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Ask HN: Have you ever regretted hiring a developer?

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Re: Ask HN: Have you ever regretted hiring a developer?

#21

Post by brianwawok »

charlesdm wrote: post #20
brianwawok wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Why would you pick the one with a degree? If two developers are of equal technical ability, I would honestly pick the one with better social skills over the one with a degree.

You are implying there is a downside. In my example they are the same in all aspects you measure.

Re: Ask HN: Have you ever regretted hiring a developer?

#22

Post by throwaway9475 »

wanderr wrote: post #13

If you hire enough people, eventually you'll have a bunch of examples for this question, unless of course you never make mistakes. Pretty 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 f…

I'm on a phone, so typing is not the easiest, but as a quick response to moving fast and breaking things: maybe people don't do that because they don't like getting paged at 3 AM when some clever piece of code breaks. :)

Re: Ask HN: Have you ever regretted hiring a developer?

#23

Post by hliyan »

marktangotango wrote: post #17
hliyan wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately, this describes a substantial percentage of "10x" engineers...

Despite your use as a pejorative, 10x is real. Developers who pound out mountains of spaghetti in whatever stack they want ignoring maintainability and best practices? I've heard the phrase "cowboy coders", or asshole works too.

Perhaps we ought to normalize the scale and call the other variety 0.1x engineers.

Re: Ask HN: Have you ever regretted hiring a developer?

#24

Post by cauterized »

acjohnson55 wrote: post #18
cauterized wrote: post #15

I'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…

That's one reason we rely heavily on thorough, structured reference checks.

How do you structure your reference checks? And what do you do for new hires who are very early in their careers and don't have real work references?

Also, I'll note that three of the above employees were sourced via referral from either other employees or friends of execs.

Re: Ask HN: Have you ever regretted hiring a developer?

#25

Post by jdnc »

aisofteng wrote: post #9

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),…

I think here the main issue was that the company hired programmers without any kind of actual technical screening. It kind of seems quite likely that in this case they would end up hiring developers, that they would come to regret later.

Questions like what you code for fun or what technical sites you browse are all fine as supplementary discussion points, but they are in no ways going to be indicative of whether the person knows how to code, unless you actually ask them to code.

Re: Ask HN: Have you ever regretted hiring a developer?

#26

Post by 49531 »

The biggest issue I've had is with engineers with strong opinions strongly held. A lot of time they're unwilling to compromise and do things their way 100% of the time.

Recently I had an engineer on my team who would never pattern match in a project. He would always introducing new patterns everywhere he went. It was all just an unwillingness to be flexible.

Re: Ask HN: Have you ever regretted hiring a developer?

#27

Post by thr0waway1239 »

EliRivers wrote: post #12

Interviewee seemed "odd". Stilted interaction during interview. Technical skills fine enough. Uncommonly, a second interview held with an extra interviewer brought in. Technical 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 ap…

Good story, but probably not one answering the question. You only regret something when you realize you ignored all the bad signs initially. In this case, your feeling was probably vindication and not regret.

Besides, if this person was only there for 3 days, its almost as if the whole episode didn't even happen :-)

Re: Ask HN: Have you ever regretted hiring a developer?

#28

Post by dominotw »

jdnc wrote: post #25
aisofteng wrote: post #9

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),…

I think here the main issue was that the company hired programmers without any kind of actual technical screening. It kind of seems quite likely that in this case they would end up hiring developers, that they would come to regret later. Questions like what you code for fun or what technical sites you browse are all fine as supplementary discussion points, but they are in no ways going to be indicative of whether the…

how can you code for fun and not know how to code.

Re: Ask HN: Have you ever regretted hiring a developer?

#29

Post by angvp »

In my case when I've regretted it was much because the "attitude problem". For a team of 10 devs (I've recruited all of them), I remember two specifically cases in which I regretted to hire those guys.

Guy #1:

A "developer" who was trash talking everyone (even me) and then he pretended he didn't do it or he alleged "I didn't say that", he complained about every one of his teammates, he pretended and believes that he was a workaholic (but he failed to be on call when the shit hits the fan). In his very last days at the company, he was harassing me to give him attention I was swamped of work and attending useless meetings and I couldn't give him much attention, so he started sending me whatsapp messages and e-mails at ridiculous hours and complaining because "I didn't reply his messages", this guy has some issues IMO.

Guy #2:

A brilliant student (almost summa cum laude in a recognized university), he was hired for built a parser for several input formats, he needed several meetings for understanding the problem, he was complaining about technical decisions so he bring more people to the meetings and he got the same result, as a developer he's the guy with the ugliest practices that I've seen in my life, he overengineered everything, he used lot of irrelevant algorithms for solving silly problems, once I asked to do a silly cronjob to fetch from an API the exchange rates of 8 different countries and cache them, so he did build a nodejs app (I asked him to do this in python) that didn't what I wanted (he built a webservice that given two currencies find the rate), a script of 10 lines max, he did 400 ugly js lines, but the worst is that those 400 lines were useless for what we wanted to achieve..

My advice when hiring please don't be desperate (guy #2) and always check his background with their previous employers (guy #1).

With the other 8 guys, I was ok, even if couple of them weren't 100% perfect (I could add couple of more guys of this team but they weren't so bad) overall I felt great with the team.

Re: Ask HN: Have you ever regretted hiring a developer?

#30

Post by samblr »

In interview what appeared to be a potential-hire's strength - became a real nuisance when we hired him. We wanted someone who could do both android and iOS. He was a senior, had enough to showcase and plenty to 'talk about software architectural things'. It turned out, he was jack of all trades (python, java, objective-c) but he really-really struggled at designing software but he could talk through people and walls. And then he formed a bad habit of mailing in out-of-hours to group that somebody's else code has this problem - how to fix, so on and so forth. Initially we didn't know of what to make of it. He could small bug-fixes ok. Then we assigned a good chunk of work in new project. And boy, did he create a mess of it. Since he was lagging behind from dates assigned - we sat for a code-design-review. I sat in horror that day on how confidently he was presenting to what was not even a freshman's work. He didn't have a clue on why blocking calls should not be made on UI thread. We didn't give any good work to him later. He left us soon and last time I checked - he was a CTO of a mobile development shop! N
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