[cauterized]

I've never had a hire go wrong for technical reasons. I have hired, participated in hiring, or inherited several developers who had to be let go for reasons related to attitude or soft skills. Some examples:

- a guy with an alcohol problem who would disappear for a week at a time or come in to work sloshed

- a junior developer who had major problems with authority, mixed with bizarre paranoia. He refused to take direction from his team lead and had to be let go after he started accusing anyone and everyone of trying to undermine him.

- a guy so obsessed with doing everything perfectly that it took him a year to produce what other engineers could accomplish in a month. Granted, his work has been running for 3 years now without a single bug, but even taking that into account he still wasn't cost effective to have on the team

- a developer who refused to take ownership of his projects and insisted that everything expected of him be specified down to the pixel (might work at a large corporation, but not a startup - we don't have time to hand-hold like that)

- a guy who was hired as a junior mobile engineer and then began throwing fits when we denied him the authority to change the priorities of the entire web and mobile product team

Takeaways:

It's fairly easy to assess who is and is not capable of developing basic CRUD apps. Getting meaningful information about a person's neuroses, self-management ability, and ability to play well with others is extremely difficult in the space of a handful of hours of interviewing.

[dilap]

The perfect code guy doesn't sound so bad.

[pryelluw]

Until you ship a product so late that its declared DOA. Perfect coders are more dangerous than shitty ones. They usually slow down progress in the name of perfection so much that nothing gets done. IMO.

[scarface74]

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/10/25/the-guerrilla-guid...

People who are Smart but don’t Get Things Done often have PhDs and work in big companies where nobody listens to them because they are completely impractical. They would rather mull over something academic about a problem rather than ship on time.

[cauterized]

If you're building life support software or manned lunar probes, maybe you want him on your team.

If you're a startup trying to find product-market fit before you run out of funding, better to ship a few bugs every week (in features that have an 80% chance of not existing or being rewritten anyway within a few years) than nothing at all for months.

[acjohnson55]

That's one reason we rely heavily on thorough, structured reference checks.

[lj3]

Does that actually work? I've never had anybody ask me for references for a technical job. Few people are going to say anything bad about a former employee for fear of being sued. And that's if the candidate plays fair. For less than $100, you can bribe three people to say you're the next best thing to Steve Jobs himself.

[cauterized]

How do you structure your reference checks? And what do you do for new hires who are very early in their careers and don't have real work references?

Also, I'll note that three of the above employees were sourced via referral from either other employees or friends of execs.

[blablabla123]

It's definitely fair to check this. Also I think this works very well when the hire worked in a well-ordered place beforehands. On the contrary, if someone worked at a toxic work place before - it's probably counterproductive to ask colleagues or even managers. Odds are high the person is exactly leaving because of that.

[pcurve]

Other than hiring someone as contractor first, have a trial run for 6 months, what do you think is a good way to minimize issues like this?

[brogrammernot]

Re: trial run. I do not suggest this.

I'm not a world class developer, but I'm a good one, maybe great depending on the day but I had 3 offers to be contract to hire and I refused.

You may save yourself a bad hire, but more than likely you will do so at the cost of missing out on hiring a handful of good ones.

If I'm interviewing with you and you don't trust me enough to make me an employee from day one then why should I trust you as a company?