Top Project Dropout Reasons
Top Project Dropout Reasons
Mon, 2007-10-29 14:25
I thought I'll start to compile a list of top reasons why
people working in my projects dropped out (and left me hanging with either nothing, unfinished crap or "so-called" finished crap)
1. Pregnancy
- Programmer was pregnant, didn't tell (to plan for it) and thought she would finish the stuff before - this happened twice in 1 year to me, and while I wish only for the best for mum & kid, I feel it very irresponsible to hide that fact ( and break or unnecessarly delay the project way beyond acceptability )
2. Can-do attitiude
- well, this is an obvious reasons, but as you can imagine even the hardest and most extensive selection process including questionaire and multiple interviews can not assure that person can deliver - be it in link building or software development
3. Shameless Availability Lies
- this just happened to me once already on RentACoder, where they even offer an Expert Guarantee where the coder has to pay in 15 or 20% of the overal project fee - and if the drops out, this money goes to charity (an I get my money back) - believe it or not, just yesterday I realized somebody committed to a bigger software development project 2 months ago just to find out he's only spending some weekend time on it... and now 1 week past deadline he's not even close to code complete, not to speak about his horrible source formatting style (which says A LOT about the quality)
4. Incompetence to test & fix
- when I'm running some smaller freelancer projects I specify exact requirements , which I in turn expect to be implemented and tested against. More than once I had people declaring "work complete" when basic functionality was just BREAKING ... throwing ugly PHP errors etc... once I even heard "I know it's not finished yet, but you know I put so much work into this that I believe I deserve all of the money and leave you [with my shit there]" ... wtf do some freelancers think they are?!?!
5. Arrogance
- I am the best coder your company can get, you just don't know about it. Well, this attitude tells a lot - except that basic data modelling experience, stable error message handling and clear code comments where missing - instead we got some broken code with dozens of duplicate files in the project directory - essentially needing a decision to reverse engineer or re-do the whole crap we got from a rookie-coder who thought he's gonna rule the world because of some completed simplier scripts
6. Pussyness
- this title sounds a bit rude, but in fact describes the problem of a guy being to much of a pussy for sticking to his own code guidelines, when the senior architect in my project setup other rules for the code to be accomplished. Obviously the initial guidelines where made to allow for a consistent code style, not for evangelic discussion about how anybody in the world should write code. They were practically set. I think we had a couple weeks discussion (which I should have stopped earlier as responsible PM, which WE should have charged this guy on later for wasting our time - or me actually) before he completey disillusioned about his status left the project... WTF I thought - that was the perfect sample for a "negative performer" - costing both you and your company more time than the new hire could ever bring in. Drop him earlier than later.
Hmmm ... I feel I should end this post now to research my RAC arbitrations a bit more - tomorrow - as I still need to DIFN other stuff ...
