Company management has discovered that sometimes if you take a chance on someone green and unproven, but obviously bright, they often turn out to be excellent hires. Some of our best developers came to the company in this way. Of course, some don't pass muster, and sometimes you get someone who's more than a little peculiar.
Patrick was hired because he had a bit of web development work on his resume, seemed sane, and we needed people. We knew it'd be a bit of an uphill climb for him to transition into the technologies we use, so we were all prepared to help him out the best we could. His orientation explicitly emphasized that he was to ask questions and seek direction from his peers. He took a desk next to mine and I made it abundantly clear I was available for any and all inquiries he might have at most any time. Others did the same. He seemed a bit quiet, and we wanted to reassure him, make him feel welcome. I suspect our coders can be unintentionally intimidating. We're a tight-knit group, all sending and receiving on the same wave-length, both technologically and personally.
Everyone takes some time to settle in and become personable, but Patrick wasn't speaking unless spoken to. He wasn't asking questions, and a lot of us couldn't figure out what he was doing most of the time. The Lead Developer took him under his wing for a few days and tried to get him up to speed on C# and have him contribute to a project, but as soon as Patrick was left alone nothing would happen. He'd come back with questions showing he had virtually no understanding of what he was being taught. We wanted to help, but we couldn't figure out where to start, and he didn't give us a clue by asking. He never asked for help on anything.
As the weeks went by and we discovered Patrick had some interesting abilities, though. First, he could sit all day at a desk and not say anything to anyone. We assumed he was getting tasks handed down from management, tasks he could work on with his limited skills, but peeking over his shoulder I couldn't figure out what that might be. Second, he had a ninja like ability to leave at 5PM without anyone noticing. As the end of the day approached I would remind myself to say good-bye to Patrick, to maybe include him in a bit of office camaraderie. But when I would remember and turn to say something he was always gone. Not once it many weeks did I see him leave at the end of the day. No one did.
Often I forgot he was next to me. He had a Zen-like ability to just evaporate in a room of developers. He didn't clear his throat, sniffle, or sneeze, and even his typing was silent. I considered giving him a squeaky chair just to tether him to the physcial world.
It eventually became obvious that Patrick wasn't working out. He was nice enough, but he'd never asked a single unprovoked question, no matter how many times you encouraged him. He wasn't connecting with his peers, we couldn't find any technology with which was proficient, and he wasn't progressing. He came to just one lunch with us, where I learned he moved from another town 150 miles to the north, had got a house and moved his family down, all for this job. It made his lack of progress all the more painful.
We kept dumbing down the tasks we gave him, trying to find something useful for him to do. One day he was given the task of simply putting a form on an existing page to collect survey information. We detailed what needed to be done and set him to the task.
A little after noon the Lead Developer was asking around for Patrick so as to check on his progress. Had anyone seen him go to lunch? No, he'd slipped out like he does at the end of the day. Hours went by. He'd always been punctual, so we were a bit perplexed. I pictured him materializing in his chair when no one was looking.
I looked at his desk and noticed something peculiar. The sparse collection of personal effects he had were missing, and all the company owned books he'd borrowed were neatly stacked on the corner of his desk. I informed management, and they tried his home phone - disconnected. They tried his cell - no longer in service. We used an admin login to get access to his machine and found it had been cleaned. Nothing remained except his installed software, his SVN projects, a handful of company email on the Exchange server, and the machine wiping utility he's used to erase all his personal information. It resembled our pristine developer setup.
Looking at his last project, he had gone to some free survey service and taken their generated HTML source and pasted it whole cloth into the existing page. He still had it posting to the survey service's servers instead of our own. It blew up as soon as you tried to run it.
A few days later someone drove by his house and found he no longer lived there.
Patrick was gone. Unsurprisingly, he'd said nothing to anyone. The last day was identical to the first and like most all the others. His vacated desk gave me the creeps, as he sometimes did when he sat behind me, so quiet and unapproachable.
We never did find out what happened to him. I wonder about him sometimes. I hope he found a job where he can do well. But mostly I hope he doesn't come back and use those ninja skills to sneak up and gut me like a fish.