Developer hiring and the market for lemons http://danluu.com/hiring-lemons/
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To the extent that things are hard, it's been stuff like: Your TL thinks version control and automated tests are a waste of time. How do you convince them otherwise? Your team has 75% turnover in well under a year for... reasons. How do you stay productive?
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On the flip side, when I've worked with people who are unproductive, it's never been the stuff people say interviews filter for (can't program, not smart enough). It's been stuff like: we sucked at helping the person ramp up, manager or senior team member was hostile to them, etc
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What data/evidence do you use to differentiate between "doesn't currently have the skill mix to be sufficiently productive" and "we sucked at helping the person ramp up"? The onboarding status quo is very, very bad almost everywhere.
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In interviews, I ask about hires that don't work out. Common answer: "They would sit at their desk, not ask for help, and produce almost no working code. They weren't a culture fit because they obviously weren't trying."
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The worst I've ever been at my job was at a company where I aced the very technical interview, but it turned out that the skills they actually needed were the ability to navigate a large anarchic team and juggle a dozen projects at once because the cycle time on each was so long.
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...but I'm really not sure how you interview for either of those skills without letting people know that they should run a mile.
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How did you end up on such bad teams? Bad luck? Misleading pre-job communication? Other considerations made the teams actually good, and the bad qualities you mentioned are just part of the story?
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Maybe I just have unlucky friends, but when I compare notes with friends, I don't seem to have had unusually bad luck. No VCS sounds off, but it was an FPGA team and I've heard of similar from other FPGA teams. 75% turnover is a lot, but it's not uncommon to hear about 50%, etc.
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Define simple. I've been given programming tests that have:
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