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?
Can you (help learn to) chunk his work into smaller units? That way any single unit being a horror won’t affect so much? It would mean checking in more often with him. But it would be shorter check-ins, and the feedback would be more specific.
I've been trying to. The giant pull requests are his own self-inflicted pain. He'll massively expand the scope of the original ticket -- or does everything all at once rather than one piece at a time. It's something we talked about, again, on Thursday because his current ticket was supposed to be a quick 1-day thing that's now 2+ weeks. The additions are good ideas, but easily should have been their own tickets/done afterwards.
(I was on vacation when he was assigned the task; it's too late to course correct)