"This stuff about having to walk in with a lot of detailed knowledge, learned on my dime and time, just as needed by Facebook for just an 'employee' position in a big company, that is, an organization that in a few years might just decide to layoff 20,000 employees, is getting to be a bad, old story. A startup, even for grass mowing, literally, looks more promising."
Spot on! Another way of looking at it is that tech companies don't want to spend $ training their employees (including a slightly longer ramp up time for an employee to begin contributing). If they did, the hiring process would be: you had a 4.0 in college. This shows you are good at learning new things. Lets check for personality fit and some other things that a college transcript does not capture. Do a one hour interview. Hire or No Hire based on this.
As a startup founder, you should be happy about this state of affairs. The attitude of large companies makes it easier for you to hire :)
I'm getting happy: I'm 70 miles north of
Wall Street and that means really close to
Vassar and not far from Princeton, Yale,
Harvard, and more. So find some bright,
humanities major coeds who otherwise
would have to start in retail or go to
law school or for an MBA and get them
started.
So, they have great SAT
scores, know how to study and learn,
know what high quality work is,
are good at working with people,
are really good at reading comprehension,
can knock out an A+/A+ term paper between
10 PM and 7 AM with just a quart of
coffee, can give a good presentation,
etc.
So, teach them about Volts, Amps,
Watts, Ohm's law, DC, AC, resistors,
capacitors, inductors, basic electronic
signals, the basic conceptual principles
of how a processor core works, a little
on caching and main memory,
data representation 101,
how a
disk drive works, the basics of
an NIC, Ethernet, a LAN switch,
and TCP/IP, and IP router,
a little
on memory protection, an 'embedded'
operating system, virtual memory,
virtual machines, a file system
with locking and security,
console sessions and command lines,
text files and a good text editor,
the Internet from DNS, SMTP, POP3,
to base 64, MIME, HTTP, HTML, and
CSS, the basics of programming languages,
e.g., Visual Basic .NET and its
memory management, classes and instances,
the .NET Framework, relational database,
SQL, SQL Server, how to use Microsoft's
MSDN, about Stack Overflow, HN, and
how to Google/Bing to get answers to
questions, how to use our technical
support account at Microsoft and
Cisco, all in about one afternoon,
with some exercises, and then have
a graduation party.
Then get to
work on some basic stuff, say,
plugging together another 20 servers, repairing
a server with a busted hard disk,
etc.
Clean, indoor work, no heavy lifting,
and better than grass mowing or retailing.
Spot on! Another way of looking at it is that tech companies don't want to spend $ training their employees (including a slightly longer ramp up time for an employee to begin contributing). If they did, the hiring process would be: you had a 4.0 in college. This shows you are good at learning new things. Lets check for personality fit and some other things that a college transcript does not capture. Do a one hour interview. Hire or No Hire based on this.
As a startup founder, you should be happy about this state of affairs. The attitude of large companies makes it easier for you to hire :)