The Programmer from Hades
In my career I have come across a lot of different types of people. The programmer that blew through my life a few months ago left a trail of destruction in his path that I have been trying to clean up for the past 2 months and will be cleaning up for the next year, and he accomplished 90% of it in his first 4 weeks here.
It all started when I came back to a project that I had previously architected, built the framework for, and lead a team of developers through the first release of. I was gone for a month and in that time frame my company had hired Lucifer (the name we will use to protect the guilty) to replace the lead developer on the project. A young fellow who had my colleagues convinced he was a child genius, who was a previous Microsoft employee, that was into fashion as much as he was technology.
When I met him he had set up his mini Mac, his wide screen (27 inches or so), and was programming on Vista. By the time I got to him, which was his 3rd week, he had refactored our entire code base renaming and moving everything around. Our code base is 3 Smart Client Apps and a Web Site. We have approximately 30 modules that integrate with the CAB. In other words it is not small.
Needless to say nothing worked. I sat with him for a week getting the apps compiling and running again. After that week our client decided he would mange Lucifer himself and did not want to pay for Architectural Guidance on the project anymore. At the same time I told management Lucifer needed to be fired. Immediately before he does anymore damage. To my dismay they still believed he was a genius.
I was out of the loop, and Lucifer was set free.
To make this very long and painful story shorter... 2 months later after never showing up for work, finding out every story he told was a lie including working for MS, and that nothing he coded ran, Lucifer was fired and I inherited his mess.
There were so many problems with the code bases that I requested a tape back up of the code from VSS. We have end of month back ups as well as daily back ups (but the daily BUs only go back 3 months) so I got the code from his first week here. In his first week here he deleted our VSS code base and recreated it under a new project destroying our entire history of the project. Never have I ever seen something so stupid and so arrogant. Changes had been made that month to the original code so it was no good to pull the month prior.
I spent a week going through IL trying to figure out what was on the production servers and the staging servers. After a 3 day migraine I decided to give up and since have been stuck with the messiest code base I have ever seen.
Lucifer has destroyed all our binding sources in all our projects, gutted our constants code, deleted reporting proxies, destroyed a framework we had built and used on the project (in VSS too), made changes to different layers of the code that just simply broke it with absolutely no logical point, had our one application's proxy pointing to another application's web service, removed validation logic from over 7 modules, and told our client prototypes were done that never existed.
That is the list of things I have found and fixed, or am in the process of fixing.
A side note... Our production code that was deployed before Lucifer hit town has been bug free since it's October deployment. Thousands have used it, and we have not received one bug report. Now we can't even get it out of testing done on our development servers. Although that will change in the next 2 weeks (I hope).
The lesson... I wish there was one. I didn't have any control over him, and could do nothing to get him canned and tried several times. Attendance finally got him canned. When along he was doing nothing but destroying our applications.
The lesson for the client... Don't try managing developers when you have no management or technical skills.
The conclusion... Lucifer was either on some really good illegal drugs, or needed to get on some really good prescription drugs.
It all started when I came back to a project that I had previously architected, built the framework for, and lead a team of developers through the first release of. I was gone for a month and in that time frame my company had hired Lucifer (the name we will use to protect the guilty) to replace the lead developer on the project. A young fellow who had my colleagues convinced he was a child genius, who was a previous Microsoft employee, that was into fashion as much as he was technology.
When I met him he had set up his mini Mac, his wide screen (27 inches or so), and was programming on Vista. By the time I got to him, which was his 3rd week, he had refactored our entire code base renaming and moving everything around. Our code base is 3 Smart Client Apps and a Web Site. We have approximately 30 modules that integrate with the CAB. In other words it is not small.
Needless to say nothing worked. I sat with him for a week getting the apps compiling and running again. After that week our client decided he would mange Lucifer himself and did not want to pay for Architectural Guidance on the project anymore. At the same time I told management Lucifer needed to be fired. Immediately before he does anymore damage. To my dismay they still believed he was a genius.
I was out of the loop, and Lucifer was set free.
To make this very long and painful story shorter... 2 months later after never showing up for work, finding out every story he told was a lie including working for MS, and that nothing he coded ran, Lucifer was fired and I inherited his mess.
There were so many problems with the code bases that I requested a tape back up of the code from VSS. We have end of month back ups as well as daily back ups (but the daily BUs only go back 3 months) so I got the code from his first week here. In his first week here he deleted our VSS code base and recreated it under a new project destroying our entire history of the project. Never have I ever seen something so stupid and so arrogant. Changes had been made that month to the original code so it was no good to pull the month prior.
I spent a week going through IL trying to figure out what was on the production servers and the staging servers. After a 3 day migraine I decided to give up and since have been stuck with the messiest code base I have ever seen.
Lucifer has destroyed all our binding sources in all our projects, gutted our constants code, deleted reporting proxies, destroyed a framework we had built and used on the project (in VSS too), made changes to different layers of the code that just simply broke it with absolutely no logical point, had our one application's proxy pointing to another application's web service, removed validation logic from over 7 modules, and told our client prototypes were done that never existed.
That is the list of things I have found and fixed, or am in the process of fixing.
A side note... Our production code that was deployed before Lucifer hit town has been bug free since it's October deployment. Thousands have used it, and we have not received one bug report. Now we can't even get it out of testing done on our development servers. Although that will change in the next 2 weeks (I hope).
The lesson... I wish there was one. I didn't have any control over him, and could do nothing to get him canned and tried several times. Attendance finally got him canned. When along he was doing nothing but destroying our applications.
The lesson for the client... Don't try managing developers when you have no management or technical skills.
The conclusion... Lucifer was either on some really good illegal drugs, or needed to get on some really good prescription drugs.
posted by tadanderson at 10:26 AM
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