Instant gratification and a quick Fixx

On the 8th of this month, there was an article in the Straits Times detailing a possible shortfall of graduates in the IT industry by 2017. One quote from the article stands out.

"When fresh graduates come to us, the coding languages they know have already been phased out"
- Mr Darren Lee, managing director of Fixx Digital.

Now admittedly I don't know the finer details of how Mr Lee runs his company, but this strikes me as fundamentally wrong and shockingly short-sighted. Programming languages, or as Mr Lee puts it, coding languages, are nothing more than tools. If you hire people based on their knowledge of a tool; when that tool inevitably becomes obsolete, these people become obsolete as well.

But they can learn new tools, right? 

That is precisely the point. Hire people who have the foundation to learn new tools, not people who know one particular set of tools. Arrays, iterative loops, MVC, human-computer interaction - what do they have in common? They are concepts. Concepts that have changed little since the day they were introduced. Languages evolve, but they will always go back to those basics.

When you do object-oriented programming, whether it's in Java, C++ or PHP, you are dealing with constructs, encapsulation and inheritance. The only thing that differs in syntax.

When you create a website, whether it's in Twitter Bootstrap or hand-coded HTML5, it still deals with HTTP and W3c compliance still applies.

No matter what version of Android API you're using to code that mobile app, the standard life cycle of an app has not changed since day one.

Whatever fancy new databases emerge on the market, they're more than likely to be queried via SQL.

There is a good reason why schools are not teaching students the latest, greatest breakthroughs in technology. Because it just isn't feasible. Technology evolves faster than you can establish a curriculum for. All you can do, is give students the foundation to build on. I may not be the biggest fan of Singapore's educational system, but let's be fair. If a school, any school, were to insist that their IT students are versed only in the latest technology, the students would never graduate. In a sense, that is true of the average developer - we never stop studying.

Learn to invest in people instead

You only want to hire people who know your stuff and can get cracking right away without having to learn it on the job? No problemo. But you're taking a huge risk here. If you hire a guy who knows the new fancy tools you've built your company around, all will be fine and dandy... until technology evolves. And this being technology, it will evolve. You can take that to the bank.

Don't hire tool users. Hire developers. 

Developers are constantly upgrading. It's part and parcel of this industry. Developers know the basics. It is the new emerging tools they need to familiarize themselves with. There is no such animal as a developer who already knows everything he needs to know and can get by without learning new things.

Companies that are not in the web industry will not understand this, nor are they expected to. They will hire based on the tools that their candidate should know now. Quite understandable. But Fixx Digital is a web design company. What's its excuse?

Get rid of that unhealthy Fixxation today.
T___T