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.
