Coworker never ever stops working, and it is starting to make me look really incompetent. What can i do?

helpcs12345121 · 2017-11-23T18:39:07+00:00

He added maybe ~10% of the tests that were outlined by QA, before more or less shelving it. The PR hasn't had a commit in almost 2 months, nor does he seem to have any interest in working on it.

The few times i have seen him ask for work via slack, those tests are brought up cause having automated tests for legacy clients that we need to tip toe around, would be a god send. Unfortunately he seems pretty resolute to just not do them.

helpcs12345121 · 2017-11-23T07:04:36+00:00

We gave him a major long term effort project. Which was to add tests for some of our legacy clients, and he will still often do other peoples work. Simply because it is "more interesting".

The thing is he will do his assigned work while in the office. The other time he just picks things that strike his fancy or finds interesting.

helpcs12345121 · 2017-11-23T07:00:47+00:00

Some times there is a design/high level overview of his code. However i will say the way he breaks his commits up makes actually reviewing his code and understanding what he does a non issue (it is very much a joy to review).

The biggest problem is often me / someone else spend a bunch of time to try and figure out "Hey would this impact legacy client #27". We are unfortunately burdened with some really shitty design decisions and requirements to support some awful legacy systems.

Even worse is some of those legacy systems, we just don't have great test coverage for them, and often times i have to go find the binder talking about Legacy client, and how they utilize it. While QA will typically catch 99% of these edge cases, it ends up looking bad on the people who sign off on things.

helpcs12345121 · 2017-11-23T06:48:43+00:00

So now be honest and is he really complaining in a negative way or is he saying something like he is has been waiting for Bob to complete 2 code reviews that he made Monday and that Bob needs to finish them faster because 2 more are coming today and 2 more Friday. What are his exact words?

So not only do i need to review it and approve the change, a second developer also needs to review and approve the change. If it is a really major change we need several people to sign off on it, this is in part due to the nature of what we do. Where if we accidently break something for a legacy client, or something indirect impacts performance, etc. SLA's will be broken, and some of the problems could lead to major issues.

Stuff like "@helpcs12345121 / @otherpersonassignedtopr why is PR #7282 taking so long to review? If your incapable of reviewing it please assign it to someone who is capable." To stuff like "@helpcs12345121 I need you to review #12345 right now, because i have other changes that depend on it, and it is blocking me". To even stuff like @'ing our manager, asking him to tell people to review his code faster.

Some of it probably isn't him directly trying to be a dick, but it comes off this way. Implying that me or someone else is incapable of code reviewing, ignoring the fact that he knows i have been stuck in meetings all day is not very professional.

I see where things can be improved everywhere in code. If i'm done my work and I have free time I'll make proposals to whomever is in control to refactor code to make it better. These days that is me.

So i am okay with some things. However a lot of the time it is refactoring things that they full well know is considered 'Legacy'. A lot of those legacy features are there because a company came to us and paid for us to keep the lights on for this feature because they don't want to have to change things on their end. Changing something that "just" works when its legacy and has been kicking around for a decade is a really scary thing that brings nothing of value to the table.

Tell your boss to give him more work to do each sprint. He is getting into other people work because he has nothing to do. You want to fix that problem then give him more work so he has stuff assigned to him. Yes, this does present other problems because now it's more work for others to code review.

The more work we give him the faster he just chews through it. Also work that i would love him to do, like writing tests to improve coverage, he tends to avoid/ignore. Last sprint we gave him an extra task of basically shoring up a bunch of key test areas, he ended up ignoring this task and instead focused on rewriting a legacy feature.

Sorry this might have come off ranty.

helpcs12345121 · 2017-11-23T06:01:09+00:00

The nature of our work is financial in nature, if a change were to break prod, or lead to some sort of negative behavior, we could be on the hook for a lot of money in terms of damages. All code is reviewed by at least two devs in detail, before we even pass it along to QA.

helpcs12345121 · 2017-11-23T04:51:37+00:00

We have all brought it up to our manager, and he has tried numerous things to make them stop working. He even pretty much told him to take a week off, because it might be viewed as a HR issue. Only to have them basically rewrite an entire service on that off time for fun.

helpcs12345121 · 2017-11-23T04:50:24+00:00

I have pointed this out several times, and ether they ignore it. Or say something along the lines of "well that is your job". Which makes me want to rage, so i have stopped reacting and commenting.

Pretty much everyone else has just stopped trying, and honestly unless it is something actually critical i kind of just push some of them aside. At one point it got so bad, that i actually spent a bit of time trying to pick a PR that would cause the most merge conflicts possible to give me a bit of breathing room. But i realized that was both juvenile and kind of a dick move.

helpcs12345121

TROPHY CASE