About a year or so into my professional career and in the second position I ever had, I was asked to help interview candidates who had passed some initial screening which consisted of asking the candidate about their resume, but, importantly, no programming or whiteboard test. The company I was working for was a multibillion dollar corporation in a non-tech industry (think something like healthcare or petrochemical),…
Thanks for sharing this experience. So I guess in this case the apllicant lacked: - technical skills - soft skills to ask for help
Ask HN: Have you ever regretted hiring a developer?
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Re: Ask HN: Have you ever regretted hiring a developer?
#12Technical director asked everyone; everyone said "no hire". Technical director hired him anyway, allegedly (but not proven) on the grounds of a bizarre, unshakeable faith in the supremacy of Russian programmers.
About day two, overheard on the phone apparently interviewing for another job. MD noticed he didn't seem to be doing much; asked if he had some work. "No." Do you want some? "No."
Gone on day three.
What went wrong? One person permitted to discount everyone else's opinion and hire a clearly bad candidate anyway, on the grounds of their own personal prejudices.
Re: Ask HN: Have you ever regretted hiring a developer?
#13Pretty much everything you can imagine can go wrong and probably more. Hiring anyone is always a risk but it's one you can't avoid, nor do I think that the interview process should be so tough as to have lots of false negatives to prevent those bad hires; better IMO to have a reasonable filtering process and then be on the alert for problems post-hire so they can be addressed early, including the possibility of termination.
That said, specific bad hire examples that were tough to deal with:
-Developers who get stuck and don't ask for help - spinning your wheels making no progress until someone notices is a great way to derail a project and make yourself look incompetent. Often times the things these developers get stuck on are quickly solved by some outside perspective, rubber ducking, or specialized knowledge.
-Negative attitude, high aptitude: a developer really good at their job but constantly sowing seeds of discontent, either getting into conflicts with others directly or subverting management directives, talking to others about how terrible the company is doing, etc. Letting an otherwise extremely competent person go is very tough so often they are allowed to remain way beyond when they should.
-Architecture astronauts/overcomplicators - maybe a cultural fit issue but some people are allergic to the move fast and break things approach, focusing way too much on nebulous code quality aspects, high levels of abstractions that often end up interacting in weird ways that are hard to debug, with the aim of high levels of code reuse and extensibility, but in the long run often leads to the need for major refactoring when underlying assumptions change. It's not that these qualities are are always bad and never work, but some developers are seemingly bored working on less complicated systems and majorly over engineer even things intended to be thrown away or overhauled later, so often times is a huge waste of time and ends up being more difficult to maintain. Of all the bad habits or deficiencies developers can have, this is the one that I haven't had much luck with intervention on.
-Lone wolf - some developers are great in one on one interviews and are quite capable, but turn out to not work well with others. They either refuse to follow processes, or on group projects will just do what they want even if it doesn't match what the group decided, they might decide that a midnight refactor of a core piece of code someone else is working on is something they have to do right now, and not even bother giving the other person a heads up. Sometimes you can give them sufficiently isolated projects that they can work effectively, but in the long run it doesn't really work, and you risk harming the rest of the team.
-Sloppy / lack attention to detail. Developers who fail to check their own work, or do it so hastily they don't notice glaring mistakes, or who are rushing so much they don't / can't follow a simple spec. These developers also often have trouble following coding standards because either they never learn them or they're not really looking at their code enough to notice when it doesn't follow.
-Not curious / quick to BS through a problem. Debugging skills are critical to being a good developer, but some developers don't spend much time or effort figuring out how to effectively debug their code and surrounding systems, so as soon as something goes wrong they have no idea where the problem is, are often quick to resort to ghost stories to explain the phenomenon, I.e. blaming a heisenbug that's caused by a race condition on the browser, a failed request caused by a network outage on the API, etc. These developers are frustrating to help because even when you teach them how to investigate these issues, their lack of interest means they'll never pick it up. Subsequently they're more likely to ship bugs because they're good at convincing themselves that bugs they observe are not the result of their changes.
Re: Ask HN: Have you ever regretted hiring a developer?
#14Developers who insist that their favorite technology is the best vs. what's the best for the task at hand, what technology will the team as a whole be successful with. Developers who don't have empathy for less experienced team members; who can't/won't mentor well.
- Mongo not having a schema, relations - Angular having a fundamentally flawed update system
But of course the argument was that 'MEAN is what everyone is using, its easy to find MEAN developers'.
Sure, if you mean it's easy to find kids who learnt how to make apps, via a MEAN stack, over a couple months as their first ever tech and now are ready to work for very cheap.
Of course it's never cheap - what you save on quality you make up in quantity.
The amount of developer time wasted writing migration scripts, debugging silly problems because of no schema, data loss (at least they took my advice on automating backups!), not to mention a ton of frontend issues - was staggering.
Yes, this was a 6 month old startup with about 6 fresh college "engineers".
Experienced developers have a favorite for a reason, usually they've been bitten by other ones - I would say don't trust a developer who pushes a certain tech without giving a reason beyond that they are familiar with it.
For example, I've found javascript a painful language to work with (although that's starting to change with all the latest revisions to the spec) - but it makes no sense to push for a different language when half the app is already written and all the devs know javascript.
Using Mongo as a db on the other hand I wouldn't suggest ever, data integrity is way too important to use a (badly implemented) cache as a database.
There are much better technologies out there that give you everything that Mongo tries to provide, and faster too.
Re: Ask HN: Have you ever regretted hiring a developer?
#15- a guy with an alcohol problem who would disappear for a week at a time or come in to work sloshed
- a junior developer who had major problems with authority, mixed with bizarre paranoia. He refused to take direction from his team lead and had to be let go after he started accusing anyone and everyone of trying to undermine him.
- a guy so obsessed with doing everything perfectly that it took him a year to produce what other engineers could accomplish in a month. Granted, his work has been running for 3 years now without a single bug, but even taking that into account he still wasn't cost effective to have on the team
- a developer who refused to take ownership of his projects and insisted that everything expected of him be specified down to the pixel (might work at a large corporation, but not a startup - we don't have time to hand-hold like that)
- a guy who was hired as a junior mobile engineer and then began throwing fits when we denied him the authority to change the priorities of the entire web and mobile product team
Takeaways:
It's fairly easy to assess who is and is not capable of developing basic CRUD apps. Getting meaningful information about a person's neuroses, self-management ability, and ability to play well with others is extremely difficult in the space of a handful of hours of interviewing.
Re: Ask HN: Have you ever regretted hiring a developer?
#16About a year or so into my professional career and in the second position I ever had, I was asked to help interview candidates who had passed some initial screening which consisted of asking the candidate about their resume, but, importantly, no programming or whiteboard test. The company I was working for was a multibillion dollar corporation in a non-tech industry (think something like healthcare or petrochemical),…
The reason I dropped out of a top 10 global engineering university was because I saw right there that it didnt teach me programming. So I learnt on my own. I recently applied for my first job, and its that type of job where its good to have progrmming skils but not mandatory. I'm so interested to see if I'll get an interview at least, cause hiring is broken.
Re: Ask HN: Have you ever regretted hiring a developer?
#17Developers who insist that their favorite technology is the best vs. what's the best for the task at hand, what technology will the team as a whole be successful with. Developers who don't have empathy for less experienced team members; who can't/won't mentor well.
Unfortunately, this describes a substantial percentage of "10x" engineers...
Re: Ask HN: Have you ever regretted hiring a developer?
#18I've never had a hire go wrong for technical reasons. I have hired, participated in hiring, or inherited several developers who had to be let go for reasons related to attitude or soft skills. Some examples: - a guy with an alcohol problem who would disappear for a week at a time or come in to work sloshed - a junior developer who had major problems with authority, mixed with bizarre paranoia. He refused to take dire…
Re: Ask HN: Have you ever regretted hiring a developer?
#19About a year or so into my professional career and in the second position I ever had, I was asked to help interview candidates who had passed some initial screening which consisted of asking the candidate about their resume, but, importantly, no programming or whiteboard test. The company I was working for was a multibillion dollar corporation in a non-tech industry (think something like healthcare or petrochemical),…
But dont you find it ridiculous that employers get what they ask for. They ask for degrees, they get people with degrees. I looked just now for some jobs that I could do and they ask for degrees. The reason I dropped out of a top 10 global engineering university was because I saw right there that it didnt teach me programming. So I learnt on my own. I recently applied for my first job, and its that type of job where…
It's ok you don't have a degree but not sure why you would be shocked that some prefer college graduates
Re: Ask HN: Have you ever regretted hiring a developer?
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
But dont you find it ridiculous that employers get what they ask for. They ask for degrees, they get people with degrees. I looked just now for some jobs that I could do and they ask for degrees. The reason I dropped out of a top 10 global engineering university was because I saw right there that it didnt teach me programming. So I learnt on my own. I recently applied for my first job, and its that type of job where…
But you are missing the case of both a degree and good programming skills. If two programmers code equally, why wouldn't I hire the guy with the degree? That took the algorithm classes and took the writing class and has more tools in his toolbox than coding? It's ok you don't have a degree but not sure why you would be shocked that some prefer college graduates