Recruiting II

Have you ever met someone that's had bad luck with people?  They tell you about how many times they've been burned and how they keep working with crazy people that are unreliable or drama queens.  You get to know the person a little longer and become friends and you start to realize that all the people they don't like are actually good, decent people and it's your new friend that's the crazy one?  I've been in that situation a quite a few times.

I've always been drawn to unstable, unique, and interesting people.  I was friends with a woman for about a year who suffered from Schizophrenia, and although she was stable 95% of the time, she'd tell me stories of what life was like before the meds--stories of hallucinations of monsters coming to life and trying to kill her and her running through public streets screaming for help from them.  I've been friends with quite a few crazy people, now that I think about it.  I'm fascinated by alternative interpretations of reality.  Such associations with people I've had generally ends pretty badly.  Now, here I am complaining about all the crazy, unreliable people I've met and how I've been burned.  Uh oh.  *looks around*

That's my segue into saying that Loki's Planet and myself have parted ways.  I have a lot to say about that, but it's probably best if I don't.

I've certainly worked on quite a few large projects run by poor and incompetent leaders in the past.  It makes me question my own leadership style.  Is there someone on our team thinking, "Man, Brian's an idiot.  It's stupid that we're doing things this way"?  No one on the team challenges anything I say.  That really makes me nervous.  I thrive on negative criticism.

I've admitted before that I'm not doing a very good job leading the programming team.  But I've been wondering if the issue is more that I haven't been doing a good job recruiting programmers.  I keep recruiting programmers that don't really want to be game programmers, but rather are just looking for something to put on their resume and get by doing the least amount of work for us that they can.  I need to start weeding those people out.  I've found, it's always better to have a small, dedicated team than a large unmotivated one.  Unmotivated people sap the morale from motivated people.  So even with an unfunded project like ours, recruiting "hanger on-ers" can do damage.  I'm learning this stuff as I go along.