So about a half year ago, a "subcontractor" is hired onshore. This is good for the vicinity factor (although we never see him) , for language clarity and for work time zones. There was much rejoicing. But it was short-lived. So to bring this guy up to speed, I pay him a visit in his first week to give him a rundown of what's where and what he needs to look out for. He falls asleep in an hour. OK. I get it. I'm boring. He didn't seem interested to start with. Then I got a hold of his resume and was less than impressed. Didn't seem to stay anywhere for more than a couple months. That means no one wanted him. So, we put him to work and he seems to know the technology a bit. Enough to kind of make it through. He can do simple stuff, but there are some things he's just not competent in. And this guy is going to support a critical system?!?!?! One thing that's different about him is that his estimates are very small. Other people guess 40-80 hours. He guesses 4-8 hours. And he's more accurate. Wonderful. Now if no other bugs were introduced into the program.... So he creates EXEs and copies them out to directories, but has no clue how the user is accessing them. I tried to explain terminal servers and Citrix, but it went over his head. At one point, the SQL db server moved. The program became unbearably slow. So I tell him to drill down and figure out what is causing it. He tells me that it's because I had him change code a week ago. I try explaining the effect of a server move and latency, but again, it's lost. Finally, I can't take any more of this and I go in to test and find that the form in question is calling in the entire customer master to grab a few fields from one row. Not once or twice, but 3 times. (not blaming this on him. Someone else wrote this lunacy) I tell him what lines of code to fix and it more or less fixes the problem.
So who would have though that his own organization would come to us and ask if we wanted to take support for this technology back? That is one request we actually loved to hear. I think we'd been through 3 guys after they let go the guy who originally wrote/rewrote those systems. (that was a bright move) So we agree on a date about 4 months out. Two weeks before, he mentions that he knows what is coming and asks me if I still want him to work on things assigned to him. Not thinking that 4 days later, in the afternoon, his company asks us if it's OK to let him go a week early. Before we can respond, he sends out an email telling us he's done and it's his last day. What an embarrassment. So to breach the contract, they let this guy go a week before he was scheduled, forcing us to suck up the support. Good thing I wasn't on vacation or sick. They gave us an apology and said that it was something about a policy on subcontractors from above that they had no control over. I asked how many other companies were affected and "they didn't know". So what I read here is that there's more to this story than is being told. They wanted him gone either because of expense or because he fell asleep at his desk all the time. But still, cutting the last week...that was a slap in the face.
Fortunately it's only a week and nothing big is planned. Thankfully the servers are all moved and nothing else needs to be done.
