>>23Leonard was a very promising C++ coder, three years out of college, with a solid work history and an impressive skill set He proved on the phone screen that he was above-average technically, and so he was invited in for an interview We needed a savvy C++ person to work on a piece of middleware that interfaced with our database, and Leonard seemed like a sure fit.
However, once we started talking to him, things went south in a hurry He spent most of the interview criticizing every tool and platform that we questioned him on We used SQL Server as our database? Puhleease We were planning to switch to Oracle soon, right? What’s that? Our team used Tool A to do all our coding in? Unacceptable He used Tool B, and only Tool B, and after he was hired, we'd all have to switch to Tool B And we'd have to switch to Java, because he really wanted to work with Java, despite the fact that 75 percent of the codebase would have to be rewritten We'd thank him later And oh, by the way, he wouldn’t be making any meetings before ten o'clock
Needless to say, we encouraged Leonard to seek opportunities elsewhere It wasn’t that his ideas were bad – in fact, he was “technically” right about many things, and his (strong) opin- ions were all backed with solid fact and sound reason (except for the ten o'clock thing – we think he may have just been making a“power play”) But it was obvious that, if hired, Leonard wasn’t going to play well with others – he would have been toxic kryptonite for team chemistry He actually managed to offend two of the team members during the forty-five minutes of his interview Leonard also made the mistake of assuming that Code Purity and Algorithm Beauty were always more important than a business deadline.