> I'm still confused about how this could have happened. Did anybody ever ask how his work was going? Did he just lie and say it was great? Yes and yes. I supp

> I'm still confused about how this could have happened. Did anybody ever ask how his work was going? Did he just lie and say it was great? Yes and yes. I suppose he also lied to get his previous job as a 'programmer', or made the whole thing up. > Did the person have a manager? Shouldn't the two of them have set some kind of goals and milestones for their first project? He'd been given time to 'get comfortable' and familiar with the codebase, and was left with some really minor tasks. I think management just forgot to check in with him after a week or so, and everyone else around assumed he was busy working on something. Quite a few freelancers in the department who sort of just did their own thing. > It seems like there must have been some serious culture/management problems at this company. Maybe. I remember that particular time being really busy because of some big feature that was about to be deployed and, as I mentioned, it was quite common for freelancers to come and go and work on things that didn't really involve the rest of the team. I think it wasn't really a serious culture/management problem, but more a consequence of the fact that he came from another department after someone discovered that he was a 'programmer', bypassing the usual process. When I started at this company I got some time to get comfortable too, but I was hired to work on something specific, so the manager in charge of that came up to me pretty soon.