Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Always makes me wonder how many dysfunctional companies are out there letting deadbeat remote employees collect paychecks and do as little work as possible because nobody cares enough to press the issue. I can't imagine it's much worse than it was in the before-times. Wally has always been able to skate along with a certain amount of meeting-attending.
If you can't tell whether your employees are working, why do you even have employees? Imagine how much money you'll save.
The new hire who showed up is not the same person we interviewed
171–180 of 623 posts
Re: The new hire who showed up is not the same person we interviewed
#172For us it's always been unpredictable and I wouldn't go as far to say intentional fraud.
But there is a trend that the people who put the most experience, list best tech skills, have good buzzword filled interviews often don't live up to it.
Often it's the fresh person with less experience, or the person coming from something different that doesn't even have the baseline skills, that becomes the super talented value adder.
I think a big part of their success is ability to teach themselves. Google it success.
I wish we had a better way to make choices. Still though it's not like it's horrible. out of like 10 we usually only get one we need to let go of or move to a less intense role.
We tried doing some basic tests of like paying people to do 2 hours of work, proof reading, etc. But didn't go well.
Re: The new hire who showed up is not the same person we interviewed
#173I once hired a guy who had no experience, but seemed like a good culture fit for our company and seemed very interested in learning. We interviewed him and made e-mail communication a large part of the interview, because it is a critical part of our business. And his communication was great! After hiring, a recurring problem we had was his e-mail to us and to customers were terrible. Bad grammar, bad spelling, uncorr…
> "My wife wrote all of those." There was a place that hired a consultant for a project a friend worked on, and she was... I don't think she could write code at all. Like, had trouble manually inserting fragments into an XML file despite fragments with the same structure already being in the file. Her productivity skyrocketed at night however, and she generally had working code in the morning, which lead to rumors th…
Re: The new hire who showed up is not the same person we interviewed
#174Here's a funny one: I worked at a financial company as a web developer. A co-developer sat at the desk opposite, with the wall behind him. He would sit there playing games on his phone all day. ALL DAY. Yet, his work got done, but it was the barest minimum and really poor code. So, one day I say "Tomas, I never see you write any code. Yet, your work is always done." "Oh!", he says with a grin, "I've outsourced my ent…
>I worked at a financial company as a web developer. [...] "Oh!", he says with a grin, "I've outsourced my entire job to my friend back in the Czech Republic. That sounds like a huge breach of the NDA or employment contract. Pretty sure you're not allowed to expose internal company code or requirements to third party outsiders without approval in any sane company with half decent lawyers who can draft an employment c…
Re: The new hire who showed up is not the same person we interviewed
#175Earlier quoted context omitted.
>You want to pay all of this money to train me right out of school? Almost certainly less common today. But extended training for new hires did (and I assume in some places) does happen. I think IBM used to do it for sales and once upon a time I interviewed with an oilfield services firm that started out with some fairly lengthy training on their specialized equipment.
Back in the late 60s/70s, when I was in university, I knew a bunch of IBMers (those were the days when your System/360-67 came with a flock of IBM staff). The standard for onboarding was that during the first 6 months, a new hire was flown here and there for courses. The goal was to make them feel valued as an IBMer, so that they'd want to stay forever.
Re: The new hire who showed up is not the same person we interviewed
#176In my experience, At large companies that hire a lot of contractors, it is not that hard to pull this off. I've seen where the contractors A team do all the interviewing, then you get a C or C- team assigned to work in your project. By the time you "give them a chance", complain up the management chain, go sideways to HR and actually change the team, the contracting firm already got 6 months worth of salary from the…
The non-scammy way this happens is senior engineers are part of the interviews and requirements gathering. They do the design and estimation. They develop task and proof of concept code for junior engineers.
During the work the senior engineer almost never 100% on a single project. They are on three different projects in different stages: design/early development on one that just started, resource and mentor on a second that's been going a while, writing quote for a third, and initial sales contacts for multiple other.
Based on availability it might not be the same senior person at any step of the process.
It's hard to impossible to a give you the same person who was part of the initial contact because by the time you get teh PO approved they are already hip deep in something else.
Re: The new hire who showed up is not the same person we interviewed
#177Re: The new hire who showed up is not the same person we interviewed
#178It's like the flip version of the guy that got let go and then re-recruited for his just vacated position. https://twitter.com/firr/status/1456324664628846599
Edit: I am laughing my balls off at this
"I offered him a gummy bear. He politely declined."
Re: The new hire who showed up is not the same person we interviewed
#179Re: The new hire who showed up is not the same person we interviewed
#180That's a great phrase, though I don't get people who do this kind of thing. But then I was also the killjoy in some college class when other people were like "Yes! Let's just skip more stuff and pass anyway!" and I went "Uh, no. What if you actually need to know that stuff for a future class or a job?!"
Everyone glared at me. They just wanted an easy A (or easy passing grade). Apparently no one but me was actually interested in learning anything when they signed up for the class.
(Smacks head on desk.)
(Context: the professor had announced we were skipping something due to time constraints.)