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Its Friday, you all know what that means! ... Its results day for practiseSafeHex's most incompetent co-worker!!!

*audience: wwwwwwooooooooo!!!!*

We've had a bewildering array of candidates, lets remind ourselves:

- a psychopath that genuinely scared me a little
- a CEO I would take pleasure seeing in pain
- a pothead who mistook me for his drug dealer
- an unbelievable idiot
- an arrogant idiot obsessed with strings

Tough competition, but there can be only one ... *drum roll* ... the winner is ... none of them!

*audience: GASP!*
*audience member: what?*
*audience member: no way!*
*audience member: your fucking kidding me!*

Sir calm down! this is a day time show, no need for that ... let me explain, there is a winner ... but we've kept him till last and for a good reason

*audience: ooooohhhhh*

You see our final contestant and ultimate winner of this series is our good old friend "C", taking the letters of each of our previous contestants, that spells TRAGIC which is the only word to explain C.

*audience: laughs*

Oh I assure you its no laughing matter. C was with us for 6 whole months ... 6 excruciatingly painful months.

Backstory:

We needed someone with frontend, backend and experience with IoT devices, or raspberry PI's. We didn't think we'd get it all, but in walked an interviewee with web development experience, a tiny bit of Angular and his masters project was building a robot device that would change LED's depending on your facial expressions. PERFECT!!!

... oh to have a time machine

Working with C:

- He never actually did the tutorials I first set him on for Node.js and Angular 2+ because they were "too boring". I didn't find this out until some time later.

- The first project I had him work on was a small dashboard and backend, but he decided to use Angular 1 and a different database than what we were using because "for me, these are easier".

- He called that project done without testing / deploying it in the cloud, despite that being part of the ticket, because he didn't know how. Rather than tell or ask anyone ... he just didn't do it and moved on.

- As part of his first tech review I had to explain to him why he should be using if / else, rather than just if's.

- Despite his past experience building server applications and dashboards (4 years!), he never heard of a websocket, and it took a considerable amount of time to explain.

- When he used a node module to open a server socket, he sat staring at me like a deer caught in headlights completely unaware of how to use / test it was working. I again had to explain it and ultimately test it for him with a command line client.

- He didn't understand the need to leave logging inside an application to report errors. Because he used to ... I shit you not ... drive to his customers, plug into their server and debug their application using a debugger.

... props for using a debugger, but fuck me.

- Once, after an entire 2 days of tapping me on the shoulder every 15 mins for questions / issues, I had to stop and ask:

Me: "Have you googled it?"
C: "... eh, no"
Me: "can I ask why?"
C: "well, for me, I only google for something I don't know"
Me: "... well do you know what this error message means?"
C: "ah good point, i'll try this time"

... maybe he was A's stoner buddy?

- He burned through our free cloud usage allowance for a month, after 1 day, meaning he couldn't test anything else under his account. He left an application running, broadcasting a lot of data. Turns out the on / off button on the dashboard only worked for "on". He had been killing his terminal locally and didn't know how to "ctrl + c a cloud app" ... so left it running. His intention was to restart the app every time you are done using it ... but forgot.

- His issue with the previous one ... not any of his countless mistakes, not the lack of even trying to make the button work, no, no, not for C. C's issue is the cloud is "shit" for giving us such little allowances. (for the record in a month I had never used more than 5%).

- I had to explain environment variables and why they are necessary for passwords and tokens etc. He didn't know it wasn't ok to commit these into GitHub.

- At his project meetups with partners I had to repeatedly ask him to stop googling gifs and pay attention to the talks.

- He complained that we don't have 3 hour lunch breaks like his last place.

- He once copied and pasted the same function 450 times into a file as a load test ... are loops too mainstream nowadays?

You see C is our winner, because after 6 painful months (companies internal process / requirements) he actually achieved nothing. I really mean that, nothing. Every thing was so broken, so insecure / wide open, built without any kind of common sense or standards I had to delete it all and start again ... it took me 2 weeks.

I hope you've all enjoyed this series and will join me in praying for the return of my sanity ... I do miss it a lot.

Yours truly,
practiseSafeHex

Comments
  • 34
    Okay I subscribed to your rants xD
  • 6
    No it can't be over yet.
  • 33
    @MrTransistor all joking aside, I did go through a period of waking my GF up in the middle of the night talking and yelling in my sleep, during this one. Most of the time she couldn't make out what it was, just knew it was "about code".
  • 16
    Your rants make me feel better about myself.
  • 13
    Man, dear lord. But.. My question is how this kind of people do not get chuck norris rotating kicked out from the company on the second week?
  • 4
    @donnico +1 and ++
  • 16
    @donnico well first point to make clear, that was what I requested, more than once.

    I work for a big company and they have a policy on giving a fair chance. Only way to get fired before the 6 months is to like assault someone or equivalent.

    ... apparently “crimes against code” is not a thing
  • 4
    @practiseSafeHex I guess you mean "unfortunately" it is no crime.
    In my opinion, it's a major case crime.
    Or even worse...
  • 13
    We need a second season of this! I can't belive this is the season finally!
  • 8
    ++ for the sitcom elements
  • 6
    @practiseSafeHex I understand the fair chance but people like this are like a cancer to a company, because they are not just a lack in productivity but also disturbing others :|
  • 5
    @donnico completely agree. Said pretty much the same thing. Fell of deaf ears.

    The process = The process

    End of story.
  • 2
    Subscribed
  • 8
    @insanealec possibly the worst part of it all. He was on a 3 month performance improvement plan, on his second last week, having gone terrible, he announces he’s leaving

    ... didn’t even get the satisfaction of firing him
  • 3
    @Nilo-jxn and a little worse about the world 😂
  • 1
    Sir, you just joined my preferite ranters.
  • 1
    how do you remember all those details? it's a nightmare
  • 3
    @spaceJunk well this one was very recent so that helps. But when this shit is keeping you up for days on end, and then you have to formally review it, and help him fix it, and explain to the client why its broken, and then replace it when he leaves

    ... its quite hard to forget after all that
  • 1
    sounds like bighead.
  • 2
    This cracked me up that I even +'d the post before finishing reading the entire rant. 😂🤣 I hope your sanity is back.
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