Ask Slashdot: How To Handle a Colleague's Sloppy Work? 332
An anonymous reader writes "I'm working on a new product with one of the more senior guys at our company. To be blunt: his work is sloppy. It works and gets the job done, but it's far from elegant and there are numerous little (some might say trivial) mistakes everywhere. Diagrams that should be spread over five or six pages are crammed onto one, naming is totally inconsistent, arrows point the wrong way (without affecting functionality) and so forth. Much of this is because he is so busy and just wants to get everything out the door. What is the best way to handle this? I spent a lot of time refactoring some of it, but as soon as he makes any changes it needs doing again, and I have my own work to be getting on with. I submit bug reports and feature requests, but they are ignored. I don't want to create bad feelings, as I have to work with him. Am I obsessing over small stuff, or is this kind of internal quality worth worrying about?"
Like code doc more than code? (Score:5, Informative)
>> Diagrams that should be spread over five or six pages are crammed onto one
And you still figured out what to do? Sounds like he knows what he's going then.
had an intern try to clean up my code... (Score:5, Informative)
I had an intern try to optimize and clean up my code on his own initiative. It was pretty irritating.
It was an internal demo and I had written the code quick and simple to get the job done. It didn't need to be clean or optimal. I wanted the intern to spend his time doing better things.
OTOH, if I had tasked him to clean up my code and optimize, I might have been happy with his work.
Re:Get over it. (Score:4, Informative)
By the time your prototype has 20 paying customers and publications in the trade press you can afford to bring in somebody to 'clean up the mess'. For the remaining 19 prototypes you just saved 90% of development cost with no harm done.
Not ideal, but yeah - perfect code is worth nothing if it never sees the day of light.