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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?

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[-] WhatTheDuck@piefed.social 5 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Appreciate the advice; I've been indirectly documenting it with the other devs since they were wondering why Bob's pull requests take 2-3 rounds of fixes. (They were starting to wonder if I was just being a hard ass about everything).

But holy shit I am never ever letting him script anything that has the potential to last beyond a few months, as it’s brilliant, but completely unmaintainable, impossible to debug, and generally can’t handle edge cases.

This sounds like Bob, but subtract a few years of experience... but finding things with a short lifespan is hard on a project that's all new code. The architecture/long term planning is crucial and that's where Bob struggles.

Point is, it’s your boss’s job to figure out where all his people fit into the grand scheme of things.

Agreed, but it's a small team of 4 devs (myself included) + 3 others. We're basically at the phase of trying to find him something or else we'll need to remove him. He's a good fit socially and is genuinely trying.

this post was submitted on 05 Oct 2025
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