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We've got a team of around 20 developers and the most junior of them all is a interesting specimen.

The kind of person who thinks they a 'expert' in anything and everything and is constantly trying to school our senior developers who have 20+ years experience behind them.

The sort of person that spends 15 seconds googling something he has never heard of before, but now that he has skimmed 1 page on Google would classify himself as a 'expert' in said topic.

He comes into my office yesterday and proclaims that it has been decided by himself that he no longer wants to be a developer anymore and wants to do Ops/Infrastructure, then starts rambling on about how he is a Kubernetes expert.

I asked what experience he had with Kubernetes and his response was "I watched a webinar they did last night" to which I asked if he had ever actually used anything to do with Kubernetes in his life.

"No, but I'll watch a few YouTube videos and will then be more than qualified" he says

Followed by him telling me that we'll be moving all of our current Docker Swarm clusters into Kubernetes.

This was news to me (I'm head of infrastructure and operations)

I needed a good giggle, so I asked why we would get rid of our exisiting Docker infrastructure that's got a 100% uptime over the past 2 years and has worked without failure. It's truely been a dream.

He says "Because it's shiny and cool and better"

The nest afternoon he comes to me and says "When I move everything into Kubernetes I am going to convert everything into micro services"

He says that he watched a YouTube video the night before on microservices and has decided that it's what we need to use for a particular project.

(It's a simple php website that gets 100 hits per day)

Hopefully his boss will notice that he is producing no output soon. Don't want to tell the manager that the guy he hired delivers no work and lives in a fantasy land.

"your not touching the infrastructure. Ever"

Comments
  • 12
    Wtf, how did he become a developer and got hired in the first place?
  • 10
    They're everywhere now. I have one on my team. They claim to be an adept developer, and yet, can't seem to come up with a solution when given ample specifications.
  • 3
    @segfault0xff and they are excuse makers and goalpost movers
  • 1
    In my case it's my boss. He sees something or hears something somewhere, then next day we are told to do the shit. It doesn't matter if that's useful for current project or not. It takes couple of hours to convince him that those are not useful for the project.
  • 5
    @jeeper as a guy that's been working 22 years, I have ever diminishing tolerance for such horseshit.
  • 1
    @segfault0xff I’ve only been doing it for 7 years and my field of fucks is currently quite barren
  • 9
    I would fire him if I could but their boss has an amazing track record for encouraging this kind of crap.

    Both of them need to be let go actually.

    This is the same boss who

    - Gave a bunch of developers and external contractors the root credentials for our AWS account with all our production infrastructure 'because it was just easier'

    - Told a developer to do something to a RDS instance in AWS and ended up destroying our primary DB replica

    Then when raised with him you get told 'he just has initiative and wants to learn'

    To which I asked how and in what universe it's appropriate to learn on production infrastructure.

    He calls it 'baptism by fire'

    I call it 'you are a utter fucking moron who encourages worst practice and has no thought for the people who need to clean up the mess that has been created.'

    This is the same guy who is convinced that VGA is superior in every way when compared to HDMI and that digital video is a inferior technology

    There is no hope
  • 4
    I, on the other hand, tries to get my code reviewed by almost every senior :P
  • 5
    @BugsBuggy most of ours completely refuse to let anyone look or work on their code because they get too upset if someone tells them there might be another way to do something

    Someone tried to help one of the developers out and gave him the fix to a bug that he could not fix , the person who tried to help didn't get spoken too for 6 months because the guy trying to help was "trying to be better than him and make him look bad "

    I only stay because I scored my own private office and get to watch the shit show unfold every day through my window. It's as addictive as bindge watching on Netflix.
  • 5
    @unclekev : You are not alone! Once I got the following answer when I suggested a possible bugfix to a junior developer (2 years experience) :

    "You aren't into C++ for long, right?"

    Naaaah, dude! I only started recently with StormC++ in 1996. ^^ (After 6 years of C)

    However, I remember when I was a "youngling", that admitting to not understanding something is very difficult. A hard to learn discipline to be honest.

    Today I have no problem to say something like: "I don't know[, yet]", or: "I don't understand that[, yet]". At the end of the day that's easier and more productive than BS'ing your way out just for your egos sake. ;-)
  • 3
    find for him some side service that he can develop and host as he like, and your main site will use it. give it totally to him to have the responsibility of the delivery. he will come to the real world without any training wheels. you will save his career and your team too and he will return a better colleague to his first position.
  • 1
    Nova days everyone thinks its a programmer just by watching a hello world on YouTube and demand that get hired as a senior programmer..
  • 3
    Good for you. My junior made me leave the company because she also watched one video and told the manager (her uncle's friend) that she is ready.

    Here I am in new company but I miss my company as I built there from ground.

    After one month I saw a Ad that they are looking for seniour resources.
  • 1
    These fuckers really grind my gears. Unfortunately they don't stop when becoming more mature developers and get giddy over to new shinny unproved frameworks or applications.
  • 2
    @Yamakuzure I am fairly junior but i don't understand some people, No one is super talented. It is necessary to know your short comings to grow more.
    I don;t understand why people act : I know everything in every technology :) and i cant be wrong because I am dumb as shit .
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