[smartician]

I don't mind slow programmers, or programmers who know when a problem is too difficult for them, or programmers who ask too many questions and need constant confirmation and hand-holding. They are a bit annoying, granted, but harmless, and can be a somewhat valuable addition to your team if you give them the right tasks. Often these guys can do grunt work at reasonable quality.

The worst ones are those that know just enough to be dangerous, and who think they know everything. Instead of asking, they make assumptions, and produce code that almost works. Meaning, it will pass most of the obvious test cases, but breaks as soon as it hits production.

Example: One guy had to add a meta tag to a web page, with the page's publish date in ISO format. Instead of using the source data, which had the date as a DateTime object, he parsed the date from the formatted page output. This worked for US pages, and European pages where the day of the month was <= 12 (because of the different order of day and month), but broke as soon as the displayed string was impossible to parse. Ugh. Any half-decent programmer would wonder, "there must a better way to do this?"