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'm amazed they find jobs but they seem to.

Any strategies for working with someone like that? Or any stories about working with such people?

[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.

[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.

[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.

[Jackypot]

> The project will likely be a massive failure IMO

That sucks man. I know that feeling.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.