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So there is this girl who joined the company as a trainee.

The company developed a 1 year project to train 25 trainees and she joined saying that she already had some experience making websites. (remember this)

They started in the beginning of January and stayed for about 3 months just studying the platform (Salesforce) and receiving some classes from Senior Devs, on subjects like OOP basics, loops, conditions and features of the platform.

After this time they joined the teams, 2 joined my team, a guy with 32 years that worked 10 years in a bank and wanted to go for a IT job and the girl of 22.

We gave her a really small task, just to make a code to copy info from one field to the other on a list of objects.

After 3 days of saying she was working on it we asked her to show us the code, she had written the "code" directly in the class, VS Code was going crazy with errors. When we asked her "But where is the method?", she answered "What is a method?"

After it we had other experiences trying to teach her some things. The team was formed by me (mid level dev), another mid level dev, a senior and a architect (who was self taught and one of the best teachers I've ever seen).

We tried for about 3 months to teach her how to do basic stuff, like a for loop, and every time we learned that she was missing some "foundations" of this basic stuff, so we would come back and explain the foundation, and a couple times she needed to use this knowledge like a week later and didn't remember shit.

So after this the team talked with our leader that we wanted to let her go and focus on the other guy who was going really well and some other junior devs who had joined the team.

But the HR found out that she had sued her last company, we don't know the reason, but HR guys were afraid of firing her without a careful firing process.

So now we're stuck with her in the team, and everything we ask her to do need to be remade, not because the code is bad, but because it NEVER works

And after all this I still ask myself, how did she finish college? Every person that i know that studied CS or CS like courses had a lot of OOP or at least knew what a class and a method were supposed to be.

Comments
  • 45
    EqUaLiTy wooooooooooo
  • 21
    The pros of working in a country where blatantly lying on your resume is grounds for termination, hard to prove, sure, but when it says "can do X" and you have to teach them "x" on the job, then they can't do X can they?

    Good luck with that one, some slip through but that's more on the person who recruited them to fact check these things.
  • 8
    @C0D4 yeah man, the whole process didn't work out. From those 25 trainees, I think we have 5 "acceptable" and a couple who are really good
  • 6
    @mattLopes if that's not doable in your country, push this one out with "under performing", I'm sure that's a universal metric.
  • 28
    I've seen plenty of people with degrees, only to find their schooling was utterly worthless. It's becoming more common unfortunately. Did her school even verify her education?

    It sounds like your trainee program needs failout criteria to protect you from situations like this.
  • 6
    @C0D4 yeah, that's the path we're going, firing her for poor performance, but the HR wants to make like a whole doc with the reasons, to not have any legal trouble with it
  • 6
    @SortOfTested yeah, I've seen some people with degree that just had the paper, they didn't know shit. But she is the worse I've ever seen

    The contract have a clause for poor performance I think, a couple of guys were fired already for it, they are holding her because they are afraid of being sued for firing her without a reason, so they are reuniting some proofs to avoid legal problems

    For the next trainee program my team's architect will make some tests for people take in the interviews and during the project.

    Even the CEO acknowledged that this year's program didn't work out
  • 5
    @mattLopes
    Look on the bright side, no matter how bad they are, IBM is worse 😋
  • 8
    HR has failed and whomever is filtering applicants failed.

    Some folks just aren't cut out for such work and you gotta have a plan to deal with those.... well not you, the company.

    I am was in a class with someone like that. She was terribly unpleasant too, but some folks thought it was so great that she was part of some girl power program and taught girls to program, but she couldn't ... you what...the rest of the story should be a rant, I'll do that.
  • 4
    @rutee07 is there a culture of just gaining any degree in your country just for the sake of having it?
  • 4
    I have this to say about reliability of formal education: I'm from a country whose education system is regarded as one of the best quality in the world, I was the top of my class (by quite a margin, may I add), and boy do I still suck. A degree really amounts to nothing in my eyes - at least it's no measure for anything.
  • 7
    A company I worked for would bring interns in for the summer. We'd give them some things to do, light stuff, and they'd get some experience.

    This was some pretty standard IT work, no rocket science.

    I was horrified at the lack of effort / motivation with most of them.

    I really felt sometimes I was looking at some wonky boomer parody about 'those darned young people just don't try"... because that's what we got way often.

    Amusingly enough one of the better students, we were warned about (called 'a bad egg' by his professor) was one of the best. We ended up hiring him... he tried, and wasn't afraid to fail and thus learned quickly... perhaps because he felt his back was against the wall a bit, and few of the others didn't? No idea, but he was great.
  • 2
    It reminds me of this video

    https://m.youtube.com/watch/...
  • 1
    @hardfault oh shi... 😱
  • 3
    @hardfault sadly, this isn't so far from the truth these days. 😟
  • 0
    She must have sued her college too
  • 1
    Worst. HR. Ever.
  • 2
    @N00bPancakes we had an intern in my team this year, looked like dude was trying but couldn't remember shit. I showed him same thing several times, he wrote it down, asked me the same question next week. Level of interest is below -9000!

    Wtf!!!

    Also me being xenial I tought I expect too much, not sure, but that dude was disappointing.
  • 1
    @devnulli yeah, we have a lot of trouble with HR, like losing a lot of good people because they were too slow to contact
  • 1
    @N00bPancakes man, that's the thing a lot of those 25 guys don't look like even trying.

    I have this theory that they think this is like college where you just need to pass, i don't know
  • 1
    @100110111 yeah man, here in Brazil that's the same thing, if you doesn't study on your own you're fucked. College doesn't give you enough, but at least basic shit like oop basics and loops you learn
  • 1
    @OneOrZero I don't understand how they get hired.

    Like there's folks out there who know more than that, give that person a spot! Stop taking up space!
  • 0
    1. this is why i'm such a pain with the point that "html is not programming"

    2. this is why feminism is cancer and affirmative action is harmful
  • 0
    @Midnight-shcode what is affirmative action?
  • 1
    @iiii
    An american work program designed to address system and racism in hiring and increase corporate accountability.

    In practice, it's had little benefit and drawn accusations of tokenism and "reverse racism." Most companies now just meet their quote by hiring H1bs, which negates any benefit from the program.
  • 2
    @SortOfTested oh... social/racial quotas. Garbage concept.
  • 1
  • 1
    @iiii discriminating agains non-white, non-male people to prop-up everyone else.

    basically the only real example of institutional racism and sexism.
  • 2
    Update guys

    My tribe leader talked to another leader and they changed trainees.

    The girl went to other team and I hope she's doing well, and we got another girl dev, about the same age but smarter, just a little bit slow.

    And she is doing fine with us (2 weeks now)
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