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Boffins
By farseeker | July 18, 2008
Back in 2003, when I had first moved to Sydney, I worked in a small computer store, selling PCs. As a salesperson I was good, as a mathmatician I was useless and as a techie I was very good. Then one day my manager said to me (probably after I screwed something up), “Mark we’re enthusiasts, not experts”. Which was absolutally true. I had no training in what I was doing, I learnt it all from the love of doing it.
Now, in a small computer business this is fine. But in the corporate world, it isn’t (which was a big factor in me un-deferring my uni). Our in-house IT guy was an enthusiast who’d worked his way into the job (he’s no longer with us, but that’s another story alltogether). Really nice guy, but nothing beats a professional.
Even huge organisations like the IRS are not immune. A whole massive database built without a single index or PK. I’m not going to go into the intricacies of an index, but I ran into this problem myself this week.
A query we were running in Microsoft SQL 2005 on a table with 20 columns and 22 million rows was taking 10 minutes to run and was bringing an 8-way 64-bit server with 4gb of ram to its knees. It was a complicated query, so I popped it into the MSSQL Query Analyser, and it came back with just one suggestion: Create a new index with these fields in this order. The result? A 10 minute query ran in sub 0.5 seconds.
The lesson here? Always hire a professional, never an enthusiast. Never let an enthusiast do a job they think they can do, make them prove it.
Topics: General | 3 Comments »
July 19th, 2008 at 12:42 pm
The reverse is always funny too, though: Where the ‘enthusiast’ knows more, or can do things better than the ‘professional’.
July 20th, 2008 at 7:49 am
Yes well in those scenarios one would have to wonder if the professional is really a professional in that field.
Which brings me to another interesting point. A uni degree stays with you forever, you can never loose it, but can you loose the status of an industry professional? In the fast moving pace of the IT industry someone who got their degree 10 years ago and hasn’t kept up to date is probably going to be fairly useless at hands-on practical stuff.
Sure, theory doesn’t change much, particularly in IT management (apart from the revolution of VoIP and telecommuting), but for a programmer or a sysadmin, professional status can be lost fairly quickly I’d say.
July 21st, 2008 at 4:34 pm
I’d prefer to hire the professional enthusiast
. I work with a dozen other uni students who are becoming professionals, and out of my whole year level there are maybe 10 or less who I think will actually be capable of consistently making intelligent decisions, and will continue to progress in their knowledge after they graduate from University. The other 110 students I get the feeling will not be able to figure out how to sync songs with the next generation of iPod.
I do understand the distinction you are drawing between an enthusiast who has no official training, and a professional who has had years of uni study and industry experience. I just think that it isn’t a matter of the enthusiast nature, but the issue is more basic than that. It is the difference between hiring a bad worker and a good worker.
A good enthusiast will learn as well as the uni-trained professional, and is more likely to stay on the technological edge purely for interests sake… the simple professional might be more interested in simply filling their 9-5 job slot sufficiently to not get fired.