My trainee
Every year we take a trainee programmer on from the local uni.
They're usually ok, a bit green, and usually void of any social skills.
This year, the bloke I have been given seems to have difficulty in understanding the need to be at work every day, and the need to turn up roughly around the time that everyone else does. He seems to think that he's above all that sort of malarky.
The excuses include:

"My car blew up" - I couldn't see any burn marks the next day when he arrived in it.
"I've got meningitis" - Meningitis that cleared up after 3 days of it's own accord (someone had to mention Honda).
"The snow was so bad I couldn't drive in it" - he lives less than a mile away. I live about 15 miles away. I got there fine. If I lived less than a mile away from work, I'd walk there every day.
"My mum and dad split up and my dad threw all my mum's horses out in the street. I had no choice but help my sister catch them all and ride them to Brighton where we have another stable" - Brighton is about 150 miles away. I doubt he even has a sister. About a week later, he went on holiday with his mum and dad to their place in France.
Loads of other bullshit about how he wrote an operating system for his iPhone as he didn't like the one Apple had provided him with...then the next minute struggling with pointers in 'unsafe' C# code. I think memory management might be of some importance when writing an operating system for small electronic devices, but hey...what do I know?

I'm wondering if university is really a good place to learn anything after having a few of these chaps come through over the years.
(dchurch bah, Sat 15 Jan 2011, 9:17, Reply)