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

~~~
DKnoll
Sounds like he was trying to design job security.

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noncoml
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
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?

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joeblow9999
Yes, but only the second time they do it. After you've explained to them why
it was a bad idea the first time.

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GoToRO
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.

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

~~~
phonon
[https://www.quora.com/log/revision/233604881](https://www.quora.com/log/revision/233604881)

[https://pastebin.com/myYsRUjq](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."

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Pica_soO
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.

