Mark.

Mark was a support guy who could have been replaced by a robot. Nearly every support request that came in, whether it made sense or not, had a reply saying:

"Thank you for your query, I will escalate with the development team"

...and then I would have a message saying:

"Hi Almond urgent issue case xxx - I think you need to PLEASE CHECK LOGS" (yes, with that capitalisation.)

I'd then look at the case, take 10 seconds to work out the customer had done something stupid when calling our API (often forgetting their authentication details, despite a clear message telling them as such) and tell Mark what the issue was, and how to find it for himself next time. I'd then usually get:

"Thank you but PLEASE CHECK LOGS to see if there is any more info we can provide to customer"

...there would be more back and forth, and then eventually something like the following would reach the customer...

"Very sorry the development team have a major issue they will fix very soon but in the meantime a workaround is (instructions for using authentication details)"

🤦‍♂️🤦‍♂️

Most memorable coworker? Definitely one of our devs in the first company I worked at. He was around fifty, quirky as fuck but damn knowledgeable about pretty much everything. Think some kind of uncle Iroh who could build his own compiler.
I haven't learned as much from university as I learned from our talks during smoking breaks. He never judged anyone for not knowing something (even really basic stuff) and was actually happy if he could help. Now, a few years later I still find myself applying techniques for conceptualizing software he explained to me on the balcony and I have to say I wouldn't be half the dev I am today if I'd have never met him so I guess that counts as memorable.

A guy that just did not know how to code. He had years and years of experience (?), but DID NOT KNOW HOW TO CODE. He was given a simple task, spent weeks on it and what came out was usually 60 lines of "if, elseif, elsif....else".

He was given several warnings, and eventually "voluntarily" left the company.

I still get screenshots of his code sent by one of my ex-colleagues who's still there when he stumbles across it.

I had a coworker that was an Air Force pilot (99% certain he was telling the truth as I was working for a government contractor and he had security clearance so I'd be a little surprised if he fooled HR and our whole team). Thing is... He genuinely believed the earth is flat. Whenever anybody would ask "haven't you seen the curvature of the earth? Like... More than once?" He'd respond with "yes I have, what's your point?". Uh.... Okay.

Didn't help that he also was convinced cpp is the only language you ever need for any project. Like, "what if instead of building a web API and two separate native mobile app frontends (Swift/Java)... We instead build our own proprietary C++ framework that somehow runs on IOS and Android and we can also use it for our Backend instead of .Net?"

I'm not saying I love Java or Swift or that at some point I haven't thought about why we can't just use cpp in both, but you're supposed to grow out of that kind of thinking. I think every noobie or college students thinks "oh there's got to be a way". But at some point in your career you realize even if you could, it wouldn't be any easier to use and the performance gain would crazy small compared to amount of effort and you'd be playing catch up with both IOS/Android forever.

But no matter how many times we'd shoot it down, he'd keep bringing it up. And he wasn't straight out of school or something. He had like 20 years of programming experience.

I don't have a lot of memorable co-workers that were positive but honestly I think that's because usually if they're good at what they do I don't have to interact with them a bunch or spend time thinking "Jesus what am I going to have to fix next from this guy". I definitely have worked with good/great programmers, they just don't stand out as much as the shitty ones.

This guy I know applied for a senior position at a company I used to do freelance for. He walked in while I was spending the day there to work on our project.

We used to work in the same company and I knew that this guy doesn't know shit. He's the type that would foam in the mouth while bullshitting his way through any sort of discussion.

Anyway, they had him set up on a computer a few tables from me to complete some coding exercises--real simple stuff just to see how he would approach some common problems.

There was no time limit set but the tests shouldn't have taken him more than an hour.

He sat there for SIX HOURS.

At this point, I went out for a smoke, came back 5 minutes later, and found that he wasn't there anymore.

Apparently, he just stood up and said, "Nope, can't do it" and then left the building without a word to anybody else.

We never heard of him again.

Oh, and the tests? Not a single line of code written XD

My mentor from my very first dev job. He was also a junior dev as well and used to say crazy things in conversations ar our desks like ‘The pope is the devil’ and ‘We are all going to get mouth herpes’.

I called him “Rogue { lastName }” because he used to dev in production like an animal.

He taught me a lot about coding though.

Miss that guy

Man, most memorable has to be the lead devops engineer from the first startup I worked at. My immediate team/friends called him Mr. DW - DW being short for Done and Working.

You see, Mr. DW was a brilliant devops engineer. He came up with excellent solutions to a lot of release, deployment, and data storage problems faced at the company (small genetics firm that ships servers with our analysis software on them). I am still very impressed by some of the solutions he came up with, and wish I had more time to study and learn about them before I left that company.

BUT - despite his brilliance, Mr. DW ALWAYS shipped broken stuff. For some reason this guy thinks that only testing a single happiest of happy path scenarios for whatever he is developing constitutes "everything will work as expected!" As soon as he said it was "done", but golly for him was it "done". By fucking God was that never the truth.

So, let me provide a basic example of how things would go:
my team: "Hey DW, we have a problem with X, can you fix this?"
DW: "Oh, sure. I bet it's a problem with <insert long explanations we don't care about we just want it fixed>"
my team: "....uhh, cool! Looking forward to the fix!"
... however long later...
DW: "OK, it's done. Here you go!"
my team: "Thanks! We'll get the fix into the processing pipelines"
... another short time later...
my team: "DW, this thing is broken. Look at all these failures"
DW: "How can that be? It was done! I tested it and it worked!"
my team: "Well, the failures say otherwise. How did you test?"
DW: "I just did <insert super basic thing>"
my team: "...... you know that's, like, not how things actually work for this part of the pipeline. right?"
DW: "..... But I thought it was XYZ?"
my team: "uhhhh, no, not even close. Can you please fix and let us know when it's done and working?"
DW: "... I'll fix it..."

And rinse and repeat the "it's done.. oh wait, it's broken" a good half dozen times on average. But, anyways, the birth of Mr. Done and Working - very often stuff was done, but rarely did it ever work!

I'm still friends with my team mates, and whenever we're talking and someone says something is done, we just have to ask if it's done AND working. We always get a laugh, sadly at the excuse of Mr. DW, but he dug his own hole in this regard.

Little cherry on top: So, the above happened with one of my friends. Mr. DW created installation media for one of our servers that was deployed in China. He tested it and "it was done!" Well, my friend flies out to China for on-site installation. He plugs the install medium in and goes for the install and it crashes and burns in a fire. Thankfully my friend knew the system well enough to be able to get everything installed and configured correctly minus the broken install media, but definitely the most insane example of "it's done!" but sure as he'll "it doesn't work!" we had from Mr. DW.

Not a coworker, but this guy who I went to uni with and was a real life saver when I was really down. (we played minecraft together)

... So, he is a real genius. One of those guys who I legit couldn't keep up with. His brain works, he doesn't bullshit his way through, he's not pretentious, he is legit a down to earth rare genius. Yet, he doesn't use his talents enough, he likes to work or go home to play minecraft. And he doesn't politically care enough, so I am almost sure that he will end up getting stuck in the defence force.

We're still friends. And I try my hardest to not be nosy and nag at him that he can do better. I mean, he is happy the way he is, and he is not ambitious. But the memory of him is a reminder that not everyone who gets somewhere is the best and brightest.

My most memorable coworker had just submitted his resignation.
I am not okay.

Oh wow, so many memorable co-workers, though typically not in a positive way. I guess the most memorable was this project manager who got his job solely through nepotism. He was a fucking moron, putting it lightly. He would rattle off buzzwords and jargon that he had randomly picked up in a completely nonsensical way, which made him sound even more ridiculous. He didn't seem to notice our blank stares.

Anyway, since he loved to show everyone just how awesome he was, he had to have the latest and greatest laptop. He had some top-of-the-line model which cost an insane amount of cash back in the day, but of course he got bored of it when something better came out six months later. So he decided to sell his old laptop.

Now, this was his personal laptop he was selling but we were about three months away from launching a top-secret project which had a seven figure budget and a lot riding on it. So what did this absolute goose do? He sold his laptop unformatted with a metric shit ton of confidential files and documents on it. As fate would have it... he sold it to someone who just so happened to work for a competing company.

Cut to about two and a half months later, around two weeks before the launch of this massive project, our competition comes out with something incredibly similar and beat us to market. Aghast, senior management then found out that they had obtained a treasure trove of confidential information from this numpty's laptop, handed to them on a silver platter.

The following Monday, with a sombre mood in the office, this guy cheerfully comes in through the door and is immediately yanked into the boardroom by management. What followed was around thirty minutes of brutal, relentless, non-stop shouting, table- banging and obscenities. When it finally stopped, the door quietly opened, this guy walks out as white as a sheet, turns towards the exit and left the building.

We never saw him again.

My most memorable co-worker? Have quite a few memorable positive and negative ones.

One of the positives was an ex-Marine (only a few months back from Iraq) 'Erin' who 'butt-ed heads' with an ex-Navy "vet" 'Tom' who was also our source control nazi (I've ranted about him before). "Vet" is in quotes because HR decided to research Tom's 'service' (what ship did he served on, etc) for an upcoming salute to veterans. They found out 'Tom' hurt his knee in basic training and had to be discharged.
Tom enjoyed talking his military "service" until HR spilled the beans (another story behind that, I'll share if interested), and when Erin found out Tom never stood foot outside basic training as a soldier, the alpha-male shit hit the fan.
The F-bombs were as plentiful as leaves in the fall.

So I’m sitting here teaching a junior how to use a website builder and that “memorable” coworker pulls out a fucking tambourine and start smashing it with a hammer acting like a fucking voodoo. Everybody including junior looks at him like tf are you doing?

He also wanted me to build a website / marketing kit builder in two days.

He was a CEO.

His company was gone a month after the tambourine incident.

My tech lead (or senior). I had been unmotivated with my dev life until I joined their team. He lit the fire in me by inspiring me and challenging me with my work. Sadly he left the team after 3 months but I'm thankful because he saved me from burn out.

My first rant. My very "african" dad just told me coding is for people who want an excuse to sit in front of a computer all day. An excuse for laziness.

it's funny coming from someone who never paid a single attention or gave me a single penny to support me 😪

A guy with a pretty fucked up aggressive personality.

At that point I already had ...more than a few issues with bald headed aggressive men for other reasons.

So from the beginning I was very wary around him... And his behaviour - sweet talking while you could _feel_ the knifes raining down your neck - made me even more defensive. I avoided him like the plague.

But for better or worse I became his supervisor. I had to work with him.

He made it very evident what he thought of having me as a supervisor - from day one there were very non subtle hints.

Every question turned into a discussion... Every discussion turned into screaming... Every screaming from his side turned into me leaving the room. I've had my anger issues and I don't tolerate such behaviour.

The tip of the iceberg was not only his behaviour, but also his limited knowledge.

He worked > 15 years in the company, me 2.

Guess that played a role, too.

But his knowledge was somewhere between junior to average.

Some of the tasks exploded not only in time because of all the rage tantrums he had - but more because he didn't solve them properly, despite given clear guidance.

Since at that time it was obvious that he either quits or will get fired, we had to look at previous projects.

It wasn't pretty - to state it in a polite way.

Non polite way: A shitfest of the worst kind possible.

All in all - he didn't quit.

Nearly half a year later he had to be fired.

Company couldn't fire him earlier for various (eg law) reasons.

But damn he made that time a living hell.

Rarely a day without screaming, door slamming, discussions that went like "I've checked all my literature, what you're saying is wrong." (without stating what literature, the discussion just turned round and round...) and so on...

One coworker in my projects now.

I work with her on two projects. One project I'm doing a review on their test scripts and saw a lot of revision is needed on hers. It's fine, she may just need some help. Offered help and did sessions and gave explanations and samples. But she is still not finished. 2nd project I was acting like the project manager until the official PM gets assigned. Her tasks is just to create test data.

Little did I know she has escalated the 1st project to her team lead and manager and requesting for a project change. This is not the first time she did this project shopping bit. But what irks me the most is doing an emergency leave so you don't have to attend the meeting on one project you are failing and then not telling me as the acting PM on the 2nd project that you have an emergency leave. She may likely never thought there is need to tell because she did attend the meeting for the 2nd project later in the day. But for the 1st project I have to pickup her slack and do the test scripts because the PM in that project already was informed about her leave.

This would have gone to daily rant but she is the first one I've encountered who fails and somehow gets away with it and even gets promoted doing the same tactics. But she did that to our junior resources in other projects who may likely got burned out and resigned.

Crappy performance should not be rewarded. I hope this time our management won't look the other way.

Does most memorable in a bad way count? 🤔

He left almost 2 years ago..or even more.. left a bunch of bugs and logical fuckups for me to fix.. some already fixed, some still lingering there..

I want to not blame him for everything, since we lack proper code review protocols and all.. but I've asked on several occasions if he understands the problem and what must be done..and the answer was always yes..results, after I got time to check up on him, the code he wrote was most probably copy pasted from stack overflow or somewhere else.. butchered in any and every way possible..

And of course already checked in to TFS.. along with bunch of files that were not even changed (he didn't bother to check that and exclude them) + a bunch of files from other projects... Told him to not do that on several occasions too, but he still managed to fuck things up this way.. leaving all the uncommented debugger; crap and alerts in the js files..

On one occasion I was working on new GUI..api part I already finished..got the order from above to delegate this to him as it is not much he can fuck up so I could focus on more important & complex stuff..
Maybe additional 4h of work + testing for everything..
I show him the prepared files, one controller, one view..explained what parts of code goes where etc.. a little short of writing everything myself.. Ask if he understands what needs to be done & how and told him if he has any problems/questions to ask me asap..
Said he understood what needs to be done.. after a day or two he asks me why something is not workig as expected.. I check the files, correct initialization was commented out and all the code was stuffed in the view file.. Took him another day to move the code to proper files.. Not sure about the possible bugs left there as the client later decided that they will not be using this..

I later found out that years of C# experience on his CV was actually a school course.. he didn't even know why the changes on api are not showing up..because he didn't know that he has to build the code..

I mean, if he was honest when asked about experience with .net, we would've taken a month or two to just explain everything from the start..

But as he didn't and based on his CV (much more experience with .net than me) and 'I understand everything' attitude from the start I assumed he knows WTF was he doing..

Boy was I wrong..

He was also more interested in how much I get payed and if I have a company phone etc..than actually doing his job.. I fucking hate chit chat, and this..well.. he didn't get the hints that this is in no way appropriate to ask.. I've told him that if he has problems with his pay and bonuses that he should talk to the management and not me about this..and that I'm only interested in his actual work and progress..

So yeah, I'll definitely be remembering this guy till the day I die..

Most memorable co-worker was a daft idiot.
this was 10 years ago - I was working as a junior in my very first job, fresh out of uni, for a very small startup. It was me, and the 3 founders, for a very long time. Then this old (45, from my perspective then..) dev was hired.
This guy had no idea how to do the job. no common sense. the code confused him. the founders confused him. I was focusing on my work - and was unable to help him much with his. His only saving grace? He was a nice guy. Really nice.
But why was he so memorable, out of all the people I ever worked with? simple. He had a short term memory problem. Could not, even if he really tried, remember what he did yesterday.... when I asked him what his issue was, he decribed his life is like a car going in reverse in a heavy fog. "I can only see a short distance backwards, with no idea where I'm going".

Startup was sold to a big company. I became a teamlead/architect. He? someone decided he should be a PM.

Not a co-worker but a personal friend, I am still developing with the dude. He is absolutely AMAZING when it comes to reverse engineering he knows much more than me in this area of computer science. Actually one of my first friends who actually geeks out over this shit.

My most memorable coworkers are also the ones I would most like to forget.

I work for a quite small company (4 people) and about 3 years ago, there was this guy from Bolivia who was an intern for graphics and similar stuff, nothing related to programming.

Turns out we got to be quite friends and still hang out from time to time now.

Best thing was when boss wasn't at the office for like a week and we hadn't much to work on, so we spent time smoking, eating, chatting and watching movies... very great time!

How come I never heard of Samsung DeX. I watched videos on hooking up a Samsung to a HDtv via hdmi but they never showed this stuff.

Practically turns my phone into a desktop

Me

Most memorable co-worker for me is my senior dev at my first job. He is awesome. He taught me everything and he never complained even if I ask some basic things and never got irritated when I made dumb mistakes.. he just simply explained and ask not to repeat that mistake. He gave me one advice that never ever be egoistic about your code, Yes you can feel proud but don't be like I will never tell or explain to my junior ones. Cause of Him I am good mentor/trainer also :) along with developer. Thank god at my first job he was mentor.

It’s a bit of a coin toss for me but probably the first sysadmin I worked with Dave, I was a software engineering graduate and tbh he scared the sh*t out of me when I first met him but when he learned I actually enjoyed doing ops stuff, he really took me under his wing taught me so much and I’ll be forever grateful to him for that

During uni times, I was working part-time in a private security firm. A co-worker, I hadn't known yet, was assigned to a 12 hour night shift with me guarding some secret weapon, which was quite boring.
So we talked about life and other things and found out that we both had great interests in building and using PCs. This has lead to a great friendship and dozens of PC we've built, modded and overclocked together.

Found a comment from a coworker in legacy Code starting with: "For those who are brave enough ..." ⚔️🛡️

An UI guy which actually complimented my will to work with non-dev professions in order to deliver quality features.
Spoiler: I am willing because you are awesome and are not offended in me asking questions outside my area of competence in order to be sure what I do is what you want, so if you happen to read this post kudos on you M. , not on me :)

I remember my colleague who was DevOps guy (15+ years exp) in our one very good project about kids' edutainment.

He always breaks things & blames others when only he had admin access of the tool.

When client was very much interested in Android app, our that DevOps focusing totally on REST API & ignored Android app related DevOps tasks.

Our Android CI/CD was not complete till project ended. Due to his stubborn nature we couldn't take benifit of automation testing.

You can't tell him how to do any task, if you tell then it will be taken by him as an insult to his intelligence.

He would waste his 2 business weeks to find a way to do that task, then he would do some frugal trick half heartedly then he will leave it. Still he wouldn't accept your help due to his ego & he would work on tasks which he likes even though they are of low priority.

He was hellbent on cost cutting so he reduced caching availability to save extra billing, now we couldn't had enough speed for even 10 users to show recommendation feed by API.

Due to this our client couldn't show demo to angel investors properly & didn't get funding.

I don't how with such a bad attitude, he could survive so long.

He had plenty of training certificates (Salesforce etc.) with very little practical knowledge.

God save people of his current & future projects.

Memorable coworkers? It's a toss up between the guy who got fired for calling a department director a c*nt on a recorded phone line loud enough for the whole call center to hear it, and the guy who reported me to HR for not including him in a private Slack conversation because it had nothing to do with him.

People are weird.

oh my, this guy was a serious joke. This was 3 years ago at a company I just joined and this guy should have had more than 10 years of experience.

He was a frontend developer and I had to explain to him how to create a hamburger slide-out menu with jQuery.

He got laid off a couple of months later and now his title holds "senior" developer... I feel sorry for his colleagues that have to deal with his stupidity every day now

I'll transform Co-worker into Co-student.

Personality wise most are like a brick, or a shoebox.

Most memorable would be the radical feminist bitch.

Dis dude @ODXT. First actual friend I made at the job. Magician that showed me the BS and Magic workarounds in report development using SAP. Also GM, Taco Accomplice, and Ramen connoisseur. Really happy to call him a friend, mentor, and partner in (food) crime

So.. I had lots of jobs.
Since my 20s I picked mostly heavy work instead of intelectual work.
Went to the army, drove trucks, Cutted steel , worked a lot in were houses.
One of my jobs was cutting steel for the molding industry. I was replacing a guy who lost his finger in a saw.
Temp that was there for less then a year tought me so well in the first day, one year latter I was still working exactly has he tought me.
Best worker I ever saw, all movements were precise, exact measures to the mm, ways to do the work better and more precise...
Then proceeded to do shit, spent hours in the bathroom watching anime and playing on his phone.
Turns out he was already on his second year as a temp (wich is illegal in my country, can only do 1 year as a temp), and to make a contract the company wanted to pay even less then minimum wage.
Leaving me doing all the work.
So.. I broke my back, stopped working and as a thanks (I was still a temp and was already at the end of my second year) they just finish my contract.
One year after, the guy I went to replace got fired because couldn't do the work as me or my pro college.
My pro college got a better job.
Now I usually work in the molding industry and many of the companies I used to cut steel to changed suppliers because they started to have problems with that one. Like blocks of steel smaller that what they needed....
To bad this guy wasn't in a manager position... His the kind of guy professionals want as a boss

So I am a fresher and have worked a lot in coding and good at full stack and reactjs.
This situation of due to covid got me into high pressure and
Rn I took a job in non department that too in sales.
I really need a job/ internship in technical so that my career gets secure.
Just 4 days back I was super confident and excited about upcoming life.. and today
Anyways.. I think this is gonna bring the best out of me and am gonna proove that am super talented and can do anything I want including getting a good job in this market :))
Wish me luck and ofcc

I would be greatful if I get wise advice on the same <3

What is mean by Co-Worker?