The Toxic Developer

Yes, I had a similar experience: I avoid these people, they're annoying and make others unproductive.
Take care, cheers!

Yes! I had a developer on my team who was argumentative and not receptive to any feedback. I was the architect on the system we were building and responsible for the code. He was a personally nice guy, but I grew to dread reviewing his code because he would constantly quibble with my notes. And it's not that I wasn't open to his points of view, but there are things that cannot be compromised. Instead of going along, he would simply argue endlessly about things until eventually someone above my pay grade had to tell him that it doesn't matter if he agrees with me. He just has to do it the way I want. I hated that it came to that, because that's not how I like to operate.

Also, he would become argumentative and belligerent in meetings, especially with the business analyst on the team, when he thought her ideas or plans for how a feature should function were wrong.

He later confessed that in his previous job, which he had had for years, he was essentially a lone developer and never received any feedback from other developers. So, he didn't have any experience in accepting feedback, and because he never received any feedback, he sort of deluded himself into thinking he had nothing left to learn about software development and engineering.

Eventually we found a way to work together and got that project across the finish line. However, his team on his next project within the organization did not find a way to work together with him and he was let go.

Hi eric, Thanks for talking to us.

I thought for the longest time that there was an unwritten rule that if you were replacing another developer on a project, you always had to tell people how bad the other guy's code was.

Good talk, I'd skip the intro though. I get that you spent some time/money on it, but it's just something to spend some effort to skip over to the real content. Alternatively make it super short like 1-2s.

u salty

I know some people who are like that, arrogance and prepotency first.

It can be tricky sometimes. I've worked at places where a developer is just a complete A-hole, nobody wants to work with him, but does all his work and is responsible. Hard to fire someone like that, especially when he knows not to do anything too extreme to not get fired.

I think the engineers who complain but don't propose any solutions are the most annoying kind. My personal rule is that I never point anything out unless I have some solution or feedback to provide. Seeing comments like "I feel there must be a better way to do this" just make me roll my eyes.

The last team lead I worked with would say to me "what is this, why did you do this?"
Everyone in the team disliked him and others outside of the team mentioned how he would bring the mood down whenever he entered a room.
He refactored everyone's code and broke everything - he also over-engineered everything making code almost impossible to work with.
Thank goodness he left - he was a horrible person.

I retrained into software engineering from a different field and, compared to my old industry, I have found software engineers to be massively more toxic. I'm really enjoying programming, and I am overall glad I made the change, but I certainly miss not having to deal with toxic individuals routinely.

Man going through a toxic lead situation. This really helped me feel better that this isn’t new.

Good video!

So I’m working with a toxic sr engineer. It sucks. He’s anal about normally trivial things and exactly like you said I’m already dreading working. I don’t event ask for his code review anymore unless I have to. I have experience with these sort of people but it’s always hard to work on a team like that. It’s all ego.

The paaive aggressive ones are the worst.

Well said. You deserve lots Of appreciation

I had the same experience with a first time job so called intern dev this year. Dude used to push his chair around me every 2 hours and checking what I was doing. Micromanaging and trying use subtle putdowns here and there, bashing my school course against his, and directly making arrogant disrespectful remarks to the point of making me feel bad about my skills and life, very ausive. I had to go directly to the boss and tell him I was going to change my desk to other side of the room. Super arrogant, fun fact is after the original boss decided to change his desk into our room and starting to perceive dude was actual slacker without imagination to come up with solutions and used to stand there consuming company time w out actually doing anything. The toxic developer is always the arrogant one who overvalues their own skills.