Apologies for being nonspecific, but I don’t know how else to describe Bob’s struggles. Bob has been on the team for over a year now, and his code is just… not okay.

To his credit, he can make something that works… but that’s not enough. His code belongs on programming horror. He’s not supposed to be my junior; I’m just the repository’s lead. I spend half my week helping him. Reviewing his pull requests takes hours because it’s always a rats nest that needs significant refactoring/simplification. I’d love to say “do better” - but this is his best.

Most recently, Bob crashed his dev environment with a getter. (A mix of nested parsing logic with Angular’s change detection = CPU crashed). It’d be impressive if it wasn’t so irritating since I’ve already had a conversation with him about proper use of getters/setters. I even demonstrated how spammy the calls can be with a console.log statement for emphasis.

I could go on, but this is enough of a rant. I don’t really know how to handle him going forward; I spend so much time helping and teaching him but he retains none of it.

Is there any hope for him? Any learning material? Advice on balancing my own sanity and workload?

  • rozodru@piefed.socialEnglish
    1·
    6 days ago

    ah I’ve seen this plenty of times before in my career. Graphic Designers/UI/UX/etc dudes that want to transition to coding. Hell back in like 2002 I started out as a Graphic Designer myself. It’s understandable, it’s a valid transition.

    So it’s safe to assume Bob was self taught? If you and your company as you’ve previously stated value Bob as part of the team then are there any options for your company to provide classes? I used to work for several places where this was an option for employees. Like they would pay for classes at the local community college or whatever. Maybe they can pay for him to take online courses? It’s a cheaper route in the long run as opposed to terminating Bob and then going through the process of hiring another dev which in todays environment is an absolute shit show.

    Maybe consider talking to HR or one of your managers on behalf of Bob to potentially bring up the possibility of providing Bob with some classes? I don’t know I’m just spit balling here.