Thursday, July 24, 2008

Sometimes it doesn't pay to help

  I recently found out that a former employer is shutting down development operations locally. The developers that worked there are hard working talented and I'd work with any of them or so I though.

My currently employer is looking to fill a couple of positions  so I passed the information on to my former co-workers since I knew they'd be looking for jobs soon. One individual, a younger mid-level programmer requested a job description and salary range which I sent along.

Now to be honest the position requires some legacy application maintenance, to be specific, some classic ASP maintenance as well as .Net development. We are in the process of moving the systems to a new architecture, but reality is we just can't "turn off" the old systems. At any rate I received a very pompous response from this developer as to how it would never work on "legacy" applications and if he didn't get to work on only new stuff we could take a hike, he wasn't interested. Ok fair enough, but for the record almost any position will require some legacy maintenance, that's just the way it is.

The response was something I'd expect from a junior developer, no actually it's a response I wouldn't tolerate from any candidate. So I'm making sure he's removed from the candidate list. It's important, especially when you are building a team, to find team players who are willing to participate in the good and the bad.  This developer is good as young developers go, but no one is worth that.

Next time this situation arises, I'll  spend more time evaluating my choices before making a recommendation.

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