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Should I fire someone who unnecessarily wrote 500 lines of code?
- joeblow9999 9y agoYes, but only the second time they do it. After you've explained to them why it was a bad idea the first time.
- Pica_soO 9y ago500 Lines- that sounds like the average electronics guy who started coding unrolling a loop with copy and paste. Yes, such a thing exists. There are "Programmers" who do not know about basic elements of the language they use. For years.
- darepublic 9y agoDon't know about whether the person should be fired-- but this reminds me of a guy I used to work with. He was notorious for finishing his tasks slowly; and what he would do was, if given even a simple task, end up writing a huge module for it, that was, though modularized, full of crappy unnecessary code. It was kind of a weird stubborness in him. He refused to use existing utils/methods that other people had written as well; he would not improve existing utils or use them, he would just write his own arcane esoteric behemoths even to solve simple problems. It frustrated the hell out of me but he never seemed to draw the ire of the other developers on our team. I ended up leaving that company and discovered a few months later he was let go.
- joeblow9999 9y agoI would have fired him after two warnings. He is negative productivity.
- DKnoll 9y agoSounds like he was trying to design job security.
- noncoml 9y agoTo anyone being harsh to this guy I suggest you go back and look the code you wrote 5 or 10 years ago. Now think how bad the code you write today will look to you 5 to 10 years later. Edit: I lost my train of thought. I meant to say, imagine how your code looks today to someone as good as you but with 10 years more experiences than you.
- greenyoda 9y agoAlso, 500 lines of tested, working code takes most people quite a bit of time to write.[1] So where was this developer's team lead or manager while they were writing all this unnecessary code? Why didn't they give the developer feedback much sooner? This sounds like as much of a management failure as a technical failure. [1] If the developer only spent a couple of hours writing it, they wouldn't have wasted too much time, so why should anyone be talking about firing them?
- gyrfalcon 9y agoThe sort of person who would think such a thing is the same sort of person who should be dumped in a lake with cement blocks tied to them.
- marcus_holmes 9y agoI would answer, but Quora has made it impossible to see any context on the question.
- phonon 9y agohttps://www.quora.com/log/revision/233604881 https://www.quora.com/log/revision/233604881 https://pastebin.com/myYsRUjq https://pastebin.com/myYsRUjq was in the original question " It was basically that we needed 3 instances of the same functionality, each instance differing by the value of two variables. The coder could not see this and made function1 for instance1,function2 for instance2 and so on with function1 and function2 being mostly similar."
- GoToRO 9y agoIt looks like everybody takes the claims in the question at face value. It looks to me like a junior team leader doesn't understand the code written by a senior. All code can be made shorter. It doesn't mean it's better or even cheaper. All the shortcuts you take will come back and byte you.