[gameprogrammer] Re: Fire on the first day?

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



---------------------
To unsubscribe go to http://gameprogrammer.com/mailinglist.html

Other related posts: