Ask HN: Am I excessive in wanting to fire a dev?

The other day in a base code for a web app in python we had exactly this problem: http://effbot.org/zone/default-values.htm

I am the interim of the boss and in the code of one of my mate developer we had:

   def compute_since_how_long(self, queue = None, start=time.time(), end=time.time() + 86400):
       """all horrors left as is"""

and my fellow (python senior) developer did not understand the problem of scopes in python and the use of sentinel.

He made me tcpdump the mongo connection, check the sessions, the OS/hardware before checking the input/output of the function he coded and that was clearly the problem.

So even though I knew the fix, since I thought he needed to understand the problem, I asked him to fix the code (it is a part of the application he coded recently). And gave him the URL as a pattern.

He has a PhD, he know how to read, he is 35 married, and seems to be able to read a newspaper, he has no known cognitive deficiencies.

He left me with a test on value and not address

    if start == sentinel:

AND he added a test on end and swapped it with start. (sabotage or lack of professional ethic // testing was screaming my brain).

I was pissed and he answered publicly, if it so easy for you why don't you fix it? (ofc I am not a victim and did not let it slip.)

And I was telling him like, well, how can you claim to be better than a PHP dev (I have been a PHP dev, but it still one of my favorite bashing at any dev) when you don't care about scopes, immutability, allocation of variables when you pretend to code into a language?

He answered what I was saying is unnice! And used the coworkers as witnesses of me being an asshole for this.

I want to kill him and it does not seems socially acceptable.

Do you have any alternative better plan than the murder I am planning?

You sound like an asshole. I would have quit a long time ago.

And if we accept that me being an asshole is not the problem here, but rather that my company has an application that customers use and may want to function without bugs, that we make money out of it, and that it pays my earnings as much as his?

It is the problem. Your attitude has probably negatively effected the people that work for you.