Wednesday, November 07, 2007

I've Got A Boner At Work!!

So for the third time this year we have to hire a new Web Developer.

The first hire was a dud, who lasted for about a month. The second hire was great, he shall be called BallsBurger. That guy was very talented and was a good worker, however he went and got a job elsewhere. Now we need to replace him.

We had a lot of bad resumes come in and we did a lot of bad interviews. Our last prospect was a guy that we passed over the last time were hiring for this position. In fact he didn't even get an interview the last time around.

This time he had a much better website and portfolio and he seemed to have the right answers at the interview. Not only that, he was also recommended by the outgoing employee, BallsBurger. We offered him the job and since he needed 2 weeks to give notice at his current job, he was scheduled to start November 15th.

Yesterday he sent us an email. The email said that he did the math and figured he was making about $2000 more at his current job than he would be making with us. This was a concern to him and he wanted to discuss resolving this problem.

My immediate reaction was, "No fucking way! We don't know anything about this guy yet and he has already been told that he would get a raise after his 3 month probation period that would be based on his performance. We want to get the message across that we don't negotiate with terrorists at our company. Who does he think he is anyway? Fucking money grubber!

Later we noticed that a strange thing was included in his email between the body of the email and the salutation. It was only two words but it was very suspicious. It said "BallsBurger said:". It became fairly obvious that he had copied the content from a chat conversation he was having with our former web developer.

After a little bit of investigation we found out that BallsBurger and the new guy are really good friends (thanks Facebook!).

This is what we figured was going on:

When BallsBurger left he was offered a much higher salary if he would stay. He didn't go for it, but we think he likley mentioned the offer to the new guy. It appeared that the new guy thought he might be able to make a play for the higher wage that BallsBurger was offered.

If his email hadn't had that extra inadvertant bit of information we might have offered him the extra $2000 per year, but as it stood there was no way we were going to budge on the salary now. We were going to call his bluff.

A little while later a second email came from the new guy. In it he said that there was a typo in his original email, so he sent another copy of what he intended to send. It was the exact same as the original except it was missing the "BallsBurger said:" bit.

WHAT?! Why would he bother to point that out? It was at this is exact time that I dubbed the new guy "Boner". I went back and looked over his website again and someone pointed out the fact that the title said "Welcome to my Webite". WEBITE?! It would appear that "Boner" has a serious problem when it comes to attention to detail.

As luck would have it BallsBurger had to come and pick up his last cheque yesterday. When he came in I let it slip that we were likely going to be still looking for a web developer.

Him: "Didn't you already hire someone?"
Me: "Well, we were going to hire "Boner" but he wants more money and we aren't down with that, so if he doesn't like it we'll get someone else. It's not like we are in any rush. We have all the time in the world to get someone for the job."
Him: "Oh, I haven't even talked to him about it."

And away he went. Probably to tell "Boner" that we weren't going for his bluff. After a couple of hours we responded to "Boner's" email. We basically said that he would get what we offered. If he didn't like it we would get someone else.

The next morning we got the following response:

"Yes, that will be fine. I'll see you on the 15th. Thank you for clearing that up for me. "

WHAT A BONER!!

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