Should I fire someone who unnecessarily wrote 500 lines of code?

https://www.quora.com/Should-I-fire-someone-who-unnecessarily-wrote-500-lines-of-code?share=1

by duramato • 9 years ago

29 10 9 years ago

Yes, 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• 9 years ago

500 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• 9 years ago

Don'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.

joeblow99992• 9 years ago

I would have fired him after two warnings. He is negative productivity.

DKnoll• 9 years ago

Sounds like he was trying to design job security.

noncoml• 9 years ago

To 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• 9 years ago

Also, 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?

marcus_holmes• 9 years ago

I would answer, but Quora has made it impossible to see any context on the question.

phonon• 9 years ago

https://www.quora.com/log/revision/233604881

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• 9 years ago

It 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.

Should I fire someone who unnecessarily wrote 500 lines of code?

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