[angvp]

In my case when I've regretted it was much because the "attitude problem". For a team of 10 devs (I've recruited all of them), I remember two specifically cases in which I regretted to hire those guys.

Guy #1:

A "developer" who was trash talking everyone (even me) and then he pretended he didn't do it or he alleged "I didn't say that", he complained about every one of his teammates, he pretended and believes that he was a workaholic (but he failed to be on call when the shit hits the fan). In his very last days at the company, he was harassing me to give him attention I was swamped of work and attending useless meetings and I couldn't give him much attention, so he started sending me whatsapp messages and e-mails at ridiculous hours and complaining because "I didn't reply his messages", this guy has some issues IMO.

Guy #2:

A brilliant student (almost summa cum laude in a recognized university), he was hired for built a parser for several input formats, he needed several meetings for understanding the problem, he was complaining about technical decisions so he bring more people to the meetings and he got the same result, as a developer he's the guy with the ugliest practices that I've seen in my life, he overengineered everything, he used lot of irrelevant algorithms for solving silly problems, once I asked to do a silly cronjob to fetch from an API the exchange rates of 8 different countries and cache them, so he did build a nodejs app (I asked him to do this in python) that didn't what I wanted (he built a webservice that given two currencies find the rate), a script of 10 lines max, he did 400 ugly js lines, but the worst is that those 400 lines were useless for what we wanted to achieve..

My advice when hiring please don't be desperate (guy #2) and always check his background with their previous employers (guy #1).

With the other 8 guys, I was ok, even if couple of them weren't 100% perfect (I could add couple of more guys of this team but they weren't so bad) overall I felt great with the team.

[mixmastamyk]

> he was harassing me to give him attention I was swamped of work and attending useless meetings and I couldn't give him much attention, so he started sending me whatsapp messages and e-mails at ridiculous hours and complaining because "I didn't reply his messages"

Sorry, but this doesn't sound so horrible on his part. Are "useless" meetings more important than getting work done at your company?

[angvp]

Well, those meetings were useless, but as I said first he just wanted to trash talk about other people (he wasn't calling for attention to show me work, I used to sync up with him about work frequently), and those meetings even useless were much important than listening crap like .. "I couldn't connect all the day to the network, somebody banned my mac address" (that wasn't true of course, he just had issues on his environment but instead of think of that, he was paranoid about someone on the team hacking him or something)

[closed]

Serious question--for some reason, I've always believed that previous employers tend to avoid saying anything negative about their former employees. Is this not the case?

[hayleox]

This is very much the case. When employees/employers broadcast negative info about each other, both parties suffer. Obviously, the accused suffers because all this negative info about them is now public, but the accuser also suffers because they look like a jerk for publishing it. Who would want to work with a person/company that is known to talk crap about people they work with?

I think angvp is only publishing this because it's entirely anonymous -- he hasn't named the two employees in question or his company.

[always_good]

    > but the accuser also suffers because they look 
    > like a jerk for publishing it

Or the accused now goes "well, I wasn't going to say anything, but here are all the things I didn't like about you."

Somewhat related, but this is one of the reasons for 5-star inflation in feedback systems like Airbnb.

I recently saw this exchange in a review:

Host: The guest kept the windows open with the A/C on full blast the whole time.

Guest: lol, you were spying on me? I wasn't going to say anything, but your place smelled like human feces.

Looks pretty bad for both parties and not something you want in your history, so my experience with Airbnb is that people give good ratings except for the worst of conditions. I think as far as Airbnb cares, it's working as intended. Everything looks peachy.

[enjo]

I think the question was about the last second to last sentence:

"and always check his background with their previous employers (guy #1)."

[lobotryas]

Maybe rules/practices are different in other countries. Never assume that OP is from US.

[Spooky23]

They don't usually trash former employees, but you can read between the line.

One time a reference given by the candidate for a senior post glossed over everything but focused on attendance. "He is a good guy. He is always on time for work and very punctual for meetings."

[fourthark]

Or the classic, "you will be lucky if you can get him to work for you."

[angvp]

Well, after Guy #1 left the company I met a former colleague of him on other company, and she told me "why you didn't call us? we would advise you to not hire this guy!" so that's where my assumption came from, you're right, there are probably people that will hide the truth just to be diplomatic.