teaching skills or the motivation to follow through on the endeavor. I would be talking to friends and they would say, "I want to learn X so I'm thinking of taking classes at the local college." I would think to myself, "that's so silly, they should just buy a bunch of books for one tenth the price!" Because that's what I would have done. As time went on though I realized most people need someone to teach them stuff. They either never developed self-teaching skills, or let those skills erode throughout high school and college due to neglect. Maybe that's a commentary on our education system: it's too focused on spoon-feeding facts (and then test on those facts) and does not put enough emphasis on self-reliance.
I pretty much want to stick to this minority in hiring. I don't know how to get useful work out of anyone else.
Given a development role, how do you get someone who needs hand holding to be worth their salary? Just hire a lot of manager/mentors and resign yourself to being a large team? Or something else?
For a long time I could not wrap my mind around why people did not put in the effort to learn new skills on their own. Eventually I realized that the reason is simple: they can't. Like you say, they either don't have the self-teaching skills or the motivation to follow through on the endeavor. I would be talking to friends and they would say, "I want to learn X so I'm thinking of taking classes at the local college." I would think to myself, "that's so silly, they should just buy a bunch of books for one tenth the price!" Because that's what I would have done. As time went on though I realized most people need someone to teach them stuff. They either never developed self-teaching skills, or let those skills erode throughout high school and college due to neglect. Maybe that's a commentary on our education system: it's too focused on spoon-feeding facts (and then test on those facts) and does not put enough emphasis on self-reliance.