
Ask HN: What does a bad tech hire actually do? - Choz3n1
We have most probably read a dozen of posts that talk about how to identify the bad tech hires (think software devs) from the good ones, and the costs associated with bad hires (financial,moral,time). But what does a bad tech hire actually do really, are they the ones always submitting their projects late, adding unnecessary dependencies to a project, what is it that makes someone bad (maybe from your experiences).
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patio11
There are many, many ways for a business relationship to not work out.
Sometimes it's a wonderful person and a wonderful company who don't work out
for each other. Sometimes it's a wonderful person but a life event happens and
they're not productive for longer than their employer is willing to wait out a
period of non-productivity. Sometimes it's a wonderful person in an
organization pathologically incapable of making software, of which the world
has many.

Engineers have an easy time visualizing all of these things. Here's a thing
they often have a great difficulty of visualizing:

You can be a senior software engineer, with 8 years of experience, earning a
salary deep in the six figures, able to talk in a good level of detail about
e.g. load balancing and round-robin queuing and hash tables and user
experience and $NAME_ANY_TOPIC... without being able to write working code.

Some engineers believe this engineer is straightforward to identify and fire.
Our industry will routinely take 1+ years to identify this engineer and then
another 6+ months to transition them out of their current job, at which point
they will transition into a new company at an effective promotion.

I know, this sounds like a fairy tale. It. Is. Not.

