Thanks.

I was guessing that partly I could exploit time: As I start to hire people, I will have a nicely successful business so, thus, necessarily, won’t go out of business if I don’t hurry up and build a great team of great programmers.

So, maybe I won’t be asking much of my first hires so could give them time on the job to learn some of the items on my list. Then have them do the shopping for the video studio and organize lessons for the rest of the training making good use of the video studio.

There’s a point: In spite of all the computing I’ve done, for my Web site startup I had to learn a lot of the skill items on that list. So, I learned them, well enough to use them and get good running code.

Well, my view is that for nearly all those skills, with some reasonably good learning materials, learning that stuff can be darned fast. So, I’ve been considering hiring some people and having them learn on the job, starting with some simple tasks we do need done.

E.g., my first hire might be an office manager, i.e., COO, to work with the bookkeeper, CPA, auditors, payroll, benefits, expense accounts, bank, landlord, insurance agent, cleaning firm, etc.

Next the COO could hire some interns. One of them could do the shopping for a video studio and write up the results of the shopping, partly or totally supervise the construction of the studio, learn how to operate the equipment and do video editing, write up a user’s guide to the studio, etc. They would make use of a computer for various tasks and learn needed skills as they went. Along the way, I might give them an hour tutorial occasionally.

Then would need some monitoring of the servers and network, so have an intern do the shopping for that, line up and use some consultants, …, document the work, and learn.

Then would need some …, etc., on and on.

So, slowly they would get into more technical things.

Eventually they’d bring up a Web site for our advertisers or some such.

But, put all the above on hold!

Yes, if I want to start hiring when I get to revenue of $1 million a month, then to get to $1 billion a month is a factor of 1000 more, essentially in each of server farm capacity, servers, racks, floor space, electric power, HVAC , system equipment failures and similarly for the network.

A factor of, gulp, 1000. Even if two spare bedrooms could get me to $1 million a month, likely possible, a factor of 1000 is totally different! An empty factory or shopping mall someplace?

A factor of 1000 is much like 1024 which is exactly doubling 10 times. Hmm …. To do that in not too many months would be rapid growth!

I wouldn’t want the site capacity to grow slower than the user demand!

Maybe have some employees and let them make a lot of use of consultants? E.g., Microsoft knows how to setup and run such a server farm and network, and I would be a darned good customer for Windows Server and SQL Server. Sooooo, maybe could get a tour of one of their server farms and hire one of their people for a week and some hour long phone calls later, or some such?

One of the keys here is that darned little of the work for growing by a factor of 1000 is really advanced, tricky, creative, etc., and the skills needed to learn can be learned quite quickly from an experienced person.

So, maybe exploit this point: For stuff or skills don’t know, look at the usual text sources and then pick up a phone or get a Skype session for an hour with a specialized expert who does that stuff all the time and has done it 100+ times. Then, apply the skill, get the immediate work done, and write up some good notes on what learned and did!

Maybe my thinking was weighted too much to some successful company growing relatively slowly and not some, initial, short term F-22 takeoff and screaming, full afterburner, climb to 100,000 feet. Factor of 1000, double 10 times, wow. It could happen.

Washington realized that the Kentucky, Tennessee, west Virginia frontiersmen had long rifles which were accurate out to 3-400 yards.

Meanwhile, the British Brown Bess was a crap shoot beyond 50 yards.

WOW! 3-400 yards v 50 yards!

And for the rest, yup, when I imagined I were in the Revolutionary War or the Civil War, I imagined that I’d be with a few other guys and we’d mostly stay hidden, be snipers, and pick the enemy off one shot and one person at a time, night, day, dawn, dusk, fog, rain. And, right, smarter to pick off the officers.

So, Washington, Steuben, never directly confronted the British, did some sniping from 100-300 yards away, disappeared into the woods, moved on, repeated the sniping — smart guys.

Thanks!

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The skills you enumerate still require training to coordinate and to direct.

Staying in our Revolutionary frame of mind, Washington realized that the Kentucky, Tennessee, west Virginia frontiersmen had long rifles which were accurate out to 3-400 yards.

Meanwhile, the British Brown Bess was a crap shoot beyond 50 yards. The Brits made up for that with their skill with bayonets. If they could get within a short distance, they would fix bayonets and come get you.

Washington — say on the road from Princeton to Trenton after the Battle of Trenton — put his long rifled soldiers in the edge of a wood and let them pick off the Brits (heading down the road to give battle on the heights around Trenton) as they formed their British Square to fight them.

When the Americans had wreaked havoc and killed a lot of British officers, the Americans fled and evaporated into the woods, came out the other side, and went to their next blocking position to lay in wait for the Brits. It was classic shoot, move, communicate warfare.

In this fashion, Washington never became decisively engaged with the Brits — meaning he never risked his entire army in a single battle. A decisive engagement — like Yorktown — means winner takes all.

These same soldiers were trained by Von Steuben to move from column-of-platoons to line-of-platoons. They still retained their distance standoff and marksmanship advantage when they gave battle. They were trained to incorporate their unique skill into the entire force structure.

When the long rifled soldiers were formed up at the appropriate distance, they killed a lot of Brits beyond Brown Bess range. They killed a lot of British officers.

In much the same way, if you can find folks who have 75% of the skills you enumerate, you will have a better start than if they only have 25%, but you will still have to fill in the last 25% and the cultural training unique to how you want your enterprise to operate.

BRC
http://www.themusingsofthebigredcar.com

When I get around to hiring technical people, I will want them good at, when they arrive and/or after training, in

(1) General computer usage and programming ‘skills’ plus some more advanced such skills.

(2) Ability to learn from courses, lectures on specialized, advanced topics, and independently from books, papers, lectures, Internet sources.

(3) Ability to write clearly to document their own work.

(4) Creativity, ability to look at a new problem and find a new solution from own ideas and work and pulling together ideas and work from books, papers, specialized experts, etc.

(5) Optional but potentially quite desirable, be a good pure/applied mathematician.

For (1), that is, some of the basic objectives of training:

General computer usage

Disk drive letters

Disk partitions

Boot partitions

Windows HPFS file system

Common command line commands

KEdit programmable text editor

Kexx KEDIT macros

Rexx command line scripts

Excel for graphing data

Internet overview

E-mail usage

Web browser usage

Computer Hardware Basics

Motherboards

Power supplies and voltages

Fans and cooling

Processors, cores, and threads

Main memory and error correcting coding

Cache memory and cache invalidate

Virtual memory

Northbridge and Southbridge chips

I/O standards — PCI, SATA, USB, etc.

Adapter cards

Computer System Administration

BIOS settings

Windows system configuration

Windows logs

User data backup/recovery

Boot partition backup/recovery

System monitoring

Temperature

Resource limits

Security

IP addresses and port numbers

Solid state disks

RAID

Programming

Windows .NET Framework

MSDN documentation

Visual Basic .NET,

our standard

C#, tricky different syntactic

sugar, we avoid

Elementary data types

Arrays

Objects

Statements and expressions

Exceptional condition handling

Algorithms and data structures

Binary search

Block binary search (new?)

Heaps and heap sort

Heaps for priority queues

Hashing — with examples

Extendible hashing

Big-O notation and criterion

Computational time complexity

NP-completeness

Combinatorial optimization

Linear programming

Simplex algorithm

Ellipsoidal algorithm

Integer linear programming,

example of NP-complete

Linear programming on networks,

integer linear programming for free

Cunningham modification

Bertsekas algorithm

Network shortest path

Balanced trees

AVL trees

Red-black trees

K-d trees

B-trees

.NET collections

.NET TCP/IP programming

SQL Server Database

Tables

Datatypes

Database definitions

Users, logins, capabilities

Command line SQL usage

ADO.NET SQL programming

Connection strings

Connection pools

Clustered keys

Foreign keys

Normal forms

SQL performance analysis

SQL administration

Web Site Programming

TCP/IP IPv4, IPv6

TCP/IP routing

DHCP and static IPs

Domain names and the DNS

Certificate authorities

Internet backbone and BGP

Content distribution networks —

Akamai, etc.

HTTP, HTTPS

HTML, HTML5

CSS

JavaScript, we try to avoid

Cookies

Ad servers

Microsoft’s Internet Information

Server (IIS)

Microsoft’s ASP.NET

HTML controls

HTML tables

HTML divisions

etc.

I’ve been in computing for a long time, learned and used a lot of material, taught computer science to undergraduates at Georgetown University and to graduate students at Ohio State University. But, still, for my Internet startup, I had to know all of the material in the list above and more and most of it I had to learn as I needed it. And I have more to learn, e.g., about more advanced parts of SQL Server administration — hope to get some good materials, lectures, expert tutoring, etc.

E.g., for the size of the learning effort, just for my startup, I found, downloaded, read, abstracted, and indexed 5000+ Web pages of documentation, mostly from MSDN but also from various other Internet sites, studied about a cubic foot of books, etc.

So, for “training”, should have video lectures (should have a decently good video production and editing facility), written materials, exercises, references to high quality texts, papers, and various additional videos, e.g., videos of invited lectures from experts, e.g., in high end server farm and network planning, monitoring, and administration.

So, that’s a lot of stuff!

So, a big question is, how much should train for, hire for, have right away, develop over time?

For my startup, those are some of the challenges of “training”.

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Sounds like interesting duty. Well played.

BRC
http://www.themusingsofthebigredcar.com

I was on a defense contract in Afghanistan where our mission was to train a commando force and then take then supervise them destroying poppy fields in order to cut down on the Heroin trade with a side of fighting the Taliban and Narco Mercenaries.

We had a contract with about 200 people on it.

40 were US trainers ( former enlisted Marines, Army SF, Rangers Police SWAT, Air Force Security Forces , SEALS, CIA Paramilitary) 12 EOD guys, 50 former British Gurhkas as light infantry for the trainers, about 10 various former 3rd Country intel and SF guys doing planning/staff roles, 4 or 5 of logistics folks and the balance were admin and support.

If you sucked you got canned quick.

Most of the folks involved had 10 years of experience and most with multiply combat tours.

So the planning and decision making were second nature, tactics were adjusted or changed quickly and learning new weapons system happened quicker.

.
Very interesting point. I wonder if it doesn’t depend on what branch one serves in?

I found it the other way. When I got out, I couldn’t figure out what people did between 6:00 AM and 9:00 AM when they reported to work.

I was in the combat engineers which meant when we came in from the field, we were building stuff. No down time. Plus it was always dangerous.

There is no question that the pace of business, the efficiency of business is accelerating.

Computers. Technology.

BRC
http://www.themusingsofthebigredcar.com

It’s faster, the players are better and the old rules don’t apply