Recent departure
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He's a junior dev and already married? $10 says he's a good little christian boy, probably had no idea what working at a trading firm is like.
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Devils advocate time - was he warned about the language in the office before he was hired or after? If before, then maybe, just maybe, it's far worse than he thought. If after, then it's a bit late, isn't it? I've had an employee complain to me about the language in meetings before, saying he would prefer not to attend the meetings if language like that was going to be used. I appreciated his honesty and openness, and had a word with everyone (without mentioning the employee)saying how unprofessional it sounded to be using four letter words in meetings. All was fine. Incidentally if you have people swearing openly in the office this can backfire on your company - people on the phone overhearing bad language can be genuinely upset. Sure the guy may have been taking the company for a ride to get relocation - alternatively he may feel so stressed at being subjected to foul language that he would rather be unemployed than put up with it. Just fucking sayin'
MVVM# - See how I did MVVM my way ___________________________________________ Man, you're a god. - walterhevedeich 26/05/2011 .\\axxx (That's an 'M')
He was warned during the interview process. I was warned. Everyone recent is warned. There is an employee on her 7th or 8th year that has brought up in the past that she gets offended (my boss named a variable PimpJuice once, and she saw it). We no longer swear in code, and she is in a far away part of the office. This guy could have requested that, too, but chose to quit after unsuccessfully trying to rally people to join his cause. He also mentioned to the CEO that he was underutilized. It's funny because he was a terrible developer, his code was poorly written, unscalable, full of overly complex nested loops and if statements that always needed to be refactored or rearchitected to classes (he didn't like classes). I spent so much of my time code reviewing, correcting, trying to teach, etc, that I was no longer utilized in the best possible way. He would submit requests to code review projects that he knew were just terrible, just to buy time to fuck around and say he had no work. 50% of my reviews were sent back immediately with "What do you need reviewed here? I know that you know what I'm going to say about this." He just never caught on to or attempted to learn OOP that well. We would give him a project, after 2 days he would start telling people (including managers) that it was done because he wrote out almost runable, untested script that worked for maybe 1 case out of 14 possible cases. There was always 2 weeks worth of testing, correcting, refactoring still to be done. The worst part is that I spent so much time trying to teach him and he spend no effort trying to learn. I've spent time outside of every job I've had to better my skills, he didn't.
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wizardzz wrote:
Here's my theory.
That's a very contrieved explanation. Here's my theory: You know socially it's a shitty place you work for - you just don't want to admit it. He shows you, and you are looking for a way to resolve this dissonance by putting all blame on him. If he was that scheming: Wanting out ASAP means he already got a new job, starting tomorrow and could care less about the opinion of your juniors.
peterchen wrote:
You know socially it's a sh***y place you work for - you just don't want to admit it. He shows you, and you are looking for a way to resolve this dissonance by putting all blame on him.
It's not shitty socially, it's shitty stressfully. It's the trading industry. It's fast paced, single bugs lose client money and close businesses. For example, Twitter, Google, Facebook (household companies viewed as cutting edge, etc, whatever) can be down for hours and continue to exist without trouble, many of us and our competitors would be toast, literally lose all clients and never recover from the reputation hit.. Anyone coming from another industry is warned throughout the process about this. I've warned or seen interviewees warned at every place I've worked. Some places only hire people with industry experience, because they know you understand and have a tolerance for the stress that comes with the pay.
peterchen wrote:
If he was that scheming: Wanting out ASAP means he already got a new job, starting tomorrow and could care less about the opinion of your juniors.
Future references.
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peterchen wrote:
You know socially it's a sh***y place you work for - you just don't want to admit it. He shows you, and you are looking for a way to resolve this dissonance by putting all blame on him.
It's not shitty socially, it's shitty stressfully. It's the trading industry. It's fast paced, single bugs lose client money and close businesses. For example, Twitter, Google, Facebook (household companies viewed as cutting edge, etc, whatever) can be down for hours and continue to exist without trouble, many of us and our competitors would be toast, literally lose all clients and never recover from the reputation hit.. Anyone coming from another industry is warned throughout the process about this. I've warned or seen interviewees warned at every place I've worked. Some places only hire people with industry experience, because they know you understand and have a tolerance for the stress that comes with the pay.
peterchen wrote:
If he was that scheming: Wanting out ASAP means he already got a new job, starting tomorrow and could care less about the opinion of your juniors.
Future references.
wizardzz wrote:
trading industry
Yeah, some people thrive under that pressure, some wilt, and most don't know before they tried.
wizardzz wrote:
Future references.
"Yeah, nothing from my boss, but that intern really liked me."
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He was warned during the interview process. I was warned. Everyone recent is warned. There is an employee on her 7th or 8th year that has brought up in the past that she gets offended (my boss named a variable PimpJuice once, and she saw it). We no longer swear in code, and she is in a far away part of the office. This guy could have requested that, too, but chose to quit after unsuccessfully trying to rally people to join his cause. He also mentioned to the CEO that he was underutilized. It's funny because he was a terrible developer, his code was poorly written, unscalable, full of overly complex nested loops and if statements that always needed to be refactored or rearchitected to classes (he didn't like classes). I spent so much of my time code reviewing, correcting, trying to teach, etc, that I was no longer utilized in the best possible way. He would submit requests to code review projects that he knew were just terrible, just to buy time to fuck around and say he had no work. 50% of my reviews were sent back immediately with "What do you need reviewed here? I know that you know what I'm going to say about this." He just never caught on to or attempted to learn OOP that well. We would give him a project, after 2 days he would start telling people (including managers) that it was done because he wrote out almost runable, untested script that worked for maybe 1 case out of 14 possible cases. There was always 2 weeks worth of testing, correcting, refactoring still to be done. The worst part is that I spent so much time trying to teach him and he spend no effort trying to learn. I've spent time outside of every job I've had to better my skills, he didn't.
My sympathies. I spent a few months trying to work with a (now former) cow-orker whose coding was similarly bad; except that as soon as he threw one method PoS over the wall to me he started failing to code the next (or more likely the one I rejected previously) until I sent the first one back; having either discovered it didn't work at all or found (typically several) cases where it failed. We were under severe enough time pressure that I didn't have time for my normal, post SVN update, micro code reviews of everything my coworkers wrote; and didn't realize how bad the theoretically, finally, working code the cow-orker wrote until he was laid off and I had to take it over. X| X| X| X| X| X| X| X| X| X| X| X| X| X| X| X| X| X| X| X| X| X| X| X| X| X| X| X| X| X| X| X| X| X| X| X| X| X| X| X| X| X| X| X| X| X| X| X| X| X| X| X| X|
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My sympathies. I spent a few months trying to work with a (now former) cow-orker whose coding was similarly bad; except that as soon as he threw one method PoS over the wall to me he started failing to code the next (or more likely the one I rejected previously) until I sent the first one back; having either discovered it didn't work at all or found (typically several) cases where it failed. We were under severe enough time pressure that I didn't have time for my normal, post SVN update, micro code reviews of everything my coworkers wrote; and didn't realize how bad the theoretically, finally, working code the cow-orker wrote until he was laid off and I had to take it over. X| X| X| X| X| X| X| X| X| X| X| X| X| X| X| X| X| X| X| X| X| X| X| X| X| X| X| X| X| X| X| X| X| X| X| X| X| X| X| X| X| X| X| X| X| X| X| X| X| X| X| X| X|
Wow that is pretty much the exact situation. My manager thought he was great, because he said everything was done so fast. Well, when he quit and I went on my honeymoon, my manager saw all the code he wrote, and e-mailed everyone "Don't trust anything X touched, any recent builds, revert to old production. Double check all your source control to be sure he didn't fuck it up." It wasn't a case of sabotage, just horrible coding that I had warned about, finally getting noticed.
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Wow that is pretty much the exact situation. My manager thought he was great, because he said everything was done so fast. Well, when he quit and I went on my honeymoon, my manager saw all the code he wrote, and e-mailed everyone "Don't trust anything X touched, any recent builds, revert to old production. Double check all your source control to be sure he didn't fuck it up." It wasn't a case of sabotage, just horrible coding that I had warned about, finally getting noticed.
Sounds like yours did a better job of baffling management with BS; this was my first project with the senior dev/tech lead and via my line manager I was getting positive feedback about how happy the senior was with my codes relative quality; but I didn't pick up on the implied cow-orkers is horrid until after the fact. I knew his testing was grossly inadequate, and that he was overly prone to reinventing the wheel because of limited .net framework awareness, but didn't know about any of the other problems until after the fact. Although I was told he was let go due to lack of new tasking (the joys of being a contracting company); the rest of the team all being covered including partially on a followon effort have me convinced they just didn't want to officially boot him for cause.
Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, waging all things in the balance of reason? Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful? --Zachris Topelius Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies. -- Sarah Hoyt
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Keep in mind, depending on your local laws' definition of a hostile work environment, "crude language" could result in a transfer of significant money from the company to the former employee (and their attorney!)
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He was warned during the interview process. I was warned. Everyone recent is warned. There is an employee on her 7th or 8th year that has brought up in the past that she gets offended (my boss named a variable PimpJuice once, and she saw it). We no longer swear in code, and she is in a far away part of the office. This guy could have requested that, too, but chose to quit after unsuccessfully trying to rally people to join his cause. He also mentioned to the CEO that he was underutilized. It's funny because he was a terrible developer, his code was poorly written, unscalable, full of overly complex nested loops and if statements that always needed to be refactored or rearchitected to classes (he didn't like classes). I spent so much of my time code reviewing, correcting, trying to teach, etc, that I was no longer utilized in the best possible way. He would submit requests to code review projects that he knew were just terrible, just to buy time to fuck around and say he had no work. 50% of my reviews were sent back immediately with "What do you need reviewed here? I know that you know what I'm going to say about this." He just never caught on to or attempted to learn OOP that well. We would give him a project, after 2 days he would start telling people (including managers) that it was done because he wrote out almost runable, untested script that worked for maybe 1 case out of 14 possible cases. There was always 2 weeks worth of testing, correcting, refactoring still to be done. The worst part is that I spent so much time trying to teach him and he spend no effort trying to learn. I've spent time outside of every job I've had to better my skills, he didn't.
wizardzz wrote:
his code was poorly written, unscalable, full of overly complex nested loops and if statements that always needed to be refactored or rearchitected to classes (he didn't like classes)
You said above you interviewed this guy? Shame on you, he should never have been given a job. What do you ask people to do in interviews? Stand on their head? Make them write code, lots of it. We have a new challenge here - people get a Pc and 4 hours to implement a basic memory allocator in c++;
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wizardzz wrote:
his code was poorly written, unscalable, full of overly complex nested loops and if statements that always needed to be refactored or rearchitected to classes (he didn't like classes)
You said above you interviewed this guy? Shame on you, he should never have been given a job. What do you ask people to do in interviews? Stand on their head? Make them write code, lots of it. We have a new challenge here - people get a Pc and 4 hours to implement a basic memory allocator in c++;