On Joel's list I've done 1,4,5,6 myself This one is hardest I think- Strategy 4 Neutralize The Bozos We had a guy that would work nights and weekends on other

On Joel's list I've done 1,4,5,6 myself This one is hardest I think- Strategy 4 Neutralize The Bozos We had a guy that would work nights and weekends on other people's assigned tickets committing non-running half assed code to trunk. Note this was in lieu of doing any work actually assigned to him, coming into the office, attending meetings, or participating in L3 rotation. This was sometimes in coordination with the boss in which Bob underbid other devs by 1 or more orders of magnitude (They said 1 week? I can do it in an afternoon!) We would get into office in morning and be told by the boss - well Bob already did that ticket last night, just help him get it working.. and spend a month of effort getting his "afternoon" hack implementation to semi-work. Sometimes he'd even email people code to commit on his behalf. This went on for a few years. Eventually we did two things: 1- The rest of the team transitioned to a release branch and let him keep committing his non-working fixes to trunk as the new major version release. We had an agreement that when he got it all working we would merge back and release to PROD. He felt like the all-star he was because he was working on the strategic improvement while us peons piddled away on "feature requests" and "bug fixes". 6 months later he admitted he couldn't get trunk running, which then lead to the next step. 2- Explained to a couple hops up in management that this developer was actually producing negative work. It wasn't that his work was subpar, it was that every hour of work he did produced 2 or more hours of work for other people. Morale was shit, the project was shit, and the whole team was going to leave if you keep this guy around.. here's a bunch of examples of him producing negative work. We presented him with the ultimate juicy prize - cut cost and increase productivity. The whole process still took about a year to get rid of a peer. I've never seen it work on a higher up. Every place I've been with a bad boss I've only seen things go from bad to worse, just interview and leave. And when you quit, all the promises they make are BS too, I've never been talked into staying but in retrospect, every "don't leave because we will do __" would turned out to have been a lie. I once had a manager try to talk me out of leaving who, when I showed up at the new shop after 2 weeks.. arrived himself 2 weeks later, so during this chat he had probably already quit himself given the extended notice period for his seniority ..