

Ask HN: should I tell my previous employer the new hire is no good? - mythrowaway3

Obviously I&#x27;m posting this from a throw away account.<p>OK, some months ago I&#x27;ve quit my job to move on to better opportunities. Since I was the only dev I agreed to be available to help the new hire out if he needed any help. So I still have access to all the servers and such.<p>Anyway, today curiosity won me over and I took a peek at what the code he produced looked like. And I was shocked. It is a mess of sphagetti code, one file that contains everything from PHP, HTML, CSS and JS, HTML that contains inline CSS etc. I should mention that the whole system is otherwise built on a MVC framework and all the code that I wrote before I left kept things where they should be.<p>So now I feel like I should say something to my previous boss. Maybe I feel that way because I was the one who did the technical interview with the new hire, and although he wasn&#x27;t amazing I got the impression that he is at least a solid developer. And time was running out so my boss decided to hire him. But I never expected the new hire to produce such rubbish code. I just feel that if things won&#x27;t change my ex-bosses business will go down the toilet as this new hire will end up producing a unmaintainable mess that nobody else will want to touch ...
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nousername
Maybe talk to the guy, be direct. Does he care about his craft? If so, then
point out his mistakes and show the guy how its done. If he cares and is given
some time to correct it, well then you solved 2 problems. Your boss gets
quality work again and theres one less developer making fettuccine for the
rest of us to eat... and we've all done it.

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mythrowaway3
Haven't thought of talking with the guy directly. One of the reasons I'm
thinking about saying anything is to avoid being perceived nosy or sticking my
noes into stuff that's not my business.

As for showing him how it's done ... he has my code right there ... I also did
one week of training and showed him how things are done, so I don't see how
any more training would help. Basically the guy "invented" his own way of
coding so he could do everything in one file ...

And I don't think he cares about the craft. I mean just looking at the code
from a stylistic point of view ... it's horrible. No code style whatsoever,
mixed tabs/spaces etc ... So I really don't know ...

edit: it's ex boss, I don't have anything to do with the company anymore ...

