Kochise wrote:

he was paid on the number of lines he was writing

Oh, no! You're working in a place that measures code by the yard, and then complain that somebody fresh out of the egg is - well let's say a little uncertain in their grasp of fundamentals. Get a grip! Frankly, I'd have fired others, starting (in the very first femtosecond) with the guy who instigated the fatuous "quantity rather than quality" regime, continuing with whoever did the hiring (since this job apparently called for an accurate, experienced programmer), and possibly with whoever did the firing (though that may have been for factors other than the predictable howlers from a coding tyro).

Kochise wrote:

He even managed to write wrappers over each native Win32 API, even the ones he was not using

Did they work? That's moderately sophisticated for a kid straight out of school. This sounds to me like someone who, with a modicum of sympathetic mentoring obviously not available in your shop, could well turn into a real code warrior. Oh, and what was the kid's supervisor doing while he did all this apparently unnecessary work? Think I'll add him to the firing line as well.