如何培养自己的软件人才？

题注：很多国内的软件公司都感叹难以找到合适的软件专业人才 ，特别是在时间和财力都不允许的情况下，其实，合格的专业人才完全可以通过内部培养获取，下面是发表在SD上的一片文章，也许你可以从这家公司的做法中学到些什么......

 

Client/Server University

July 2000

Can’t recruit experts in your area? Make your own.

by Denny Williford

Extensive testing has revealed that making a hole-in-one with a one iron is easier than hiring a client/server (C/S) expert. Yet our Little Rock, Arkansas, company now has over 60 C/S experts on staff. How have we managed such a feat? We hire bright college graduates and spend five months and $500,000 making them experts.

The thought of spending that much time and money on training shocks many people. Why do we do it? Because we have no choice! There is a tremendous demand for our services, but there aren’t enough qualified people to staff the opportunities. Our application suite has a complex three-tier architecture, is implemented in several languages and runs on multiple operating systems.

Originally, we tried to hire the experts we needed, but we found it impossible to recruit in the Little Rock area. We widened our search to include a larger talent pool by recruiting in Dallas and Atlanta. However, C/S experts in Dallas and Atlanta were generally not interested in moving to Little Rock. After much effort and few results, we decided that if we wanted top-quality C/S programmers, we were going to have to make them ourselves.

Trial and Error

The traditional approach is to hire programmers and assign mentors to give them on-the-job training. We tried mentoring and found it didn’t work for a number of reasons. First, there are few developers who have the people skills to be good mentors. Second, if a senior programmer with the ability to mentor exists, he is too busy pounding out designs and code to mentor anyone. Even if you do get good results from mentoring, it is a slow process. New programmers can’t grow quickly using mentoring techniques, and mentors can only work with one or two people at a time. In addition to the assigned mentors, we gave people books to read, videos to watch and computer-based training software to run. We also sent people to one-week classes, conferences and seminars. Eventually, we concluded that on-the-job training was just too slow, too expensive and too limited.

Our first shot at extended training was a six-week course in Visual Basic and software engineering. During those six weeks, we were able to teach syntax, effective usage, graphical user interface design, program design, and our programming standards and methods. The graduates of that class were able to immediately begin production work. Our success at creating VB programmers encouraged us to expand our efforts.

Ambitious Curriculum

In January of 1997, we started a five-month client/server programming class. The goal was to produce C/S experts who could work on application architecture, object design, GUI design, database design, coding, testing and anything else that needed to be done. We met those goals.