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Totally undisciplined of course -- we hired him and he refused to follow any instructions, got bored easily, thought he knew better than his engineering manager
by drugme 8y ago
Totally undisciplined of course -- we hired him and he refused to follow any instructions, got bored easily, thought he knew better than his engineering manager, and was ultimately fired after about 3 months on the job.
Or in other words - apparently quite talented as a coder; but as an engineer not so much.
- jeffreyrogers 8y agoTo be fair, he was 17. I think you learn a lot about how to be an employee on the job.
- Radle 8y agoI remember when I was 17, honestly even if I was a genius, I would have been horrible to work with.
- mywittyname 8y agoI was exactly like that at 19, sans genius. I spent way too much time on the "fun" parts of my work and not terribly much at actually getting work done. I'd also push-back on managers pretty hard. As a result, my first two jobs involved me coding alone on projects of negligible importance.
- drugme 8y agoI'm not damning his character. Or even questioning his character. Just saying, from the thumbnail description given of his work habits - you couldn't quite call him an "engineer".
- ivanhoe 8y agoNope, sorry, but being an asshole doesn't make you less of an engineer. It makes you a poor choice for a team and a bad hire, but that's a different story. In other industries it's better defined, you pass the exams, you get the right to use the title. The software industry on the other hand is using the term engineer too liberally - we basically just invent those titles for ourselves, consultant, engineer, architect - but being an engineer still primarily means having a certain level of technical expertise in the field. And btw, in every industry you have those lone-wolves characters who are arrogant and hard to work with, but they get tolerated because they can solve hard problems better than others. I think you get even more of this in other lines of work, because in programming those types are usually not as crucial resource as in say maintaining some old machines that only they know how to keep running properly. May dad was a civil engineer and he had quite a few colleagues like that, and while no one enjoyed working with them, they certainly respected their expertise and would never say that they're not engineers, just bricklayers.
- drugme 8y agobeing an asshole doesn't make you less of an engineer. The issue wasn't that he was an "asshole"; but that he was undisciplined.