I'm sorry, but what's the point of a coding interview if you can pass it without knowing how an if statement works?

This was an intern, not an employee. Isn't the whole point of an internship to find out if someone is good enough to be employed? This one wasn't, so the internship was terminated and no job offer was made. No need to feel bad about it.

The article says the reason an intern was taken on was that hiring an employee would be too expensive. I guess the author learnt his lesson that this is a very bad reason to take an intern. An intern should not be relied on to do any business critical work. If you want someone you can rely on to produce production quality code from day one, hire an appropriately experienced employee.

In Brazil interns are supposed to be sort of apprentices, not people you are testing to see if you will hire them.

For example unpaid internships are illegal, and although they don't get much benefits, their mininum wage per hour is higher (Brazillian law says mininum wage is monthly, but limits the number of hours a intern can work in a month, so interns hourly wage is higher).

Also it was not business critial work, it was work that we could let the intern do and fail and whatnot, the problem is that the intern was so bad it disrupted the work of people doing business critical work.

I understand the whole wanting to hire the best people sentiment, but this sentence really annoyed me:

> I finally understood why you should always try to hire someone better than you, why a “A player” hire another “A player”, instead of settling with a “B player”.

The guy the author described was a D player at best. There are plenty of great, yet not uber-genius programmers out there. B players. They're not as flashy, but they work hard, and get shit done. Stay away from the D players, fine. But don't knock the Bs.

I get the sentiment but honestly this kind of writing quality hardly ever makes it to the front page. Every paragraph was just one huge run-on sentence.

Thanks :) I will try to not do that next time.

I'm confused how this is on the front page of HN. I also feel like I'm left hanging after reading that - you hired someone, he wasn't a good fit so you fired him and you're upset.

What was the resolution, what did you learn from that? That would have been a better way to end that post. I feel cheated of the time I read that in a way.

I am confused...

I think that is what I wrote on the last paragraph?

Sorry, but I realized my issue was mistaken, and primitivesuave's comment describes why I was put off.

You did. I can only conclude that the GP simply didn't read the last paragraph.

Why couldn't you attract decent candidates? That was the root cause of your bad hire, not a weak filter.

This isn't always possible or desirable: "you should always try to hire someone better than you".

Building an organization is really challenging; I don't know how to draw a line between investing more in someone versus cutting them loose.

So you hired an intern and were surprised they needed guidance and training instead of cheap/free labor ( which you were in no way looking for )