Wednesday, December 14, 2005
I'm not interested but you should talk to...
Early in my career I worked at a company that built turnkey CAD/CAM systems (hardware/software bundles). They bought "bare" hardware from Digital (backplane and cards) to repackage into their own systems. This worked fine with their existing PDP-11 systems but when they moved to the VAX, Digital made life more challenging. Digital also manufactured its own disk drives and made it very difficult to replace the "boot" hard drive on VAX systems. And since Digital charged a premium for their hard drives, it would mean less profit for our company. So the company negotiated to obtain a VMS source license in order to write its own boot drivers.
To get the driver work done quickly, source code alone wasn't enough; the company needed to find developers who understood VMS internals. But nearly all of them worked for Digital. So they employed a headhunter to find appropriate candidates. When the headhunter called people at Digital she was often told that she should talk to a specific developer (e.g. "I'm not interested but you should talk to ..."). At the same time, someone noticed that this particular developer's name showed up a lot in the VMS source code. Sounded like a perfect match. After one or two interviews, the developer was hired. But things didn't really work out. It turned out that he wasn't the stellar developer that they had expected. His peers at Digital were trying to get rid of him by giving his name to headhunters. His name was all over the VMS source code because whenever he touched a file he would put him name in it to take credit.
Moral: Be cautious when people seem too eager to recommend a co-worker. They may be trying to make their problem into your problem.
To get the driver work done quickly, source code alone wasn't enough; the company needed to find developers who understood VMS internals. But nearly all of them worked for Digital. So they employed a headhunter to find appropriate candidates. When the headhunter called people at Digital she was often told that she should talk to a specific developer (e.g. "I'm not interested but you should talk to ..."). At the same time, someone noticed that this particular developer's name showed up a lot in the VMS source code. Sounded like a perfect match. After one or two interviews, the developer was hired. But things didn't really work out. It turned out that he wasn't the stellar developer that they had expected. His peers at Digital were trying to get rid of him by giving his name to headhunters. His name was all over the VMS source code because whenever he touched a file he would put him name in it to take credit.
Moral: Be cautious when people seem too eager to recommend a co-worker. They may be trying to make their problem into your problem.
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