Content A new software developer spent 4 days to make a simple HTML button and CSS, should I fire him? Os Answer Follow 169 Request 100 Answers Dominic connor. Heachunter in rinancia Markets U04-present Updated Nov 6 Upvoted by Alan Mellor, Started programming 8 bit computers in 1981 and Prashanth Pinto. M. sc computer science. Technical University of Munich (2019 B. No, you should resign instead. Let us talk like programmers. At most development shops I would fire someone who got that much done so quickly. Firstly, you hired him, it he is indeed that incompetent, then vou as a manager are incompetent at hiring people a critical part of your job. Also, as a headhunter I feel I need to explain the core competences of a sottware development manager. You are supposed to be getting people to do things, vou have tailed. You are also supposed to develop them as protessionals, so they are more valuable to the firm in the long term, not whining and firing them. Goodbye. Second, why was a newbie programmer left for four days when he had just joined the firm? It you were a first line development manager working for me I would be giving you clear, trank explicit and deeply unpleasant career counseling I've used a whole bunch of libraries for Python, C, the Javas even VB, but have used them all? No I have not. Some are well documented, some especially internal libraries are documented to corporate standards, lots of words, but a lot less useful. we hoth know how much documentation tells us that integer offSet; Is an integer that specities an ottset. And yes the s gets capitalised, because coding standard. That's veryHelpful. Others libs are just hard because they do hard stuff. Sometimes just to get to the point where I can get something trivial to happen can take days. Did you even give him a PC to work on? Oh dear, you've seen the label on this post that I'm a headhunter, yeah that's true, but I've also written more code than you for a whole bunch of tech firms, banks and the occasional major government. The average time to get me a development machine that worked properly, plus an ID to the network, sw dev tools installed and even a bloody chair is about a week. At IBM Labs it took over three weeks and that was on an urgent project. At one bank I gave up and simply used my own rather over-powered laptor Among the crap I've waded through at the start of a job includes a Windows security policy that meant I could not write to any .EXE files, ie could not actually compile anything. Only being allowed to use a system that I had both designed and coded a large part of when being watched by a minimum wage government security contractor (who by the end of it knew a lot more about C). Not being allowed to read manuals at the UK's largest telco because as my boss put it "we're paying a lot for you and we're not paying you to read"; I was flattered that they expected me to know everything, especially given that at interview I made it clear that I'd never used the specitic Lisp dialect they so loved. As an expert witness often am not allowed to read the full code of the system I'm supposed to by analysing and have to request parts of it are printed out as I need them. Yes, on paper like it's 1999. Not being allowed to use a current or even recent version of the language because although it is open source, the outsourced support firm needs weeks and serious monev to veriv vthon as sate to use. Being given a German keyboard which did not support the 00 and other characters used in programming C. On more than one project it has required active effort for me to extract from my boss what exactly they are paying me to do. I reckon more than a whole month of my life has been lost to "orientation briefings" telling me that I should do a good job and be nice to people, often being asked to sIgn vet another plece of paper to that effect and since I've done work for two SwISS banks, I've had to be briefed (and signed N bits of paper) that I must not conspire to destroy documents about the way they stole gold from German Jews in WW2. HP wanted me to promise never to work for any computer company ever again discussing that took up some. Oh yes and HR. Go look at my name at the top. I have a really boring name, that anyone from Europe or the Americas will not see as confusing. You're not in HR are you ? I've had to waste time when starting getting my name spelled right, my job title, and more than one has been confused about my pay. IBM HR never did grasp that I am a man, and later harassed my boss fearing in their own minds that I would claim maternity benefits demanding my termination in writing. Yes. IBM HR were not not just sexist, but incompetently sexist and yes, I have a copy of some of the emails and as it happens I'm married to a really scary lawyer who by chance I started dating whilst at IBM where she being whiter than most white people was a well paid intern. If you were a real developer you'd know that version control systems are as user friendly as a cornered rat it they ve been in use and enhanced by your company for a while. Has anvone taken him through the maze of twisty passages all alike between the repository and actually getting code you can work on? So we get to why I'd fire a developer who got something working in only 4 days. He's a hacker pretending to be a developer. Only an elite cyber warrior who has spent weeks spying on your systems can just walk in and get something, anything that actually works, on a computer he can actually use. There's an RTC AI Dinner Tuesday the 19th, you might find it interesting. 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