No no, look, it’s so much more than that—he’s using stegonography! You just have to know the key, and then what he’s saying becomes very clever.
I hope.
No no, look, it’s so much more than that—he’s using stegonography! You just have to know the key, and then what he’s saying becomes very clever.
I hope.
@DOA said:
Just be glad you can veto a hire. Some of use have to work with whoever the boss had a drink with last night.Well, I haven’t talked about the consultants that the company has used since before I was hired (and are still used, despite me and another person telling the owner in no uncertain terms that she should not be using them). I probably should; there’s an endless supply of WTF there. The only reason I haven’t had to do much work with them is because their complete lack of maturity early on made it so that I was entirely justified in refusing to work with them.
The first incident was about a month after I was hired. One of them sent me an email asking me to call them for a “quick 5 min call”—at 8:30pm on a Friday. I replied back that I didn’t provide phone consultations during the weekend, but that I could schedule a call on Monday if he let me know what time was good for him, or alternatively that he could email his request directly and I’d be able to respond to it more quickly that way. He took my email and forwarded it to the person that recommended me for the job as well as the owner of the company and called me “an arrogant asshole”.
The second was about a month after that, after I prepared a report showing a myriad of security vulnerabilities in their codebase. Instead of copping to the fact that these issues existed, they decided to deny everything—and then disabled my access to make changes to the codebase, claiming that I was a security risk, and that before I would be allowed to work on anything again, the company would need to pay them an (exorbitant) fee for a new dedicated server. (Yes, the consultants were hosting the site on their own server, and the company I worked for, that paid for the work, was never actually in control of the entire codebase up to that point.)
Despite this, and the fact that a second person just the other day said that he couldn’t stand working with them anymore because they are incapable of following very simple instructions (like, “go to this Web page with nothing on it except for a link that says ‘Download files’, click the link, and deploy those files to your Web server”), the owner has continued to send them work. In response to this person’s complaint, the owner said “i don't think that [contractor name] is terrible. i just think he doesn't listen or pay attention often”. Which is, of course, a ridiculous thing for someone with no technical prowess to say when she’s being told by two different qualified entities to stop using them. Funnn.
So, we’re trying to hire a second Web developer at a company where I work. I’ve spent the last several weeks going through résumés, code samples, and interviews to try to find someone qualified for the position, and am absolutely blown away by the complete vacuum of competence that seems to exist in this field.
For example, the developer that didn’t write HTML because “the designers do that”. He also thought front-end development was “writing actions [in PHP] and JavaScript that connect the back-end parts together” and that back-end development was “things like forums”. His favourite feature of Postgres was the EXPLAIN function, and for his code test he essentially spent 3 days editing some Symfony configuration files to present a final product that missed about half the required functionality.
Or, the
programmer with 17 years of experience on their résumé that sent along something that
looked like it was based on an “introduction to PHP” tutorial from
2001, complete with AJAX functionality
ripped from anyexample.com, a very novel attempt to use $_SESSION as a function passing an undefined constant ($user_id = $_SESSION(USER_ID);
), attempts to concatenate strings using an addition operator, and—the coup de grâce—SQL statements that were passed back to the server and executed directly from JavaScript.
TL;DR, I am curious to know if any of you have had actual experience with a process that manages to somehow filter away bad code into an acceptable end-product. (Also if you know PHP, have experience with Web apps, don’t suck at it, and want a new job, please get in touch.)