!dev

There’s this person at $work who never uses punctuation of any kind. She has mental issues and insists on neutral pronouns (and strongly advertises these) so I’ll use the indefinite to pretend to be respectful. It has multiple thoughts while typing a message and just keeps typing through all of them without stopping. It pauses not to collect its thoughts, to edit for clarity or to fix mistakes, to separate anything (including disjoint topics), to summarize, etc. (Though calling these “thoughts” is a huge stretch, given its lack of propensity for that particular subject.) It’s as if it has zero distinction between writing and speaking, and simply lets the mental diarrhea flow while their fingers do their best to keep pace. Reading these trainwrecks of thought — and gleaning any useful information from them — is always difficult and a little bit painful.

It is also in charge of IT security, which is more than a bit worrying. (But I hate the company with a passion, so it doesn’t bother me nearly as much as it otherwise would.)

Instead of ranting I thought it would be nicer to ask for opinions/solutions: How to cope with a collegue that keeps producing trainwrecks of code which you have to first refactor to make it work in a more logical/structured way? Yes, his initial solution works (in a way), but it's just not how 99% of the other developers would solve it. And yes, we've shown him quite a few times how it should/could be (in a positive and constructing manner)