Re: So what if 8i is outta support ?

DA Morgan wrote:

[snip]
>
> In the interest of brevity I snipped the balance and want to focus just
> on this. If the person is going to be expected to begin, day one,
> managing a RAC cluster.

Well, as I said, there are jobs where restriction of applicants is appropriate. I don't know whether this is one of them or not. I'm not too interested in the specifics, for obvious reasons (ie, I don't know what they were). I myself would consider that is is highly unlikely that there would be 9i RAC *experts* out there, so I *would* expect to be training people a bit. That would mean an 8i OPS user would (perhaps) suit me just as well.

> And if there are plenty of viable candidates
> that do have this experience ... and there were. Why would you waste
> your time interviewing people that wouldn't know a quorum file if it
> bit them on the lip?

In general, because they might know all sorts of other stuff that I would find equally desirable, such as being able to get on with clients, being able to problem-solve. Being able to explain GC_FILES_TO_LOCKS. That sort of thing.

If the recruitment environment is "We need somebody who can start yesterday with no ramp-up, no training... s/he just needs to know the product X and get on with it", then I can understand drafting an advert demanding experience of product X, and only interviewing such people. But that sounds like an emergency situation being resolved, not an approach for general, normal recruitment.

Again, the issue is "define the term viable". You define it (or seemed to in this thread) as "knowing product X". My point has been (and I think it was David Sharples' as well) that to define it thus is missing out on a lot of perfectly good talent.

> You seem to be advocating investing time training people in place of
> finding people that have invested their own time and money in training
> themselves.

Quite right too. Unless you advocate employing someone with skillset X from day one and never intending to add to their skillset. In which case, I quite understand that you might have done this recruitment lark quite regularly. *I* wouldn't want to work somewhere I couldn't develop and mature! And I would leave pretty smart-ish anywhere that assumed I had body-of-knowledge-A, and never intended to help me add to it.

> That just doesn't compute for me. Surely the self-starters
> and self-motivated people that invest in their own skills are always
> going to be the best choice. Their actions speak far louder than other
> people's mere words.

There are more ways of displaying self-motivation than learning version X of product Y. And it might well be more appropriate and productive to mould and shape talent into a form that is desirable for you and your organisation than it is to take on an already self-formed talent that might not fit quite right.

HJR Received on Sun Oct 24 2004 - 20:27:12 CDT