What can be done for programmers that lack "it" ? (piefed.social)

submitted 2 days ago by WhatTheDuck@piefed.social to c/programming@lemmy.ml

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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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[-] AnarchoSnowPlow@midwest.social 3 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

Anyone can learn to code well enough for a corporate environment.

As the repo owner, you can put in place PR guardrails to help you manage the workload it puts on you. You can enforce pre-commit linting and code formatting, mandatory PR templates, size limits on PRs, etc and these can limit the chunks of work you're sent by this person.

This is part of creating a culture of good code, enforcing code standards and contribution behaviors comes with the territory as you move up the chain in your career.

Another part unfortunately, even if you're not a supervisor is having sometimes tough conversations with contributors it's just part of the deal.

"Hey Bob, I just wanted to connect with you. It seems like you're having kind of a tough time keeping up with our standards (producing code that's usable for our team, or something said tactfully like that), is there something more that I can do to help you? Or is there something specific you're having trouble with? I just want to help you be the most successful that you can be, because the more successful you are, the more successful our team as a whole is."

If you have a discussion or two like this and it's not working out, then maybe you need to talk to Bob's supervisor/manager directly about the issue. Sometimes people don't even realize what's going on.

[-] WhatTheDuck@piefed.social 2 points 2 days ago

Anyone can learn to code well enough for a corporate environment.

The bar is even lower for a government environment. 🥲

Thankfully, we're already setup with a linter/auto code formatting. Mandatory PR templates/size limits would probably be overkill with a team this small - but I get your point. He really just needs to stick to the ticket's original scope and I'm going to harp on it more. We just had another talk about it on Thursday.

I appreciate the suggested dialogue. We've had conversations like this - mainly to see his openness to a lead in developer-adjacent things like testing. He's not very... self aware or well experienced career wise to say the least.

We're at the "figure out somewhere he can fit" or "remove him from the team" phase. We'd prefer to find a way to keep him.

Thank you for the sound advice/suggestions though.