Pretty much. We had the worst junior dev ever and he never got better for a period of two years because he was coddled and allowed to keep submitting horrible code. He was laid off, thankfully honestly, but if there weren't budget cuts I feel like he never would've improved and just kept wasting everyone else's time.

Edit: the point I was making here is that coddling him kept from either being fired or getting better. Not sure why people cannot understand that more than one thing can be true. In this case that the dude is a horrible dev and also that management dropped the ball. I tried to teach him shit. When he didn't improve I let my manager know how things were going. Nothing happened to him for literal years.

And as the cherry on top here he said he was going to start some kind of businessy-sounding machine learning degree program, after he was let go in layoffs. So yeah the dude knows he sucks at coding but definitely wants in on the AI grift.

[–] HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world 19 points 1 week ago (4 children)

So why didn't y'all train him if he was that bad?

[–] FearfulSalad@ttrpg.network 17 points 1 week ago (2 children)

This assumes that Jr Dev wanted to be trained, and could be trained. I've known some AI-brain "devs" from before AI was a thing.

If someone can't be bothered to read an error message, can we really be expected to teach them how to debug? Etc.

[–] TrickDacy@lemmy.world 11 points 1 week ago

Yeah. Several of us tried to train him. He was not only not as good as he seemed in the interview, he didn't care to learn.

[–] HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world 7 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Oh a "what the hell's an error message" Dev. I thought they all died out

[–] FearfulSalad@ttrpg.network 4 points 1 week ago

There's a tsunami of them coming, and they will all beach in the Great AI Outage of 2028, just you wait.

[–] DireTech@sh.itjust.works 3 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Ha no. There are a ton of new juniors like that.

[–] HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world 1 points 6 days ago

I grew up during the great Sierra adventure game age so if you didn't know how to program a boot disk you weren't turning on your computer properly. With style.

[–] BeigeAgenda@lemmy.ca 13 points 1 week ago (1 children)

[–] TrickDacy@lemmy.world 7 points 1 week ago

"Someone represented themselves as being very interested in development and getting better at it. It's obviously not their fault if all that was bullshit!"

[–] TrickDacy@lemmy.world 10 points 1 week ago (2 children)

It is a long story but yeah it was about 80% management's fault and 20% the fault of the dude having zero ambition. I didn't expect this comment to get so many downvotes... it's as though I would need to explain that I'm not entirely blaming him for continuing to be employed in a problematic manner as he was. Obviously management should have addressed the issue and didn't, but why am I not allowed to blame a person for sucking at their job... ? If the idea is that if I thought he sucked I should have fixed it, that's silly, but regardless I did try to teach him things. He never retained anything, so after a few months I gave up.

[–] calisti@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (1 children)

You’re totally allowed to blame him. He had a choice and he decided not to do what it takes.

I’m not even sure why you’d allocate only 20% to the dude.

[–] TrickDacy@lemmy.world 1 points 5 days ago

Thanks for actually reading what I wrote. Many people read a little and make up the rest or make up something to replace what was written. I mean yeah, he deserves way more than 20% of the blame for pretending like he wanted to learn, however my manager bears a lot of blame for the situation overall because he should have reprimanded him then fired him after a couple months if he didn't improve. Instead, my teammates and I spent hours and hours ripping this guy's PRs to shreds and trying to teach him shit and it never went anywhere. I remember one PR had over 90 comments on it! He routinely broke the build, usually in the same ways as before. I spent so much time pointing out the same mistakes over and over.

If he'd been fired, that timesuck would've been minimized and actually there's some small possibility he would've gotten better if he thought he couldn't get away with coasting like he did. But since his incompetence went uncontested for two years by management, he wasted tons of everyone's time. If it were up to me he would've been gone before three months.

[–] Chakravanti@monero.town 1 points 1 week ago

Corporation is parasitic. Why did you sustain the existence of Mani Mani's vampiric thieves of your entire existence, by your own choice?

That guy wasn't making mistakes when poisoning the blood drawn.

[–] jj4211@lemmy.world 8 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Sometimes it just doesn't pan out.

Had a junior dev that basically decided he would rather try to grift through instead of doing the job. Never seen someone work so hard at trying not to work at all. Every day it was a different excuse, a different other person to point to as to why he didn't even try to do anything that day. I think at least 7 or 8 of his grandmothers died during his tenure. And management ate it up.

Until one day he lost track of things and blamed the manager asking him why things weren't done. Said the manager never sent him some material and of course the manager had. Suddenly the manager believed the rest of us who had been saying he was lying for the last many months...

The key was he was cheap and was in theory supposed to be as good as a higher paid alternative, so management would have to admit to being wrong to ditch him...

[–] calisti@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 points 5 days ago

I’ve had a similar case in my department, and the guy couldn’t even be let go because he’s family of some important man in the company.