This is less a person and more a mythical creature. So rare, in fact, that when they ask a question, the boilerplate response you give everyone
else would be actively insulting here. They already read the docs, the ticket history, and the last three PRs. They're not asking what to do,
they're verifying reality.
This individual practices the lost magicks of search, reading, and understanding error messages. They arrive having already reproduced the issue,
identified the root cause, and checked whether it was fixed three years ago under a slightly different name. If you're involved at all, it's only
because they don't yet have the permissions required to bypass you entirely.
Their code changes are small, surgical, and correct. Tests are included, edge cases are handled. Somewhere in the commit is also a fix for a
completely unrelated bug they noticed while tracing the call stack, because of course there is. By the time you've finished reading the PR, it's
already been approved, merged, and deployed.
The real damage comes afterward, when the questions start. Are there more of them? Do they all come from the same team, the same ancient CI
pipeline? Do they need another person? If so, why are you trapped in a meeting debating the value of using containers while this creature
quietly ships value? Is it possible that what we call "senior" has drifted so far from competence that basic professionalism now feels
supernatural?
It's best not to think about it and just forget the whole thing. They've already disappeared back into the etheral plane they came from leaving
behind only clean code, a green build, and the reinforced belief that this was never as hard as everyone else says it is.
A genuine piece of shit. Their legacy will be that they were able to perfect the art of weaponizing incompetence. Every task is approached not
with the intent to contribute, but to argue... circling, nitpicking and "just asking questions" until everyone in the periphery is too mentally
exhausted to keep fighting. The absolute second someone else finally breaks down and does the work for them out of survival instincts,
this person emerges, confident, invigorated, ready to slap their name on it like a motivational sticker handed to a child.
Those not on the business end of these outsourcing by attrition antics powered by stubbornness and selective confusion, will often mistake this
with "leadership". After all, even though nothing gets done by them things constantly get done around them until it can be claimed
as a destiny fulfilled.
This strategy only works because most software developers didn't become developers to compete in endurance contests to see who can tolerate more
pointless meetings. While they also didn't sign up to serve as human code generators for someone whose contribution is arguing in circles, it's
often the fastest path to getting back to what they do want, which is to write code and ship software.
The only way to avoid these people is to be able to identify them. They have an unnatural willingness to pair program on even the most trivial
tasks. Commit histories will often be littered with irrelevant changes, such as moving files around, fixing typos and changing the whitespace settings.
Two questions that would yield the same answer are, "Why would someone bother making irrelevant changes?" and "Why do dogs piss on fire hydrants?"
Oh Neddy. Will you ever learn? The answer is no, not ever. This person has been in the "fake it" stage of the "fake it till you make it" ideology
long enough to be considered common law married to it. Whenever this individual is working from home, they will be on video. This is how they
ensure everyone sees their bookcase full of technology books they've never read.
This person has a gift for listening to the perfect explanation and immediately asking the one question that proves they were daydreaming about which
mechanical keyboard switches sound "more senior". They'll volunteer for documentation work, an actual relief for the team, until the team actually
reads it and realizes it's going to generate more support requests than the "Coming Soon" wiki page that currently exists.
While this person may be technically illiterate, they're an expert at tracking their own social debt. The second they sense their "quick question"
card has been declined, they pivot to abusing the git workflow. They'll open a PR containing three lines of broken code just so they can use the
comment section as a secret portal to ask the exact same questions you've already answered twice.
Trying to get rid of this person is like trying to kick a golden retriever puppy out into a thunderstorm in front of a live audience. They've
unknowingly managed to weaponize their own incompetence into a "learning journey" that suckers in every manager within a five mile radius.
It's the professional equivalent of falling for a stripper and thinking you're the one who's going to save them. Their current team knows this
is a lost cause, but is more than happy to let you pay for their next three months of "onboarding".