Hiring Useless People : A Root Cause Analysis

Can you guess the common factor when it comes to recruiting dead wood?

Photo by Martin Lopez on Pexels

I’ve seen many disastrous events during my time in the grand game of software engineering since I mistakenly played my first move back in the 1990s and have rather alarmingly been here ever since and pretty much all have of them have something pretty major in common.

See if you can guess what it is.

Problems have arisen on a regular basis primarily as a result of one or more of the following reasons:

1. People who were hired because they were friends with someone in management.
2. People who were hired because management thought they “knew the requirements” better than the actual people who needed the resources.
3. People who were hired because they went to the same school, college, university, or correctional institution as someone in management.
4. People who were hired because management decided they were “obviously qualified by the look of them” and therefore allowed a free pass through the conventional technical hiring pipeline put in place by people they’d have to work with.
5. People who were hired because they bullshitted their way through an interview conducted solely by management who went all starry eyed as they were led up…