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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?

#41

Post by badminton1 »

So far:

- Takers: mentally healthy people, but heavily biased towards self-benefit and competition. Never a volunteer, tries to profit from every little interaction and sees everything as a zero-sum game. Only interjects in a conversation with the objective of gaining social rank, doesn't see value in altruism and collaboration, and is rude or dismissive to people considered lower ranking.

- Neurotics: people characterized by high anxiety, low tolerance to frustration, envy, depressed mood, loneliness, etc. In the "Big 5 personality traits" system, neuroticism plays against any person in any professional setting.

- Groupthinkers: people that form cohesive groups that collectively become biased towards group harmony, becoming incapable of applying critical thinking in problem solving or having a difficult conversation even if it's in the collective best interest.

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

#42

Post by EliRivers »

thr0waway1239 wrote: post #27
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 :-)

Good story, but probably not one answering the question.

He said: "I'm trying to find out what can go wrong while hiring​ a developer."

I said: "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?

#43

Post by adnanh »

id122015 wrote: post #16
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),…

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 important to know that engineering is not just about programming. Programming is just a tool.

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

#44

Post by rikkus »

thr0waway1239 wrote: post #27
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 :-)

[s]he regrets the hiring of the developer. And if they're hired at all and then leave quickly, that's an awful lot of money (even it was all in people's time) wasted.

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

#45

Post by eropple »

philmander wrote: post #31

I've regretted hiring a few developers who have been apathetic about the actual software product we're making. I am sometimes too optimistic about a technically proficient candidate sharing these traits, during the interview process. After hiring they are depressingly unexcited about delivering a new feature that promises business value, significantly improves performance etc. It's just work to be done.

> After hiring they are depressingly unexcited about delivering a new feature that promises business value, significantly improves performance etc. It's just work to be done.

Well...yeah, it is just work to do, because it's just a job. Turn it around: why should they be excited about something they have no meaningful ownership (and I don't mean a few tenths or hundredths of a percent) in?

If the co-founder who owns fifty percent of the company isn't excited, sure, be worried. If the developer who you value only for work-units provided doesn't, it's because you haven't created a reason to (and "hard problems" isn't one; pretty much anybody can find hard problems to work on).

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

#46

Post by mixmastamyk »

angvp wrote: post #29

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…

> 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"

Sorry, but this doesn't sound so horrible on his part. Are "useless" meetings more important than getting work done at your company?

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

#47

Post by wanderr »

throwaway9475 wrote: post #22
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. :)

Yeah that's definitely a company culture thing too, breaking things at some places is considered terrible and the company would prefer a 5x longer development cycle for half as many bugs. But clever code usually takes longer to write anyway, writing dumb code that just does what it's supposed to is less fun, can be downright boring but usually fails in obvious ways that are easy to detect and even easier to remedy because there's no cleverness involved.

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

#48

Post by aianus »

philmander wrote: post #31

I've regretted hiring a few developers who have been apathetic about the actual software product we're making. I am sometimes too optimistic about a technically proficient candidate sharing these traits, during the interview process. After hiring they are depressingly unexcited about delivering a new feature that promises business value, significantly improves performance etc. It's just work to be done.

Did you tell them the truth about the product they'll be working on before you hired them?

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

#50

Post by dilap »

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…

The perfect code guy doesn't sound so bad.
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