We Just Hired a “Messy Coder”. Here Are My Fears
It's a Mess!
Recently we took a new member of the software engineering team despite some concerns raised during interviews.
Now it seems things are going slowly, irrevocably wrong.
Here’s the story of how we hired a messy coder.
Our Interviews
I’m the first to admit it. Our firm’s interview process isn’t the best which means that we sometimes hire coders who aren’t quite up to the job.
In this case, we hired a software engineer who is a less-than-excellent coder. Here is how that happened.
The Interview Feedback
The FE interview process at our place is a comfortable chat with a couple of members of the team. We then get them to produce a little project live (or as live as you can get screen-sharing).
The interviewers picked up a couple of issues with the candidate during this process:
- They seemed to rush through their work
- They didn’t seem to plan their code before making implementation decisions
On their own, these two comments are far from damning. The problem is that one particular comment has really stuck with me.
