in reply to (OT) Finding the Ideal Employees

What a candidate knows is not as important as how fast they can find out what they need to know. This gives you an indication of their learning habits. Someone with good learning habits will be able to grow and adapt to your changing needs.

Neil Watson
watson-wilson.ca

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Re: Re: (OT) Finding the Ideal Employees
by vek (Prior) on Oct 03, 2003 at 03:32 UTC

    I was reading a blog the other day (can't remember whose for the life of me) and it said something similar. Something along the lines of: you no longer have to remember facts, you only need to remember where to go to get the facts.

    -- vek --
[reply]
      I don't buy that. Sure, you can't expect people to remember everything, but not knowing anything, just knowing where to get it from is the other extreme.

      It reminds me of a small anecdote. During my previous employment, the office manager once said "Why would I have to know math, I have a calculator". To which I responded, "Why would I have to know Dutch, I have a dictionary".

      To be productive, one must have a proper balance between having knowledge, and knowing how to get knowledge.

      Abigail

[reply]
      ...you no longer have to remember facts, you only need to remember where to go to get the facts.

      I have seen this view stated many times over the years. And it is obvious that research skills are critical and getting more important as time goes on.

      However I have yet to meet anyone who was good at aquiring the facts that they needed on demand who did not know a large number of facts already. Here are a few guesses as to why this might be:

      1. You get to be good at getting facts by actually doing it a lot. Eventually something will stick.
      2. In researching things it is critical to be able to make critical judgements on what turns up. An existing body of relevant knowledge helps immensely in that.
      3. Existing facts give you the context needed to absorb the information you are looking for when you find it.
      4. Needed facts often come up again. Being able to cache them for a period in your memory is faster than looking again.
      5. An imperfect memory of where and when you might have seen something vaguely like the thing you want to find is invaluable in coming up with search terms to find it again.
      6. With a good body of knowledge, you have additional options for how to figure out unknown information (eg reading source code becomes an option).
      Therefore while I agree that learning how to find facts on demand is more important than possessing large numbers of them, this does not make it useless to learn a large number of facts.
[reply]

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