So I started as a senior in my team 3 months ago. Product is extremely complex embedded system with multiple Linux systems with separate systems that talk to each other to perform some specific processing. We are 1 of 5 teams on the project. Industry is regulated.
They recruited another 6YOE senior who started 2 weeks after me, so 10 weeks ago. Previously he was working as a lone dev.
We haven't merged a single PR from him. Everything he submits for review is a shit show - some 5k line PRs, some tagged with wrong requirements, some removing all code comments from another dev's work he's not even touching. In the last sprint he submitted 3 PRs and went on leave with a week of the sprint left. I reviewed them on the morning he was leaving and left comments. He didn't see it and just left my reviews hanging. The next week I raised this with our EM and because we were on a tight deadline I then redid his work in 3 hours. It's not complex stuff! The tickets have very generous points!
Yesterday I walked him through a ticket. It was a 10 line ticket... But he couldn't get it working the way I described. Thinking I might be wrong I did it myself locally and my suggestion worked - 2 mins job. I sent him the code and he couldn't get it running. I went over to his desk and nuked his dev environment and started a new one... Now it worked.
The guy is trusting Claude to do everything for him, but it's making mistakes (with environment setup too) which he's iterating on and causing a big mess. He told me he was actually using Haiku for a while by accident... When I ask him how he's approaching a problem he often "doesn't know". I've stressed the importance of trying to understand what's happening and he nods...
His git hygiene is also messed up. I was trying to be pragmatic so I specifically told him in reviews not to attempt to fix merge conflicts and if he got his code up to scratch that I would fix the conflicts for him... But he attempts to fix his conflicts with AI which makes an insane mess somehow!
I did an hour session with him on "how to review a PR before asking for review" hoping that would help. I can't tell if it has yet.
The final straw is today, the code that I walked him through yesterday, he made a 10 line PR this afternoon... He's not tagged requirements properly (regulated industry so this is a must). I messaged him about it and asked him to clarify expectations on this with our EM. We also had a public discussion about the scope of the ticket this morning with other teams and it turns out there was more work to do. I then privately walked him through what needed to be done step by step... And that was ignored so it's just a PR with code I wrote in 2 mins yesterday lol
What's crazy is he managed to use AI to reverse engineer stuff from the other teams. He's SSH'ing in to another system and reading shared memory, extracting information and formatting it beautifully. When I asked him how it worked he said he thought it was using a network service which was broadcasting the data lol. I checked the branch and figured out what was happening and some of the shared memory referenced the network service which is why he thought that's where it came from. It must have been a serious effort to reverse engineer! Then I showed him he could just clone the other teams repos to understand their systems...
Am I justified in just telling the EM I don't want anything to do with this guy? Can you wash your hands of a colleague? I feel like I'm just wasting my time...
Our EM has said he sees me as a lead and wants to prepare me for a principal role. For context I took a step back from hands on management at a SaaS back into an IC role at a F500 here. If this guy was brought on to my team as a senior at the SaaS I'd be looking to fire him.