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Comment by TallGuyShort | Hacker News Reader

Case study: At my last employer, we had a guy who worked on-site and still had the gall to ask us how to access source control very late in a project. Being a moron who isn't held accountable doesn't get solved because you're not remote.

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I would imagine that moronic tendencies are easier to notice on a day-to-day face-to-face basis, though.

Not in software, commit logs reveal everything.

Also:

"Our entire team knew they were doing very little work"

Allow me to clarify; there were no commits to source control on the very project we were working on. That was proof to us that no work was being done, unless there's one massive pending check-in waiting to happen, which would violate our team's internal standards.

At the risk of invoking a No True Scotsman, that sounds like a hiring problem, not a remote working problem.

In this case it was the same - I had complained several times that this individual had contributed absolutely nothing to the project, and this was proof. He asked how to access source control, and then while showing me what he was trying to access source control for it was apparent he didn't even know which operating system we were running on. He had written no code, and had never even successfully run the software. My point is that if people are going to tolerate useless employees, it can happen on-site just as easily as off-site.

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