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Comment by everdev | Hacker News Reader

Similarly, I was running a digital agency and the performance of one of my first employees took a nose dive. After trying everything I could think of to help him turn things around I had to let him go.

Shortly after, I got an Email from an unknown individual who said he knew the employee and asked if I could chat. Turns out, my employee was subbing out all of his work and stopped paying his sub, who then stopped delivering. The sub proved this to me by confirming some confidential information that he shouldn't have had access to.

After revealing that he had taken part in this scheme, the sub then asked me for a job! Needless to say I told him he wasn't a good fit.

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Somewhat similarly, I once hired an employee who didn't have the skills we needed but said he was motivated to learn, seemed like a good fit from a personality standpoint, and had really great communication during the interview process.

We spent a year trying to bring him up to speed, waiting through all sorts of excuses, and worse, all of his communications were terrible (bad spelling, inability or unwillingness to use a spell checker, bad grammar). It was so bad that we eventually made him get any communications that went to clients (~30% of his job) be reviewed by a coworker before they were sent out.

At the last "PIP" meeting we had I asked him: "I went back and looked at all of the e-mails we exchanged during your interviewing, and they didn't have any spelling or grammar or punctuation problems. How did you do that?" "Oh, my wife wrote those."

Oh wow. Yeah, there's a difference between helping and doing. Teach a man to fish...

"How did you do that?" "Oh, my wife wrote those.""

Haha yeah I have a similar one - I emailed a colleague once (on a Saturday) "hey, how are you on task xyz". He comes back to me less than an hour later "yeah my wife's almost done with it."

Should have hired his wife from the start

That's exactly what I said to my other management team. :-(

Seems like he'd be a great fit. He knows what you're building, knows the codebase, and apparently works for less than you were paying for the same service before.

He didn't "take part in a scheme", he was tricked into it the same way you were. He should have been getting a real pay check and not just the cut your employee was giving him.

Well, he wasn't tricked. He knew that he was performing the entire work for a full-time employee, which violates that employee's contract. My employee propositioned him and he agreed to do it.

So, while his skills were great and agree that the cost would have been reasonable, the ethical choice to willingly access the confidential information of a full-time employee and prop up someone with far less technical ability made hiring him a no go.

That's slick. I can't say that I never thought about outsourcing work I was tasked with in the past as an intern. It was so tempting to pay someone and just watch youtube all day. (I didn't end up doing it)

I imagine there's a whole lot of that going on these days at companies who would never think to check for it.

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