Mistake 3: Trained, But Not Qualified
Jerry, a software developer, was tired of freelancing. He was an excellent PHP programmer who just happened to find a job that seemed to fit. The interviews went well and everyone seemed happy to have Jerry on board. And it was a good time to hire him, because the development team at this medium-sized company was just about to start a project to make the product catalog available through a web service. Jerry was supposed to write the PHP code and provide examples to clients who would use the web service.
It all sounded simpleuntil Jerry started work. Everyone had failed to mention that this project had PHP running on a Windows server, and that the team was using IIS 7, a server that Jerry had never even seen. Jerry had expected the team to be using something like the Apache web server on Linux. As a good trouper, Jerry plugged away trying to learn Windows and IIS 7 and the vagaries of PHP on the combined platform.
Unfortunately, no one talked to Jerry very much, and they just assumed that his silence about the project meant that everything was going well. Meanwhile, Jerry had started to sweat bullets because everything was far from all right. Eventually, things started to fall apart on Jerry's endand that's when everyone jumped on the poor fellow. As a result of being trained but not qualified, Jerry ended up out of a job, and the team was extremely late with its project.
The moral of this story is that Jerry probably could have come up to speed if someone had taken the time to mentor him. A team that doesn't care about the individual is almost certainly going to end up late, and with an inferior product to boot.