What does the job description and/or his contract say about working hours? Is there a formal after hours support policy for "critical bugs?"

@17of26 The other half of these questions is whether there's a robust test suite.

Yeah seeing how the OP didn't get fired yet for repeatedly not fixing "critical" bugs, it seems they're not quite so critical.

Could you give an example of a critical bug? Are these bugs in deployed software, or in software under development?

What do you mean by ownership? Your choice of words is important when speaking to engineers. They are, by their nature, very specific about things (and for good reason). Look at the highest up-voted answer to this question. It doesn't answer your question at all, but focuses entirely on your word choice: ownership. That should tell you that perhaps what you are communicating isn't being received how you think it is. Can you elaborate on what you really want from this person?

You need these bugs fixed TODAY, because it really breaks the software and it's impossible for clients to use it, or you want these bugs fixes because you just want?

Exactly how much are these "critical" bugs costing the company? Thousands of dollars an hour? Millions? Did you make it clear to this developer that putting it off til tomorrow would cost the company many times his annual salary?

You have 20 engineers, but no production support roster? No fix team? Is it a production problem? Critical means critical.

You seem to be confusing the words “ownership” and “obedience”.

"We released it to customers with all green in tests. After deployment, we found that some numbers are off so we retested everything and found the same issue coming back - users can't login." ... so, I have to ask... why didn't you just roll back the release at this point and fix it for the next one?

@eis because it's on AppStore

@codeproject asking this question here is like asking directly to your senior dev...do you expect anything else than "management sucks" answers? Fortunately you already know what you have to do in this case, you have a serious issue (both technical and professional) with this employee. Let's have a serious talk with him...

@AdrianoRepetti Many people in Workplace are or have people people leaders.

Have you investigated what the team were doing during the 2 weeks that you allocated to "critical bug fixes"? And, do your teams only perform Unit Testing - a simple round of End-to-End testing should have identified this as the first bug that they encountered.

Not planning sufficient testing and ending up with critical bugs that need to be fixed by staying late regularly is a management failure, more specifically your failure as their manager. It's also your emergency and not theirs, so your poor planning not being their emergency is understandable.

@gregory of course, but the vast majority are upvoting answers where the only point is to blame OP management without even considering how unprofessional his senior dev is behaving. It's popular but it doesn't make it sensible

@AdrianoRepetti What is so unprofessional about saying that one will not do some work today and then not doing it? OP is talking about "their promises", but it seems they were "OPs promises", that the dev isn't willing to fulfil.

@alexander without blaming anyone for the bug itself, imagine a critical bug preventing users to use the app. Let's say you will need 3 working days to fix it (9-5, no overtime). This will cost the company, for example, 10$×3 (because of missed revenue). Your senior dev ignores your orders and does not start to work on it today but tomorrow. Who will pay those extra 10$? Now should be obvious that it's not a dev call to decide and it doesn't even matter who caused the bug (the dev). If it was your own money then the dev would be outside the door even before OP finished typing his question.

Perhaps it is because I don't work in such environments, but it seems that the tests were not well written. Do you have any quality measure of tests (beyond % of coverage)?

@gregory how do you define an employee that ignores orders from his manager? Let me stress a point: the dev does not need to work overtime but he MUST start immediately if his manager asked so.

OP, can we get a country here? Expecting overtime is such a cultural thing...

If there is a critical bug, they must fix it even if they have to stay late. That's the most worrying part of this imo. I can't imagine many places where that's legal.. is this mentioned explicitly in their employment contracts?

@AdrianoRepetti I get the impression, which may be wrong, that the manager asked for work to be completed/started after hours. The employee is probably not obliged to follow that direction.

@gregory I agree, I'm assuming no reasonable manager may expect to have a bug fixed "today" because, by definition, it may take days even to consistently reproduce it, let alone to fix it. I may be wrong on this but I read it as "start fixing now" (unless OP alway finds these critical bugs around 16:55 which is unlikely)

@AdrianoRepetti the fact that the dev was not fired yet means his judgement was kind of aproperiate, it would have escalated to top mangement by now if it can be attributed to a single bug and a single person refusing to cooperate.

@AdrianoRepetti hapless managers identifying bugs only 5 minutes before it's time to leave do exist, I met them.

Wait, you had 20 engineers doing nothing but fixing critical bugs for two weeks and a critical bug still made it into release?!?! There is something fundamentally broken at your company. My new theory is that the senior engineer in questions is the only competent one at the company and he's fed up with it all.