> or he actually is a "fucking moron" and you failed as a manager to elevate his skills/performance to a satisfactory level.
sometimes managers don't have the authority to fire somebody and are forced to keep their subordinates. Yes good managers can polish gold, but polishing poop still results in poop.
I was consulting at a place, there was a very bad programmer whose code looked sort of like this
cost arrayIneed = [];
const arrayIdontNeed = firstArray.map(item => {
if(item.hasProp) {
arrayIneed.push(item);
}
});
return arrayIneed;
the above is very much a cleaned up and elegant version of what he would actually push into the repo.
he left for a competitor in the same industry, this was at the second biggest company for the industry in Denmark and he left for the biggest company - presumably he got a pay raise.
I asked the manager after he was gone, one time when I was refactoring some code of his - which in the end just meant throwing it all out and rewriting from scratch - why he had been kept on so long, and the manager said there were some layoffs coming up and he would have been out with those but because of the way things worked it didn't make sense to let him go earlier.
> the manager said there were some layoffs coming up and he would have been out with those but because of the way things worked it didn't make sense to let him go earlier.
Incentives are fucked across the board right now.
Move on a low performer today and you'll have an uphill battle for a backfill at all. If you get one, many companies are "level-normalizing" (read: level-- for all backfills). Or perhaps your management thinks the job could be done overseas cheaper, or you get pushed to turn it into a set of tasks so you can farm it out to contractors.
So you keep at least some shitty devs to hold their positions, and as ballast to throw overboard when your bosses say "5% flat cut, give me your names". We all do it. If we get back to ZIRP I'll get rid of the actively bad devs when I won't risk losing their position entirely. Until then, it's all about squeezing what limited value they have out and keeping them away from anything important.
sometimes managers don't have the authority to fire somebody and are forced to keep their subordinates. Yes good managers can polish gold, but polishing poop still results in poop.