[spoiler]

You both make good points.

Striving for perfection is a toxic habit (not just to your team, but to yourself too). However, there's also a category of people that write sloppy/unthoughtful code at the expense of their colleagues. Often times this is just due to inexperience, and we should reach out with advice and mentorship, but also have patience with their pace of improvement.

However, there's also a subset of people who abuse this compassion to get away with being sloppy intentionally (ie lazy). We should be mindful that these people exist, as they also create resentment/contempt, which also creates a toxic work environment.

[badtension]

Can you provide some rough statistics of each group size from your personal experience? Not asking to trap you but I am genuinely interested whether in practice it is useful to focus on the underlying cause.

Intentionally sloppy vs. inexperienced/tired/overworked/ADHD sloppy

[spoiler]

Intentionally sloppy is someone I would categorise as being persistent sloppy, and showing no interest in improving themselves, but also a resistance to advice, and/or feedback. It sounds silly, because "who wouldn't wanna improve?", but sometimes they can't tell the difference between saying/wishing it and doing it.

I'd say I probably had a handful of such colleagues out of roughly ~70 devs I've worked with. They were all good people though, and had different reasons for their "sloppyness," but I think it kinda boiled down to being slightly more insecure and egotistical, or self-serving than I'm personally comfortable with (not that I hold it against them; all these traits are gradients). One was very open that he doesn't care about maintenance burden, and couldn't understand why I'm frustrated by the idea of amalgamated hacks. It was just the cost doing business to him. I sometimes think about this attitude and the wonder of I'd be happier by caring less about quality and maintainability than I do right now.

There's other components to all the other kinds you listed, IMO. People who are inexperienced tend to learn from their mistakes and don't repeat them (or at least try not to) once they know better. People who are tired/burnt out also show this indirectly outside of code in different ways. And people with ADHD don't tend to be sloppy in my experience, but they tend to just have a more erratic cadence (depending on how well they can maintain focus), or just be a bit sporadic (ie not get anything done for almost two weeks then have a barrage of PRs on Thursday/Friday).

All of these can be addressed if the person is willing to improve, though.

[rulamba]

“I sometimes think about this attitude and the wonder of I'd be happier by caring less about quality and maintainability than I do right now”

Probably. Do they get paid any less than you? At the end of the day it’s your employer that benefits from your commitment to quality, not you. Your employer is also the one paying your colleague, so unless your his/her boss it’s not really you who gets to judge the quality of their work.

[badtension]

Thank you for a detailed response. In my limited experience I don't think I ever met anyone who genuinely didn't give a fuck. Some people were slower than others, some had a "5 pm and I am off" attitude (but without dropping work on others on exit), some were stuck in their old ways of doing things but no one was actually malicious.

Like you said, it is a gradient. We are all a bit different, in my work it was much more beneficial to me and everyone involved to just understand each other honestly, without judgement. That way it is much easier for everyone to find a good path to work happily and grow as people.

Some do not want to improve that much and I still think it's ok as long as it doesn't hinder anyone else's work. They may get switched to simpler and less challenging work over time but there's usually plenty of that to go around.