Have you ever seen one of those Medium articles with a title like: “How I went from being a pizza delivery guy to a highly paid software engineer in nine months”? Those articles annoy the crap out of me.
They’re like the tech industry’s version of reality TV’s inspirational ugly duckling transformations. And about as likely for the average person to successfully reproduce.
I also can’t recall ever seeing a follow-up piece outlining how good an employee the person became, whether they’re still employed at whatever company hired them… or if they’re back delivering pizzas.
That said, if the dude had been a delivery driver for a while, he could be a really interesting and useful contributor to a company’s customer service or marketing efforts. After all, who knows more about how doing business works in the real world, and what actual customers want and are really like, than the people who interact with them face to face every day?
This idea of taking smart, interesting people with diverse experience and bringing them into the tech sphere had me doing a mental fist pump when I read about “Getting into Tech.” If my career had developed along similar but non-tech industry lines, I would be all over that idea.
The potential and need were further highlighted when I read this Inc. piece about how cybersecurity companies are working on an apprenticeship model to address an ever-growing dearth of skilled hires. It all fits together.
Tech companies get access to a larger pool of potential workers, which they desperately need. Workers get to stretch their brains and potential, explore new career paths and enjoy tech salaries, which can make a big difference in people’s lives.
I’ve written before about taking a risk on hiring people who may not at first glance look like the perfect cookie-cutter candidates. And about how a guild-type system could benefit the tech industry and pipeline issues.
How we look at finding good candidates (and how we define a good candidate), as well as how we train people to the level of skill we need, are just additional pieces of the pie in terms of building a stronger, sustainable tech industry.
Now, sure, there are ways for these ideas to be implemented poorly. We’re not talking about shipping impoverished Irish people to the New World and making virtual slaves of them for seven years of indentured servitude. Nor half-baked ideas like how you used to hear about “teaching computers” to middle-aged factory workers who’d been laid off.
The ideal manifestation of a well-developed recruiting — and possibly apprenticeship-centric — system that welcomes people from diverse backgrounds does need to be based on some core principles.
We need to acknowledge privilege and shift perspective. Not everyone has or had the same or equal opportunities. There’s a lot of untapped potential out there as a result, but we can’t look for it, or at it, through the same lenses we traditionally have, because the potential doesn’t shine through that way. This goes for recruiting, the hiring process, training, and even just becoming comfortable in the tech industry corporate environments.
We need new tools and ideas. How we recruit, hire and train people with diverse personal, educational and work backgrounds needs to be approached differently than how tech has traditionally approached it. The old systems don’t necessarily serve, and can actively discriminate against, many candidates. Less formally, we’ll need to be extra conscientious in crafting and evolving inclusive company cultures as well.
We have a reputation. The tech industry has to prove itself to prospective recruits. Its foibles and failures are well known and can be a major turn-off (inside and outside the industry). Horror stories from companies like Uber or Amazon make for sensational headlines, and colour people’s impressions of the tech industry even if they don’t reflect actual local tech companies.
We’re only superficially sexy. The tech industry has to offer more to prospective recruits than just money and office perks, because while a salary bump is a pretty sexy incentive initially, that alone isn’t necessarily going to draw the people you want. It also loses its shine over time if you’re asking too much in exchange for the money, and if people don’t have opportunities to learn, advance, have a life, etc. and realize they’re still in an unfulfilling grind. This would just lead to further to career pipeline leakage, which we already have.
We don’t know everything and we’re not better. Tech people need to become comfortable with their ignorance and recast themselves as learners – even while they educate others – and abandon what tech traditionally elevates as valuable. A key potential benefit of diverse hiring is integrating people’s real-world experience. Given we already often have perceived hierarchies of work value within tech companies, devaluing people who may have a wealth of knowledge and experience, but who came from, say, minimum-wage jobs, could be all too easy to do.
We don’t need rock stars. Tech companies’ goals with diverse hiring, and particularly with an apprenticeship model, should not be to build (ugh) rock stars. It’s not realistic, and it’s an invitation to failure for the company and their hires. Rock stars can do some impressive things, but companies run and grow on the solid day-in-day-out work of engaged, empowered journeypersons. It sets realistic expectations for recruitment, remuneration, training, performance and advancement that everyone can work with.
Now, it bears noting that such a philosophy and ecosystem are only applicable to entrepreneurs and companies planning to build sustainably for the long term. For those whose goals are supersonic growth, astronomical valuation and lucrative acquisition as quickly as possible, this model is slow, expensive and pointless.
There will always be those chasing that particular brand of shiny. But that attitude is the stuff of bubbles, and bubbles are ephemeral. Good tech companies are built on principles that are a bit more... concrete.
And who better to lead that charge than a company that knows the construction industry?
