They may well have been paid in part already for work and you're left with nothing to show for it. In many cases they'll leave and find a new "victim" to work for.
I always thought "if this software thing doesn't work out, I'm gonna go be an electrician". I've now met lots of them making way more money than I am (and I'm well paid). Most of them basically have two or three customers, all of which are GC's. They've shown that they are:
- responsible (show up on time and in the right place)
- dependable (they get the work done on time and on budget)
- knowledgeable (they keep up to date with changes to code)
- respectful (they keep the job-site clean and work well with other subs)
In short, they're professionals in every sense of the word. In exchange they charge 3x what other tradesman charge. People are happy to pay it.
A friend of mine is an electrician. He did his apprenticeship with a guy who worked a lot with high end residential clients (i.e. stately homes — this was in England). He says the one of the most important things that he learned was to clean up after himself — which talks to your respectful point. It made him stand out amongst his peers, and is one of the factors that goes a long way towards repeat business and referrals.
1. Physically appearing at job site.
Being a software developer who just completed a substantial project (200 metres squared house on a difficult site) this was the most powerful thing I learned on the job. And now I apply it to my own code related problems. Who's in my crew? Where can I get new good crew? How do I manage dealing with cognitive overload by delegating back to other team members etc. I find the similarities/differences between software and construction crews fascinating.
I totally wouldn't have a problem paying top dollar for someone who is reliable and respectful of my time.
The more likely scenario in software is you get to day 45 with 90% of the wall built and the client asks you to hand over your key to the job site and stops taking your calls.
There's where most of the "half built walls" in my industry come.
Bricklaying machines where bricks go into a bucket and out the other end comes a horizontal wall. You could prefab this on the floor and then just put it up ... maybe, I don't know, I'm not a bricklayer.
Seems automated from the article.
Edit: As mentioned below, reading is fundamental, I should learn to do it sometime.
So it is a more ergonomic way of laying bricks; you're doing it upright, not crouched down. But you still have to lay them. You can't just throw a pile of bricks into it and get a road out without workers doing anything.
One thing that is hard to work around is where the interviewee must demonstrate their skill first hand (e.g. implement FizzBuzz followed by strcpy and a binary search.)
Many common interview questions are too indirect (Show me a certificate; Answer this trivia question about a Java API from 1997) or misguided attempts at personality tests (How many sewing machines are there in West Virginia) all of which one can prepare for without having the actual ability to do the job.
These kinds of questions can still work, as long as they have not yet made it into "How to succeed at interviews" type books. Or when the applicants you want to filter out cannot resist outing themselves even with training (e.g. "Tell me about a time when you have been wrong / publicly changed your opinion" will probably always be a useful filter.)