> I had to make a decision with Bryan and fast. So I decided to ignore him on Slack and just let him fall on his face. If my mentor found me doing fraudulent shit like this, it would have been 10x worse. Blacklisted and booted permanently...
> My inside source told me that they felt that Bryan was not even a junior developer and that his solutions were all from StackOverflow. Apparently they gave hime 3 weeks to get his shit together or they were going to fire him. I divulged to my inside source that I wrote the fizzbuzz test for him and that he used AirPair for his capstone test. My inside source was furious and called the VP of engineering immediately.
Is it so outside the realm of possibility that the junior dev in question could've gotten their act together in those three weeks, or at least used that time to prepare a backup plan? Reaching out to your "inside" contact instead of confronting the dev (which clearly never happens in this story) is cowardly and sleazy.
CASE A: [Struggle to learn]=>[Succeed a bit]=>[Struggle to learn]=>[fail]=>[struggle to learn]=>[fail harder]=>[struggle more to learn]=>[gain key insight]=>[succeed]
CASE B: [cut&paste]=>[appear to succeed]=>[cut&paste]=>[appear to succeed]=>[cut&paste]=>[get job]=>[fail]=>[decide to struggle to learn]=>[struggle to learn]=>[gain key insight ~instantly]=>[succeed]
Case A happens all the time; it is the standard process of learning.
Case B doesn't happen.
Moreover, by his fraudlent cut&paste antics, 'Bryan' has already told us one of two things:
* either Bryan himself doesn't believe that he can learn, so why should anyone else believe that he can learn?
or
* Bryan doesn't believe that learning is necessary, so why should anyone expect him to start now?
The ideal and fair solution (which won't happen) would have Bryan not only fired on the spot, but repaying the company for all wages and costs of all the time that everyone wasted on him, and delays in the project. Bryan was already treated far more than fairly, and the author was correct to provide the accurate background information on him.
There are also larger considerations than the fate of the fraudulent Bryan himself -- the rest of the team. Not only is he failing to pull his own weight, he is taking deliberate actions that impede the progress of the rest of the team. He cannot be gone soon enough.
I think you're misreading the last section: the inquiry to the inside source came after Bryan was looking for another job already and moving on.
I don't think shakycoder left Bryan out to dry so much as he just stopped enabling the habit. Bryan had already written the job off from my understanding.
I do agree that at some point shaky should have confronted Bryan - the unfortunate and disagreeable part of being a mentor is that sometimes you have to be unpleasant and confront people. But I don't think that Bryan lost the job because of the actions of shaky - Bryan lied his way into it and lied his way out of it, and it was just a matter of time until he was found out; if shaky were to have helped, they likely would have taken a credibility hit as well.
I hope the author does learn to spot this behavior much earlier on and confront their pupils, but Bryan made his choices on his own.
> My inside source told me that they felt that Bryan was not even a junior developer and that his solutions were all from StackOverflow. Apparently they gave hime 3 weeks to get his shit together or they were going to fire him. I divulged to my inside source that I wrote the fizzbuzz test for him and that he used AirPair for his capstone test. My inside source was furious and called the VP of engineering immediately.
Is it so outside the realm of possibility that the junior dev in question could've gotten their act together in those three weeks, or at least used that time to prepare a backup plan? Reaching out to your "inside" contact instead of confronting the dev (which clearly never happens in this story) is cowardly and sleazy.