When we had an OE person they could do good work if you gave them a lot of time, but getting them to communicate and be present with the team was hell. You had to always be tracking them down, getting them to respond, and working any meetings (which we had few of) into some narrow time slot where they were available.

It also drags everyone else down. The team figures out what's going on. They get tired of adjusting their communication around the one person who's always distracted and doing something else.

Basically, it turns into a lot of work for everyone else to get work out of the OE person. Like they can do good work, but they're going to make everyone else work hard to extract it from them because they're busy juggling multiple jobs.

All of the Soham stories I've read today have been the same: Good work when he was working, but he was caught because he wasn't working much.

Yeah, this looks like a cargo culting. Don't need work, need the guy to belong only to them...

Sometimes it's NDA. Depends on what company does, but it's hard to imagine a product that does not compete with e.g. Google.

trust. he was not forthcoming when confronted with the "this other company says you are full-time and just went to their offsite - is that true?"

[dead]