The thing is, he's very smart. He talks like a smart person, and he's very knowledgeable. And he can code well, and destroyed every question when we interviewed him. He even works long hours, to the point where he broke up with his girlfriend.
The problem with him is that every feature he has worked on is buggy and ends up causing more work to fix because his implementations are terrible. This is something that doesn't come up in interview questions.
I don't understand, because he's a smart guy. But he worked on 3 features in 2014, and all of them are disasters. A year later, we still run into bugs caused by poor implementation.
The thing that really boggles my mind is that people don't realize it, and think he's a guru. Even in a company filled with people that I think are smart, they can't see through his ruse and realize that for the most part, the work he does is not good, and the decisions he makes are poor. He even got a raise and a promotion. It's infuriating, but I guess things like this happen all the time.
some people have very asymmetrical perception of code they write vs code other people write. every bug in their code is "just a small edge case, whoops let me fix that", and every bug in someone else's is idiotic and the library is useless. just like how some people cant hear that they suck at music because they cant be as objective about their own stuff.
it is actually a hard, underrated skill to acquire. i hope i have it.
I also work with someone like this. They get jobs easily because they nail interviews and talk intelligently about problems. But when it comes to implementing actual code to solve real world problems, he can't scale it intelligently at all. Duplicate logic all over the place, hard coded values, refusal to research and use frameworks' best practices...it's all there. It's incredibly frustrating, and because he's so knowledgeable, it makes him even more stubborn to constructive criticism. Many times his arguments boil down to "I don't feel like doing it that way", in the face of valid arguments. The facts remain, his code is difficult to maintain, difficult to scale, and buggy.
Can it be he just doesn't care about the work assigned to him so he just half-asses it? Not saying it is a good excuse, but I have seen good developers that are indeed good, when moved to projects they have no interest at all, become like your co-worker.
If I was in your place I would go further than that and try to figure out what he is missing. If his programs don't work how does it work in interviews. Making buggy programs are after all things we all do from time to time. Ensuring that you don't repeat such mistakes are utmost essential.
The thing is, he's very smart. He talks like a smart person, and he's very knowledgeable. And he can code well, and destroyed every question when we interviewed him. He even works long hours, to the point where he broke up with his girlfriend.
The problem with him is that every feature he has worked on is buggy and ends up causing more work to fix because his implementations are terrible. This is something that doesn't come up in interview questions.
I don't understand, because he's a smart guy. But he worked on 3 features in 2014, and all of them are disasters. A year later, we still run into bugs caused by poor implementation.
The thing that really boggles my mind is that people don't realize it, and think he's a guru. Even in a company filled with people that I think are smart, they can't see through his ruse and realize that for the most part, the work he does is not good, and the decisions he makes are poor. He even got a raise and a promotion. It's infuriating, but I guess things like this happen all the time.