Comment by dazzeloid
12 days ago
he's a really talented engineer, crushed our interviews. the funny thing was that he actually had multiple companies on his linkedin at the same time, including ours. we just thought they must have been internships or something and he never updated them (he felt a bit chaotic). but then it turned out he was working at all of them simultaneously.
worked for us for almost a year and did a solid job (we also let him go when we discovered the multiple jobs)
> he's a really talented engineer, crushed our interviews.
Think it says a lot about this industry if "really talented 'engineer'" means passing loads of gamified interviews and not delivering things on time.
But the person you’re responding to said he did a solid job for almost a year.
That’s pretty faint praise.
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How was he talented? All the stories are the same. "Talented" etc. But then it leads to he never did any work. How can you assess his talent?
Perhaps he's talented at interviewing? Turns out this is the only skill you really need...
> worked for us for almost a year and did a solid job
All I hear is "really good at interviewing."
The people assessing his talent are falling for the same delusion as the people conducting the interview.
If passing their interviews isn't the same as being a good developer, then those people have to not only admit that the people they hire may not be good at the jobs they are hired for but they themselves aren't good at the job they sell themselves as doing. It's obviously easiest to accept an explanation that doesn't require them to reach that conclusion.
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https://www.montgomerycountymd.gov/pol/fraud/resistance.html
mid-level output, clearly had more capability than his output suggested from his ideas and some particularly strong contributions
Did he just lie and say he wasn't working at those places? Or did the question never come up?
When I used to interview I always had to check a box that said I wasn't currently employed, or they would ask at some point.
funny thing was he had other places on his linkedin under "active employment" but we never really dug into it (until we learned he was full-time there) because he just seemed like the kind of person who wouldn't keep his LinkedIn up to date.
Why would you let him go if he was doing a solid job?
When we had an OE person they could do good work if you gave them a lot of time, but getting them to communicate and be present with the team was hell. You had to always be tracking them down, getting them to respond, and working any meetings (which we had few of) into some narrow time slot where they were available.
It also drags everyone else down. The team figures out what's going on. They get tired of adjusting their communication around the one person who's always distracted and doing something else.
Basically, it turns into a lot of work for everyone else to get work out of the OE person. Like they can do good work, but they're going to make everyone else work hard to extract it from them because they're busy juggling multiple jobs.
All of the Soham stories I've read today have been the same: Good work when he was working, but he was caught because he wasn't working much.
Yes. He could do solid work when you narrowly define it but he probably sank the productivity and morale of people he was working with.
Individual performance doesn’t matter. Team performance does. All of this work to find 10x engineers is meaningless if they can’t raise the output of the team itself. People can make their teams better (sometimes with elite communication skills instead of technical), but we should be focusing more on building 10x teams, not trying to find unicorns.
Yeah, this looks like a cargo culting. Don't need work, need the guy to belong only to them...
People who practice overemployment delude themselves that multiple jobs doesn’t affect their performance and therefore there’s nothing wrong with working multiple jobs. Their subreddit is a dumbfounding echo chamber.
I had an “over-employed” person on my team (who lied about it) and I can confirm what all others are saying about this guy: they start going AWOL, miss important discussions, miss deadlines, blame their colleagues (creating toxic culture), start doing shoddy work because they’re not thinking deeply through problems and also to keep expectations low, create busywork for others to take the pressure off themselves, use company resources and accounts for other projects (creating security issues, among others)… just to name a few reasons.
It’s not about possessiveness. Many co’s are glad to hire contractors, who don’t “belong” to them.
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It’s called team building. You can believe in it or not. You can join a company that values that, or not.
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I worked with a guy who wasn't even "over employed" but was working on some big side project at home.
He would blow off any meeting before noon. Just wouldn't show up.
His work was usually late and rushed/poor quality. Lots of corners cut. Oftentimes he didn't even get something right the first time because he didn't have the full context because he missed discussion that happened in the meetings he didn't show up to.
He was full of shit. Every day he was having some personal tragedy. Excuse after excuse.
He started trouble with teammates in a way I've just never seen before.
He was just all around a net negative even though he occasionally did decent work. Everyone was happy to see him go.
Sometimes it's NDA. Depends on what company does, but it's hard to imagine a product that does not compete with e.g. Google.
trust. he was not forthcoming when confronted with the "this other company says you are full-time and just went to their offsite - is that true?"
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It seems to me a really talented engineer would deliver more than solid work, no?
Why bother, when you get the paid the same regardless?
I don’t know the guy, but I feel like a lot of people are missing this angle - just because you’re technically capable, doesn’t mean you’re actually motivated or that you actually bother to deliver. You can also be lazy and just collect your check.
This is my experience for the past 10 years I've been working in the industry. As soon as someone finds out I am more capable at something than the rest of the colleagues on the team I get to do all the work in that area yet receive nothing in return. Every time I tried to bring something up as an example of doing something more my achievements were downplayed as part of the regular duties or my mistakes were put on the pedestal instead. There were also calls to do more, even though I already was doing more than the average programmer on the project. Nothing was ever enough.
In my current job I aimed to be painfully average at everything I do and so far I haven't seen any difference. I still get the same reviews I was getting all these years and the salary increases are still as mediocre as the ones I was getting when I was trying my best. My only fear is that this strategy might lead to complete stagnation. I am already bored out of my mind and I would switch jobs in a heartbeat, but I can't currently do that due to variety of reasons.