1 day temp to fill in for employee who called out sick.
Temp receptionists work at Dental Office for 1 day.
Maybe there is a training program for temps.
Receptionists make $18 hour.
Temp receptionists make $23 hour but dont work every day.
Does this exist in the IT field?
Does this exist in the software field?
Software Developer Taking a day off from work and looking at new code that the temp wrote but the temp worked 8 hours and didnt have enough time to write comments and we had to revert all the temps work.
Maybe there is a training program for temps.
Receptionists make $18 hour.
Temp receptionists make $23 hour but dont work every day.
Does this exist in the IT field?
Does this exist in the software field?
Software Developer Taking a day off from work and looking at new code that the temp wrote but the temp worked 8 hours and didnt have enough time to write comments and we had to revert all the temps work.
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There are plenty of contract workers in the tech sector. They don't generally work for 1 day - more like a few months at a time, although for things like IT there are companies who can send somebody in for short projects - a bit like calling a plumber.
Hiring a software developer for 1 day at a time would guarantee 100% horrible code :)
Hiring a software developer for 1 day at a time would guarantee 100% horrible code :)
dpearson has hit the issue on the nose. It takes a minimum of a month to bring someone up to speed on coding practices at a new employer, and even then they will be learning for the next year. It's not possible to bring a magical rainbow unicorn Programmer For A Day who knows all the local procedures, what the code is about, how the database is organized, and all the APIs.
And if it were possible, it wouldn't be for less than $250/hour.
And if it were possible, it wouldn't be for less than $250/hour.
While I -usually- agree with the above statements, I would say that the true answer is, "it depends."
I would say that the time required to get up to speed has a strong correlation to the time it took to write the code. In this case, you have a temp working for 8 hours, so presuming the temp had little to no background, I would assume it would take less than 8 hours to analyze the temp's code and comment it, especially considering that it's far faster to read code than write it.
That said, the temp had no business saying s/he didn't have time to comment his or her code. Good programmers comment as they go - it is a bad sign if someone says that they will add comments later on.
As far as whether or not a temp can successfully fill in for 8 hours - I would say not unless they have very specific, short tasks that don't require a lot of contextual knowledge. For example, a temp could be given a task to write some code to take input X and return output Y. But I would never give a temp the task of filling in parts of the main application's algorithm or defining its data structures.
I would say that the time required to get up to speed has a strong correlation to the time it took to write the code. In this case, you have a temp working for 8 hours, so presuming the temp had little to no background, I would assume it would take less than 8 hours to analyze the temp's code and comment it, especially considering that it's far faster to read code than write it.
That said, the temp had no business saying s/he didn't have time to comment his or her code. Good programmers comment as they go - it is a bad sign if someone says that they will add comments later on.
As far as whether or not a temp can successfully fill in for 8 hours - I would say not unless they have very specific, short tasks that don't require a lot of contextual knowledge. For example, a temp could be given a task to write some code to take input X and return output Y. But I would never give a temp the task of filling in parts of the main application's algorithm or defining its data structures.
A little story from personal experience - I once created a custom application for a small company. My rates aren't cheap so the CEO tried to save some money by hiring a college graduate to make some changes to the application. They used this guy for a few months before their CTO reached out to me for help because the application was running really slowly.
Once I got in there, I saw that this kid hadn't bothered to learn the application code so he began adding code in various places just to "make it work." In doing so, he ignored all the data models and caching that were there, and he added queries to the headers that would pull every record in a certain table every time the page loaded. He didn't comment, he didn't add indexes on new tables, etc etc. It took months to clean up his mess without incurring downtime.
So even if you have a good experience with a temp developer, you can't know for sure that they did it correctly. They might put in something that works but causes problems later on. If you want temp work, your best bet is to hire interns and train them over time. They'll write code slower but they will have the context to do it similar to the people who trained then.
Once I got in there, I saw that this kid hadn't bothered to learn the application code so he began adding code in various places just to "make it work." In doing so, he ignored all the data models and caching that were there, and he added queries to the headers that would pull every record in a certain table every time the page loaded. He didn't comment, he didn't add indexes on new tables, etc etc. It took months to clean up his mess without incurring downtime.
So even if you have a good experience with a temp developer, you can't know for sure that they did it correctly. They might put in something that works but causes problems later on. If you want temp work, your best bet is to hire interns and train them over time. They'll write code slower but they will have the context to do it similar to the people who trained then.
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