I am a senior developer who has been working solo on a long project for the past 2 years. I'm about 75% done.
Last week, my boss told me to work with one of our interns. He explained this intern has done poorly on every project, and spends most of his time goofing off online looking at cheeseb...
@Aria he also said "was shocked to see he had done literally the entire project that I had been working on. From scratch"
Wait...hang on..by any chance, you are not the intern in the question...right? Two years of work in 3 days, including the tests, too much to be true (with all due respects) :)
Assuming this is not a troll, I'd be really interested in knowing what kind of company decides to both a) allocate a multi-year project (meaning it's important), and then b) staff exactly one developer on it (meaning it's not important). Like, what's going on there?
"When I told him that he was only supposed to work on a small piece of the project, he apologized and said he misunderstood." And that's why this intern is "underperforming". I'd be lookin' at cheeseburgers too if the answer to "I did all the work" was "well you shoudn't have".
Something doesn't seem right with this question. So the codebase is 1/3 of the size? And you have been working on this for 2 years? How big (in lines of code) is this project, and how many lines of (allegedly high quality) code per day does that mean this intern has produced? This seems beyond prodigy levels, and into something else, such as finding an open-source project that already does what you want and deleting the license/attribution. If this is a true story, I would do a web search on some parts of the code.
"2 years work could have been done in 3 days" * "Company's financial are tight" - are directly proportional. No wonder why company is bad with stability and finance.
He did in three days what you couldn't achieve in two years? Something's not right here.
By the way, why did it take three days for you to notice this? Did you not keep an eye on source control? Did you not have an update when you got in in the morning?
Assuming this is a serious post, there is a big chance that the intern simply found the code somewhere (GitHub maybe?) and spent his time removing copyright and author notes. One fishy thing laying around is that a big part of large project development is done in architecture developing, which is not something one could figure out easily. Also, a project normally involves interface work, which can be trivial to perform (rather than an intellectual challenge) but is very time consuming.
real question is.....if he did a 2 year project in 3 days and he then went back at looking at cheeseburger recipes...HOW MANY RECIPES ARE THERE??? He must have gone through thousands by now!! Is he going to open the new burger restaurant?
The intern did in 3 days what you couldn't do it 2 years? I don't believe it. I just don't believe it. There is a large and important bit of information missing from this question.
To be fair, I've worked on several places that the current "rockstar developer" was utterly incompetent and would do work on a glacial speed. A case in point - a very simple task scheduling system - 2 week-works time for any average developer - took almost a year to be done under the hands of my antecessor on my current job. When I was hired, I rebuilt the system in ten or so days. This happened not because I'm a genius, but because the other guy sucked and slacked off all day long.
@JanDoggen I believe we kinda know xD This is clearly written by someone who has no idea about how coding works... 4.5x faster code in 65% less code, done in 3 days vs 2 years of a senior's work? xD
@T.Sar The senior has to suck too much to make that numbers even a possibility. And the intern has to be extremely good. I mean, it's a multi-year project, that means it HAS to be a bit bigger than a simple web app (or no company would have paid 2 years of a senior dev's salary for that), and you simply can't make that in 3 days with that high quality of code and tests
@dquijada I disagree. I once picked up the code from a "nearly finished, honest" scientific computing app which somebody had been working on for 2 years before he left the company. The thing was such a mess, and used such inappropriate algorithms, that I just started again and had a beta version (which the customers immediately started using as a production version!) done in a week. And it ran 1000 times faster (literally, not metaphorically) than the first attempt on some real world problems, as well.
I'm not saying one of the metrics is impossible, just that all of them together are unrealistic. 1/3 of the code, better tests, cleaner code, 4.5x faster, done in 3 days (this is almost what's less credible imho) by a intern that has done poorly on other projects and who has no access to the original code (so he couldn't even look for solutions to domain specific problems... If the OP has the slightest idea of what he's doing this should be impossible
This could be believable if the senior is re-inventing a wheel neatly done by an open source project. A timeframe difference of that magnitude would not denote a difference in brightness but in methodology. You can reimplement 8 years of work in a month because you add a dependency to MongoDB and a web framework instead of doing everything yourself.
Even if I was utterly incompetent and somebody else was the machine spirit themselves, there is no way anybody could even type 35% of what I did in the last 2 years in three days. Voting to close as trolling.
There were no interface in this program? I mean how one could rewrite form, or graph, and report, with no knowledge of existing code? Did he forsees the user interface.
I think this is the intern, writing from a different perspective, who THINKS he did all these things, and is now trying to garner support for himself on the internet. He justifies goofing off because it's so apparent to himself that he is a "genius". If this "Genius" intern was as good as he pupports to be, he'd already have a job a long time ago, and wouldn't need an internship.
@dquijada It depends. But, just to give an example - my antecessor used to play emulated retro videogames during worktime. I don't know how much time he did spent playing, but the sheer amount of ROM files I found on his computer when it was given to me was staggering.
@nvoigt I'm going with you on the close vote. While I believe that similar situations to this one can happen, I do not believe this was the case on this question given the timeframes and overall details. Voting to close, too.
Thanks for the edits. Could you please give numbers? The 2 years vs 3 days difference is still huge, the way you put it. First, estimate how many productive days you have actually put into this project over 2 years, and tell us that, because currently you are claiming someone coded line-by-line 20x faster than you! Also, you know the relative sizes of your and intern's code, so please give a rough indication of how many 100s or 1000s of lines of code this intern is supposed to of produced in 3 days. This is key to understanding your situation better and suggesting the correct approach.
The premise is absolutely possible, I once did something similar to myself. I spent 9 months implementing a custom system in Scala to evaluate data for a chapter in my thesis, and amidst the many levels of abstraction, I had not even done half of what I needed. Then I set away the sophisticated OO code that attempted to match the semantic of my project, started writing R code, and had the evaluation completely done in 10 days. When a sole developer works on a project, they can get tangled up in inventing a buldozer when they only need a 10 cm hole. So please don't close the question.
I see so many time seniors developers reinventing the wheel that I am not surprised anymore discovering a custom ORM, a custom MVC framework, a custom cheeseburger when opening a project the first time. Also, I feel that solo developer assigned to a project get so intimated with the project that they invests tons of time on details and sometime they stuck for a long period of time on an legitimate impediment.
@rumtscho: The premise of a background "big project" never completing with a senior dev and only taking a little re-start and some focus from another dev is entirely reasonable. The OP added specific details (35% code size) and omitted others (they have not actually been writing it solidly for 2 years) that made it seem unreasonable. Knowing some real numbers, and not just hyperbole, will help pitch a useful answer. I would still be concerned if OP honestly thinks intern wrote 5000 lines of quality code in 3 days, regardless of the feasibility of the rest of the tale.
The implication to me, is if this is real, that OP is beating themselves up over a perception of themselves slacking when the "big project" was not so big after all, just low priority (with maybe some key bit of computer science or other knowledge which made it easy for intern) . And if I were to answer I would still have concerns about the intern's behaviour, but this does not have to be OP's problem
No access to the code base, only an explanation on a small part of the project, still does the whole project 20 times faster without knowing all about it, with full test suite. Seems totaly legit...
If he spends his time looking for burger recipes and those figures are corrects, it looks like you spend 2 years cooking those burgers instead of coding (even more if you could check his whole code in just 1 day). Either that or he is an almigthy coder that could guess an entire project just by looking at a small part of it.
Discussion on question by John Gopher…
Discussion on question by John Gopher…