EmphasizedInsanity at /life

In the last couple of days (weeks? i lost track) iv’e been hunting for some new rails developers for a new team i am starting in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.

In the beginning, i believed it will not take me more than a couple of days to find me a couple of brave, relentless and sharp Rails ninjas to hold our new fort.

i was wrong

After doing about 8 interviews with people (some even came by flight) i must say that i never thought that people have that kind of nerve to do what they did.. here are my chronicles:

The UFO

This guy just landed out of nowhere, got him of a Linkedin ad i posted on the RubyOnRails group. He seemed really smart at the beginning, his profile picture seemed ok too, so i decided to go on with the interview anyway “maybe it’s just a bad day” i thought.

He walked into my office smelling like the Mc’donalds kids menu, wearing a KISS t-shirt and untied shoes… now i’m not the person who sets his opinions based on first impressions, but this was way over the line.

I think that guy was high too, every second word was “HUH?” or “MMM” and he couldn’t answer a simple question like, “where was your last job?”.

Result: 10 minutes, and he was on his way home.

The Liar

Me: “For how long have you been working with rails?”
Liar: “about 2 years”
Me: “Ok, what do you think about the ActiveRecord :include option? would you use that or prefere an SQL JOIN?”
Liar: “Wait…ActiveRecord?”

The REALLY BAD Liar

Me: “For how long have you been working with rails?”
Liar: “7 years”

WTF?!

The human FAILed debugger

This guy was pretty cool actually, so he made it to the next level where i gave him a simple application that i made, with all kinds of bugs in it on purpose, and had him sit on it for a while and identify these bugs.

One of the bugs was a buggy config.gem statement, which made him realize the amazing conclusion that “You don’t have Rails installed”.

Damn it.

More people

I hope not, but if there will be something worth mentioning, it will be here.