Ask HN: What to do when a lazy programmer is ruining the teams motivation

3 points by vuyani 8 years ago | 3 comments

Hi, So theres this programmer at work that hardly does any work at all. He spends most of his time surfing the net and watching videos. His attitude is affecting his teams motivation as they under pressure to deliver, and they end up doing most of the work while he surfs the net. The thing is. They extremely upset, but also feel like they cannot approach management and tell on him as they feel bad about that. Management hasn't noticed his lack of work cause he bullshits his way in stand up and about his task deadlines.

What would you recommend them do in order to either get him off the team or start pulling his socks?

onion2k 8 years ago |

What would you recommend them do in order to either get him off the team or start pulling his socks?

Before doing either of those things, why not try to address why he isn't working? Is he finding his tasks boring? Is he out of his depth? Is there a problem outside of work that's affecting his productivity that he needs help with?

It's preferable for everyone if you can help a team member rather than being antagonistic or defensive when there's a problem.

vuyani 8 years ago | |

Valid points. He is a very capable programmer and the work is definitely not boring. His team mates think he threw his toys out the cot because he did not agree with using a particular technology going forward. So now instead of helping write the code, he chooses to do small tasks that he sits on for weeks and months. Really, this is also a failure on management. Managers should know how much work load he has and when he should realistically be able to finish it. But they haven't paid attention to that, so he gets to sit on these tasks for the longest time.

For example. He decided to build a date-picker from scratch for no apparent reason, when there are a trillion jquery, bootstrap date-pickers available. It took him 3 months just to do this, Now he has said he is gonna work on CSS clean up and re-styling all the validation errors, its been 3 weeks of him doing this.

He is the senior dev in his pod. So when theres demos, he's the one that talks and includes himself on features that they rolling out as a "team" effort when he hasn't written a single line of code on it.

brudgers 8 years ago |

It's not your job. It is management's. If it is not worth the risk of airing your concerns to management, then that just shows that it is not really the particular developer that is the problem. And the idea of "the team" taking matters into its own hands is just another sign of how dysfunctional the workplace is.

Either act properly, or don't act. There's no excuse for anything else. The internet cannot give you permission.

Good luck.