Developer on my team QUIT/FIRED

[torpid]

Warning, geek .net talk below. Meaningless to non .net geeks (or maybe smart Java people)

I am fortunate that my coworker who is like this is known by everyone to be that way. She uses passive aggressive means to insult people all the time and complain. But my boss is on to her. She likes to say, "I'm not complaining. I just wanted to let you know". And she likes to reference her personal web site work as an example of how to properly do things, such as connection strings in aspx code behind.

My favorite thing she does is complain that our infrastructure code is "not .net" but is "something on top of .net" and thus she doesn't know how to use it and often talks about "coding around" the infrastructure code. The infrastructure even has a feature where you can turn on SQL logging and it will log to a file so you can see what's beign sent, but nonetheless every single time she's had a sql problem she complains that she doesn't know how to find the SQL and demands to know what line of what file to put a breakpoint. And then I acquiesce and tell her and she can't always figure out to just look at the "cmd" variable which is a "datacommand" and look at the SQL and parameters.

She also complains about the infrastructure as being responsible for everything. Even things that are basic knowledge and not issues at all, such as not being able to pass in an array in a bind parameter as just a single long string with commas. She goes on tirades because it "works" in "SQL Navigator" when in fact she's hard coding the SQL in SQL Nav without bind parameters.

In fact she complained that she can't create a button in a footer template of a repeater, then on the page load wipe out and recreate the entire repeater before the button click event is fired. She believes it is the infrastructure code that causes the event validation error in that case, not realizing that she has wiped out the "old" button and made a "new" button.

 

[Kaido]

Originally posted by: torpid
Warning, geek .net talk below. Meaningless to non .net geeks (or maybe smart Java people)

I am fortunate that my coworker who is like this is known by everyone to be that way. She uses passive aggressive means to insult people all the time and complain. But my boss is on to her. She likes to say, "I'm not complaining. I just wanted to let you know". And she likes to reference her personal web site work as an example of how to properly do things, such as connection strings in aspx code behind.

My favorite thing she does is complain that our infrastructure code is "not .net" but is "something on top of .net" and thus she doesn't know how to use it and often talks about "coding around" the infrastructure code. The infrastructure even has a feature where you can turn on SQL logging and it will log to a file so you can see what's beign sent, but nonetheless every single time she's had a sql problem she complains that she doesn't know how to find the SQL and demands to know what line of what file to put a breakpoint. And then I acquiesce and tell her and she can't always figure out to just look at the "cmd" variable which is a "datacommand" and look at the SQL and parameters.

She also complains about the infrastructure as being responsible for everything. Even things that are basic knowledge and not issues at all, such as not being able to pass in an array in a bind parameter as just a single long string with commas. She goes on tirades because it "works" in "SQL Navigator" when in fact she's hard coding the SQL in SQL Nav without bind parameters.

In fact she complained that she can't create a button in a footer template of a repeater, then on the page load wipe out and recreate the entire repeater before the button click event is fired. She believes it is the infrastructure code that causes the event validation error in that case, not realizing that she has wiped out the "old" button and made a "new" button.

1, for you too
2, yay for PHP

:Q

 

[Chryso]

Originally posted by: jbourne77

Originally posted by: foghorn67
Is this the guy that used big yet meaningless words in meetings. Like the word 'synergy'?

YEP!

That's the beauty of this. We didn't really have "office politics" before he got here. Everyone just did their jobs. Once he got here, he ruined my team's dynamic. People were becoming more and more worried about not getting credit for their work, and getting blamed for problems they had no part it. That's how he worked. He took credit for everything he DIDN'T do, and would then start stabbing people in the back when he made mistakes.

One time he checked code in to source control that ended up clearing out a customer's database. When he realized what he had done, instead of telling our DBA, he went above my head and to my boss and said the he (the boss) should look into our DBA's work ethic, because he (Tom) doesn't think he pays close enough attention to his work.

He always underestimated the power of source control, thankfully. It was never difficult catching him in a lie, with ample proof to back it up.

But what was so frustrating, especially in the beginning, was he could talk a good game with people who weren't technically educated. To someone who doesn't know anything about development, he would sound extremely proficient. He loved being the "idea guy".

Finally all that bullshit is OVER.

You should have had him moved into sales.

 

[Stuxnet]

Originally posted by: xSauronx
a guy like that lasted a year?

yipes

My boss is VERY stubborn. He hired this guy directly, and he's embarrassed now that he put so much stock in him. I tried to ignore if for quite some time, but after awhile, it just wasn't possible.

 

[Queasy]

Originally posted by: jbourne77
Mistakes
8. His testing methods SUCKED. He would run his code through one ideal set of circumstances, and if it didn't explode in his face, he considered it complete and tested. This has actually been a major problem, because while his responsibilities in our projects have been extremely narrow in scope, he yields more bugs than the rest of my team combined. They're also catastrophic, how-the-fvck-did-you-miss-this bugs.

What testing procedures do you use?

We usually go
Dev unit test -> Dev peered -> QA system test -> rinse/repeat -> Customer UAT

Since we started having Devs peer their work before it gets sent to QA for testing, the number of bugs we've had coming out of Dev has dipped significantly.

 

[blackdogdeek]

Originally posted by: xSauronx
a guy like that lasted a year?

yipes

it is very difficult to fire someone in big corporations.

 

[Stuxnet]

Originally posted by: torpid
Warning, geek .net talk below. Meaningless to non .net geeks (or maybe smart Java people)

I am fortunate that my coworker who is like this is known by everyone to be that way. She uses passive aggressive means to insult people all the time and complain. But my boss is on to her. She likes to say, "I'm not complaining. I just wanted to let you know". And she likes to reference her personal web site work as an example of how to properly do things, such as connection strings in aspx code behind.

My favorite thing she does is complain that our infrastructure code is "not .net" but is "something on top of .net" and thus she doesn't know how to use it and often talks about "coding around" the infrastructure code. The infrastructure even has a feature where you can turn on SQL logging and it will log to a file so you can see what's beign sent, but nonetheless every single time she's had a sql problem she complains that she doesn't know how to find the SQL and demands to know what line of what file to put a breakpoint. And then I acquiesce and tell her and she can't always figure out to just look at the "cmd" variable which is a "datacommand" and look at the SQL and parameters.

She also complains about the infrastructure as being responsible for everything. Even things that are basic knowledge and not issues at all, such as not being able to pass in an array in a bind parameter as just a single long string with commas. She goes on tirades because it "works" in "SQL Navigator" when in fact she's hard coding the SQL in SQL Nav without bind parameters.

In fact she complained that she can't create a button in a footer template of a repeater, then on the page load wipe out and recreate the entire repeater before the button click event is fired. She believes it is the infrastructure code that causes the event validation error in that case, not realizing that she has wiped out the "old" button and made a "new" button.

Pfft... I got ya beat

Tom didn't know what a web.config was until I explained it to him. He was hired a Senior Programmer/Analyst and made $70,000/year. He also had no knowledge of user controls (.ascx), Viewstate, or Properties (accessor methods).

We have a data assembly, an in-house web component assembly, etc. He finally threw up his hands one day: "What the heck is an assembly???!!!"

 

[Queasy]

Originally posted by: blackdogdeek

Originally posted by: xSauronx
a guy like that lasted a year?

yipes

it is very difficult to fire someone in big corporations.

And God forbid if they are a minority. Had a guy at my first job that couldn't type much less read or write code. Everyone knew he was a problem but management seemed to be afraid to fire him since he was a minority. He was eventually let go much later than he should have been because of lay-offs.

 

[Kaido]

Originally posted by: jbourne77

Originally posted by: xSauronx
a guy like that lasted a year?

yipes

My boss is VERY stubborn. He hired this guy directly, and he's embarrassed now that he put so much stock in him. I tried to ignore if for quite some time, but after awhile, it just wasn't possible.

That's one thing I've learned, it's 99% political. You can do good or bad, but as long as you show up nearly every day and act confident, you can squeeze your way out of anything. I'm not saying I do (lol), but you have to understand egos and feelings and whatnot. Like you said, your boss hired him directly, so if he fired the guy it would look bad on him - it would say that he made a bad hiring decision and doesn't know what he's doing. Plus there's the friendship side of things (the guy was your boss's school buddy or something?), so he didn't want to chance nixing that relationship on the account of having to fire him, or even not hire him in the first place because he had a previous friendly relationship with him. It's complicated and I don't really care for office politics Just remember, you're not really working for your job, you're working for the boss directly above you. If you don't tick him off and if you do good work to boot, that's the closest you'll get to job security.

Oh and if I see a thread in OT by your buddy titled "I quit my job at a stupid development company" I'm going to LOL

 

[ViviTheMage]

elaborations!!

 

[Phokus]

Originally posted by: blackdogdeek

Originally posted by: xSauronx
a guy like that lasted a year?

yipes

it is very difficult to fire someone in big corporations.

why is that?

 

[mugs]

Originally posted by: jbourne77
Mistakes

2. He made no effort to learn our in-house standards and methods. This guy would do insane ****** like passing entire controls as parameters. The best example of this is rather than passing datasets to move data around, he would instead pass the controls the data was bound to. WTF on so many levels.

I can think of cases where it makes sense to pass a control as a parameter, and I'm pretty sure I've done it before - but the specific case you gave is idiotic.

3. In early efforts to "neutralize" him, I made him the install/upgrade bitch on the team. I no longer had him coding anything. Instead, he was to sit at his desk and upgrade our software at customer sites whenever someone requested. Our upgrade procedure consists of 3 steps: back up config, install, restore config. He ALWAYS forgot to back it up, so he would blow away our customers' configurations ALL THE TIME.

Sounds like the installation process could be improved. Still his fault, but it's better to remove the potential for human error like that.

4. When asked "why the fvck did you blow away the customer's config?!", instead of fessing up he would lie. "Oh, VisualStudio must have cached this or that blah blah blah." Are you fvcking kidding me Corky? Is that the best you can do?

Unacceptable. I've made a few mistakes in the past, and when I do I admit it and tell my boss what I'm doing to make sure it doesn't happen in the future. Works very well.

7. He refused to work late. Once the clock hit 5:00, he was GONE NO MATTER WHAT. The irony of that is that the rest of us usually had to stay to try to recover from what he did between 8 and 5. My boss HATES "clock watchers", so this hurt him a LOT. I don't really hate clock watchers, but if you fvck something up, you're the one staying to fix it.

I HATE people like that. I've worked with those people before. Not many of them at my company. I rarely/never have to work more than 40 hours in a week, but I often work more than 8 hours in a day if I'm on a roll. I like my job - I enjoy doing it. I don't dread being at work. Hell I don't even mind doing a little bit of work on vacation - it just reminds my bosses of how valuable I am to them.

8. His testing methods SUCKED. He would run his code through one ideal set of circumstances, and if it didn't explode in his face, he considered it complete and tested. This has actually been a major problem, because while his responsibilities in our projects have been extremely narrow in scope, he yields more bugs than the rest of my team combined. They're also catastrophic, how-the-fvck-did-you-miss-this bugs.

Do you not have dedicated testers? Or are you saying he released his code to the testers with too many bugs?

 

[sixone]

Congrats.

 

[Kaido]

Originally posted by: jbourne77
Pfft... I got ya beat

Tom didn't know what a web.config was until I explained it to him. He was hired a Senior Programmer/Analyst and made $70,000/year. He also had no knowledge of user controls (.ascx), Viewstate, or Properties (accessor methods).

We have a data assembly, an in-house web component assembly, etc. He finally threw up his hands one day: "What the heck is an assembly???!!!"

$70k a year for incompetence?? Sheesh, I need to buy myself a snake oil sales kit :Q

 

[Darkstar757]

I have a serious question to the OP. I know the guy was a jerk however if he had not been such a a-hole and came to you for help with his coding issues would you have helped him become a better coder?




Thanks,
Darkstar

 

[Czar]

"1. First and foremost, he coded like a VB 6 developer. I've found that the most difficult part of finding a good .NET developer is finding someone who either a) successfully adopted OO methodologies while transitioning to .NET, or, better yet; b) never used VB 6. "

******, my company is moving from vb to visual studio
thankfully I'm networking

 

[Drakkon]

In my short time I've learned that MBA + computer science is never a good thing. I've never met someone with a good business background who can follow good programming priciples. Sure they can write software but will it be good software? unfortunately I've yet to find that to be the case. They can however sell the %@# out themselves and make you THINK they will be able to take it all on. I rememebr our last interview process I had 3 MBA's and + college dropout of a CS program come in. the mba's acted all tuff and smart yet the simplst questions about parameter passing seemed to elude them. The CS guy with less than a year of knowledge knew more than they did. The real test came when i said write a piece of code - a simple read an XML file and tell me whats in one of its properties - 1 of the MBA's gave up after 4 hours (we just let him sit there and try as long as he wanted - it was sad/funny at the same time), the second MBA jsut walked out saying stuff like that was below him, The thrid MBA finished but took him almost an hour and couldn't quiet get the data formatted correctly, the CS guy who didnt even know how to program in the lanaguage i proposed to write it in had me a soln in 15 mins that was correct and worked perfectly.
The moral of the story - I dunno - but if i ever see MBA or business programming on a guys resume for a developer ever again - that guy goes on the BOTTOM of the stack.

 

[Descartes]

Originally posted by: jbourne77
Mistakes

1. First and foremost, he coded like a VB 6 developer. I've found that the most difficult part of finding a good .NET developer is finding someone who either a) successfully adopted OO methodologies while transitioning to .NET, or, better yet; b) never used VB 6.

Honestly, I think it's far worse, but I guess it depends on what you mean by adopted. I find people that make use of every OO "feature" possible, but they still don't have the slightest comprehension about how to be able to organize a solution in terms of OO; in other words, they're not thinking in OO. Evidence of this usually manifests itself in different ways, but some notables are: A lot of switch statements, objects with names like "Manager" or "Controller" (in that they literally manage or control other objects), fat objects that do far too much, lack of behavioral cohesion, etc. etc.

2. He made no effort to learn our in-house standards and methods. This guy would do insane ****** like passing entire controls as parameters. The best example of this is rather than passing datasets to move data around, he would instead pass the controls the data was bound to. WTF on so many levels.

Ugh. I absolutely hate people like that. We have a lot of them, and the argument tends to be "it's hard to break habits." It's really not. A good developer can easily adopt whatever style necessary. There's little worse than seeing multiple code styles in a codebase.

3. In early efforts to "neutralize" him, I made him the install/upgrade bitch on the team. I no longer had him coding anything. Instead, he was to sit at his desk and upgrade our software at customer sites whenever someone requested. Our upgrade procedure consists of 3 steps: back up config, install, restore config. He ALWAYS forgot to back it up, so he would blow away our customers' configurations ALL THE TIME.

4. When asked "why the fvck did you blow away the customer's config?!", instead of fessing up he would lie. "Oh, VisualStudio must have cached this or that blah blah blah." Are you fvcking kidding me Corky? Is that the best you can do?

5. He would argue with people he was taking direction from. If I wanted XYZ implemented, he would get this perplexed look on his face as if to say "I think that's a stupid idea, but instead of telling you outright, I'm just going to look perplexed as to why you think this is wise". I was there the first time he did that to my boss, and my boss literally told him to wipe the look on his face off or he'd knock it off with a baseball bat.

6. In any given week, it wasn't uncommon for him to have two dentist appointments, one for himself and one for his "wife".

7. He refused to work late. Once the clock hit 5:00, he was GONE NO MATTER WHAT. The irony of that is that the rest of us usually had to stay to try to recover from what he did between 8 and 5. My boss HATES "clock watchers", so this hurt him a LOT. I don't really hate clock watchers, but if you fvck something up, you're the one staying to fix it.

8. His testing methods SUCKED. He would run his code through one ideal set of circumstances, and if it didn't explode in his face, he considered it complete and tested. This has actually been a major problem, because while his responsibilities in our projects have been extremely narrow in scope, he yields more bugs than the rest of my team combined. They're also catastrophic, how-the-fvck-did-you-miss-this bugs.

I'll post more as they come to me.

Wow, he just sounds like a tool all around. There's not likely to be anything you can do for someone so clumsy and unwilling to learn from mistakes.

 

[sygyzy]

You seem like a pretty mature and competent person. AKA, an adult. Why didn't you just bring this up with your superiors earlier rather than hatch an elaborate plan to "oust" him. Are you programming for a real company? Is this .NET or .PLAYSCHOOL?

 

[Phokus]

Originally posted by: Drakkon
In my short time I've learned that MBA + computer science is never a good thing. I've never met someone with a good business background who can follow good programming priciples. Sure they can write software but will it be good software? unfortunately I've yet to find that to be the case. They can however sell the %@# out themselves and make you THINK they will be able to take it all on. I rememebr our last interview process I had 3 MBA's and + college dropout of a CS program come in. the mba's acted all tuff and smart yet the simplst questions about parameter passing seemed to elude them. The CS guy with less than a year of knowledge knew more than they did. The real test came when i said write a piece of code - a simple read an XML file and tell me whats in one of its properties - 1 of the MBA's gave up after 4 hours (we just let him sit there and try as long as he wanted - it was sad/funny at the same time), the second MBA jsut walked out saying stuff like that was below him, The thrid MBA finished but took him almost an hour and couldn't quiet get the data formatted correctly, the CS guy who didnt even know how to program in the lanaguage i proposed to write it in had me a soln in 15 mins that was correct and worked perfectly.
The moral of the story - I dunno - but if i ever see MBA or business programming on a guys resume for a developer ever again - that guy goes on the BOTTOM of the stack.

Why are MBA guys applying for programming jobs?

Also, did the college dropout get the position?

 

[her209]

Hey wait a tick! My name is Tom!

 

[torpid]

Originally posted by: jbourne77Pfft... I got ya beat

Tom didn't know what a web.config was until I explained it to him. He was hired a Senior Programmer/Analyst and made $70,000/year. He also had no knowledge of user controls (.ascx), Viewstate, or Properties (accessor methods).

We have a data assembly, an in-house web component assembly, etc. He finally threw up his hands one day: "What the heck is an assembly???!!!"

That guy sounds so awful I don't know how he lasted so long. We have people like that here but they are open to learning and don't profess knowledge they don't have.

 

[Descartes]

Originally posted by: jbourne77

Originally posted by: torpid
Warning, geek .net talk below. Meaningless to non .net geeks (or maybe smart Java people)

I am fortunate that my coworker who is like this is known by everyone to be that way. She uses passive aggressive means to insult people all the time and complain. But my boss is on to her. She likes to say, "I'm not complaining. I just wanted to let you know". And she likes to reference her personal web site work as an example of how to properly do things, such as connection strings in aspx code behind.

My favorite thing she does is complain that our infrastructure code is "not .net" but is "something on top of .net" and thus she doesn't know how to use it and often talks about "coding around" the infrastructure code. The infrastructure even has a feature where you can turn on SQL logging and it will log to a file so you can see what's beign sent, but nonetheless every single time she's had a sql problem she complains that she doesn't know how to find the SQL and demands to know what line of what file to put a breakpoint. And then I acquiesce and tell her and she can't always figure out to just look at the "cmd" variable which is a "datacommand" and look at the SQL and parameters.

She also complains about the infrastructure as being responsible for everything. Even things that are basic knowledge and not issues at all, such as not being able to pass in an array in a bind parameter as just a single long string with commas. She goes on tirades because it "works" in "SQL Navigator" when in fact she's hard coding the SQL in SQL Nav without bind parameters.

In fact she complained that she can't create a button in a footer template of a repeater, then on the page load wipe out and recreate the entire repeater before the button click event is fired. She believes it is the infrastructure code that causes the event validation error in that case, not realizing that she has wiped out the "old" button and made a "new" button.

Pfft... I got ya beat

Tom didn't know what a web.config was until I explained it to him. He was hired a Senior Programmer/Analyst and made $70,000/year. He also had no knowledge of user controls (.ascx), Viewstate, or Properties (accessor methods).

We have a data assembly, an in-house web component assembly, etc. He finally threw up his hands one day: "What the heck is an assembly???!!!"

Ahh, I might have you beat

A few examples:

1) We had a guy that would reflect on everything. If he had a System.Object, he would reflect to get to ToString().

2) We had another guy that "couldn't remember" how to create a property in .NET. I was walking through something with him, instructed him to override a property, and he had forgotten the syntax. Right.

3) We had someone try to write this code: this = null;. We had another try to write this = new Foo();. Believe it.

4) One of my favorite methods was something like this...

private bool IsFileExist(string fileName)
{
if (!File.Exists(fileName))
{
throw new FileNotFoundException("Hi, I can't think properly");
}

return true;
}

I have so many examples it's ridiculous, and ALL of these people make ~$75/hr or more. These specific examples are in one of the largest software projects ever to hit big 4 accounting.

 

[Chryso]

Originally posted by: sygyzy
You seem like a pretty mature and competent person. AKA, an adult. Why didn't you just bring this up with your superiors earlier rather than hatch an elaborate plan to "oust" him. Are you programming for a real company? Is this .NET or .PLAYSCHOOL?

1/10 troll attempt.

 

[miniMUNCH]

Originally posted by: blackdogdeek

Originally posted by: xSauronx
a guy like that lasted a year?

yipes

it is very difficult to fire someone in big corporations.

Nigh impossible in some cases. If they are a minority... then it is even worse.

The company I worked for last (grad school now)... we used the "humiliation via demotion" tactic. Pay stayed the same but they gotet demoted in an orderly, documented fashion that, somehow, everyone knew about. 90+% people would leave inside two months because their ego couldn't bear it.