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Any strategies for working with someone like that? Or any stories about working with such people?
If there is nothing you can do to remove them the best you can do to ignore them, separate yourself, or them from everyone else. If you care enough you can try to mitigate the damage they may do. If you are surrounded by these type of developers you may want to do what I did: find a job where you can actually learn from others. I recommend small businesses as they cannot afford to have these people.
The first time, the dude was promoted to manager of the department after our manager was fired for missing a pretty big deadline (massive scope creep, very poor project management). He was very good at cultivating relationships and throwing people under the bus when it suited him. Everyone hated him by the time I left, I hated him first because he was a charlatan though, he'd complain about the API I was building but when pressed for the JSON payload he'd prefer instead he took literally weeks to not provide it while still complaining (and emailing our manager DAILY) about this.
The second time (my current job), a coworker, four years of "experience". He had a hard time figuring out how to find a line of code in his IDE. We literally could not give him tasks to change the color on a button, because he could not find the button in our codebase. I helped him as much as I could, but his mentality wasn't keen on learning and I'm pretty sure he outsourced his actual job because he'd show up the day after with close enough code snippets that still didn't work. Every night the day after he'd made progress while he was incapable of explaining what the code did. Eventually some other peers complained, he was put on an improvement plan and let go after about 6 months
The third time (current job again!) I've seen several developers more senior than I push for this or that idea or architecture, and no one in my reporting line cares enough or has enough influence for us to say "this is a horrible fucking idea and the people promoting this are incompetent". So I just do it, it's a job and gives me a paycheck in exchange for my time. If I'm not allowed the kind of influence that would make things better I figure they still expect me to work since I still expect my paycheck. The project will likely be a massive failure IMO
What exactly does terrible dev skills mean? What's wrong with them?
I'm on my second job where I work with people like that. The first time, the dude was promoted to manager of the department after our manager was fired for missing a pretty big deadline (massive scope creep, very poor project management). He was very good at cultivating relationships and throwing people under the bus when it suited him. Everyone hated him by the time I left, I hated him first because he was a charlat…
That sucks man. I know that feeling.
What exactly does terrible dev skills mean? What's wrong with them?
Just programmers that can't program. Guys with years of experience tucked under their belt who struggle with simple things. I have pair programmed before with a guy to whom it wasn't obvious when to use a foreach loop, and who didn't parse test failure output for hints as to what went wrong. Everything was just a mystery. We'd make a change, test would fail and tell us exactly why (lo and behold, it was the thing we…
But nobody got anything done. They were simply satisfied with emptying their inbox by shoving it into someone else's.
For example, we'd have a meeting on a database. I'd give them the names of tables and fields. Manager forwards the agreed upon specs to everyone.
But the database guy has his inbox full. He says he didn't get the email. Manager says she never followed up with him. This is not an uncommon thing, but a routine. It buys them time to finish off the next thing.
A week later, I follow up with them. Manager says she deleted the old file. We do the exact same meeting again. This time database guy gets the email.
However he makes typos. "routes" table becomes "route". "weight" field becomes "obj1234" field.
I told the CEO either that guy leaves or I do. CEO tells me that I don't know to work in a team. I'm supposed to CC him every time I ask them to do something.
Things magically worked well when I CC the CEO. But sometimes they reply to me only over an issue. When the next email is not CCed, things mysteriously go wrong again.
The company is a global enterprise company with no staging server, no development server, everything is pushed to production. Source control is sending an email out with a zipped file of today's changes.
They're good developers, it's just that they're too busy being busy to develop anything.