Comment by HauntingPin
1 day ago
Thanks for sharing your story, it was an engaging read.
The part about filters in interviews resonated with me because of a recent experience. The place I work has been interviewing for new developers and the team lead asked me for my opinion on one of them. Overall seemed like a good candidate. But when I took a closer look at the assignment and the solution, I noticed that while technically the solution was good, the candidate had ignored a bunch of requirements outlined in the assignment.
At first I was willing to give him a chance, but when I gave it more thought, I realized that one of the biggest issues I've had with colleagues was them not reading the issue they're given, not understanding it, not fulfilling the requirements given in the issue and/or outright ignoring what's written because they independently decide they know a better solution (without consulting anybody), which turns out to be worse because of reasons which might not have been outlined in the issue, but still lead to the given requirements.
I pointed this out and felt it was a big red flag that, in a best-case scenario, this candidate was still unwilling to follow or incapable of following clear instructions. The candidate wasn't invited to the next round.
It also really bugs me when I've put more time into reporting an issue or setting someone up for success than they've spent working on a solution.
You would know best, but it struck me that one reason to skip parts of a take-home interview assignment is that it was taking far longer than it "should". A sufficiently senior candidate should have noted this but (I'm feeling charitable towards junior candidates this lazy Sunday afternoon) maybe that's something that's a reasonable thing for them to learn in a real job.
Ugh... I've had two bad hires in two years that were exactly like this - if you can't follow simple instructions, how have you survived in this career for this long?
Ugh... we have a new colleague who does this repeatedly. Most recently, I said in order to build, you need to do this:
- git clone <repo1> <dest1>
- git clone <repo2> <dest2>
- git clone <repo3> <dest3>
What do they do? git clone repo1, 2, 3 without giving <dest> parameter, which clones into default folders named after the repos. Build fails of course because repo1 depends on repo2 and 3 being named specifically. He sends me the error log (remote colleague, yay) and I say: you gotta rename those folders. Instead of renaming them, tries other things for hours, then comes back and shows me other build errors. I look over the errors and realize, again, the folders are still named incorrectly. Rinse and repeat 2 more times before finally the build process works. Lost a few hours to this. This kinda stuff keeps happening with this colleague. It's really a huge time-sink. If I had more time, I would do remote call and watch over them, but I'm so deep in my own stuff that I don't have time to babysit (not to mention calls take 1-2 hours with this person just trying to explain really basic things, over and over and over again).
Available now, can follow directions, and yes write scripts to automate that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47609859
If he is young enough he probably did not know how the file systems worked (and I mean: what a directory is, what files are). Supposed to be quite common now for people using only mobile devices. So he lacked the fundamentals to understand what you wanted.
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Dude, this sounds more like a build problem than a new guy problem. Your process sounds completely broken.
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Sure, that's frustrating.
But you know what's also frustrating? Code bases which involve multi-step manual steps to build.
You should be able to get a working local environment with a single command.
You should be able to get a working local build with a single build command.
If you have depedent projects, they should either be in a monorepo, or delivered through a packaging system so they are not depend on the specific local naming of other repos.
Having a repo depend on a different repo being in a specific place on the file system is bad, having multiple of them is terrible.
Stick what's needed in an onboarding script, and make sure it works before onboarding someone.
Ideally that script should be kept to a minimum, if it grows too large that's a sign you've split things artificially instead of finding natural splits.
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I mean the only other alternative, since they survived this long and it happened two unique times in a year, is that you are the problem.
No, I've onboarded a few people people over the years and everyone until now has been able to follow instructions. In one case the guy had stuff going in his personal life but it wasn't a case of me being unhappy with his output (which I would have understood) but he just didn't follow instructions. In the other case I'm 99% sure my manager and the recruiter misrepresented the job and he didn't want to be here but... grind it out until you find something new (which he did after 6 weeks). Instead he wasted my time and ended up leaving with a bad reputation.
To make it fair, did you also inquire into firing your colleagues? :)