Originally

Originally posted on r/ExperiencedDevs but got removed by mods because it's a rant (to be fair, it is). Hopefully this kind of content is allowed here. I'm a mid level software engineer (3 YoE) at a medium sized software company. We mostly WFH. There's this junior engineer on my team (let's call him Slacker) who does no work at all, EVER. Slacker has worked at the company for over 2 years, and it's his first job. At this point I'm certain that Slacker has had a negative overall contribution to the company by wasting other people's time. Slacker is super creative when it comes to excuses. Every single day there is a new excuse. The engineering department does a daily end of day call where each person gives a brief update saying what they did that day. I usually zone out when most other people give their updates because the meeting is mostly for the benefit of the department head. However, I always listen to Slacker's update purely for my own amusement. It's worth noting that the end of day call is completely optional, yet Slacker still makes a point of attending every day to let us all know that he got nothing done and what the reason was. Usually the reason will be some minor inconvenience, but he ends up spinning it as a big thing that prevented him from getting any work done for the entire day. When talking, 90% of his update is about the excuse and 10% of the update is about the work he was meant to be doing. Some recent examples: * He had a head ache * He was feeling run down * He was feeling fuzzy * He was feeling tired * Someone was over to remove a wasp nest outside his house * An engineer came over to look at his boiler * His boss had slow WiFi * He had a flat inspection coming up so needed to tidy * He had a doctor's appointment * He needed to inspect a flat (he used this excuse about once per week for 6 months until he finally moved) * He needed to deal with some personal stuff (with no further elaboration) * He used eye drops and couldn't see Occasionally, in the end of day call, Slacker will report that he got some work done. However, if you ever dig into what he actually did, or worked with him that day and know the truth about what happened, it's always less than 20 minutes of actual work. A recent example: the other day Slacker updated his PDP objectives on the work HR system, which is a simple copy and paste task based on predefined objectives our boss gave us. It should take 5 minutes. For Slacker, this was the only thing he did that day. And the next day he had the audacity to announce in the morning call that his plan for that day was finish off his goals. How had he not already finished them?! I sometimes wonder what Slacker actually does all day. Although we work from home 99% of the time, there have been a few times that we were both working in the office. Every time I walked past his desk he was on his phone scrolling through Twitter. One time my boss was on holiday for a week and asked me to stand in for him as deputy. During this week, Slacker was offline most days, missing most of his calls, and ignored me when I offered to help him out. When my boss returned, I said my piece about Slacker's performance. My boss admitted that Slacker gets assigned the easiest "quick win" tickets, and he can't even get those done. These tickets would drag on for weeks. Slacker's tickets only get done if our boss or someone else in the team manages to get Slacker in a call and walks him through how to solve the problem and what code to type - basically doing the work for him. When Slacker does occasionally raise a PR, the code changes were always written this way either by our boss, me or other colleagues. It's not that Slacker isn't supported. Our boss is super supportive, but Slacker delays or actively avoids help, probably because receiving help would mean that he has to do some actual work. I have no idea how Slacker has not been fired. The company is clearly all about profit, but this guy is getting paid around £35k a year to drag other people down whilst bringing nothing to the table himself. Honestly, at this point I wouldn't be surprised if 2 years from now he's still employed here. Edit: To address the many comments about Slacker being underpaid: this may be hard to understand, but £35k is an above average salary for an entry level software engineer role in my city. I'm not going to share a source for that as I don't want to reveal the city, so you'll have to take me on my word. As one commentator pointed out, I probably shouldn't have mentioned the specific salary in the first place.