Things have been hectic, but I wanted to point out the following quote in a Sunday post.
“Hire curious people. Even if they don’t have the exact skill set you want, curious, passionate people can learn anything.”
I learned a long time ago that if you speak the lingo of a certain subject, people begin to believe you understand that subject – it is just one of the indicators of knowledge that we all use when we know little to nothing about a subject. Sometimes it is a good indicator, many times it is not. An example of the latter is the movie “The Fast and The Furious.” There is a part in that movie where Vin Diesel’s character says something like “granny shifting instead of double-clutching like you should” when criticizing a fellow street racer. That sounded cool to me when I first heard it, like he really knew what he was talking about, but it also made me wonder what on earth it meant – so I asked a car guy I knew back then, and he pointed out that the statement was in fact incorrect there.
(A particular case of this led to a joke in one of my circles that involved blending crypto buzzwords together in a way that made absolutely no sense yet sounded profound. For example,
So, we take some X9.31 (no BlumBlumShub around here), add a touch of SHA-256 (MD5 is so 90’s, you know) with a little of the HMAC, and mix in a few bits of AES (combined with the Diffie-Hellman of course, cause, well, you know why). That’s not all – we then ECDSA that and even toss in a little modular exponentiation with hardware acceleration just to be conservative. But, man, you don’t even want to know what we do next… [And so on until it gets old.]
)
What does this have to do with the quote above? Well, questions about skill set commonly result in answers that are a bunch buzzwords and surrounding fluff. It is a rarity that you get responses that convey passion and curiosity with technical competence as just a given. Yet, those are exactly the type of responses we should be looking for when trying to find people to help with our technology needs. For example, having sat through many a technical interview, my favorite interviewees do not list a bunch of skills and buzzwords, they talk about what cool technologies they are currently playing with.
People who love to dig are rare. They tinker, they research, they build – in other words, they love to play with things and learn. Such people accumulate experience and knowledge, and can connect the dots. They also like to share and tend to know others just like them. Statements like “I first encountered this while…” or “I played with something similar…” or “my buddy and I are working on a project…” are commonly heard from them.
Any of us that have dealt with first tier technical support, only to work our way up the chain to someone that actually knew how to dig have experience this. Static people regurgitate training and checklists without listening to you, dynamic people listen to you and then solve your problem, evolving all the while.
And, this is one of the difficulties with many open source platforms crossing over to the mainstream – they require people to dig. Most of people using IT act as I do with my couch – they just want it to meet their needs, they don’t care how it really works. Why should they? Specialization is one of the benefits of our world, and we can trade to meet our needs.
So, lets have a new buzzword 
– curious geeks, hackers in the traditional sense. I can’t see using anyone else for hands on technical work.
Update: Looks like that joke is not forgotten… I received the following via email.
Dude.. I am DYING! I tried to explain to [removed] why I have tears rolling down
my eyes, but [removed] just doesn’t get itYou did forget about XORing the result with the closing price of Light Sweet
Crude Oil and concatenating with Avogadro’s number
Welcome to my world. 
[...] Knowing what I was talking about, and learning (value: knowledge and/or expertise). That was why people were listening to me and looking for guidance about their particular needs in the first place. Being a curious geek helped here, especially with learning about customers’ systems and then analyzing them against requirements all on the fly. [...]