Close the tracker item and go home

What to do with average developers that do bad things without even thinking about it?

Short answer: do NOT hire them.

Being an ISV owner I have a challenge of hiring developers to help me. Most of them do help, but if their commitment to the development and the company is not real, they will produce many errors. They simply do not care: “just close the tracker item and go home” is the policy.

What prompted me to write this is anger I feel, after users reported a huge bug I believed was fixed ages ago. In fact, it was fixed 17 months ago. I just found my commit (hash 2f51bc152d03e6efbfcb563c46519cc5872d971d in our Git tree). However, our employee had a small fix on that file (changing a single line) a few days later and he got a merge conflict.

Instead of going in and applying his change to my version (which changed some 50+ lines) he decided to simply rewrite it with his own. He could, of course, ask any other developer to do it, but I guess that was too much work. It’s easiest to screw things up, and not close your tracker item.

Anyway, he left the company some time ago, so it does not even make sense to tell him about this. Somehow, I feel it’s my own fault, maybe I did not provide enough motivation? Experiences like this assure me in thinking that you should never hire mediocre developers. Well, unless it is not your company and you can leave tomorrow, careless about any wreckage you leave behind you. Nobody is going to blame you anyway.

Tweet to @mbabuskov Milan Babuškov, 2010-03-15