Who was the single worst developer that you ever worked with, and how did you deal with it?

I’ve been pretty fortunate to work with pretty great developers. The worst was actually by far the most senior. He was the only developer at the company with the Principal Developer title. He was hired in at that level rather than being promoted internally.

He knew a lot. He was very well read. But he was an abject pain to work with sometimes. He was often rude and mean during standups and other meetings. He had serious issues deferring to the team lead and would instead just sort of do his own thing. He never communicated what he was doing. His code was actually kind of sloppy and poorly commented. For a long tile he refused to attend standups and would lose his temper if he did show up. He refused to review code. He constantly derailed meetings and used any meeting as a soapbox to complain about other unrelated things in the company.

The worst part is his boss tolerated all of it just because he was well read. So everyone else at the company had to constantly deal with his bullshit because he got special treatment that nobody else got.

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