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Ladies and gentlemen, prepare yourselves for a rant with a capital R, this is gonna be a long one.
Our story begins well over a year ago while I was still in university and things such as "professionalism" and "doing your job" are suggestions and not something you do to not get fired. We had multiple courses with large group projects that semester and the amount of reliable people I knew that weren't behind a year and in different courses was getting dangerously low. There were three of us who are friends (the other two henceforth known as Ms Reliable and the Enabler) and these projects were for five people minimum. The Enabler knew a couple of people who we could include, so we trusted her and we let them onto the multiple projects we had.
Oh boy, what a mistake that was. They were friends, a guy and a girl. The girl was a good dev, not someone I'd want to interact with out of work but she was fine, and a literal angel compared to the guy. Holy shit this guy. This guy, henceforth referred to as Mr DDTW, is a motherfucking embarrassment to devs everywhere. Lazy. Arrogant. Standards so low they're six feet under. Just to show you the sheer depth of this man's lack of fucks given, he would later reveal that he picked his thesis topic "because it's easy and I don't want to work too hard". I haven't even gotten into the meat of the rant yet and this dude is already raising my blood pressure.
I'll be focusing on one project in particular, a flying vehicle simulator, as this was the one that I was the most involved in and also the one where shit hit the fan hardest. It was a relatively simple-in-concept development project, but the workload was far too much for one person, meaning that we had to apply some rudimentary project management and coordination skills that we had learned to keep the project on track. I quickly became the de-facto PM as I had the best grasp on the project and was doing a lot of the heavy lifting.
The first incident happened while developing a navigation feature. Another teammate had done the basics, all he had to do was use the already-defined interfaces to check where the best place to land would be, taking into account if we had enough power to do so. Mr DDTW's code:
-Wasn't actually an algorithm, just 90 lines of if statements sandwiched between the other teammate's code.
-The if statements were so long that I had to horizontal scroll to see the end, approx 200 characters long per line.
-Could've probably been 20 normal-length lines MAX if he knew what a fucking for loop was.
-Checked about a third of the tiles that it should have because, once again, it's a series of concatenated if statements instead of an actual goddamn algorithm.
-IT DIDN'T FUCKING WORK!
My response was along the lines of "what the fuck is this?". This dipshit is in his final year and I've seen people write better code in their second semester. The rest of the team, his friend included, agreed that this was bad code and that it should be redone properly. The plan was for Mr DDTW to move his code into a new function and then fix it in another branch. Then we could merge it back when it was done. Well, he kept on saying it was done but:
-It still wasn't an algorithm.
-It was still 90 lines.
-They were still 200 characters wide.
-It still only checked a third of the tiles.
-IT STILL DIDN'T FUCKING WORK!
He also had one more task, an infinite loop detection system. He watched while Ms Reliable did the fucking work.
We hit our first of two deadlines successfully. We still didn't have a decent landing function but everything else was nice and polished, and we got graded incredibly well. The other projects had been going alright although the same issue of him not doing shit applied. Ms Reliable and I, seeing the shitstorm that would come if this dude didn't get his act together, lodged a complaint with the professor as a precautionary measure. Little did I know how much that advanced warning would save my ass later on.
Second sprint begins and I'm voted in as the actual PM this time. We have four main tasks, so we assign one person to each and me as a generalist who would take care of the minor tasks as well as help out whoever needed it. This ended up being a lot of reworking and re-abstracting, a lot of helping and, for reasons that nobody ever could have predicted, one of the main tasks.
These main tasks were new features that would need to be integrated, most of which had at least some mutual dependencies. Part of this project involved running our code, which would connect to the professor's test server and solve a server-side navigation problem. The more of these we solved, the better the grade, so understandably we needed an MVP to see if our shit worked on the basic problems and then fix whatever was causing the more advanced ones to fail. We decided to set an internal deadline for this MVP. Guess who didn't reach it?
Hitting the character limit, expect part 2 SOON7 -
This Part 3 and finale of the tale of Mr DDTW, or the worst coworker I've ever had to deal with. I suggest you start from the beginning if you don't have the context, it's been a trip.
Part 1: https://devrant.com/rants/4210605
Part 2: https://devrant.com/rants/4220715
The problem with this man threatening to snitch on me to the professor if I didn't revert my commit was that he backed me into a corner. Letting him go at his pace with his quality standards would have ruined the project for the rest of us, and I'm not going to let three other people's grades suffer because one was lazy. I'm the PM, team lead, the guy who will ultimately be held responsible for this project succeeding or failing and the mediator of problems.
So I snitched first.
The professor knew us. He had an idea of how we worked as a team, who was enthusiastic about this subject, who was diligent, and who wasn't. It'd been half a semester and he wasn't stupid. I'd also taken the not-so-minor task of testing our software and handling all the little integration problems between components and between the professor's server. This had resulted in several calls between me and him because he'd been flying by the seat of his pants with some of the upgrades he'd been doing to the server code and as the fastest group we were the ones running into all the bugs on his end. And he'd also noted our prior complaint and seen the discrepancy in commits, author tags and hours logged. Mr DDTW had been graded significantly worse than the rest of us. So when I sent him a goddamn novel about our team's internal problems, the bomb was set. And so we get to the conference call, with everybody panicking and with no clue what any of this is about. Except me.
Dear god. That call was pure catharsis. Never have I seen a man get demolished so hard. Mr DDTW got a 45 minute LECTURE, a goddamn SMACKDOWN, about how he needs to take some responsibility for this team effort and that in the real world he'd have been fired. And the professor was so incredibly serene throughout! He could've blasted him with the rage of a thousand suns but he said it in such a way that Mr DDTW's only real responses were "yes", "I understand" and "I'm sorry". An entire semester of this useless fucking bitch being nothing but a leech on our team in three separate projects and he was finally getting SCHOOLED. And then, it gets even better. The professor asked how we could solve this problem, as Mr DDTW needs to do work to be graded but he can't hold us back.
I dropped a suggestion: As I had implemented the module in a way that worked, we could carry on using my version while Mr DDTW could work on a separate branch. Everything else was working reasonably well for an MVP, we just needed to improve and test now, so if Mr DDTW got it working we could merge it back into the main branch. This solved the team's problem of not being able to progress, it solved Mr DDTWs problem of not wanting to fail the course, and it solved my problem of not having to work with this shit-for-brains for the forseeable future. A weight was lifted off my shoulders. No more Mr DDTW. No more bitching and no more shitcode. A grating arsehole that had been bugging everyone all sememster put in his place and out of my hair.
On the way home from uni that day, I rang a friend and told him the entire story as I needed to get it off my chest. Every time I brought up a problem, an issue, a setback, an argument, he made a remark.
"Damn, if only he just... did the work."
Every time he said it it was in a slightly different way, but every time it made me laugh harder as he just didn't stop interrupting me with the same comment. If only he did the work. But the funniest part of all was how right he was. Mr DDTW had so many opportunities to just sit down, shut up, and do the work like the rest of us, but instead he decided to do fuck-all until he got flak for it and proceeded to dig his own grave. What sort of delusional entitlement, sheer incompetence or other dumbfuckery was he suffering from to make such terrible decisions? It's his last year of university and he still hadn't learned to just do the goddamn work (I would later find out that his friend had covered his shortcomings a lot and was apparently the reason why he hadn't flunked out of uni yet).
And so ends the story of Mr Didn't Do The Work the worst person I have ever had the displeasure of working with. We never did merge his branch as we ran out of time during testing. The professor passed him, possibly out of pity or just so that he wouldn't have to resit the course and burden some other poor sods. We weren't the top scorers this time, partially because of my shortcomings as PM but mostly because of the huge delays and manpower deficit, but we did well enough to pass the course with some very high grades. With one exception of course.4 -
Part 1: https://devrant.com/rants/4210605
So let's talk about these tasks we were assigned. Ms Reliable and Mr DDTW's friend who I just realized I haven't named yet were in charge of programming communications. Ms Enabler and Mr DDTW were in charge of creating the vehicle subclasses for the new variants we were instructed to build. Each one had to handle one variant, and we estimated that both of these would be about the same difficulty (Ms Enabler's one turned out to be a little harder).
I like Ms Enabler, and she's a good friend, although she isn't the best at problem solving and her strengths as a dev lie in her work ethic and the sheer amount of theory she knows and can apply. These just so happened to be the exact opposites of my strengths and weaknesses. Within a few days of having assigned the tasks, she came up to me asking for help, and I agreed. Over the following couple of weeks I'd put in quite a lot of hours reviewing the design with her, and we'd often end up pair programming. It was more work for me, but it was enjoyable and overall we were very efficient.
The other two girls in the group were also absolutely fine this sprint. They simply did the work they had to and let us know on time. Outside of some feedback, requests, bugfixes, and mediating disagreements, I didn't have to do anything with their tasks.
A week and half into the sprint and everybody else has their part almost in an MVP state. As Mr DDTW hadn't said or shown anything yet, I asked if he could push his stuff to the repo (he got stuck with this and needed help btw), and what does he have?
A piece of shit "go to this location" algorithm that did not work and was, once again, 150 lines of if statements. This would not have been such a massive deal if THE ENTIRE PREVIOUS SPRINT HAD BEEN DEDICATED TO MAKING THE CODE DO THIS IN A SENSIBLE WAY. Every single thing that this guy had written was already done. EVERY SINGLE THING. A single function call with the coordinates would let the vehicle do what he wrote but in a way THAT ACTUALLY WORKED AND MADE THE TINIEST BIT OF FUCKING SENSE. He had literally given so few shits about this entire goddamn project that he had absolutely zero clue about what we'd even done last sprint.
After letting this man civilly know through our group chat about his failures, giving him pointers on what's wrong and what he can use and telling him that he should fix it by the end of the week, his response?
"I'll try"
That was it. Fuckass was starting to block us now, and this was the first sign of activity he's given since the sprint started. Ms Enabler had finished her work a fucking week ago, and she actually ASKED when she ran into trouble or thought that something could be improved. Mr DDTW? He never asked for shit, any clarification, any help, and I had let everybody know that I'm open. At least the other two who didn't ask for shit ACTUALLY DID SOMETHING. He'd been an useless sack of shit for half a semester in three separate projects and the one time he's been assigned something half important that would impact our grades he does this. I would not stand for it.
I let him know all this, still civil (so no insults) but much less kind, capped with "Stop fooling around. Finish this by the of the week." which probably came off as a threat but his shithead kinda had it coming.
He was actually mad. Dropped a huge faux-apologetic spiel in the chat. Why couldn't I just trust him (his code was garbage and he was constantly late without explanation), his work was almost done (it wasn't and if he'd started he'd understand the scope of what he was assigned), that the problem was that I'm a condescending piece of shit (bruh), and was suddenly very interested in doing work. Literally everybody ignored him. What was funny was seeing the first questions and requests for help after that spiel. I obliged and actually answered what he asked.
The end of the week came and went he'd just uploaded more garbage that didn't work. I had foreseen this and, on top of everything else, had been preparing his section of the work done by myself and properly. Thus came a single commit from me with a working version of the entire module, unblocking the entire team. I cannot imagine the sheer hatred for this man at that moment for the commit message to simply be:
"judgement"
And with that, all I got was a threat to report me to the professor for sabotaging his work. The following day our group got an email from the professor, with no explanation, asking for an almost-immediate video conference. Group chat was a shitshow of panic, as nobody knew what was going on. Least of all Mr DDTW.
Once again, I'm approaching the word limit so to be continued in part 3 (hopefully of 3)7
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