Could you train someone to do your job in a month?

No prior programming or domain knowledge? Absolutely not. Even good programmers take months to become productive in my team due to how obscure the knowledge that is required. You have to lean piles of stuff you would otherwise not have learned, on top of what a programmer in our "general area of knowledge" is expected to have.

After a decade as a dev, I work in developer support now. It's often much harder than regular coding because I have to try to guess what the other dev might be doing wrong (or how their edge case could cause a bug) just from experience and intuition, often without being able to see their source code and logs.

I don't think I can teach someone all of this in a month if they have no prior web dev experience. It requires an awareness (if not deep expertise) of the whole stack and various network and caching factors across several codebases and vendors.

On the other hand, my previous job was just a frontend dev. It paid better but had way less responsibility and required very little cross-domain knowledge. I'm pretty confident I could teach someone to do that within a month. My partner there was actually a boot camp grad (few months of education), but he was terrific. It's not terribly difficult work, just requires an eye for detail and some empathy.

If a job can be learned in a month to a degree where the learner is now proficient in it, then the barrier to entry is low and the job is either repetitive in nature or has a very low expectations bar (e.g. for junior roles). I highly doubt that's the case for most folks on HN. This is a field where experience can't be entirely replaced with diligent study (doubly true for management roles).

I was a JavaScript developer for 15 years and now I do something different that is new to me.

I could easily train somebody off the street, assuming higher than 125 IQ, to be a decent JavaScript developer in a month assuming that month is dedicated to training and I can assign homework. By decent I mean not an expert but certainly far superior to the average professional JavaScript developer.

How, you might ask? Teach them from the technology standards without helpful abstractions. Tooling and configuration nonsense are what bad developers do to look busy and justify their existence, so absolutely avoid all of that. Don't waste time on stupid things indented for stupid people. Build their confidence one step at a time so that they can write original high performance software at high durability.

To go through the motions? Sure. To do the job right the first time and completely, not a chance.

It takes more than a month to come up to speed in a new environment - new tools, new processes, new goals and constraints, you go home every night with your head hurting and tired from sweating it.

And that's if you've done most of it before. Getting that context, internalizing it so you can do the work without second-guessing yourself on every little thing, that takes a long time for anybody.

Velocity, the Agile people call it. That's why folks are paid less, maybe half what an experienced 'resource' gets paid, for maybe a year. Until they do enough to be worth keeping around!

> Assume no prior programming or domain knowledge.

That makes it a “no” for any programming job. I’ve taught programming, and it takes a good 3 months of full time education and practice for smart, motivated beginners to become Jr level. Even that puts most of them at intern-level, rather than Jr.

Maybe if they've already had a very similar job at a different company. Then still not 100% but it would be good enough for them to pick the rest on their own after the 1 month.

Starting from scratch with no prior programming and domain knowledge - no way.

Have you ever started a new job? How long did it take you to be relatively productive compared to the rest of your teammates? Now imagine how it would take if you lost all of your technical skills and experience.

Maybe? I'm a software architect and while 20 years of programming experience cannot be communicated in a month a sufficiently acceptable job of "How to draw technical pictures and write documents" could probably be communicated. Of course, lacking experience it won't be long before designs are created which are digital houses of cards waiting for a stiff breeze...

Not even close. Someone without programming or domain knowledge would take at least a year (more likely two or three) to learn to do my job. Seasoned devs with domain knowledge typically take 3-6 months to become productive.

Make that five or more years for someone coming cold to do the jobs of a couple of my teammates.

"Could you train someone to do your job in a month?"

Yes and no. If they are an employee, then most likely yes. If they are a contractor, my experiences tell me they most likely will not learn it fast enough or well enough.

I can probably (and had many times - in a few months) train someone to write ruby,js code that compiles and even achieves few simple real world like goals.

But this is ~15-20 years far away from my job and ~1 year far away from a job that would be useful for real company.

This depends on the specific work he is doing and his natural talents. If he is responsible for important parts of the code and he has been lacking in relevant domain experience in the past, it could be quite challenging.

No way. Someone with several years of programming experience and a little domain knowledge then yes, maybe.

For them to be as productive as me would take months, assuming programming knowledge and domain knowledge.

I am pretty positive that I could teach someone to code at my level if I had a year dedicated to teaching them every day.

If I were that good a teacher, my supernatural talent would be wasted on engineering work.

Without prior knowledge of programming it's going to be 3 months, otherwise 1 month.

Would be great if I could even hire my replacement in a month, even at a high salary

Noooope. One does not simply learn 15 years of CAD techniques in a month.

My job is mostly designing solutions (figuring out the best code), so I don't think a college graduate can get there in a month. I can teach them the patterns- but understanding the tradeoffs, knowing what is a major vs a minor priority, communicating effectively with other people involved, and knowing what to do when the shit hits the fan are things that I think are mostly garnered form sheer experience.

Nope. I could train someone to update, commit and push edits to markdown files, but the rest will be a lot harder.

Eventually the static website will need bigger updates. Then they'll need a full stack web developer. Someone who knows SEO and marketing wouldn't hurt. Oh and UX too. Technical writing experience wouldn't hurt.

But even then, they will still miss the huge amount of context and obscure domain knowledge I have acquired over the years. They won't have all the connections to industry experts.

I love being self-employed and wearing so many hats, but it makes me quite hard to replace.

routine tasks maybe, creative tasks lol no good luck with that