Oh yeah, she's also an adjunct CS professor at a local college.
It’s not that I expect someone to try and salvage a situation where someone is coding in Word - but is there more to the story when you say this went on for months ? I don’t think I have ever been in an environment where that would ha e been allowed to continue for that long... ? Sounds like an environment scared of dealing with things ?
In other words it was a mess. And it took a lot of firings to get rid of all of them once the tower of failure was discovered by a new outside hire department head. There appeared to be a something an effect of the incompetent senior person surrounding himself with incompetents who then hired incompetents and turtles all the way down.
It was almost comical that we ended up with such a group of terrible technical staff in this area, but "types code in MS-Word" was definitely the low point and is now a bit of a company legend.
11. Do new candidates write code during their interview?
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/08/09/the-joel-test-12-s...
It's a shame the lengths universities will go just to make sure they look good, even if that includes rehiring problematic employees.
How did that go un-noticed for months?
When we asked him to copy some code from one file to another, he'd click on 'edit' and 'copy', struggle to get to the other file, and then click on 'edit' and 'paste'.
How it went unnoticed is that we were all busy with our own stuff, he was put on some small project that none of us were working on, and we just assumed that nobody would be stupid enough to hire someone without at least /some/ vetting.
He slipped through the cracks because he got hired into another department, and when they found out that he'd worked as a 'developer' at Microsoft they figured he'd be more useful in our department.
In hindsight I feel I should've known something wasn't quite right when every time I walked past his brand-new MacBook, he seemed to /really/ be struggling with something and it never looked like it was code. I imagine he spent the entire month figuring out how to deal with not having a 'start' button.
EDIT: I'll add that while this was in my top 10 of worst situations, there are many others that, for me, provided a convincing argument against the idea that corporations are somehow more efficient or whatever than the government.
My experience with both the public and private sector, beyond a certain size at least, is that they're largely similar in wastefulness/inefficiency/idiocy/etc.
I'm still confused about how this could have happened. Did anybody ever ask how his work was going? Did he just lie and say it was great? Did the person have a manager? Shouldn't the two of them have set some kind of goals and milestones for their first project? Does the company do code review? Wouldn't it be considered odd that the person wasn't sharing any code to be reviewed?
It seems like there must have been some serious culture/management problems at this company.
There were a couple of reasons why this happened. Firstly because at the time, companies were hiring anyone who could spell "programming". There was this huge shortage of talent. And secondly, everyone was too busy and tired from 14+ hour days to have done a proper interview.
Yes. In almost every case I've seen it seems to come down to a localized culture/management issue in the area where the person works. Usually fixed on a particularly terrible senior manager who has the clout and connections to distract from the problem while problem employees fester forever.
Yes and yes. I suppose he also lied to get his previous job as a 'programmer', or made the whole thing up.
> Did the person have a manager? Shouldn't the two of them have set some kind of goals and milestones for their first project?
He'd been given time to 'get comfortable' and familiar with the codebase, and was left with some really minor tasks. I think management just forgot to check in with him after a week or so, and everyone else around assumed he was busy working on something. Quite a few freelancers in the department who sort of just did their own thing.
> It seems like there must have been some serious culture/management problems at this company.
Maybe. I remember that particular time being really busy because of some big feature that was about to be deployed and, as I mentioned, it was quite common for freelancers to come and go and work on things that didn't really involve the rest of the team.
I think it wasn't really a serious culture/management problem, but more a consequence of the fact that he came from another department after someone discovered that he was a 'programmer', bypassing the usual process.
When I started at this company I got some time to get comfortable too, but I was hired to work on something specific, so the manager in charge of that came up to me pretty soon.
having different keymappings in different machines is hard
I've found it very difficult to use Ctrl+C to copy from Windows and then Cmd+V to paste on Mac OS without pretty frequently using the wrong modifier key.
Then again, that's still a problem even now, since switching between a PC and Mac on a fairly regular basis still leaves me a tad confused about the shortcuts and key bindings.
I resolved from day one to not fight the machine into behaving like Fedora instead learning the actual shortcuts (and I installed Rectangle).
It took about a week before I was comfortable and a lot of that was remapping my IDE since I have extensive altered keybindings and shortcut keywords for that on linux.
Once I accept it was just a unix with a different DE it wasn't so bad, messes me up more the other way I keep hitting alt+C etc on linux now.
allow me a counter.
incompetent people can do little snippets of work for a sprint, and then get promoted. and be absolutely unable to deal with anything more complex that a small bit of functionality. after a couple of sprints, they have the 'chops' to become a manager, or a director, or an engineering VP.
Quite some time ago, I worked in a company that hired a independent contractor for writing some non-trivial code (low level NLP) in C or C++ and interfacing it with a slightly opaque proprietary API. The guy came with an impeccable resume, or so we thought until we found out 6 weeks later that he'd been busy typing garbage, and not a lot of it either. He claimed these 100 to 200 lines were some form of design, but it was so utterly ridiculous that he was sent away immediately. I did have some experience with the API, and ended up with a working module of 2600 lines over a few days.
Maybe I should bookmark this thread? This and the other examples in this thread is so crazy it should make me feel super productive any day ;-)
They seem to exist through some kind of combination of manifesting some kind of acute highly-sensitive HR problems (health, special class, etc.), bouncing around from unsuspecting job to job to keep the paychecks coming in, and simply being walking Dunning–Kruger manifestations. Eventually they accumulate enough time in enough jobs that it gets easier and easier to get new jobs due to being experienced and some of them will end up in senior positions where they no longer have to code (or perform in the core of their technical area).
They can come in from all sorts of places, often have stunning educational credentials and backgrounds, often have great looking resumes.
He would stare at the screen doing nothing and when every body else was busy and not paying attention to him, he would watch videos and visit gaming websites.
He was supposed to be a web developer but honestly I don't know how we passed his classes. He didn't know anything.
And, of course, we didn't hire him after the 3 months period ended.
I have met people like this at a job interview (where I gave them a programming task, and the interview ended soon afterwards), and they were charismatic extraverted talkers, with CVs that contained previous software development jobs. I could easily imagine them passing the interview with a non-technical interviewer.
Arguably, the modern obsession with metrics and monitoring is creating even more waste than there was before, as managers invent bullshit metrics, and employees perform fake-work to optimize for them.
I do like Word's comments interdace. I wish there was a format for replying to comments in code (aka "comment conversations"), so that IDEs could render them similarly to how Word / Google Docs do.
(I am genuinely looking forward to a vim/emacs user telling me that they have been using such a format for the last 30 years!)
No whiteboarding or coding test during the interview process. As much as I detest them, I wouldn't work for a company that doesn't use them to screen candidates.
I bet came across to them as totally incompetent fool... "Slipping through the cracks of multiple pre-screening technical interviews before the onsite..."
Why is this not surprising at all.
Oh I know, because people think it's "ok" to put CS papers with pseudocode out there.
At this point I'm not sure you can even blame the person if the interview process was so bad that it let a person like that get in.
(Yes please interviewers bore me with another long winded description of FizzBizz or somethng because you don't know how to ask constructive questions that show competency)
With real code, those problems are less likely.
Although I personally prefer a link to a public repo of code. But I'm a code monkey.
But today it's more of a crutch than anything else, when you can have actual code running.