Beware of Developers Who Do Negative Work
Considering that the author writes on his resume that he lead several teams, it startles me a bit to see how easily he puts all the blame on the developer and none on the other team members (including him) and the management.<p>The way I see it, as a senior developer or team lead it is your job to make sure that your junior level programmers are doing good work, and if they don't, you either help them to improve or (if that's not possible) let them go. Whenever I hear a story like "this person did bad work for six months so we had to delete all his code changes and let him go" I immediately know that something is very wrong with the management of the software project in question, as in a good team structure it's just not possible that a single person does "negative work" for several months, let alone a year without being noticed.<p>Also, whether a developer will do good or bad work does not only depend on his/her ability, but also on the circumstances under which he/she works. Some people need more oversight and a tighter feedback loop to be productive, while others can work in a more independent way. In any case, with a good team process it is really hard for a single person to do negative work, and if it happens it's usually the fault of at least several people (due to lack of clear standards, missing feedback cycles or lack of ownership).<p>So if you're a senior developer or team lead, don't put the blame on other programmers, but instead ask yourself how you can build a process that makes it really hard for individual programmers to do bad work.