[gameprogrammer] Re: Fire on the first day?

Of course, I don't know anything about the size of your company, your
current team etc.  But be aware that if you're taking people on, you
should be spending your time in more of a designer/managerial role,
and shouldn't be so concerned about implementation details.  Better
still, you shouldn't be writing code yourself much, if at all.

I think the Pragmatic Programmer book (or it might have been Code
Complete) describes a situation where a "Team leader" type employee
begins to do all the coding tasks instead of delegating properly to
the suitable members of his team, and as a result gets far less work
done than if he'd kept track of the higher level picture and stayed
away from the code.

Make sure you're not falling into this trap.

Indeed - if you haven't read The Pragmatic Programmer or Code Complete
then get hold of them both and read them :)  They're excellent for
technical and managerial staff alike.

On 3/24/07, Kevin Jenkins <gameprogrammer@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

These are fair arguments but in the end it doesn't make economic sense
to keep him around.  It took him 8x longer to build the game than more
senior programmers have done before him, meaning not only is he slower
but he is more expensive.  His questions are too basic and become
disrupt to my own work as well.

He's a smart guy - if I had a big company I'd train him for 6 months
and it would pay off in the end.  But not a fit for my company where
I'm shipping the game in 2-4 months.

With some thought, I realize now I should have had him write code
during the interview.  He passed the knowledge and theory part, and in
fact has a Master's degree, but I didn't test what he could accomplish
in a real-world situation.  This involves things you don't learn in
school:

* Ability to quickly read and understand code written by others.
* Ability to effectively navigate large bodies of code.
* Ability to independently research and come up with good solutions to
general problems.
* Ability to efficiently solve problems through reuse of existing code
and solutions
* Ability to express oneself meaninfully

He failed on all those 5 points, all but the last of which come from
experience.

In the future, I think it will save time and be more effective just to
give a real-world problem as the interview.  "Solve this non-trivial
problem as fast as you can" and based on what I get back determines if
they are hired and what they are offered as salary.

Sam Nova wrote:
>> If i were working at a company where I could be fired for a
>> single wrong answer, i don't think i'd want to stick around :P
>
> Or would anyone else in the company feel comfortable if this happened to
> a new programmer, don't really think so.
>
>> FWIW i say give him a chance and I predict you will be
>> pleasantly surprised.
>
> Could very well happen. Hope to hear/read about positive results.
>
>
> -Sam Nova
> http://www.SamuelNova.com
>

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Paul Smith
Computer programmer

paul@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

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