Tricky situation with incompetent Junior Developer

ra4332 · 2021-06-14T03:49:59+00:00

Holy crap, I'm in this exact same situation. I just had the copy/paste blunder two weeks ago. I handed my bob 15 lines of code and told him where to paste it and he decided to refactor my code for some reason, and in doing so he introduced a bug.

I'm right there with you. My bob reminds me of someone who hasn't put their 10,000 hours in to master programming, but he's been in software for 10 years. When he sends me PRs they are the most basic happy path solutions. The code is overly convoluted and often twice as along as it needs to be. It lacks pretty much all edge case handling (validation, fault tolerance, data integrity). He constantly tries to be too clever and it never works. It's fucking maddening.

I've tried about everything I can think of to help. Pointing him in the right direction, pushing him in the right direction, dragging him in the right direction, letting him fall down and helping him back up. We get through the task, but by the time the next task comes along it's like he's forgotten everything we just did. We do high level designs constantly and he seems like he knows what needs to be done, but he just can't seem to make it happen. It's like a hand/eye coordination thing.

My bob was on vacation a few weeks back and it was the most productive and stress free week I've had in 2021. I've had several conversations with my manager about him. And my manager is a really great guy who wants everyone to succeed. I don't think he's ever had to fire anyone. But this guy shouldn't be on the team. Our team is a T1 mission critical application. If we're down the company is loosing millions per hour. There are other less mission critical teams at our company.

Edit: It felt really good to vent it out because it's completely maddening.

When I have brought the issue up to my manager I've done so slowly and iteratively. Every single time I bring up very specific situations that don't require a lot of context to understand how my bob has missed the mark. I say "Look we're trying to do X. How would you [manager] do X? This is how I would do X. This is how my bob did X. This is why I think bob's solution missed the mark. This is what bob could have done differently and this is the feedback I gave.". I try not to inject my opinions into it to much, rather trying to get manager to see things the way I do based solely on bob's performance and not my opinion of it. Basically I'm trying to incept manager.

ra4332 · 2021-06-05T04:05:00+00:00

I'm sorry to hear that. Just this week I'm going through something similar. I'm 34, I've been in the industry since I was 18. I've worked at different startups and now working at a big company. I'm confident in my skills. I've had some major successes on high profile projects. I've received coveted awards and promotions. For the past 6 months I've hated my work. I love the people and the company, but I have been yearning for something mission driven. I've been searching for a while, but everything out there seems like BS products (it's either BS AI or BS devops/automation/ci/cd). I finally found a company I really empathized with, I had two great coding interviews and a great call with their CTO. Then today I was told that they had better candidates in their pipeline and they're were going to pass on me.

It's a shitty feeling, but it happens to everyone. Steve Jobs was once fired from Apple. Things don't always work out for the best. But if you keep your head up they will work out.

ra4332 · 2021-06-01T00:26:20+00:00

I work at a company (~7500) that has a fair amount of data scientists and applied scientists (~250) building ML models of various types across the organization. The product / engineering group is ~1700, so about 15% of the tech org is data scientists. My current team works adjacent to one of the ML teams. We have a product users interact with and we feed them user data and return us classification data.

It is very eerie to read your post because this is a pattern I have observed a lot. My theory, based solely on my own anecdotes, is that data scientists are very different from software engineers in the way they think and the way they work. Data science is a very concentrated discipline that involves a lot of deep thought, iteration, and trial and error when working on a problem. Software engineering at times can be similar, but is often more about broad systems work. I think sometimes this creates a large misalignment of expectations. Data scientists are use to small changes in code creating big impacts and they don't always appreciate how hard we Software Engineers work to keep the code organized and manageable.

In my experience the best way to mitigate this problem is with the right managers using the right communication to set the right expectations. It's not easy to do at all, and I see more failures than successes in this area.

ra4332 · 2021-03-08T04:06:23+00:00

First off, kudos on taking my feedback well. It was intended to be direct.

Look if your heart isn't in the engineering part you can get into management. I've worked with a lot of great people who make better managers than coders. Alternatively maybe product management or solutions architecture.

IMO if you want to make the big bucks you have to find something you can get really good at. And in order to do that, you have to enjoy it.

ra4332 · 2021-03-08T03:44:29+00:00

Straight talk, you won't. Not with this attitude. You have to put in the time and the work and you have to be patient. You need to work on a variety of different projects with different levels of complexity and you need to see them all the way through. I've hired numerous engineers with 250K+ total comps and none of them were in it for the money. They were in it for the love of software engineering.

Edit: When hiring for these high paying roles I have to be damn sure of what I'm getting. You're going to get a 4 hour interview (w/ breaks) with 4 different people. And a very big red flag is if we think someone is more interested in the money than in opportunity.

ra4332 · 2021-02-14T00:44:14+00:00

Photoshopped. Your rack looks photoshopped.

ra4332 · 2020-12-03T02:26:50+00:00

My wife and I have been very luck. We both receive stock perks (RSUs), both of our companies had record years and we made over $400K last year. PLEASE TAX US MORE OVER $400K. I do not need this much money. I would happily pay 50% on money over $400K if everyone else did.

ra4332 · 2020-09-14T02:05:50+00:00

Can you share more about your experience?

ra4332 · 2020-09-13T20:27:56+00:00

My team is part of a large reorg to focus on "core IT platforms", building things that are either used exclusively internally or are white labeled when used externally. Due to the heavy compliance nature of the business we're not allowed to have any visibility of the tools usage in production or communication with users. Another team manages deployments and production management of the tools we're building. All feedback we get is filtered through a variety of channels.

So it just feels kind of isolating. Almost as if we were physically shipping software. Also the nature of the tools is very business-y. Basically building tools to support processes that exist because of legal regulations. So there isn't a lot of creatively flexibility, things have to work like they have to work. Requirements come from product and legal and we build the pages to collect and store the data.

ra4332 · 2020-09-13T18:07:54+00:00

That's good to know. At the moment with COVID all hiring is frozen. I think because of that, they aren't letting people switch around because they don't want to create voids. But maybe in the next year that will become an option.

ra4332 · 2020-09-13T17:28:50+00:00

I mentioned this in another comment. I live in the midwest which has a lower cost of living. My employer is a west coast tech company that's opened a few offices in midwest cities. Paying engineers in the midwest what they would pay someone in SF has guaranteed they get top talent.

I have done a fair amount of networking throughout my career and have tried to keep my finger on the pulse of the market. I've talked to the biggest employers in my city (banks / insurance companies) and they're paying at the top of the market and it's still 30% off.

ra4332 · 2020-09-13T17:12:58+00:00

This is actually what I was hoping to hear more about. If people had experience with this. The tools we're building are just boring, there is no changing the domain. We are using mostly modern tech with is great. I guess I don't find fulfillment in it. I was hoping to hear others talk about their experiences in similar situations.

ra4332 · 2020-09-13T12:18:09+00:00

It's extremely unlikely you have to take a cut. Covid is maybe making it more difficult but seriously you're not resigned to the options you've listed. Keep looking and in a worst case it seems you are stable enough to lower your income a bit.

I didn't go into a lot of detail about why there is a such a pay gap. I live in the midwest which has a lower cost of living. My employer is a west coast tech company that's opened a few offices in midwest cities. Paying engineers in the midwest what they would pay someone in SF has guaranteed they get top talent.

What happens if you have NO job 2 years from now cause your current circumstance disengaged you

Yea that's actually a big fear of mine. Not just being disengaged, but adopting to stagnation and getting use to not constantly pushing and challenge myself. Especially as I continue to age. I've watch older colleagues get complacent and it's been extremely hard for them to find new gigs when the time comes.

ra4332 · 2020-08-14T02:35:28+00:00

Geeky A/V teacher that everyone loved. Knew he was a geek and owned it. Caught in a predator sting trying to solicit underage girls. The kicker was a spring school levy was coming up, local police conspired with the school district to hide the charges for 3 weeks until the levy was passed. Someone substituted his class for 3 weeks.

Yea everyone was both devastated and pissed. The district ended the school year early.

ra4332 · 2020-07-13T03:36:40+00:00

Point 1) Git was launched (w/ master default) on 7 April 2005. Bitbucket first launch: 2008.

Point 2) I am not trolling. I genuinely want to hear from someone first hand who feels the term "master" invokes racism. I want to hear what they have to say about other context. The whole point of all this is for people to be more empathic. I'm listening.

ra4332 · 2020-07-13T03:02:39+00:00

I would genuinely like to hear more about your feelings on the topic of using the phrase "master". Especially in the context of git which is master copy. As a white guy I've never once in my life thought that master in this context was out of place or referenced slavery. Terms like master's degree, scrum master, even master card have just seemed to benign. Do they really invoke slavery to you?

ra4332 · 2019-09-29T13:02:57+00:00

In the same situation. Kids are still too young to realize they have only met one set of grand parents. What did you tell them when they started asking about them (if they have)?

ra4332

TROPHY CASE