3 ms·
If you work in an intense environment like an agency, particularly one with high profile clients, then on the job training causes more problems than it solves.
by neya 8y ago
If you work in an intense environment like an agency, particularly one with high profile clients, then on the job training causes more problems than it solves.
We had a guy who wrote a production web application software, completely untested in R lang (which is the worst choice for this situation) with terrible code (Think of mixing camel case and snake case, sometimes with same names (ExVariable and ex_variable and they both refer to different things). This thing kept failing over and over again to the point where the clients terminated their contracts with us.
I had the bad luck of having to re-write his R code into Python which was suitable for this specific problem than R was and had to explain to this junior dev. Still, he wouldn't budge and kept writing untested production software in R when in reality most of his peers already knew Python and Ruby, whereas he was the only one with R knowledge and no one else in the company could understand his code, not even people familiar with R.
Eventually he costed the company a lot of revenue, in terms of clients, and the company almost hit bankruptcy to the point where almost everyone quit (including me).
Learning on the job isn't such a bad idea if the impact you have isn't as much. Like writing in-house applications for experimentation. Other than that, it's a terrible idea.
- gambiting 8y ago>>I had the bad luck of having to re-write his R code into Python which was suitable for this specific problem than R was and had to explain to this junior dev. Still, he wouldn't budge and kept writing untested production software in R when in reality most of his peers already knew Python and Ruby, whereas he was the only one with R knowledge and no one else in the company could understand his code, not even people familiar with R. Why was he given so much freedom in writing code? Especially as junior? I'm a senior at this point and I couldn't just arbitrarily decide to use R(or any other language that isn't C++ for that matter) for my job - it just wouldn't go through code review. Because I'm sure you had code review at your work, right? And if you did - who was approving his mess of a code?
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- alex__c 8y agoWhy, yes, I think what you're describing is a management problem: a) the new employee was given customer-impacting tasks without checking their competency properly, and then b) his work quality was not constantly evaluated in a feedback loop, allowing him to continue writing shit code. I mean, you have a client LEAVE and the person still continues to do exactly the same thing? Excuse me, but that's not only the employee's problem.
- yhoiseth 8y agoI think you're right in that one of the major reasons why companies prefer seniors is to reduce risk. But the agency in your story appears to have had such a lack of quality control that it was a disaster waiting to happen. Didn't you have any procedures to prevent things like this from happening?
- frankchn 8y agoAt some point, shouldn’t his manager fire him if he is unwilling to write code in an “acceptable” language? Also, since he is a junior dev, why is he given any latitude at all in choosing what language or framework to use?