Ignoring the out of place second half of the article...
Whats most troublesome to me about this article is in the first example.
> On his third day, we gave him a project that was scheduled to take one month. Arthur completed the project in three days with nearly flawless quality. More specifically, he completed the project in seventy-two hours: No stops, no sleep, nothing but coding. In his first quarter on the job, he was the best employee we had and we immediately promoted him.
This is the monkey getting his hand caught in the jar. This is Chewbacca thinking with his stomach and getting hung upside down by Ewoks.
Behavior like Arthur's is unsustainable. The human energy to stay up for 72 hours writing code has to come from somewhere. Burnout in these sort of cases is inevitable.
Why oh why would you promote someone like this before waiting for them to display an ability to be consistent? We should see these sort of things as red flags. Instead, the dream of having a programmer that can get month-long projects done in three days is too sweet too ignore. It's ironic that his downfall was giving in to drugs, which provide short term gains at long term costs -- the company was guilty of the same, with Arthur as their drug
Whats most troublesome to me about this article is in the first example.
> On his third day, we gave him a project that was scheduled to take one month. Arthur completed the project in three days with nearly flawless quality. More specifically, he completed the project in seventy-two hours: No stops, no sleep, nothing but coding. In his first quarter on the job, he was the best employee we had and we immediately promoted him.
This is the monkey getting his hand caught in the jar. This is Chewbacca thinking with his stomach and getting hung upside down by Ewoks.
Behavior like Arthur's is unsustainable. The human energy to stay up for 72 hours writing code has to come from somewhere. Burnout in these sort of cases is inevitable.
Why oh why would you promote someone like this before waiting for them to display an ability to be consistent? We should see these sort of things as red flags. Instead, the dream of having a programmer that can get month-long projects done in three days is too sweet too ignore. It's ironic that his downfall was giving in to drugs, which provide short term gains at long term costs -- the company was guilty of the same, with Arthur as their drug