We may be looking for some help this summer (and beyond), so we put a Ruby Developer Wanted post on Craigslist. We’ve had great success with Craigslist in the past; we found two of our employees and two of our key contractors there. But of course, the signal to noise ratio is lower than we would like. We usually get form-letter offers from offshore developers offering .NET or Java skills (even though we specifically ask for local Ruby developers).
This last time, we got a priceless email from an applicant that I’ll call Ivan (not his real name). Ivan’s email started OK – “saw your Craigslist ad and I’m interested,” etc. Quickly, though, problems came to the surface.
- Ivan doesn’t do Ruby work. He’s mostly offering design, along with PHP and ASP.
- Second, Ivan won’t work onsite, even though he appears to have an area code in the Twin Cities.
- Third, Ivan doesn’t really appear to be looking to do any work himself. He is offering to subcontract the work to others. “I can staff as little as 1 part time, to as much as you need (50+ full time designers).”
This isn’t remarkable so far. I usually get a few of these when posting to Craigslist. But take a look at the next paragraph:
“Let me explain how we work a little bit here. I have system surveillance software installed on the computer which will send you an E-mail every X minutes with a screenshot of my computer (50k in size each). This way you can be sure that I am working on your project at the scheduled shift and you can see the quality of work as it is being produced. You can also use this to confirm that I came in on time to my shift, and left on time, etc…”
This is wrong for so many reasons.
1. I don’t wan’t to sift through X (10? 500?) screenshots every day to make sure that my contractors are doing their job. Nor do I have time. The reason we might need a contractor is that we’re too busy to do the work ourselves.
2. Seeing screenshots taken from someone’s computer just feels slimy, like an intrusion of privacy. Even if Ivan is sending them to me (instead of me stealing them from him), it is not something I want to do.
3. How absurdly easy would it be to fake something like this? Heck, it would probably be easier to fake it than to do it for real.
4. We don’t hire people based on the idea that they will sit at their desk for 8h/day. We hire people to get things done. This is a misdirected approach to productivity.
And of course, the only point that really matters:
5. Ivan has destroyed any sense of trust. He’s asking me to expect deceit, and giving me a means to protect myself against his deceit (and an unreliable one at that). There is no way in hell that I would work with a contractor who I didn’t trust, no matter how many screenshots he offers me.
As I think about it, trust is even more important than competence. I’d rather have a trustworthy employee who made mistakes than a genius who I didn’t trust. Fortunately for Slantwise, we’ve been able to find both. I don’t think I’ll break our streak by hiring Ivan.
Truly worthy of the daily WTF (until they ruined the name)!
Heh heh. I love stories like this because it reassures me there’s always room in the economy for anyone who can understand, speak, and write proper English and who has even a modicum of commonsense!
Actually, the outsourcing / freelance developer site ODesk does that screenshot thing. It wouldn’t surprise me if he was just going to farm out to people on there. There was a big debate over the ethics of seeing people’s desktop screenshots and webcam images all day, but I think the idea won out. It sounds kinda creepy to us, but compared to the conditions of most of the world’s workforce, I guess it’s a pretty small issue.
HA….I actually got that exact same email. We are looking for a designer with some php skills, so his skills actually line up with what we want, but we are looking for someone to work onsite. Why do people even bother?
I apologize on behalf of Ivan’s everywhere.
Though I have worked on a computer vision / automated surveillance suite :-P
That is far funnier than most DailyWTFs.
Congrats on making reddit. I’m a friend of Bruno’s from back in the day. Met Ben @ RubyConf.
Agree 100%. This goes for everything from contractors to employees to friends. Trust is everything.
The 3 step program to being a great manager: 1) Hire people that you trust to get the job done. 2) Give them the tools they need to get the job done. 3) Get the hell out of their way.
~jw
wow. if ivan was a designer he’d be faxing you a photocopy of his sketchings to prove that he wan’t off slacking somewhere.
Jon – I’m surprised you wasted this much time on his spam.
These contractors work purely on a numbers game—you get tons of these idiots replying to your ads whenever you post on CL.
If they get just 1/300 people to take their bait, then they make money.
Though I agree 100% with your productivity assessment. I don’t care if developers take 2, 4 or 8 hours to get the same amount of work done!
One Bay Area co. I know of recruits RoR developers by pitching “we work 80 hours a week and love it”, and I’m like… that’s supposed to be a selling point? =)
Too bad the position is filled. I would have one upped Ivan by sending you hourly videos of me working, so you could see my eyebrows wrinkling which means that I was concentrating.
Fantastic post. I get idiots appying to my job postings like this all the time. But I think that’s because I’m in South Florida.