Long ago when Adobe wanted to hire all kinds of new technicians they asked me what they should look for. I told them that they should hire people with “The Knack” – I was totally serious. The best techs are people who can look at a problem and figure it out through research and intuition alone. In other words – people who can use resources to find answers rather than have all the answers in front of them (like in a knowledge base, or through training) alone. Not saying training and knowledge base articles aren’t important, but very often as a tech neither exist – especially on new products and technologies.

The Knack is basically is basically an extreme intuition in all things electrical and mechanical. Finding people who have “The Knack” like the cartoon below says is like finding the one good rag in a pile of bad ones. Sometimes people find “The  Knack” on the job, and I saw it happen to a lot of people all the time at Stream – those are the kind of people you want to hire I think.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TirAmOFw_WA

Anyhow its a good episode none the less – even if you don’t agree with me .