Skills or Tools That is the Question
On July 22, 2009 I received the following message:
“David doesn’t look to be a good fit. For this position, we are looking for true .Net professionals and not Renaissance developers that have every arrow in their quiver (he mentions experience with everything for Pascal to Ruby)”
As my resume shows, I have a very strong background in .Net. I not only redesign and implement the entire import subsystem in C# and .Net, by myself, I have also become the team lead for the maintenance of that subsystem.
What this comment shows is a lack of discernment between skills and tools. It seems that the person making this comment was looking for specific words on a resume and has no idea of what these words mean. In today’s environment if a hiring manager cannot tell the difference between skills and tools, they are very unlikely to hire the best people for the job.
The goal of hiring should be to define the skills needed then find someone who has those skills. For example: if I am looking for a person on a team that does the backend system and does not need to do the interface; I will be looking for a very strong Object Oriented skill set. This person will need to be able to design highly decoupled systems that can be scaled to large user bases. I would also want to have someone who understands how to develop software that is very maintainable. Thus I would want to have someone who understands Test Driven Development, TDD, very well since this skill naturally leads to both decoupled and maintainable code. It is not important if the person know Nunit, Junit, or CPPUnit because they can learn these tools very quickly if they have a strong knowledge of TDD. My experience has shown that most of the time if someone has strong knowledge in one area they tend to have some sort of tool knowledge in that area as well.
In short, the top-hiring managers of the future will be the ones that can discern between skills and tools to find the highest productive people for their teams. It is a lesson that management has to learn to make their business more profitable in a world economy.