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?
Bob cannot be saved at all. If you cannot move him out of the project, I suggest you change mental gears and see this as a deliberate burden, imposed on you by your bosses, to enable you to develop people skills needed for your eventual promotion.
This gave me a good chuckle. If only that were true! I'm not in a typical work environment -- promotions/bosses work differently.
My people skills hit their maximum potential from previous management roles... There's no where but down from here! 🫠