> Bad programmers.. went through quite a few of them, mostly contracted. Some even from big named universities with very impressive looking resumes
This is baffling to me. We hired some graduates from big named universities and I am constantly amazed at their incompetence. Now they don't lack enthusiasm and are good talkers but not great doers.
We also hurried and hired because we had large contracts coming up and management has slipped and fell into the trap of "well one experience programmer left, we can hire 3 graduates to replace him for about the same salary!". I don't mind that we grow and train our own but these are not a replacement for a experienced engineers.
>We hired some graduates from big named universities and I am constantly amazed at their incompetence.
I experienced the same exact thing due to my ignorance of programming. I wanted to launch an idea that a friend and I came up with, but neither of us knew how to program. A friend of a friend attended a top university for CS so we assumed he competent. Two-three months after joining us he had not done much except write code full of bugs and didn't understand the concept of OOP. He had some half-assed PHP scripts written; that's about it. When I confronted him he said "it's too hard, I can't do what you guys want." Well, needless to say we were both upset because we pretty much wasted 3 months. I was so frustrated one day that I decided to look up some PHP tutorials and see if I could fix his code. Well, after a couple tutorials I felt pretty comfortable and said "screw his code, I'll write my own." Three months following that (puts us to about a month ago) and I finished nearly 75% of the coding for our website and I feel pretty good knowing that I was able to do what this guy said couldn't be done (also knowing he has a CS degree and I don't).
I learned that you can't pass responsibility to anyone during crucial times unless you truly know that person's abilities , or if you know the basics well enough to keep tabs on that person (who hopefully knows more than you).
This is baffling to me. We hired some graduates from big named universities and I am constantly amazed at their incompetence. Now they don't lack enthusiasm and are good talkers but not great doers.
We also hurried and hired because we had large contracts coming up and management has slipped and fell into the trap of "well one experience programmer left, we can hire 3 graduates to replace him for about the same salary!". I don't mind that we grow and train our own but these are not a replacement for a experienced engineers.