
Ask HN: Working with developers who can't code - Jackypot
Does anyone else have experience working with developers who just cannot code? By which I mean professional devs with terrible development skills, and little knowledge or interest in the field. I&#x27;m amazed they find jobs but they seem to.<p>Any strategies for working with someone like that? Or any stories about working with such people?
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muzani
One company I worked with had chronic overwork. Everyone was always busy on
something. Everyone cooperated.

But nobody got anything done. They were simply satisfied with emptying their
inbox by shoving it into someone else's.

For example, we'd have a meeting on a database. I'd give them the names of
tables and fields. Manager forwards the agreed upon specs to everyone.

But the database guy has his inbox full. He says he didn't get the email.
Manager says she never followed up with him. This is not an uncommon thing,
but a routine. It buys them time to finish off the next thing.

A week later, I follow up with them. Manager says she deleted the old file. We
do the exact same meeting again. This time database guy gets the email.

However he makes typos. "routes" table becomes "route". "weight" field becomes
"obj1234" field.

I told the CEO either that guy leaves or I do. CEO tells me that I don't know
to work in a team. I'm supposed to CC him every time I ask them to do
something.

Things magically worked well when I CC the CEO. But sometimes they reply to me
only over an issue. When the next email is not CCed, things mysteriously go
wrong again.

The company is a global enterprise company with no staging server, no
development server, everything is pushed to production. Source control is
sending an email out with a zipped file of today's changes.

They're good developers, it's just that they're too busy being busy to develop
anything.

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hackermailman
Teach them by doing code reviews together. By doing this you become a better
developer yourself and at the same time prevent your product from sinking and
you getting sacked because nobody in management wants to hear your complaints
about another coworker they want you to figure it out yourselves. Keep
documentation of everything you had to rewrite to ensure high standards are
kept then use these records to demand a raise/promotion later instead of
telling management you want to be moved.

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arenaninja
I'm on my second job where I work with people like that.

The first time, the dude was promoted to manager of the department after our
manager was fired for missing a pretty big deadline (massive scope creep, very
poor project management). He was very good at cultivating relationships and
throwing people under the bus when it suited him. Everyone hated him by the
time I left, I hated him first because he was a charlatan though, he'd
complain about the API I was building but when pressed for the JSON payload
he'd prefer instead he took literally weeks to not provide it while still
complaining (and emailing our manager DAILY) about this.

The second time (my current job), a coworker, four years of "experience". He
had a hard time figuring out how to find a line of code in his IDE. We
literally could not give him tasks to change the color on a button, because he
could not find the button in our codebase. I helped him as much as I could,
but his mentality wasn't keen on learning and I'm pretty sure he outsourced
his _actual_ job because he'd show up the day after with close enough code
snippets that still didn't work. Every _night_ the day after he'd made
progress while he was incapable of explaining what the code did. Eventually
some other peers complained, he was put on an improvement plan and let go
after about 6 months

The third time (current job again!) I've seen several developers more senior
than I push for this or that idea or architecture, and no one in my reporting
line cares enough or has enough influence for us to say "this is a horrible
fucking idea and the people promoting this are incompetent". So I just do it,
it's a job and gives me a paycheck in exchange for my time. If I'm not allowed
the kind of influence that would make things better I figure they still expect
me to work since I still expect my paycheck. The project will likely be a
massive failure IMO

~~~
seventhtiger
This is confusing to me. I'm a compsci grad and hobbyist programmer working in
IT. I want to switch into software development.

On the one hand, I'm intimidated. I'm pretty sure I wouldn't do that well on a
whiteboard interview, and I need to brush up on some concepts. I have around a
50 to 80% comprehension when software developers talk shop.

On the other hand, I hear stories like these of people who are barely
functional yet they have my dream job.

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croo
My experience is that these kind of devs only survive in big environments e.g.
multinational companies. Once they become the mayoriy (or the loudest) then
part of the company will match their speed over time and the development time
and time itself slows down. Tasks will be measured in weeks instead hours,
meetings will be about anything to further the day, deadlines will fly by with
everyone pointing to each other.

If there is nothing you can do to remove them the best you can do to ignore
them, separate yourself, or them from everyone else. If you care enough you
can try to mitigate the damage they may do. If you are surrounded by these
type of developers you may want to do what I did: find a job where you can
actually learn from others. I recommend small businesses as they cannot afford
to have these people.

~~~
muzani
I've seen them thrive in startups too. The company was incompetent, made
millions. Things regularly broke (enterprise!) but the startup was backed by
one of the biggest accelerators in the region, CEO hung around a lot of
influential groups, media covered them a lot.

They think income is slowing down because of AI, but it's really because they
make bad software and are running out of customers.

But it's a very unsexy field and there are no new competitors.

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stvmlbrn
Oh yeah, they are rampant in government work. I find it extremely frustrating,
but I just try to focus on my responsibilities and try not to get worked up
about things I can't control. It's easier said than done.

As a side note, the fact that these people are able to find and keep jobs
really makes me question myself. I'm not a rockstar, but I am a competent
developer that can get shit done, bring value to the team, and is always
trying to learn but I'm having a hard time getting a new job. It's frustrating
as hell.

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painful
I recommend asking the manager to put you on a different project where your
code and theirs is completely separate. Moreover, don't even worry about code
reviews of their code. This advice is terrible for the company, but it's
nearly optimal for you.

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djinnandtonic
Get out of your company if they're really letting people with no productivity
hang around.

I'd bet $99 to $1, though, that you've missed something in interacting with
this person. They've held a job, presumably for some time? They're clearly
producing something.

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wrestlerman
What exactly does terrible dev skills mean? What's wrong with them?

~~~
Jackypot
Just programmers that can't program. Guys with years of experience tucked
under their belt who struggle with simple things. I have pair programmed
before with a guy to whom it wasn't obvious when to use a foreach loop, and
who didn't parse test failure output for hints as to what went wrong.
Everything was just a mystery. We'd make a change, test would fail and tell us
exactly why (lo and behold, it was the thing we had _just_ changed) and he was
unable to find the thing which was broken. It was painful to have to state the
obvious (what ought to be obvious to a professional developer) all day long.

~~~
wrestlerman
Oh, now I get it, thanks. Unfortunately, I don't have an answer to your
question.

