I resolved from day one to not fight the machine into behaving like Fedora instead learning the actual shortcuts (and I installed Rectangle).
It took about a week before I was comfortable and a lot of that was remapping my IDE since I have extensive altered keybindings and shortcut keywords for that on linux.
Once I accept it was just a unix with a different DE it wasn't so bad, messes me up more the other way I keep hitting alt+C etc on linux now.
Then again, that's still a problem even now, since switching between a PC and Mac on a fairly regular basis still leaves me a tad confused about the shortcuts and key bindings.
having different keymappings in different machines is hard
I've found it very difficult to use Ctrl+C to copy from Windows and then Cmd+V to paste on Mac OS without pretty frequently using the wrong modifier key.
I'm still confused about how this could have happened. Did anybody ever ask how his work was going? Did he just lie and say it was great? Did the person have a manager? Shouldn't the two of them have set some kind of goals and milestones for their first project? Does the company do code review? Wouldn't it be considered odd that the person wasn't sharing any code to be reviewed?
It seems like there must have been some serious culture/management problems at this company.
There were a couple of reasons why this happened. Firstly because at the time, companies were hiring anyone who could spell "programming". There was this huge shortage of talent. And secondly, everyone was too busy and tired from 14+ hour days to have done a proper interview.
Yes and yes. I suppose he also lied to get his previous job as a 'programmer', or made the whole thing up.
> Did the person have a manager? Shouldn't the two of them have set some kind of goals and milestones for their first project?
He'd been given time to 'get comfortable' and familiar with the codebase, and was left with some really minor tasks. I think management just forgot to check in with him after a week or so, and everyone else around assumed he was busy working on something. Quite a few freelancers in the department who sort of just did their own thing.
> It seems like there must have been some serious culture/management problems at this company.
Maybe. I remember that particular time being really busy because of some big feature that was about to be deployed and, as I mentioned, it was quite common for freelancers to come and go and work on things that didn't really involve the rest of the team.
I think it wasn't really a serious culture/management problem, but more a consequence of the fact that he came from another department after someone discovered that he was a 'programmer', bypassing the usual process.
When I started at this company I got some time to get comfortable too, but I was hired to work on something specific, so the manager in charge of that came up to me pretty soon.
Yes. In almost every case I've seen it seems to come down to a localized culture/management issue in the area where the person works. Usually fixed on a particularly terrible senior manager who has the clout and connections to distract from the problem while problem employees fester forever.
When we asked him to copy some code from one file to another, he'd click on 'edit' and 'copy', struggle to get to the other file, and then click on 'edit' and 'paste'.
How it went unnoticed is that we were all busy with our own stuff, he was put on some small project that none of us were working on, and we just assumed that nobody would be stupid enough to hire someone without at least /some/ vetting.
He slipped through the cracks because he got hired into another department, and when they found out that he'd worked as a 'developer' at Microsoft they figured he'd be more useful in our department.
In hindsight I feel I should've known something wasn't quite right when every time I walked past his brand-new MacBook, he seemed to /really/ be struggling with something and it never looked like it was code. I imagine he spent the entire month figuring out how to deal with not having a 'start' button.
EDIT: I'll add that while this was in my top 10 of worst situations, there are many others that, for me, provided a convincing argument against the idea that corporations are somehow more efficient or whatever than the government.
My experience with both the public and private sector, beyond a certain size at least, is that they're largely similar in wastefulness/inefficiency/idiocy/etc.