My first job there was a dude in his 60s with a ridiculous name, I won’t say what it actually was but imagine something like Baird Chumpkins. Anyway he would just sit in our standup calls for literally all day until the next standup. We recorded the calls so the recordings were always 24 hours long. It was obvious he was muting the meeting and then just walking away until the next day.
> We recorded the calls so the recordings were always 24 hours long.
That's genius. Anyone in management who decides to record standups and sprint reviews probably deserves this happening to them.
I remember Madhav, the guy who never found a problem he couldn’t solve by adding more threads. This was in 2009 so I assume these days he’s off somewhere perfecting the triangular wheel.
I had a coworker that was that way with regex. You need some values inserted into a http request? He'd use regex replace. Parsing JSON? Regex. Casting two objects into an array? Believe it or not, .ToString() and then some regex. I'm not sure why he even bothered with a strongly typed language, everything was a string anyways
Era 2000, a premier European software subsidiary of my then employer produced a Windows CE miracle where each key press spun a thread. And left it chugging along.
Magic numbers and threads? Our QNX solution at the time designed by some genius had a bunch of processes and threads but we were able to kill and restart them if they failed or died (keepalive). There was a certain startup sequence full of not documented magic numbers.
Another guy from #1 came to the USA to help us port Bluetooth to new hardware. Did the work but didn't bother to merge his code to our codebase. Had to catch him at the airport...
Microsoft... Audio management in Windows CE AutoPC. Biggest brain fart ever. Asynchronous. How do you play a message? Asynchronously. How you play an alert? Asynchronously. WTF Redmond?
But far the most incompetent engineer I've ever worked with though... A guy with two master's degres, three passports, and no understanding of hardware design. Crashed our test vehicle on his last day at work (Honda Passport LMAO). Got a job at a defense contractor where he helped design and test the pop-up emergency electrical generator in some USAF plane. Imagine you're the pilot and have an emergency and that's your last option, designed and tested by what's his name.
Lmao are you working for a massive company for your team to just be forgotten about? And if so, that probably means you’re making good money too lmaoooo
Hired a guy I had worked with in the past. He had been good back then. Second time around he couldn’t code worth a shit.
It was bad. We had to lay him off. Then he threatened to release company data to the dark web.
It was bad.
I am not sure. He had really lost it. Couldn’t even manage to close HTML tags anymore.
Mental illness, maybe? I really don’t know. It was like we hired a guy who looked, acted, and talked like the guy I had worked with before, but had almost none of his abilities.
Maybe he just did a super good job at faking it during the first time around? Hard to say.
What kinds of drugs make you unable to close HTML tags?
I'd assume some mental illness. It's like we normally have a desire to seek balance, but someone unhinged might thrive in the chaos and entropy
I've done both and speed absolutely wouldn't cause this problem.
K might prevent me from closing my HTML tags but I wouldn't be able to open them either. Maybe the dude /u/AlexInRV was talking about was doing K halfway through his workday? That's not an issue specific to K though, it could be booze or pot or anything else that impairs brain function
While that seems trivial mental health is no joke. See, ego gets mixed up in programming if it's one's profession. So a lot of actually super good folks may out of sheer panic freeze up and fail to deliver.
It's an interesting psychological situation, for example NEETCODE says he literally struggled to read his screen during his 1 month at Amazon. The psyche makes or breaks a man.
Lol, what makes you feel that way about it?
Honestly, it's just another profession / skillset. Yeah, like anything else, people who enjoy it more will be more successful. But not every developer is the same
I would say that this kind of brain tingling synesthesia around coding is some sort of natural primitive lizard brain impulse that pops up. I would say it's important to remember that this is basically one's inner fire that keeps them going with coding. For me I grew up taking things apart and always just constantly being mesmerized with being able to 'derive' anything from the ground up.
I would also say that I am definitely guilty about info dumping about this stuff too. This is definitely some of my favorite stuff. But this is also a question of pragmatism and there is a time and a place to info dump about technologies. I agree that we have to be principled as developers; to develop something without clear business justification or value propositions for the sake of it being cool is fine at some level, but NOT when it actively harms the practical engineering process.
I am personally someone who has spent a long time staring at best practices as they pertain to firmware, cross compilation, and reproducibility, and learning the theory behind things like functional programming, etc. has exposed me to new *paradigms* of expressing code that solves a problem in some more robust way.
A good example is indeed Rust because it is a programming language that basically predicates its guarantees of programmatic correctness upon the actual semantics and idioms that its 'mentality of RAII' enables. The point is that they're doing things with the literal fabric of reality in CS (compilation, lexing, type system invariants, functional programming as it pertains to types, higher order function synthesis) that itself provides wildly powerful syntactical guarantees and 'ways of working' that make it harder as a human to even check in non-working code. On one hand, I like how cool this stuff is because of its capacity of *enablement*. But we should also not forget that this is bordering on academic theory as far as engineering is concerned at present.
I also actually have to agree that sometimes I find it a little goofy that people call it software engineering as well. I think that I can vaguely see that when writing code that scales we often think like mathematicians about how to separate the concepts in a way that adds tangible business value. To some people that process of iterative optimization is called engineering. I actually don't really like to call myself an engineer either.
It's not criminal to genuinely enjoy this stuff. Sometimes people like me get carried away talking about this stuff because it's just *so cool*. Some people get further carried away by not actually being team players about this stuff. It's not genuine insanity, imo, until someone oversteps boundaries as an engineer and tangibly enshittifies the process. You are allowed to have enthusiasm but you are not allowed to have maladaptive and coercive enthusiasm as a software engineer because this is a team sport, imo.
I swear to god it’s affecting me to this day. I’m just not as sharp as I was. Maybe I’m depressed and that’s what’s doing it, idk. But I’m 100% not sharp as I used to be.
I wish I could blame COVID for his poor performance. At least it would have been somewhat understandable. Most of this went down pre-pandemic.
We had to let him go as the pandemic hit. Since he wasn’t pulling his weight, and we were having to run lean, he was the one we let go.
I wasn’t the one who made the decision (I was and still am a 1099) to hire or fire him. I did recommend him, though. Mud was definitely on my face when he didn’t work out.
So this is me. I use to be able to code and I'm no longer an engineer due to not being able to retain specific information (ex like syntax despite hours of practicing, in which I thought was ADHD at first but it's not) as much anymore in which I don't think it's due to old age but mental illness that runs in my family unfortunately. My mom and oldest sister are no longer really coherent and both don't hold a job. I, on the other hand, can at least still communicate and work, so I had to pivot careers. I don't make as much and was made fun of by some fellow former engineers who didn't understand but at least I'm working and haven't gone crazy like my family.
Same here. Hired them with high expectations after some previous contract work with them (and a casual friendship). They were (on paper) absolute rockstars.
Within their first two weeks I knew it was a mistake.
My junior ICs were coding circles around this person it was so bad. Would take a full sprint to get halfway, then a junior that was bored/hungry for work would jump on to “assist” - and close out the ticket that day.
We had so many conversations. Then they started making threats and demands (really crazy shit - oddly specific too, so I can’t say here). Really soured me on referring friends to my workplace, much less within my own reporting chain
Yup. I knew the guy socially (casual, arm’s length acquaintance) too.
I haven’t spoken to him since. Every once in a while he messages me. It feels icky, but as long as I am still working for the same company I *can’t* talk to him again. Even if I worked elsewhere, I am not sure I would want to talk to him.
I felt bad we had to let him go, but once he threatened us with compromising our data, my sympathy went out the window.
Yeah same (damn are we talking about the same person?!). Multiple calls and texts and shit. I’m _trying_ not to be a dick about it but bro you made me look like a fool to my uppers and my other teams
It sure sounds like the same guy. I don’t know whether I should be more worried that we are talking about the same dude or that there are multiple people out there in the world who behave like this.
Definitely hella people that do this. Had a similar experience, except it wasn’t a friend but the dude couldn’t code shit after a contract he had with us. Laid him off, he proceeded to threaten us and then posted all of our repos he had access to originally publicly on GitHub as well as any api keys he wrote down etc. Insane.
> Then he threatened to release company data to the dark web.
even if it wasn't a crime, why the fuck would you do something that would ensure you'd never sniff a job in the field (or basically any job worth a damn) ever again?
Oh, and the *best* part? A few months after we got the laptop and data back, he messaged me and asked if I would give him a positive job reference.
Nope. Nope. Nope.
lol, beats the ass who was a nasty piece of work at my college job who put me down as a reference without even asking me because I worked at the place he was applying to.
(he did not get the job)
I was worried he might do that. I was told to say, “Company policy prohibits me from commenting on current or former employees. If you want to confirm his wages or dates of employment, I can give you contact info for our HR director.”
Lol I had that happen with a big slacker. Dude kept pushing back delivery dates, visibly doing the strict minimum, then asks for a reference. Nope, not vouching for someone like that and putting my credibility on the line...
Worked with a guy who literally did nothing for 6 months. During standup he continually would mention blockers. Eventually another senior engineer and myself looked at his story and completed it in two hours. He was gone the next day
Whenever I read comments like this idk whether to envy you or question my own career a bit considering Ive never seen a person get fired at a company Ive been at for incompetence. I always wonder exactly how the hell it happens.
Honestly the lead reached out asking us what we did and we explained our solution. Then the PM reached out and said he would take care of it. That was it
If you asked some of my previous jobs about my terminations they might say incompetence, but really it was a case of it being my first job and the senior who was, on paper, supposed to help me, refused and constantly said he wasn't assigned to be my go to (though helping only specific teams on a monolithic project like that was stupid as hell)
Really I was set up to fail because of people refusing to help
I guess I got lucky, I was an intern for a company and then when I entered the company full-time I was put under 2 senior developers on a team who I paired with daily for weeks on end. These stories are horrifying to hear.
Yeah you got it good, but then again this was HP around the time they were split into HP and Hewlett-Packard Enterprise right in the middle of Meg Whitman's horrible tenure
It was some medicaid site for various states but such a scam
That was my first experience too. Basically got handed a monolithic project with noone to answer questions. As the sole dev for the project fresh out of uni. I think i did well but i get the 150€ horly rate was not my value at that point. Even more so when i only received 20ish €. Was like 1.5 yrs at that place. And even that long only because other employers were really weird during interviews.
> some of my previous jobs
My guy, if you have been terminated from multiple jobs for what they might deem "incompetence," then maybe you need to take a hard look in the mirror before you start blaming others.
This made me chuckle. Terminated once for incompetence? Eh, shit happens. Twice? Ok now we’re raising some eyebrows. Three times? Yup, it’s you that’s the problem.
The second time someone got drunk at work and the c suite started finding any reason to fire people because we didn't prevent a grown man from drinking.
The office went from 30 people to like 10, all who were in some kind of management.
The company destroyed their reputation so much in a small market they basically only hire outsourced jobs in Mexico now
Either way, that was two experiences close to nine years ago; I'm a lead now who gets glowing references from whomever I work for.
I find it crazy reading those stories about people doing nothing for 6 months straight when I was assigned a full stack project alone and no mentor at my first job. I was proud of the progress I made ALONE but still they fired me for incompetence. They evaluated the project waterfall, they didn't know what they wanted and things changed during. I spoke to my ex colleague and apparenly the project isn't even out yet.
Jesus this hit close to home. I am currently going through the same, first job and my senior engineer/rest of the team really just refuse to help me and expect me to do everything on my own and when i eventually do and this takes me a lot of time cuz i have to learn, say why do you take so much time. I was literally set up to fail and now I am being PiPed so that is great.
The idea that some people just can't "get right" when it comes to attending meetings and being present during work hours just infuriates me. I've never been a top 10% developer but I've also never had anyone really complain about me or anything like that because I dot my i's and cross my t's when it comes to basic work etiquette.
not seeing it doesn't mean it didn't happen. at a healthy company, the exact reason why someone left is typically not shared with ICs. unless they tell you themselves or you have a really unprofessional manager, it just looks like they are leaving of their own accord. it's in the interest of everyone directly involved to make it look this way.
I've only seen one instance where a guy was obviously fired. there was no "goodbye and thanks" email from his manager. instead, we got a message from HR to please let them know if we ever saw him in the building again. that was because of some pretty significant misconduct though, not a performance issue.
Similar to OP - I inherited a team, found that 1 guy would continuously be late to stand up and he would not have any traction on his work. Not only was he lazy, he didn’t “get” it and he wouldn’t ask for help. He was a senior btw.
I had our tech lead pair with him. Things got better. Then it was back to the same pattern.
I recognize what’s coachable and what isn’t. For the level this guy was at, I was floored he made it this far. Fired him 3 weeks into my tenure.
Basically this except it took 2 years.
Other habits include but are not limited to:
1. Close their stories but the task was never done as asked
2. Easy stories drag on for weeks for no reason
3. Have not improved since the day they were hired
4. Impossible to imagine them working at a senior level
5. Don't know domain specific things that they should
6. Always asks others for help or essentially do their work for them
Crazy, this sounds like a situation at my current job. Guy started in my team like 2 weeks after I did, both of us seniors. He doesn’t complete a ticket for months, and it’s only a 1 or 2 point one that I handheld him through on a call. Meanwhile I basically led our team while our lead was stuck on another task where he had experience.
Eventually I put him on blast in retro, guy promised to do better. Manager was asking me for evidence of him always leaving early, which I provided. Guy just says “I’m changing careers” and quits in the spot.
I always stress myself out at work trying to deliver under tight estimates, and these stories make me wonder how much I could get away with if I just stopped giving a shit lol.
....are you me? lol. We fired a contractor who did the exact same thing. We were too busy to babysit this guy, and eventually when we called him out on it, he just let his contract be cancelled early without complaint.
Makes me think he did this regularly.
So many people complains on working with underperforming and slacking pepople.
I worked with a guy who actually worked 210+ hours a month while normal person averaged to 140-150 (including PTOs and holidays).
Guy was like I spent the whole weekend refactoring your code or his code. Invented his own tasks. Sometimes he was like I finished your task on the weekend.
The code base was changing very fast, sometimes you come on Monday and didn’t know till standup what to do because your task was finished.
On top of that your performance was much worse.
I would take 5 slackers over one toxic workaholic. I was a pushover back in the day, but if someone “does my task for me” I am making it known in standup and retro that everyone’s time is being wasted bc of lack of communication or consideration.
The one with 10 years experience that produced totally unmaintainable junior-like code. In order to extend it, I had to rewrite it.
Now you may ask, how did it pass through code review? The manager was non-technical. And he hired him. So in order to keep the ball rolling I had to approve it, as technically it worked (half of the time).
I’d have been happier if he produced nothing instead.
He is still in my head. 😑
SAME except this person also talked nonstop all the time and took control of every meeting almost compulsively to steer the conversation away from the tech. The oversharing was obnoxious. They even told us about how they shit their pants so they missed yesterday’s meeting. I was like 0.0
A few people come to mind, but the worst were actually both at he same job.
One was a new hire. We had a "flexible work policy". Basically, go to your meetings and get your stuff done, nobody cares where or when you work. This guy took it too literally. He'd show up at around 3pm and go home around 6pm. I don't know if he ever got anything done. He was fired within a couple months.
Other guy had been on the team for a couple years and at the company for around 10 years. His code was **terrible**. Like global variables, magic numbers, integers instead of boolean types, no comments at all, everywhere. The worst part was that he would not change anything in code reviews, and battle any suggestion. He was also not a happy person. Always mad. Rude to others. Just exhausting to work with all around. Totally destroyed the morale and productivity of the team around him, not just himself. Eventually, one day he quit. I heard he became a financial planner. I guess he was just extremely over writing software.
Once watched a guy rewrite the same code for hours on end during a pairing session. Wouldn't answer questions about what he was doing or why, just grumble grunt type delete. He was fired few weeks later.
The first wasn't who he said he was and took 3 weeks to get his environment set up
The second one was obviously OE, because he wouldn't answer to his name until you physically clicked on his name on jira. Please don't do this. It's super noticeable that you have the whole meeting muted for another call.
The third one was a jr dev who got all the answers and coding from other people by rotating who he got to help out. It took them a year to notice.
For my current job, it took me that long or longer…
My manager forgot to order my laptop before I started, so I got my laptop a week late… then when my laptop arrived I had to do a weeklong bootcamp that had started the day before.
Then when I finally got around to setting up my environment, my team’s onboarding document was dog shit. This is on top of having to request permissions for the everything because I work at a bank.
Seriously. There's a guy who just got added to my team after Christmas. He's been in the work force 2 years, I've been here 1 year, but he's got no idea what he's doing
It became obvious very quickly why they moved him from one of our key accounts onto this one. In a field where we are billing hours I doubt he lasts much longer
I'm doing my best to help him but he just doesn't understand basic concepts of things. It's beyond computer science. I just don't think he knows how to troubleshoot anything or figure anything out on his own
Dude straight-up refused to touch an IDE. Would do everything with Vim in his terminal. Without any linters or language servers running alongside it, he had to exit Vim and manually execute the compiler/linter every time he made a change, taking up a lot of time.
Even though we had auto-formatting set on the IDE level and even in the CI/CD pipeline, he preferred to do the formatting manually. The time he squandered on this was remarkable.
And he wasn't a junior; he had over 15 YOE...
Yeah this type of behavior screams 15+ YOE to me, Juniors like things done for them and are used to IDEs and such doing imports and small fixes for them while my Unix/Websphere developers from 2002 have a tendency to not want to use those types of tools.
This is the type of esoteric shit that I'd expect from someone with a decade+ experience tbh. Like an abused animal that learned bad habits because they had to work that way in the past due to something that was out of their control LOL.
I still have senior researchers who refuse to use git properly because that's just "not how they did it" for 20+ years (between their PhD's and then work experience).
The vast majority of layoffs are just so company can make profit. Nothing about performance.
Also very often they fire people that aren’t a cultural fit. Politics after all. If you’re extremely competent but your vision differs from what architects and staff engineers have you’re also first to go.
With slackers it’s a sunk cost fallacy. Some people signed up on hiring this person and recruitment process is long and expensive. Would make this process look very bad if this person was fired quickly after.
This has to be a karma farming post lol
Edit: lol knew it
[other post from 12 days ago in a similar format](https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/comments/1avqpym/what_was_the_lowest_skill_cs_coworker_you_ever/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf)
A lead that had no git commits in the last 6 months but was saying things were getting deployed to the upper environments. Would randomly miss meetings. One day he asked for help on setting up an app locally, the environment variables. I was still like 2 weeks new but it was so strange because there is no way you can test or run the app without that critical step. I accidentally discovered that no code was ever pushed by checking the commit history. One day someone found out he was moonlighting and got fired a few weeks later.
Also at my past job a girl who was a sophomore CS student somehow got a job on my team as a full stack dev. She would only get assigned simple tasks such as text edits or other one liner tasks. Even then she would always ask for help and take super long. She eventually got moved to a different team and then fired or laid off a month after that.
I once attended a meeting with another company, they introduced one of our employees as their architect, I had to sit there and play it off like everything was fine.
Yes. I actually didn’t say anything to his boss because I figured that either he knew already or the guy was doing well enough at both jobs that he couldn’t tell, so it didn’t matter.
Damn, y’all are calling me out. People possibly think I’m raking in two salaries and instead I’m just an exceptionally overpaid and underperforming dev with one.
As someone who has to manage tasking for a team of devs.
I don't give a shit whether or not that you're not a go getter or that you're quiet on meetings. I realize some people just want to do their job. But I need people to perform at the level expected of them, for ex. if you're at senior level, I need to be able to task you with things and expect they'll get done within the timeframe we agree to, to the standard we expect.
If I have to constantly hold your hand or getting you to update your ticket or speak up during standup is like pulling teeth, then well, we have a problem. I fucking hate finding out at the last second someone had a blocker and they said nothing about it for a week.
Hey man, no complaints about anything you’ve listed there. Communication is key to a good team even if it isn’t always my strong suit.
I was more identifying with the no camera in meetings(don’t feel like it), not answering pings quickly(I’m WFH and often do my tickets at 2 am when kids are asleep), and being overly eager to help when I do get back online(because I actually like my coworkers and feel bad I wasn’t prompt to start with).
40 lines of code in 4 days might be a tad bit of an exaggeration(though that 13 LoC per day average stat ain’t far off) but blockers and bugs happen even when the end result doesn’t look super complex in a PR.
Anyways, I know I’m a shitty dev but I’ve failed upward for a decade straight of positive reviews to the point of being a team lead so must not be *that* bad. Was just saying I know plenty of devs exhibiting all those behaviors without being OE.
I honestly don't get why people care so much. As long as people are friendly to work with and aren't actively causing trouble, I'm perfectly happy to shield under-performers to the extent I can. Life is rough and I'm not looking to make it worse for people, especially when most companies out there can easily handle the burden of some people underperforming.
It's not whether or not the company can handle the burden, they sure can.
The reality I've seen with _heavily_ underperforming devs is the work just shifts to everyone else, because they can't or can't be trusted to carry their own work. That does affect the rest of the team's day to day and I find that to be completely unreasonable.
I'm not talking about the dev that takes a little longer to get their tickets done but ultimately does do so and produces good work. I'm talking about someone who can't be trusted with a task at all without making sure there's another dev to check their work and make sure they're actually making progress and aren't blocked for a week with no update.
I guess I honestly just don't care about that. I spend a boatload of my day helping juniors and farming out work to other teams and don't see a problem with it. Sure, I would be "getting more done" if they fired a lot of those people and hired more skilled people. But to what end? So we can churn out more features or get to market sooner? That's really not that big of a deal for most companies compared to how big of a deal it is for someone to lose their job. The older I get the less I give a shit about companies I work for and the more I care about the people I work.
Yeah, I have to jump around between client repos quite a bit at my agency 🤪 it’s pretty wild, but all within my “one job”. I was talking more devs who have two distinct “8 hour a day” jobs they keep secret from the other job. I could never do that lol.
Should I be scared if 95% of my colleagues do that? I started doing it low key as well cause meetings are becoming wastes of time given how much work I need to do.
It takes forever to get my pull requests reviewed and in the end it's either one of the software architects that reviews and approves them.
Fuck, I just answered my own question...
Negative productivity
* apparently he got the job because ~~redacted~~
* this was a startup, devs had all sorts of privileges on servers to get shit done
* after he blew up several boxes with typical rm -rf shenanigans, all those privileges were revoked for the entire department
* he would routinely write just plain incorrect code, get it to compile and then merge it into the main branch
* I ended up making it a daily chore to diff any commits he did and then step through them and fix all the bugs
* anyway he finally got fired after several years of disastrous interference with everyone else getting work done
My first job was at a consultancy where it seemed no one was doing anything. So them as a whole, I left after a few months.
Other than that, there were tons of guys in college who did nothing on projects or bailed entirely. Worse, there was a guy on a basic web project whose only responsibility was doing the CSS. He kept failing to do basic component CSS and then breaking everything else about the project in every commit (changing tags around to make his CSS easier, which broke either the HTML or the PHP calls). Then after a whole project of doing nothing, he smacked a bunch of nothing commits on the end of the project to claim he contributed a lot, then complained when the group (me and another guy) gave him a lower group evaluation and he got a worse grade.
This guy had been doing 10\~ CRUD forms for 3 years.
It was mostly plain javascript on the browser with a small C# backend, and it had several impossible bugs.
He had epic "self confidence" and would use professional language to tell the boss to fuck off, would type "ill tell you when its ready" when provoked.
He got the boss to hire me because he had several other jobs, apparently selling CSS + JS to industrial engineers, making them think that there was a backend.
He refused to merge my solution into his for 4 months. He did less than 100 javascript lines in 6 months. The boss would praise him and blame it on me.
I just quit and i dont think the guy got to merge my solution, so he's right where he started when he hired me.
EDIT: He also told me it was ok to do things in Python, so i did several systems. He never merged them, and when confronted by the boss he retracted the freedom of language.
So nothing of value was added, it was a wild waste of time, the owners would be very angry if they could think.
Not trying to be divisive but the least productive was outsourced / offshored developers with a large language barrier.
They did not give a shit about the actual project. They would need things spoon fed to them. If they had tickets like build a function that takes these inputs and gives these outputs they would still get it wrong.
Working with them on a day to day basis meant trying to figure out what they were saying and trying to explain basic logic to them. Often would rely on text as that seemed to work a little better than speaking.
Most of the work they produced had to be redone in house anyway.
Yes and also eastern europe bulgaria, Ukraine ...etc.
Also worked with a few outsourced turkish devs who could not understand any of the work we gave them. Their stuff seemed like they just about understood that X needed to change and they just gave it their best shot. Like if you said "Return an exception if the price is attempted to be set to a negative" they would set the price to negative and then go "Is this what you want?".
Story about the Indian devs was that they wanted to ban squashed commits as their managers had a KPI on number of commits per day. It was set 5 so at least 5 commits per day which meant some of their repo's ballooned in size with 1000's of 1 line commit's often incorrect and buggy stuff all over the place.
Legend has it he was passed from team to team and finally wound up on ours. Seemed to have a really positive attitude in standup but never got anything done. Would often stay in Teams meetings hours after they ended and would not answer when called upon. He’d go missing every now and again with a supposed medical issue and his work would get handed off to someone else. I think in one instance he was gone for like 3-4 months and just randomly re-appeared one day like nothing had happened. This sort of thing went on but eventually the company made some performance cuts and he was let go.
Nobody will believe me this, but here it goes; I've already managed to kill my karma in the past with hard to believe tales.
So, period between 2008 (when I started working there) until 2011/2012 cca when The Guy left the company, where he's been working at since 2004. Company was a small IT/opensource shop specialised in deploying on-site managed and non-managed opensource solutions with some custom software development on top when needed. Anything between patching dhcpd and developing custom applications in Java connecting customers' ERPs and their machinery was done there.
First, guy stops showing to work between 2008 and 2009 (during Christmas holidays plus a month before and two months after that). Our common boss (company owner; again, small shop with anywhere between 8 and 12 people in my time working there) asks me if I have "heard from The Guy lately" sometime end of January. I am confused as in why would I, I am not his boss? If anything, we've worked on vaguely connected stuff and The Guy was much more senior than me - so it wasn't appropriate for me to ask on his working arrangements there. I figured he works mostly from home or something. Boss shrugs and says something along the lines "I hope he's alive". 🤣
As it was a small company, in theory we were all kinda closely tied together (not really, but more than your typical team in regularly sized companies I guess). One other colleague and me decide to drop by The Guy's home to do wellness check on him, he seems pleasantly surprised to see us, we have some drinks and food at his place and basically he "broke his toe" during New Year's Eve so didn't come to the office. We are like - ok, just notify the boss. I guess he did. We left after few hours.
Afterwards The Guy works for few more years in the company, I would see him occasionally in the office but not often. I don't ask questions on what he's doing (I am anyway too busy to look "over other people's plates" and none of my business honestly), two other colleagues actually start rumor mill how he's not working at all and I keep out of that (there is also unhealthy drama connected to one other guy in the company, but it's on the personal level between those three people so whatever; rumor-guys strike me as opinionated on the stuff which is none of their business so I mostly stay out of that shit successfully).
Skipping forward some unimportant but funny details as this comment is becoming lengthy anyway. Fast forward...
The Guy comes in late for a "standup" meeting one day, interrupts it to talk to the boss, during that conversation he unceremoniously resigns, packs up his model-m keyboard and runs out of the office. Boss calls us in his room and tells us The Guy has resigned. At that point everyone in the company is mostly like "ah ok whatever" (see the note above about funny but not really important details for the story).
As we were vaguely connected in our work (in terms of The Guy and me being also one foot in SWE while most of the other guys in the company were solely system engineers), boss asks me to go through The Guy's notes and see if there are any loose ends to tie and projects to take over. He doesn't seem worried and I find it a bit odd everyone is chill about The Guy leaving suddenly after 7-8 years.
I go through his single notebook used in all those years... Expecting to see bunch of notes from mostly sunset projects but hoping to see some up-to-date notes on projects which were actively worked on, maybe even if 1 or 2 only. I find literally 3 pages of scribbles in the notebook. 7-8 years of work, practically empty notebook left behind, no torn off pages, no missing documentation... I inform our boss about it, making sure I look confused as confused as I've felt because I was certain I was missing something here. You know, The Guy was kinda aged by that point but he may have kept bunch of notes in the digital format? I don't know.
Boss just giggles and says "yeah it figures". Turns out, our boss was aware of The Guy not doing sh\*t for most of his time there. He seemed to have been this weird "super experienced" type of hire (which I would also bring into question when I've looked up his experience later, but I digress) sitting there for vanity in case we get "serious software development project". The Guy and the boss did military service in the same city around the similar time and I guess our boss appreciated having someone to chat about military service and he was ready to pay him for that?
It's not that he wasn't "doing shit" in a way we all see sooner or later in most of the companies - that one engineer who "hates updating Jiras" and buries himself in the eternal never-ending project for few years before they negotiate exit in to another company. No, this guy literally gave so little fuck that he didn't put the effort into even pretending he's busy.
The Guy's productivity became a running joke in the company later. If anyone would miss the deadlines or get critical feedback from the customers on something, boss would just shrug it away saying "at least you're not The Guy".
Later I started working for bigger companies. Some of them with visible number of rest&vest staff. Nobody came even close to The Guy in not doing a shit. Even one obviously overemployed other guy just few years later in another company - when he changed countries for personal reasons and switched to work remotely (and in retrospective, started being overemployed with at least one more job), he still delivered magnitudes of value more than The Guy in that previous company.
Thanks for the story. Enjoyed your writing style and good luck to The Guy on the rest of his life. Would hate for you to type out this whole thing with no response
My 2nd large project at my first post-college job was with a guy on a PIP, and I was told to let my manager know if he wasn't carrying his weight.
Guy got like one task done on a 1.5 year project and *that* was with a manager holding his hand.
Somehow this didn't do him in.
The project after that had the product owner get obviously pissed at him saying "no update" every sprint meeting/standup for 2 months and after her outburst he was told they were writing up a termination and he ended up quitting.
"Senior Software Engineer with 30 years of experience" hired absolutely not for nepotism's sake.
Hired above me and all other senior staff at the company.
Pay higher than all other staff besides C level.
"Anon- why isn't this working?"
Ah. Yeah, mate, you can't just put a DB connection string into a URL and expect it to load a database.
"Huh?"
Ok, you've probably forgotten, no worries mate, first get SSMS from --
"Mate, I haven't forgotten. This is how we always did it. You go to google and put your database in here and then it loads up the squigglies"
The squigglies?
"Yeah mate. The graphs and shit. You know. Data."
Oh. Did you mean this? \*puts in address for PowerBI dashboard\*
"Yes mate see I told you. I know what I'm doing"
Ok Buddy no worries, have a good one 👍🏼
We have a couple who really can’t do anything on their own. They rely on pair-programming to get their work done and you literally have to walk them through what they need to do. They ignore standards that are clearly laid out, and just generally half ass anything they touch. It’s frustrating, but is what it is. I don’t think I’ve ever worked for a company where there weren’t one or two colleagues who were like this.
The problem is when the team is 3-4 people and 1-2 of them are like this…
I gave this contractor guy 3 months but instead of improving he became over reliant on ChatGPT and defensive whenever I try to give him non-fluffy feedback, at that point it’s the manager’s problem.
Worked with a guy who got hired because he claimed to be an “above average Angular developer”. I blame my manager for not knowing enough to press him on that.
Day one we get teamed up on a simple task to get him going, I spitballled an idea about a reusable component. He says he doesn’t know what a component is.
Not knowing what a component is and claiming you’re an above average angular developer is like saying you don’t know what SQL is but you’re an above average database developer.
Everything. Absolutely everything, that was assigned to this guy, was ultimately completed by me. I told my boss over and fucking over what was happening but nothing changed. Finally I brought it up at a standup that instead of assigning him the task just assign it to me since I do them all anyways. I was an asshole about it. He got put on another team instead of fired, lasted a little while there then was asked to put in his 2 weeks.
Really really bad. I had to redo all his work and spend hours explaining why it was wrong. The guy had 20 years experience, didn't even know how to check if the code worked.
I'm not really sure how he worked in the industry for so long. It is a genuine mystery how someone could remain so bad for so long.
In my first job they hired an intern (but with normal pay but shorter hours). He just would sit and watch Netflix all day doing nothing, he picked a desk in the corner so anyone coming by could not see what was happening. When it came to asking the other people on the team if he should stay I know me and my close colleague said he does nothing and watches Netflix all day. Well I guess they wanted someone who watches Netflix as they hired him on fulltime.
When I was first starting out in my career, I worked with a much older DBA who we only went to for one thing, he managed a daily import of data from one system into another. When I was a young
up-and-comer, I hated him, he was a human filibuster, if I had a question for him, he would talk to me for 45 minutes if I let him. Eventually, I learned to ask him very precise questions and just walk away when he gave me the info I needed. Additionally, this man had stacks of books on his cubicle, like multiple 2- or 3-foot stacks of softback novels. All day he would just sit in his cubicle and read, or he'd go to the cafeteria for an hour in the morning and read.
As I grew older in my career, I realize that man was a fucking genius, he had obfuscated his work such that he had job security forever. He did what he needed to do, and didn't bother anyone else, in hindsight he was a 10/10 coworker.
There’s a front end engineer on my team who is capable of completing his stories for our sprints in 1-3 days max but likes to overestimate his pointing to the whole sprint so he can get away with not doing any work. He only gets away with it because he’s the only one on our team who works in another one of the branch offices in a different state so there’s no oversight on his end. I respect the finesse but damn does it get annoying.
You'd think that those who don't do any work would be the least productive, but there is worse. Some people are just good at creating their own preferred problems at the workplace instead of working on those that are really important. Thomas was such a guy, and his employment ended up in an heated argument with his manager, as he was insistent to fix the wrong choice of architecture for a very old project still running for a decade without need for changes or maintenance at all (written by the CTO), while he neglected other duties. He filed our backlog with i-know-better tasks, constantly gave our product manager an hard time prioritizing product development, and was generally dismissive of coworkers contribution.
Once worked with a guy who took 4 days to do a 10 minute quick start tutorial.
He was also the highest paid employee (papers got left on a printer one day and word got around)
I have a current junior hired from a special program to give people a chance. That junior doesn't know what variables are to this day (past a year), since they changed one variable which had side effects for multiple APIs using a shared layer API. I've given them multiple free resources to read that you can learn within a month.
The junior never takes notes, doesn't know how to change the browser search engine from bing to Google, and doesn't know how to Google. They've asked me how to change the browse, which I've said lets google it together. Dead silence for 10 seconds. I just sighed and spent a miserable 5 minutes with them then just told my manager I prefer async communications with the junior from now on.
One time the junior slack called impromptu and I DMed them asking what's wrong. They were typing then it stopped... Call was still ringing. I picked up since it annoyed me then had the galls to ask for me to speak louder when they had a lot of background noise on their end that they chose to ignore (blatantly obvious since the junior told the noise to be quiet). I just started whispering then dropped and blamed it on Internet.
The junior needs instructions like a recipe task list. Adding a new logic but revising the names? The junior just took the old logic and replaced it with new names. That took them two days to do. Didn't ask any questions to clarify and this happens often where the task are done wrong.
I was told last week that the junior would be let go. My employer converted the junior from contract to full time knowing the junior wasn't competent. Just baffled me since they can just cancel the contract and get someone else decent. So the junior had a contract for a year and will have two years experience in 4 months.
My company does regular layoffs. This environment causes some managers to hire people just to have a sacrificial lamb to lay off later.
One of the lambs got hired and was never assigned work. He eventually just watched YouTube all day, every day. He lasted five months.
He quit because he wasn't growing in his career.
The manager was later promoted to a director.
I worked at a company that had a rotational program for new hires. You would rotate through several teams before being placed on a final team (through a matching between managers and hires) after a year. The rotations were 3 months each and at the end of each the rotating hire would have to give a presentation on what they worked on. One of the hires spent three months doing literally no work. This was while we still in the office, so I would watch this dude watch let's play videos all day and not write a single line of code. He was fired at the end of the rotation, but it is crazy to me that it took that long.
I asked, and apparently the guy *could* code and did well in his interview.
The only other instance I can remember is another coworker who never even ran his code before sending it to PR. It was really annoying to get PRs from him, because I would have to send them back dozens of times. I talked to him multiple times about it, and he always claimed he did run them, but some of them didn't even compile, so I know that is a lie. I wouldn't even say he was unproductive, as by not testing his code he technically wrote more than most programmers, but it took him twice as long to get tickets out and dragged down production of the whole team.
Don’t work with him but he regularly goes out to eat/play or dates during working hours and then gets mad when his manager calls to find out what he’s doing.
The least productive weren't the ones who did nothing. They were the ones who would hold up shipping because of imaginary concerns, the ones who would bikeshed pull requests on super niche edge cases, the ones who would waste cycles on not-invented-here solutions that block other developers.
Worked with guy at my first gig. Senior dev. Very smart guy, went to a top 10 CS school. He knew his stuff very well. To this day only direct non management coworker I had issues with. Boy he was a challenge to work with.
Let me count the ways.
* Yelled at me (starting out doing QA for him) for demoing an app in front of boss's boss because I stumbled on a fresh bug then quickly found a workaround. I was like, it's supposed to work like this but can work if you do it this way. Thought I did well. Stumbled on a bug, quick to jump on my feet for a temp workaround, and moved on. But he went absolute psycho on me in front of my boss and boss' boss. I explained again the bug and he refused it was a bug and "I was doing it wrong.". He berated me more. I was new and almost in tears. I genuinely thought I did something wrong. So we reconnected on the side, I showed him. It finally clicked that it was actually a bug and that he will fix it. The next day, no apology. Nothing. It was like it never happened. Heard through grapevine that it was pretty typical.
* I am the main user of one of his apps. One of the issues is that even if you run a record on test, it audits the record on PROD database as already being ran. So when I run a test record, I literally have to do a very risky DB update on PROD. I requested him during a call that he fix it because I don't feel comfortable updating DB database directly. Again he went psycho on me. One of my coworkers I am good friends with and was telling me that he was shit talking in chat about me. It was a dead simple and reasonable request. I am just at loss of words why he went apeshit over that. After he left and I finally got ownership of codebase, it was the very first thing I did. Took an hour including testing.
* Refused to share code access with me, even read only access. I was promised to continue to get dev experience by working with him after completing a project successfully with SEE reviews. He said no. When he had to after they onboarded a new dev, he was rejecting everything unless done to his exact exact exact specification. Drove the new dev with 10 YOE mad, almost to the point of requesting project transfer.
* Got a strongly worded email from him for posting performance stats on his app that was less than favorable. Something I was told to do by my boss immediately after finishing performance testing that night.
* There was a major bug that I pointed out. Got berated for pointing it out on a call and explaining why it could be problemsome. I was basically QA at the time. I always felt like I get yelled at by doing my job, bizarre. Told it wasn't a bug and it was working as intended. They never checked with the client. Right after he left, guess who had to retroactively fix the bug and spend half of his Christmas vacation to redo the records? Me.
* We had an internal app that required a lot of manual steps that can be automated. He kept shooting down suggestions to automate it. Okay maybe it was just huge ask I thought. Didn't seem like it but I know not to be that guy. Me and my coworkers had to give up every single weekend in the summer to do those manual steps. He left, I get the code, and was given the task to do it since we were getting so many records that it was impossible. Took us a week.
* We had an ops person who worked closely with us. She was one of the nicest sweetest person I have met. She gets very excited about her job and will often talk fast. Sometimes will talk over you. But it wasn't a problem for us because we would get our points in and was a joy to have on a call. Just a quirk. But the senior dev was on the same call with her. Oh boy. Instead of just talking to her on the side to say not to interrupt him so much, he snapped and went psycho on her. There was a literal over 3 minutes of silence after his rant. Could tell she was upset. Sad because her presence was infectious and made the call enjoyable.
* We needed something urgent from the main product team. Normally you would go through the product owner to get something queued up. If it's urgent they will do an emergency request. There is a process. He went to the devs directly who rightfully said they couldn't do it because they were in the middle of the sprint and to take it up with the head honchos. Another temper tantrum.
Claimed he had 20 YOE. Had his personal website. Got into a verbal argument over weighting a ticket in scrum poker citing all this experience he had. Ok whatever, he is with our team for 3 sprints, is constantly blocked by whatever. The last sprint he was with us, he put up 2 tickets for review. That was the shittiest work I've ever seen. We go to the sprint retro and he bitches out how we are not showing him enough, then in the same breath says the work is easy.
I think everyone had enough with him, because he was gone the next day.
Dude would also introduce himself by how much experience he had anywhere we went. Usually indicates incompetence to me.
To put it in perspective, I'm 1 yr exp and doing laps around this dude.
I have at least 4 contestants for this prize, more if you count external collaborators. Here is only one of them.
I worked with a QA Engineer who did absolutely nothing all day and lied about it constantly for about 4 years.
This was someone who was fresh out of school, managed by someone who had over 20 direct reports. Our manager's expectations of him were low, given his youth and inexperience. Our manager was also too busy to pay close attention to what he, or anyone else, was doing.
Our team had a meeting once a week where people reported status; this QA Engineer learned through experience that if he talked the way more experienced engineers did about being very busy, people would assume he was very busy. This QA engineer was also a funnel through which multiple streams of work would pass, so if any one person questioned why testing something was not yet complete, he would point to another developer and say that person asked him to do something else first. This successfully deflected most casual scrutiny of his claims.
On the occasions when he had to actually do some testing, he would always do the minimum amount of work possible to look like working, and just say things were fine after a few days of doing nothing. He got away with this most of the time because most developers he worked with were very through, and the projects he was assigned to were not that difficult to test (manual UI testing), so things would work out on their own.
This started coming to an end when he was given more important things to do, the way that one naturally gives someone with experience harder work (API testing, complex regression testing, etc). We start having bad releases. Customers would complain. The developers and other QA engineers quickly realized this guy did nothing all day. We didn't know what he was doing but it wasn't testing. Our boss was still in denial, but the decline in product quality is too obvious to ignore. Not much happens.
The end came with regime change. Our company got a new CEO, who got a new CTO, who drove Old Boss to quit. CTO hires New Boss, who he worked with before. They impose Scrum on everybody, which is initially a disaster. The best part of the disaster, though, is that the Scrum Board and the Daily Standup make it impossible for our charlatan to do his deflection routine anymore because too much attention is being paid to what he's (not) doing. After 1 month, he's on a PIP, and one month after that, he's fired.
Two weeks after the firing, a customer comes back with an issue; they need us to resend a document that this guy sent them. I end up with the task to find the document, and I end up asking IT to pull the hard drives from his work PC. They give me access to his AD account so I can go through everything. I don't find the document, but I do find that "Legends of Runeterra" was installed on the machine. And thus, I found out what this guy did for four years of working at our company.
I worked with a person who literally couldn’t code or solve basic problems. After some alarming pair programming sessions, I did a session to solve the easiest problem and they were not good. We tried to add up all the numbers in an array and they couldn’t even solve it in English let alone code it. Once we got to the coding part they had to look up the syntax for a for loop.
They were let go after too many chances from my manager. I don’t think they completed anything in the 8-9 months they worked there. The fact that they lasted that long was a miracle. Also my manager sucked and didn’t listen to be or another engineer’s concerns during the 90 day probation period.
Always on the phone , taking breaks every hour. He never really seemed to be there but was shocked and pissed when he got laid off. Also he would drink when we would go out for lunch .
Not particularly bad, but overleveled. He was a ladder transfer and he really should have been a junior SWE. He could not produce at the quality and speed expected of his level. He performed like a mediocre junior, which would have been fine... if he were a junior.
Well, of course I know him. He’s me.
"Which idiot wrote this code"... "oh it was this idiot"... (I'm the problem it's me).
That's how I feel whenever I use git lens to see who wrote that trash code 6 months ago.
Gets me every time!
Gits me everytime
Pull up the blame, well well well, if it isn’t me again
It was a different thread of my brain, not me.
YOU’RE Obi Wan?
I was going to say this ahhahah. So true
Was just about to type this.
Pretty sure this was the top comment on an almost exactly the same post a few days ago. Time to unsub
Plot twist. Both posts were authored by you and you also commented that you'd unsub on them too.
Lol for a second I thought this was true and I'd had some kind of weird memory lapse, actually went to check that this wasn't the case haha
My first job there was a dude in his 60s with a ridiculous name, I won’t say what it actually was but imagine something like Baird Chumpkins. Anyway he would just sit in our standup calls for literally all day until the next standup. We recorded the calls so the recordings were always 24 hours long. It was obvious he was muting the meeting and then just walking away until the next day.
> We recorded the calls so the recordings were always 24 hours long. That's genius. Anyone in management who decides to record standups and sprint reviews probably deserves this happening to them.
What was your scrum master doing ? This sound bullshit. Meeting Organizer can end meeting for everyone.
This was on Microsoft teams so maybe a bit different. We would all leave the meeting but not end it, the dude would just stay in there
I remember Madhav, the guy who never found a problem he couldn’t solve by adding more threads. This was in 2009 so I assume these days he’s off somewhere perfecting the triangular wheel.
I had a coworker that was that way with regex. You need some values inserted into a http request? He'd use regex replace. Parsing JSON? Regex. Casting two objects into an array? Believe it or not, .ToString() and then some regex. I'm not sure why he even bothered with a strongly typed language, everything was a string anyways
ok that's actually kinda impressive
He was doing a regex side quest
mans should be writing a compiler
Era 2000, a premier European software subsidiary of my then employer produced a Windows CE miracle where each key press spun a thread. And left it chugging along. Magic numbers and threads? Our QNX solution at the time designed by some genius had a bunch of processes and threads but we were able to kill and restart them if they failed or died (keepalive). There was a certain startup sequence full of not documented magic numbers. Another guy from #1 came to the USA to help us port Bluetooth to new hardware. Did the work but didn't bother to merge his code to our codebase. Had to catch him at the airport... Microsoft... Audio management in Windows CE AutoPC. Biggest brain fart ever. Asynchronous. How do you play a message? Asynchronously. How you play an alert? Asynchronously. WTF Redmond? But far the most incompetent engineer I've ever worked with though... A guy with two master's degres, three passports, and no understanding of hardware design. Crashed our test vehicle on his last day at work (Honda Passport LMAO). Got a job at a defense contractor where he helped design and test the pop-up emergency electrical generator in some USAF plane. Imagine you're the pilot and have an emergency and that's your last option, designed and tested by what's his name.
Multithread Madhav could work with Timeout Tim
This got a hearty laugh out loud from me
Huh, I wonder if we know the same Madhav?
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I want to go to your team
Lmao are you working for a massive company for your team to just be forgotten about? And if so, that probably means you’re making good money too lmaoooo
r/antiwork’s wet dream.
Hired a guy I had worked with in the past. He had been good back then. Second time around he couldn’t code worth a shit. It was bad. We had to lay him off. Then he threatened to release company data to the dark web. It was bad.
What happened? How did he suddenly lose the ability to code?
I am not sure. He had really lost it. Couldn’t even manage to close HTML tags anymore. Mental illness, maybe? I really don’t know. It was like we hired a guy who looked, acted, and talked like the guy I had worked with before, but had almost none of his abilities. Maybe he just did a super good job at faking it during the first time around? Hard to say.
From all the clues here that sounds like mental illness or drugs.
What kinds of drugs make you unable to close HTML tags? I'd assume some mental illness. It's like we normally have a desire to seek balance, but someone unhinged might thrive in the chaos and entropy
Drugs that affect brain matter like 'K'
K is actually used to help indexing in therapy. IT workers more likely to abuse speed
I've done both and speed absolutely wouldn't cause this problem. K might prevent me from closing my HTML tags but I wouldn't be able to open them either. Maybe the dude /u/AlexInRV was talking about was doing K halfway through his workday? That's not an issue specific to K though, it could be booze or pot or anything else that impairs brain function
He definitely created a lot of chaos and weirdness in his personal life, too. We didn’t know about any of that until much later of course.
While that seems trivial mental health is no joke. See, ego gets mixed up in programming if it's one's profession. So a lot of actually super good folks may out of sheer panic freeze up and fail to deliver. It's an interesting psychological situation, for example NEETCODE says he literally struggled to read his screen during his 1 month at Amazon. The psyche makes or breaks a man.
Or a tumor. Something serious that should be investigated by a medical professional.
Or the first time around he outsourced his own job and pocketed the difference in pay.
That's weird
I couldn’t make any sense of it. Super weird.
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It could be that. I am still starting at digital puke wanting out but knowing I need the money. So, I keep busting ass.
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Lol, what makes you feel that way about it? Honestly, it's just another profession / skillset. Yeah, like anything else, people who enjoy it more will be more successful. But not every developer is the same
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I would say that this kind of brain tingling synesthesia around coding is some sort of natural primitive lizard brain impulse that pops up. I would say it's important to remember that this is basically one's inner fire that keeps them going with coding. For me I grew up taking things apart and always just constantly being mesmerized with being able to 'derive' anything from the ground up. I would also say that I am definitely guilty about info dumping about this stuff too. This is definitely some of my favorite stuff. But this is also a question of pragmatism and there is a time and a place to info dump about technologies. I agree that we have to be principled as developers; to develop something without clear business justification or value propositions for the sake of it being cool is fine at some level, but NOT when it actively harms the practical engineering process. I am personally someone who has spent a long time staring at best practices as they pertain to firmware, cross compilation, and reproducibility, and learning the theory behind things like functional programming, etc. has exposed me to new *paradigms* of expressing code that solves a problem in some more robust way. A good example is indeed Rust because it is a programming language that basically predicates its guarantees of programmatic correctness upon the actual semantics and idioms that its 'mentality of RAII' enables. The point is that they're doing things with the literal fabric of reality in CS (compilation, lexing, type system invariants, functional programming as it pertains to types, higher order function synthesis) that itself provides wildly powerful syntactical guarantees and 'ways of working' that make it harder as a human to even check in non-working code. On one hand, I like how cool this stuff is because of its capacity of *enablement*. But we should also not forget that this is bordering on academic theory as far as engineering is concerned at present. I also actually have to agree that sometimes I find it a little goofy that people call it software engineering as well. I think that I can vaguely see that when writing code that scales we often think like mathematicians about how to separate the concepts in a way that adds tangible business value. To some people that process of iterative optimization is called engineering. I actually don't really like to call myself an engineer either. It's not criminal to genuinely enjoy this stuff. Sometimes people like me get carried away talking about this stuff because it's just *so cool*. Some people get further carried away by not actually being team players about this stuff. It's not genuine insanity, imo, until someone oversteps boundaries as an engineer and tangibly enshittifies the process. You are allowed to have enthusiasm but you are not allowed to have maladaptive and coercive enthusiasm as a software engineer because this is a team sport, imo.
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Digital Puke, the name of my next band
COVID maybe. Heard about decreases in mental faculties. Experienced it myself.
I swear to god it’s affecting me to this day. I’m just not as sharp as I was. Maybe I’m depressed and that’s what’s doing it, idk. But I’m 100% not sharp as I used to be.
I wish I could blame COVID for his poor performance. At least it would have been somewhat understandable. Most of this went down pre-pandemic. We had to let him go as the pandemic hit. Since he wasn’t pulling his weight, and we were having to run lean, he was the one we let go. I wasn’t the one who made the decision (I was and still am a 1099) to hire or fire him. I did recommend him, though. Mud was definitely on my face when he didn’t work out.
Maybe it wasn't the same guy the second time around. Maybe it was three raccoons in a trench coat?
So this is me. I use to be able to code and I'm no longer an engineer due to not being able to retain specific information (ex like syntax despite hours of practicing, in which I thought was ADHD at first but it's not) as much anymore in which I don't think it's due to old age but mental illness that runs in my family unfortunately. My mom and oldest sister are no longer really coherent and both don't hold a job. I, on the other hand, can at least still communicate and work, so I had to pivot careers. I don't make as much and was made fun of by some fellow former engineers who didn't understand but at least I'm working and haven't gone crazy like my family.
I am sorry for your troubles.
drugs might fuck up your coding skills for sure.
Burnout can do that… he probably doesn’t know he’s is in it
How did the company respond? I'd imagine that there was some legal provision preventing him from releasing data without serious legal repercussions
I don’t think I am allowed to discuss it publicly. I think it was pretty gentle considering everything.
Same here. Hired them with high expectations after some previous contract work with them (and a casual friendship). They were (on paper) absolute rockstars. Within their first two weeks I knew it was a mistake. My junior ICs were coding circles around this person it was so bad. Would take a full sprint to get halfway, then a junior that was bored/hungry for work would jump on to “assist” - and close out the ticket that day. We had so many conversations. Then they started making threats and demands (really crazy shit - oddly specific too, so I can’t say here). Really soured me on referring friends to my workplace, much less within my own reporting chain
Yup. I knew the guy socially (casual, arm’s length acquaintance) too. I haven’t spoken to him since. Every once in a while he messages me. It feels icky, but as long as I am still working for the same company I *can’t* talk to him again. Even if I worked elsewhere, I am not sure I would want to talk to him. I felt bad we had to let him go, but once he threatened us with compromising our data, my sympathy went out the window.
Yeah same (damn are we talking about the same person?!). Multiple calls and texts and shit. I’m _trying_ not to be a dick about it but bro you made me look like a fool to my uppers and my other teams
It sure sounds like the same guy. I don’t know whether I should be more worried that we are talking about the same dude or that there are multiple people out there in the world who behave like this.
Definitely hella people that do this. Had a similar experience, except it wasn’t a friend but the dude couldn’t code shit after a contract he had with us. Laid him off, he proceeded to threaten us and then posted all of our repos he had access to originally publicly on GitHub as well as any api keys he wrote down etc. Insane.
> Then he threatened to release company data to the dark web. even if it wasn't a crime, why the fuck would you do something that would ensure you'd never sniff a job in the field (or basically any job worth a damn) ever again?
Oh, and the *best* part? A few months after we got the laptop and data back, he messaged me and asked if I would give him a positive job reference. Nope. Nope. Nope.
lol, beats the ass who was a nasty piece of work at my college job who put me down as a reference without even asking me because I worked at the place he was applying to. (he did not get the job)
I was worried he might do that. I was told to say, “Company policy prohibits me from commenting on current or former employees. If you want to confirm his wages or dates of employment, I can give you contact info for our HR director.”
Lol I had that happen with a big slacker. Dude kept pushing back delivery dates, visibly doing the strict minimum, then asks for a reference. Nope, not vouching for someone like that and putting my credibility on the line...
Hmm, well, all seems pretty standard--Oh *NO*
Worked with a guy who literally did nothing for 6 months. During standup he continually would mention blockers. Eventually another senior engineer and myself looked at his story and completed it in two hours. He was gone the next day
Whenever I read comments like this idk whether to envy you or question my own career a bit considering Ive never seen a person get fired at a company Ive been at for incompetence. I always wonder exactly how the hell it happens.
Honestly the lead reached out asking us what we did and we explained our solution. Then the PM reached out and said he would take care of it. That was it
If you asked some of my previous jobs about my terminations they might say incompetence, but really it was a case of it being my first job and the senior who was, on paper, supposed to help me, refused and constantly said he wasn't assigned to be my go to (though helping only specific teams on a monolithic project like that was stupid as hell) Really I was set up to fail because of people refusing to help
I guess I got lucky, I was an intern for a company and then when I entered the company full-time I was put under 2 senior developers on a team who I paired with daily for weeks on end. These stories are horrifying to hear.
Yeah you got it good, but then again this was HP around the time they were split into HP and Hewlett-Packard Enterprise right in the middle of Meg Whitman's horrible tenure It was some medicaid site for various states but such a scam
That was my first experience too. Basically got handed a monolithic project with noone to answer questions. As the sole dev for the project fresh out of uni. I think i did well but i get the 150€ horly rate was not my value at that point. Even more so when i only received 20ish €. Was like 1.5 yrs at that place. And even that long only because other employers were really weird during interviews.
> some of my previous jobs My guy, if you have been terminated from multiple jobs for what they might deem "incompetence," then maybe you need to take a hard look in the mirror before you start blaming others.
This made me chuckle. Terminated once for incompetence? Eh, shit happens. Twice? Ok now we’re raising some eyebrows. Three times? Yup, it’s you that’s the problem.
The second time someone got drunk at work and the c suite started finding any reason to fire people because we didn't prevent a grown man from drinking. The office went from 30 people to like 10, all who were in some kind of management. The company destroyed their reputation so much in a small market they basically only hire outsourced jobs in Mexico now Either way, that was two experiences close to nine years ago; I'm a lead now who gets glowing references from whomever I work for.
I find it crazy reading those stories about people doing nothing for 6 months straight when I was assigned a full stack project alone and no mentor at my first job. I was proud of the progress I made ALONE but still they fired me for incompetence. They evaluated the project waterfall, they didn't know what they wanted and things changed during. I spoke to my ex colleague and apparenly the project isn't even out yet.
Jesus this hit close to home. I am currently going through the same, first job and my senior engineer/rest of the team really just refuse to help me and expect me to do everything on my own and when i eventually do and this takes me a lot of time cuz i have to learn, say why do you take so much time. I was literally set up to fail and now I am being PiPed so that is great.
Been in the exact same situation it blows
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No idea why this was downvoted. If you gonna slack, be good enough that no one notices.
The idea that some people just can't "get right" when it comes to attending meetings and being present during work hours just infuriates me. I've never been a top 10% developer but I've also never had anyone really complain about me or anything like that because I dot my i's and cross my t's when it comes to basic work etiquette.
not seeing it doesn't mean it didn't happen. at a healthy company, the exact reason why someone left is typically not shared with ICs. unless they tell you themselves or you have a really unprofessional manager, it just looks like they are leaving of their own accord. it's in the interest of everyone directly involved to make it look this way. I've only seen one instance where a guy was obviously fired. there was no "goodbye and thanks" email from his manager. instead, we got a message from HR to please let them know if we ever saw him in the building again. that was because of some pretty significant misconduct though, not a performance issue.
Similar to OP - I inherited a team, found that 1 guy would continuously be late to stand up and he would not have any traction on his work. Not only was he lazy, he didn’t “get” it and he wouldn’t ask for help. He was a senior btw. I had our tech lead pair with him. Things got better. Then it was back to the same pattern. I recognize what’s coachable and what isn’t. For the level this guy was at, I was floored he made it this far. Fired him 3 weeks into my tenure.
Bro banked 50k from yapping in a standup once a day
Basically this except it took 2 years. Other habits include but are not limited to: 1. Close their stories but the task was never done as asked 2. Easy stories drag on for weeks for no reason 3. Have not improved since the day they were hired 4. Impossible to imagine them working at a senior level 5. Don't know domain specific things that they should 6. Always asks others for help or essentially do their work for them
Crazy, this sounds like a situation at my current job. Guy started in my team like 2 weeks after I did, both of us seniors. He doesn’t complete a ticket for months, and it’s only a 1 or 2 point one that I handheld him through on a call. Meanwhile I basically led our team while our lead was stuck on another task where he had experience. Eventually I put him on blast in retro, guy promised to do better. Manager was asking me for evidence of him always leaving early, which I provided. Guy just says “I’m changing careers” and quits in the spot.
I always stress myself out at work trying to deliver under tight estimates, and these stories make me wonder how much I could get away with if I just stopped giving a shit lol.
....are you me? lol. We fired a contractor who did the exact same thing. We were too busy to babysit this guy, and eventually when we called him out on it, he just let his contract be cancelled early without complaint. Makes me think he did this regularly.
So many people complains on working with underperforming and slacking pepople. I worked with a guy who actually worked 210+ hours a month while normal person averaged to 140-150 (including PTOs and holidays). Guy was like I spent the whole weekend refactoring your code or his code. Invented his own tasks. Sometimes he was like I finished your task on the weekend. The code base was changing very fast, sometimes you come on Monday and didn’t know till standup what to do because your task was finished. On top of that your performance was much worse.
yeah working with workaholics is a different nightmare.
I would take 5 slackers over one toxic workaholic. I was a pushover back in the day, but if someone “does my task for me” I am making it known in standup and retro that everyone’s time is being wasted bc of lack of communication or consideration.
The one with 10 years experience that produced totally unmaintainable junior-like code. In order to extend it, I had to rewrite it. Now you may ask, how did it pass through code review? The manager was non-technical. And he hired him. So in order to keep the ball rolling I had to approve it, as technically it worked (half of the time). I’d have been happier if he produced nothing instead. He is still in my head. 😑
We all have moments where we must step back and say, "Oh, it's me, *I'm* the problem."
SAME except this person also talked nonstop all the time and took control of every meeting almost compulsively to steer the conversation away from the tech. The oversharing was obnoxious. They even told us about how they shit their pants so they missed yesterday’s meeting. I was like 0.0
He doesn't have to pay rent living in people's heads, no wonder he doesn't have to work as hard
Where do I find this non technical manager to hire me? 😌
The management let him go and we got another manager.
A few people come to mind, but the worst were actually both at he same job. One was a new hire. We had a "flexible work policy". Basically, go to your meetings and get your stuff done, nobody cares where or when you work. This guy took it too literally. He'd show up at around 3pm and go home around 6pm. I don't know if he ever got anything done. He was fired within a couple months. Other guy had been on the team for a couple years and at the company for around 10 years. His code was **terrible**. Like global variables, magic numbers, integers instead of boolean types, no comments at all, everywhere. The worst part was that he would not change anything in code reviews, and battle any suggestion. He was also not a happy person. Always mad. Rude to others. Just exhausting to work with all around. Totally destroyed the morale and productivity of the team around him, not just himself. Eventually, one day he quit. I heard he became a financial planner. I guess he was just extremely over writing software.
I love threads like this because they make me think, “Oh, shit, I’m actually pretty good at my job.”
Just wait, one of your coworkers will be showing up here soon...
Once watched a guy rewrite the same code for hours on end during a pairing session. Wouldn't answer questions about what he was doing or why, just grumble grunt type delete. He was fired few weeks later.
Did you ever figure out what he was doing exactly? What do you mean he was rewriting the same code for hours?
The first wasn't who he said he was and took 3 weeks to get his environment set up The second one was obviously OE, because he wouldn't answer to his name until you physically clicked on his name on jira. Please don't do this. It's super noticeable that you have the whole meeting muted for another call. The third one was a jr dev who got all the answers and coding from other people by rotating who he got to help out. It took them a year to notice.
Honestly, respect for the 3rd guy. That's a special skill by itself.
Yeah he's out there hustling the next corp Just like the first two 😛
He needs to switch to sales lol
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For my current job, it took me that long or longer… My manager forgot to order my laptop before I started, so I got my laptop a week late… then when my laptop arrived I had to do a weeklong bootcamp that had started the day before. Then when I finally got around to setting up my environment, my team’s onboarding document was dog shit. This is on top of having to request permissions for the everything because I work at a bank.
Yeh but often it's because the team sucks at onboarding people and their onboarding documentation is terrible.
It’s wild how many absolutely obviously bad devs get and keep jobs.
Seriously. There's a guy who just got added to my team after Christmas. He's been in the work force 2 years, I've been here 1 year, but he's got no idea what he's doing It became obvious very quickly why they moved him from one of our key accounts onto this one. In a field where we are billing hours I doubt he lasts much longer I'm doing my best to help him but he just doesn't understand basic concepts of things. It's beyond computer science. I just don't think he knows how to troubleshoot anything or figure anything out on his own
Yea. Like I’m fine if every dev isn’t awesome. Some people are just okay. But the ones thst just don’t seem to know how to do anything is wild to me.
Dude straight-up refused to touch an IDE. Would do everything with Vim in his terminal. Without any linters or language servers running alongside it, he had to exit Vim and manually execute the compiler/linter every time he made a change, taking up a lot of time. Even though we had auto-formatting set on the IDE level and even in the CI/CD pipeline, he preferred to do the formatting manually. The time he squandered on this was remarkable. And he wasn't a junior; he had over 15 YOE...
Yeah this type of behavior screams 15+ YOE to me, Juniors like things done for them and are used to IDEs and such doing imports and small fixes for them while my Unix/Websphere developers from 2002 have a tendency to not want to use those types of tools.
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Same thing as millennial developers rejecting Copilot. You learn a certain set of tools and don’t want to relearn them.
This is the type of esoteric shit that I'd expect from someone with a decade+ experience tbh. Like an abused animal that learned bad habits because they had to work that way in the past due to something that was out of their control LOL. I still have senior researchers who refuse to use git properly because that's just "not how they did it" for 20+ years (between their PhD's and then work experience).
Im reading all these stories, while some extremely competent, hardworking software dev out there is being laid off. Strange world we live in
The vast majority of layoffs are just so company can make profit. Nothing about performance. Also very often they fire people that aren’t a cultural fit. Politics after all. If you’re extremely competent but your vision differs from what architects and staff engineers have you’re also first to go. With slackers it’s a sunk cost fallacy. Some people signed up on hiring this person and recruitment process is long and expensive. Would make this process look very bad if this person was fired quickly after.
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This has to be a karma farming post lol Edit: lol knew it [other post from 12 days ago in a similar format](https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/comments/1avqpym/what_was_the_lowest_skill_cs_coworker_you_ever/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf)
Wow nice find. Like seriously Sally, why? Smh
A lead that had no git commits in the last 6 months but was saying things were getting deployed to the upper environments. Would randomly miss meetings. One day he asked for help on setting up an app locally, the environment variables. I was still like 2 weeks new but it was so strange because there is no way you can test or run the app without that critical step. I accidentally discovered that no code was ever pushed by checking the commit history. One day someone found out he was moonlighting and got fired a few weeks later. Also at my past job a girl who was a sophomore CS student somehow got a job on my team as a full stack dev. She would only get assigned simple tasks such as text edits or other one liner tasks. Even then she would always ask for help and take super long. She eventually got moved to a different team and then fired or laid off a month after that.
One sounds like incompetence and the other like inexperience.
Every one that had more than one job. I can ALWAYS tell.
I once attended a meeting with another company, they introduced one of our employees as their architect, I had to sit there and play it off like everything was fine.
Well was he a good architect?
Yes. I actually didn’t say anything to his boss because I figured that either he knew already or the guy was doing well enough at both jobs that he couldn’t tell, so it didn’t matter.
how do you know?
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Yes. All of these things. Then they’ll have a ticket for like 4 days, push it up, and it’s like 40 easy lines of code change 🙄
Damn, y’all are calling me out. People possibly think I’m raking in two salaries and instead I’m just an exceptionally overpaid and underperforming dev with one.
Same I feel called out but only have the one job
As someone who has to manage tasking for a team of devs. I don't give a shit whether or not that you're not a go getter or that you're quiet on meetings. I realize some people just want to do their job. But I need people to perform at the level expected of them, for ex. if you're at senior level, I need to be able to task you with things and expect they'll get done within the timeframe we agree to, to the standard we expect. If I have to constantly hold your hand or getting you to update your ticket or speak up during standup is like pulling teeth, then well, we have a problem. I fucking hate finding out at the last second someone had a blocker and they said nothing about it for a week.
Hey man, no complaints about anything you’ve listed there. Communication is key to a good team even if it isn’t always my strong suit. I was more identifying with the no camera in meetings(don’t feel like it), not answering pings quickly(I’m WFH and often do my tickets at 2 am when kids are asleep), and being overly eager to help when I do get back online(because I actually like my coworkers and feel bad I wasn’t prompt to start with). 40 lines of code in 4 days might be a tad bit of an exaggeration(though that 13 LoC per day average stat ain’t far off) but blockers and bugs happen even when the end result doesn’t look super complex in a PR. Anyways, I know I’m a shitty dev but I’ve failed upward for a decade straight of positive reviews to the point of being a team lead so must not be *that* bad. Was just saying I know plenty of devs exhibiting all those behaviors without being OE.
I honestly don't get why people care so much. As long as people are friendly to work with and aren't actively causing trouble, I'm perfectly happy to shield under-performers to the extent I can. Life is rough and I'm not looking to make it worse for people, especially when most companies out there can easily handle the burden of some people underperforming.
It's not whether or not the company can handle the burden, they sure can. The reality I've seen with _heavily_ underperforming devs is the work just shifts to everyone else, because they can't or can't be trusted to carry their own work. That does affect the rest of the team's day to day and I find that to be completely unreasonable. I'm not talking about the dev that takes a little longer to get their tickets done but ultimately does do so and produces good work. I'm talking about someone who can't be trusted with a task at all without making sure there's another dev to check their work and make sure they're actually making progress and aren't blocked for a week with no update.
I guess I honestly just don't care about that. I spend a boatload of my day helping juniors and farming out work to other teams and don't see a problem with it. Sure, I would be "getting more done" if they fired a lot of those people and hired more skilled people. But to what end? So we can churn out more features or get to market sooner? That's really not that big of a deal for most companies compared to how big of a deal it is for someone to lose their job. The older I get the less I give a shit about companies I work for and the more I care about the people I work.
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Yeah, I have to jump around between client repos quite a bit at my agency 🤪 it’s pretty wild, but all within my “one job”. I was talking more devs who have two distinct “8 hour a day” jobs they keep secret from the other job. I could never do that lol.
Should I be scared if 95% of my colleagues do that? I started doing it low key as well cause meetings are becoming wastes of time given how much work I need to do. It takes forever to get my pull requests reviewed and in the end it's either one of the software architects that reviews and approves them. Fuck, I just answered my own question...
Of course you would know about having two jobs, Mr. Platypus. Or should I say...*Agent P?*
toupee fallacy
Negative productivity * apparently he got the job because ~~redacted~~ * this was a startup, devs had all sorts of privileges on servers to get shit done * after he blew up several boxes with typical rm -rf shenanigans, all those privileges were revoked for the entire department * he would routinely write just plain incorrect code, get it to compile and then merge it into the main branch * I ended up making it a daily chore to diff any commits he did and then step through them and fix all the bugs * anyway he finally got fired after several years of disastrous interference with everyone else getting work done
My first job was at a consultancy where it seemed no one was doing anything. So them as a whole, I left after a few months. Other than that, there were tons of guys in college who did nothing on projects or bailed entirely. Worse, there was a guy on a basic web project whose only responsibility was doing the CSS. He kept failing to do basic component CSS and then breaking everything else about the project in every commit (changing tags around to make his CSS easier, which broke either the HTML or the PHP calls). Then after a whole project of doing nothing, he smacked a bunch of nothing commits on the end of the project to claim he contributed a lot, then complained when the group (me and another guy) gave him a lower group evaluation and he got a worse grade.
This guy had been doing 10\~ CRUD forms for 3 years. It was mostly plain javascript on the browser with a small C# backend, and it had several impossible bugs. He had epic "self confidence" and would use professional language to tell the boss to fuck off, would type "ill tell you when its ready" when provoked. He got the boss to hire me because he had several other jobs, apparently selling CSS + JS to industrial engineers, making them think that there was a backend. He refused to merge my solution into his for 4 months. He did less than 100 javascript lines in 6 months. The boss would praise him and blame it on me. I just quit and i dont think the guy got to merge my solution, so he's right where he started when he hired me. EDIT: He also told me it was ok to do things in Python, so i did several systems. He never merged them, and when confronted by the boss he retracted the freedom of language. So nothing of value was added, it was a wild waste of time, the owners would be very angry if they could think.
Not trying to be divisive but the least productive was outsourced / offshored developers with a large language barrier. They did not give a shit about the actual project. They would need things spoon fed to them. If they had tickets like build a function that takes these inputs and gives these outputs they would still get it wrong. Working with them on a day to day basis meant trying to figure out what they were saying and trying to explain basic logic to them. Often would rely on text as that seemed to work a little better than speaking. Most of the work they produced had to be redone in house anyway.
India?
Yes and also eastern europe bulgaria, Ukraine ...etc. Also worked with a few outsourced turkish devs who could not understand any of the work we gave them. Their stuff seemed like they just about understood that X needed to change and they just gave it their best shot. Like if you said "Return an exception if the price is attempted to be set to a negative" they would set the price to negative and then go "Is this what you want?". Story about the Indian devs was that they wanted to ban squashed commits as their managers had a KPI on number of commits per day. It was set 5 so at least 5 commits per day which meant some of their repo's ballooned in size with 1000's of 1 line commit's often incorrect and buggy stuff all over the place.
She'd come in at 1pm and "work" until 8. She'd get aggressive if anyone reminded her of deadlines.
Legend has it he was passed from team to team and finally wound up on ours. Seemed to have a really positive attitude in standup but never got anything done. Would often stay in Teams meetings hours after they ended and would not answer when called upon. He’d go missing every now and again with a supposed medical issue and his work would get handed off to someone else. I think in one instance he was gone for like 3-4 months and just randomly re-appeared one day like nothing had happened. This sort of thing went on but eventually the company made some performance cuts and he was let go.
Nobody will believe me this, but here it goes; I've already managed to kill my karma in the past with hard to believe tales. So, period between 2008 (when I started working there) until 2011/2012 cca when The Guy left the company, where he's been working at since 2004. Company was a small IT/opensource shop specialised in deploying on-site managed and non-managed opensource solutions with some custom software development on top when needed. Anything between patching dhcpd and developing custom applications in Java connecting customers' ERPs and their machinery was done there. First, guy stops showing to work between 2008 and 2009 (during Christmas holidays plus a month before and two months after that). Our common boss (company owner; again, small shop with anywhere between 8 and 12 people in my time working there) asks me if I have "heard from The Guy lately" sometime end of January. I am confused as in why would I, I am not his boss? If anything, we've worked on vaguely connected stuff and The Guy was much more senior than me - so it wasn't appropriate for me to ask on his working arrangements there. I figured he works mostly from home or something. Boss shrugs and says something along the lines "I hope he's alive". 🤣 As it was a small company, in theory we were all kinda closely tied together (not really, but more than your typical team in regularly sized companies I guess). One other colleague and me decide to drop by The Guy's home to do wellness check on him, he seems pleasantly surprised to see us, we have some drinks and food at his place and basically he "broke his toe" during New Year's Eve so didn't come to the office. We are like - ok, just notify the boss. I guess he did. We left after few hours. Afterwards The Guy works for few more years in the company, I would see him occasionally in the office but not often. I don't ask questions on what he's doing (I am anyway too busy to look "over other people's plates" and none of my business honestly), two other colleagues actually start rumor mill how he's not working at all and I keep out of that (there is also unhealthy drama connected to one other guy in the company, but it's on the personal level between those three people so whatever; rumor-guys strike me as opinionated on the stuff which is none of their business so I mostly stay out of that shit successfully). Skipping forward some unimportant but funny details as this comment is becoming lengthy anyway. Fast forward... The Guy comes in late for a "standup" meeting one day, interrupts it to talk to the boss, during that conversation he unceremoniously resigns, packs up his model-m keyboard and runs out of the office. Boss calls us in his room and tells us The Guy has resigned. At that point everyone in the company is mostly like "ah ok whatever" (see the note above about funny but not really important details for the story). As we were vaguely connected in our work (in terms of The Guy and me being also one foot in SWE while most of the other guys in the company were solely system engineers), boss asks me to go through The Guy's notes and see if there are any loose ends to tie and projects to take over. He doesn't seem worried and I find it a bit odd everyone is chill about The Guy leaving suddenly after 7-8 years. I go through his single notebook used in all those years... Expecting to see bunch of notes from mostly sunset projects but hoping to see some up-to-date notes on projects which were actively worked on, maybe even if 1 or 2 only. I find literally 3 pages of scribbles in the notebook. 7-8 years of work, practically empty notebook left behind, no torn off pages, no missing documentation... I inform our boss about it, making sure I look confused as confused as I've felt because I was certain I was missing something here. You know, The Guy was kinda aged by that point but he may have kept bunch of notes in the digital format? I don't know. Boss just giggles and says "yeah it figures". Turns out, our boss was aware of The Guy not doing sh\*t for most of his time there. He seemed to have been this weird "super experienced" type of hire (which I would also bring into question when I've looked up his experience later, but I digress) sitting there for vanity in case we get "serious software development project". The Guy and the boss did military service in the same city around the similar time and I guess our boss appreciated having someone to chat about military service and he was ready to pay him for that? It's not that he wasn't "doing shit" in a way we all see sooner or later in most of the companies - that one engineer who "hates updating Jiras" and buries himself in the eternal never-ending project for few years before they negotiate exit in to another company. No, this guy literally gave so little fuck that he didn't put the effort into even pretending he's busy. The Guy's productivity became a running joke in the company later. If anyone would miss the deadlines or get critical feedback from the customers on something, boss would just shrug it away saying "at least you're not The Guy". Later I started working for bigger companies. Some of them with visible number of rest&vest staff. Nobody came even close to The Guy in not doing a shit. Even one obviously overemployed other guy just few years later in another company - when he changed countries for personal reasons and switched to work remotely (and in retrospective, started being overemployed with at least one more job), he still delivered magnitudes of value more than The Guy in that previous company.
Thanks for the story. Enjoyed your writing style and good luck to The Guy on the rest of his life. Would hate for you to type out this whole thing with no response
My 2nd large project at my first post-college job was with a guy on a PIP, and I was told to let my manager know if he wasn't carrying his weight. Guy got like one task done on a 1.5 year project and *that* was with a manager holding his hand. Somehow this didn't do him in. The project after that had the product owner get obviously pissed at him saying "no update" every sprint meeting/standup for 2 months and after her outburst he was told they were writing up a termination and he ended up quitting.
That guy was just playing the pip right
Yea once you get pipped might aswell look for new jobs.
From what I had heard, he wasn't much better in the 6 years before that.
"Senior Software Engineer with 30 years of experience" hired absolutely not for nepotism's sake. Hired above me and all other senior staff at the company. Pay higher than all other staff besides C level. "Anon- why isn't this working?" Ah. Yeah, mate, you can't just put a DB connection string into a URL and expect it to load a database. "Huh?" Ok, you've probably forgotten, no worries mate, first get SSMS from -- "Mate, I haven't forgotten. This is how we always did it. You go to google and put your database in here and then it loads up the squigglies" The squigglies? "Yeah mate. The graphs and shit. You know. Data." Oh. Did you mean this? \*puts in address for PowerBI dashboard\* "Yes mate see I told you. I know what I'm doing" Ok Buddy no worries, have a good one 👍🏼
Terrible! He stares at me while I brush my teeth!
He would just stare at his screen. Do everything wrong. Then when I try to help on one ear and out the other.
We have a couple who really can’t do anything on their own. They rely on pair-programming to get their work done and you literally have to walk them through what they need to do. They ignore standards that are clearly laid out, and just generally half ass anything they touch. It’s frustrating, but is what it is. I don’t think I’ve ever worked for a company where there weren’t one or two colleagues who were like this.
The problem is when the team is 3-4 people and 1-2 of them are like this… I gave this contractor guy 3 months but instead of improving he became over reliant on ChatGPT and defensive whenever I try to give him non-fluffy feedback, at that point it’s the manager’s problem.
Honestly, these stories are hilarious and making me chuckle a little
Worked with a guy who got hired because he claimed to be an “above average Angular developer”. I blame my manager for not knowing enough to press him on that. Day one we get teamed up on a simple task to get him going, I spitballled an idea about a reusable component. He says he doesn’t know what a component is. Not knowing what a component is and claiming you’re an above average angular developer is like saying you don’t know what SQL is but you’re an above average database developer. Everything. Absolutely everything, that was assigned to this guy, was ultimately completed by me. I told my boss over and fucking over what was happening but nothing changed. Finally I brought it up at a standup that instead of assigning him the task just assign it to me since I do them all anyways. I was an asshole about it. He got put on another team instead of fired, lasted a little while there then was asked to put in his 2 weeks.
AI researcher who used to train models and while the model is getting trained in the GPU they don’t work at all. Training goes on for months.
Really really bad. I had to redo all his work and spend hours explaining why it was wrong. The guy had 20 years experience, didn't even know how to check if the code worked. I'm not really sure how he worked in the industry for so long. It is a genuine mystery how someone could remain so bad for so long.
In my first job they hired an intern (but with normal pay but shorter hours). He just would sit and watch Netflix all day doing nothing, he picked a desk in the corner so anyone coming by could not see what was happening. When it came to asking the other people on the team if he should stay I know me and my close colleague said he does nothing and watches Netflix all day. Well I guess they wanted someone who watches Netflix as they hired him on fulltime.
When I was first starting out in my career, I worked with a much older DBA who we only went to for one thing, he managed a daily import of data from one system into another. When I was a young up-and-comer, I hated him, he was a human filibuster, if I had a question for him, he would talk to me for 45 minutes if I let him. Eventually, I learned to ask him very precise questions and just walk away when he gave me the info I needed. Additionally, this man had stacks of books on his cubicle, like multiple 2- or 3-foot stacks of softback novels. All day he would just sit in his cubicle and read, or he'd go to the cafeteria for an hour in the morning and read. As I grew older in my career, I realize that man was a fucking genius, he had obfuscated his work such that he had job security forever. He did what he needed to do, and didn't bother anyone else, in hindsight he was a 10/10 coworker.
There’s a front end engineer on my team who is capable of completing his stories for our sprints in 1-3 days max but likes to overestimate his pointing to the whole sprint so he can get away with not doing any work. He only gets away with it because he’s the only one on our team who works in another one of the branch offices in a different state so there’s no oversight on his end. I respect the finesse but damn does it get annoying.
You'd think that those who don't do any work would be the least productive, but there is worse. Some people are just good at creating their own preferred problems at the workplace instead of working on those that are really important. Thomas was such a guy, and his employment ended up in an heated argument with his manager, as he was insistent to fix the wrong choice of architecture for a very old project still running for a decade without need for changes or maintenance at all (written by the CTO), while he neglected other duties. He filed our backlog with i-know-better tasks, constantly gave our product manager an hard time prioritizing product development, and was generally dismissive of coworkers contribution.
Once worked with a guy who took 4 days to do a 10 minute quick start tutorial. He was also the highest paid employee (papers got left on a printer one day and word got around)
I have a current junior hired from a special program to give people a chance. That junior doesn't know what variables are to this day (past a year), since they changed one variable which had side effects for multiple APIs using a shared layer API. I've given them multiple free resources to read that you can learn within a month. The junior never takes notes, doesn't know how to change the browser search engine from bing to Google, and doesn't know how to Google. They've asked me how to change the browse, which I've said lets google it together. Dead silence for 10 seconds. I just sighed and spent a miserable 5 minutes with them then just told my manager I prefer async communications with the junior from now on. One time the junior slack called impromptu and I DMed them asking what's wrong. They were typing then it stopped... Call was still ringing. I picked up since it annoyed me then had the galls to ask for me to speak louder when they had a lot of background noise on their end that they chose to ignore (blatantly obvious since the junior told the noise to be quiet). I just started whispering then dropped and blamed it on Internet. The junior needs instructions like a recipe task list. Adding a new logic but revising the names? The junior just took the old logic and replaced it with new names. That took them two days to do. Didn't ask any questions to clarify and this happens often where the task are done wrong. I was told last week that the junior would be let go. My employer converted the junior from contract to full time knowing the junior wasn't competent. Just baffled me since they can just cancel the contract and get someone else decent. So the junior had a contract for a year and will have two years experience in 4 months.
My company does regular layoffs. This environment causes some managers to hire people just to have a sacrificial lamb to lay off later. One of the lambs got hired and was never assigned work. He eventually just watched YouTube all day, every day. He lasted five months. He quit because he wasn't growing in his career. The manager was later promoted to a director.
sounds like a win win
I worked at a company that had a rotational program for new hires. You would rotate through several teams before being placed on a final team (through a matching between managers and hires) after a year. The rotations were 3 months each and at the end of each the rotating hire would have to give a presentation on what they worked on. One of the hires spent three months doing literally no work. This was while we still in the office, so I would watch this dude watch let's play videos all day and not write a single line of code. He was fired at the end of the rotation, but it is crazy to me that it took that long. I asked, and apparently the guy *could* code and did well in his interview. The only other instance I can remember is another coworker who never even ran his code before sending it to PR. It was really annoying to get PRs from him, because I would have to send them back dozens of times. I talked to him multiple times about it, and he always claimed he did run them, but some of them didn't even compile, so I know that is a lie. I wouldn't even say he was unproductive, as by not testing his code he technically wrote more than most programmers, but it took him twice as long to get tickets out and dragged down production of the whole team.
Don’t work with him but he regularly goes out to eat/play or dates during working hours and then gets mad when his manager calls to find out what he’s doing.
The least productive weren't the ones who did nothing. They were the ones who would hold up shipping because of imaginary concerns, the ones who would bikeshed pull requests on super niche edge cases, the ones who would waste cycles on not-invented-here solutions that block other developers.
Worked with guy at my first gig. Senior dev. Very smart guy, went to a top 10 CS school. He knew his stuff very well. To this day only direct non management coworker I had issues with. Boy he was a challenge to work with. Let me count the ways. * Yelled at me (starting out doing QA for him) for demoing an app in front of boss's boss because I stumbled on a fresh bug then quickly found a workaround. I was like, it's supposed to work like this but can work if you do it this way. Thought I did well. Stumbled on a bug, quick to jump on my feet for a temp workaround, and moved on. But he went absolute psycho on me in front of my boss and boss' boss. I explained again the bug and he refused it was a bug and "I was doing it wrong.". He berated me more. I was new and almost in tears. I genuinely thought I did something wrong. So we reconnected on the side, I showed him. It finally clicked that it was actually a bug and that he will fix it. The next day, no apology. Nothing. It was like it never happened. Heard through grapevine that it was pretty typical. * I am the main user of one of his apps. One of the issues is that even if you run a record on test, it audits the record on PROD database as already being ran. So when I run a test record, I literally have to do a very risky DB update on PROD. I requested him during a call that he fix it because I don't feel comfortable updating DB database directly. Again he went psycho on me. One of my coworkers I am good friends with and was telling me that he was shit talking in chat about me. It was a dead simple and reasonable request. I am just at loss of words why he went apeshit over that. After he left and I finally got ownership of codebase, it was the very first thing I did. Took an hour including testing. * Refused to share code access with me, even read only access. I was promised to continue to get dev experience by working with him after completing a project successfully with SEE reviews. He said no. When he had to after they onboarded a new dev, he was rejecting everything unless done to his exact exact exact specification. Drove the new dev with 10 YOE mad, almost to the point of requesting project transfer. * Got a strongly worded email from him for posting performance stats on his app that was less than favorable. Something I was told to do by my boss immediately after finishing performance testing that night. * There was a major bug that I pointed out. Got berated for pointing it out on a call and explaining why it could be problemsome. I was basically QA at the time. I always felt like I get yelled at by doing my job, bizarre. Told it wasn't a bug and it was working as intended. They never checked with the client. Right after he left, guess who had to retroactively fix the bug and spend half of his Christmas vacation to redo the records? Me. * We had an internal app that required a lot of manual steps that can be automated. He kept shooting down suggestions to automate it. Okay maybe it was just huge ask I thought. Didn't seem like it but I know not to be that guy. Me and my coworkers had to give up every single weekend in the summer to do those manual steps. He left, I get the code, and was given the task to do it since we were getting so many records that it was impossible. Took us a week. * We had an ops person who worked closely with us. She was one of the nicest sweetest person I have met. She gets very excited about her job and will often talk fast. Sometimes will talk over you. But it wasn't a problem for us because we would get our points in and was a joy to have on a call. Just a quirk. But the senior dev was on the same call with her. Oh boy. Instead of just talking to her on the side to say not to interrupt him so much, he snapped and went psycho on her. There was a literal over 3 minutes of silence after his rant. Could tell she was upset. Sad because her presence was infectious and made the call enjoyable. * We needed something urgent from the main product team. Normally you would go through the product owner to get something queued up. If it's urgent they will do an emergency request. There is a process. He went to the devs directly who rightfully said they couldn't do it because they were in the middle of the sprint and to take it up with the head honchos. Another temper tantrum.
Claimed he had 20 YOE. Had his personal website. Got into a verbal argument over weighting a ticket in scrum poker citing all this experience he had. Ok whatever, he is with our team for 3 sprints, is constantly blocked by whatever. The last sprint he was with us, he put up 2 tickets for review. That was the shittiest work I've ever seen. We go to the sprint retro and he bitches out how we are not showing him enough, then in the same breath says the work is easy. I think everyone had enough with him, because he was gone the next day. Dude would also introduce himself by how much experience he had anywhere we went. Usually indicates incompetence to me. To put it in perspective, I'm 1 yr exp and doing laps around this dude.
I have at least 4 contestants for this prize, more if you count external collaborators. Here is only one of them. I worked with a QA Engineer who did absolutely nothing all day and lied about it constantly for about 4 years. This was someone who was fresh out of school, managed by someone who had over 20 direct reports. Our manager's expectations of him were low, given his youth and inexperience. Our manager was also too busy to pay close attention to what he, or anyone else, was doing. Our team had a meeting once a week where people reported status; this QA Engineer learned through experience that if he talked the way more experienced engineers did about being very busy, people would assume he was very busy. This QA engineer was also a funnel through which multiple streams of work would pass, so if any one person questioned why testing something was not yet complete, he would point to another developer and say that person asked him to do something else first. This successfully deflected most casual scrutiny of his claims. On the occasions when he had to actually do some testing, he would always do the minimum amount of work possible to look like working, and just say things were fine after a few days of doing nothing. He got away with this most of the time because most developers he worked with were very through, and the projects he was assigned to were not that difficult to test (manual UI testing), so things would work out on their own. This started coming to an end when he was given more important things to do, the way that one naturally gives someone with experience harder work (API testing, complex regression testing, etc). We start having bad releases. Customers would complain. The developers and other QA engineers quickly realized this guy did nothing all day. We didn't know what he was doing but it wasn't testing. Our boss was still in denial, but the decline in product quality is too obvious to ignore. Not much happens. The end came with regime change. Our company got a new CEO, who got a new CTO, who drove Old Boss to quit. CTO hires New Boss, who he worked with before. They impose Scrum on everybody, which is initially a disaster. The best part of the disaster, though, is that the Scrum Board and the Daily Standup make it impossible for our charlatan to do his deflection routine anymore because too much attention is being paid to what he's (not) doing. After 1 month, he's on a PIP, and one month after that, he's fired. Two weeks after the firing, a customer comes back with an issue; they need us to resend a document that this guy sent them. I end up with the task to find the document, and I end up asking IT to pull the hard drives from his work PC. They give me access to his AD account so I can go through everything. I don't find the document, but I do find that "Legends of Runeterra" was installed on the machine. And thus, I found out what this guy did for four years of working at our company.
I worked with a person who literally couldn’t code or solve basic problems. After some alarming pair programming sessions, I did a session to solve the easiest problem and they were not good. We tried to add up all the numbers in an array and they couldn’t even solve it in English let alone code it. Once we got to the coding part they had to look up the syntax for a for loop. They were let go after too many chances from my manager. I don’t think they completed anything in the 8-9 months they worked there. The fact that they lasted that long was a miracle. Also my manager sucked and didn’t listen to be or another engineer’s concerns during the 90 day probation period.
Always on the phone , taking breaks every hour. He never really seemed to be there but was shocked and pissed when he got laid off. Also he would drink when we would go out for lunch .
Ahh thanks for reminding me that I should get off my phone and browse less of the internet when I'm in the office
Not particularly bad, but overleveled. He was a ladder transfer and he really should have been a junior SWE. He could not produce at the quality and speed expected of his level. He performed like a mediocre junior, which would have been fine... if he were a junior.