23 January 2008 - 16:08Hiring

I was reading the Prefer Design Skills post on Martin Fowler’s bliki and I agree with most of its conclusions. He’s spot on on the need to prefer someone with design skills vs. someone with skills about a particular language.
Design skills carry a lower risk of becoming obsolete than the knowledge of a programming language, programming languages come and go, good design usually stays. So it would follow that when you bring design skills in house you bring in skills which depreciate slowly and this is beneficial.

Design skills are largely the outcome of some soft skills (good communication with the customer, easy understanding of a domain, maybe knowledge of a few domains, etc…) that are much needed by any developer. When you bring design skills in-house you also bring those soft skills in. These soft skills will translate in a more frictionless environment, better communication with the client, faster ramp-up on new projects for which the person with design skills has domain knowledge, etc…

Hiring a person can be viewed as an investment: you are investing the salary for the probation period, the relationships that this person will make (these relationships may included relationships with your customer).

Hiring a person comes with opportunity costs: you will probably have to refuse the same position to some other one.The opportunity costs of a hire are the skills of the person(s) which has/have been refused the position and the contribution that the refuse would make in the future, it is important to keep these costs down as well.

The opportunity costs of choosing a person with design skills vs one with language skills is largely the time it takes the design-skills person (I am getting tired of typing this denominator) to learn the language. I would trade this opportunity cost vs. the opportunity cost of hiring someone with no design skills because I feel so (sorry, I don’t have time to go into details).

Reading the above you will see a huge bias towards design skills vs. language skills in this post to the point of where you are probably wondering when should you hire a person with strong language skills (or who knows, maybe if you should hire such persons at all).
Staying in the same controlled thought-experiment environment I would add that positive bias towards a particular set of people tends to rise those people’s salaries, they become more expensive as the demand for them increases faster than their supply. It would follow that at one point the premium associated with design skills would become so large as to dwarf the benefits from employing people with design skills. At that point it would become economically sensible to hire language-skills people.
Another point would be that you could lower the opportunity cost of refusing a person with design skills by hiring a person with language skills which is motivated to sharpen his/her design skills. If you come across such a person the opportunity cost of hiring his/her would be the contribution made by the person with design skills while the person with language skills is still in the ramp-up period of sharpening his/her design skills. I would say that this opportunity cost would be more than offset by the relationship that you will develop with the person with strong language skills while mentoring, tutoring his/her.

And this is the last time you will read design skills in this post, I feel like I said it 500 times ;-).

P.S. I guess it shows that I love economics ;-).