“You’ll be working in a fast-paced environment…” ALWAYS means “We’re incompetent, we don’t realize it, we don’t hire enough people to spread out the workload, we don’t have a real process, and we’ll blame you, the new guy, the first time something goes wrong.”

Hiring season comes.

I find a good coder, a few years of professional experience.

Manager: “No, he’s too expensive.”

Me: “he’s within HALF our budget!”

Manager: “yeah, but I think we can find cheaper ones in 3rd world countries. Let’s look for one ourselves instead of having to pay a fee to a recruiting company. How about this other candidate?”

They hand me a second resume. No professional experience, but he had a lot of hobby projects that looked legit. No degree. Passed the coding test.

Me: “this one…? Well, he’d be _acceptable_ but barely. The first one is good, really good, but this second one is barely ok.”

Manager: “great! That means he’s ok. He’s much cheaper. Go with the second one.”

I had to spend almost two months training this new guy before he could be really useful. Two months we could’ve focused on writing features.

@eo2875 I don't think 2 months is horrible. But can you give us more on what you would have expected the better guy to be able to do right away?

@iSwimInTheC An better understanding about git and migrations. The better dev had had experience in professional projects, whereas the ok-dev had had a lot of personal projects but little colabs. So he ended up messing git branches a lot, and the feature got either split into different branches or multiple features got stuck in the same branch etc. Also, he didn't know how database migrations worked besides the commands "django-admin makemigrations" and "django-admin migrate", which kinda work if you're working alone or if you get it all right the first time but if you're working in collaboration and make further changes it gets more complicated. Also turns out the ok-guy lied in his resume and hadn't finished college yet, so his knowledge about algorithms was still so-so

@eo2875 ah! I see. Thank you for the clarification. I totally understand what you mean now.