Have you met over-engineers among juniors and middles? How should one deal with these?

Question

Career in IT

It’s worth starting with the fact that this is a very enthusiastic employee who tries to understand all the nuances of the project, actively conduct various discussions, does not hesitate to express his opinion, and usually this opinion is worth it. It would seem that this is even good, but ...

The fact is that the described type always tries to jump above its head. Or maybe above the heads of all team members. Most likely, he is a very chsv-shny person, although he may not openly show it.

What drives them? Unknown. Perhaps he is a real perfectionist who always wants to do more, better and more ideally. If he sees that a hedgehog has thorns, and can already crawl into a narrow gap, then he immediately wants to create an animal that has both. Perhaps he has quite selfish goals - he can work for a portfolio, for experience, believing that in the future he will be able to find a better job faster. Or maybe he expects to become the favorite of someone from the leadership at this job. Or some combination of the above.

But the fact is that it is he who writes unit tests all day long for something that no one has ever written them for. It is he who introduces Long polling into the registration page, otherwise the nickname may already be busy while the user fills in other fields (and regrets that the deadline does not allow him to implement even WebSocket there). It is he who is a real maniac of both optimization and code readability...

He may not even be lazy to take out his achievements in re-usable libraries - again, either with the goal of really making everything cool, or with the goal of later showing someone what he is cool at 21 and how many libraries he wrote and how many stars they have on github.

All this leads to the fact that the character stubbornly piles up a huge amount of code and functionality.
He lacks deadlines - he begins to lack sleep, and very much. He is very hardworking.
He lacks understanding of what is happening in his code - he writes a bunch of tests and tests each feature manually for a long time and tediously. Again, diligence allows him to, but oh, how I don’t want to screw up with a bug.

In addition, he can also check the work of other team members (although no one asked him to do this), find bugs and fix them.

But overall, this person is still harmful to the project. At best, he harms the team, but raises his status in the eyes of higher management. At worst, he generally "owns" the entire project.

Have you met something similar, and how to deal with it?

Answer 1

The person is not guilty of anything at all.
it’s just that the company’s business processes are not built (or are not properly built).
a man with burning eyes and a skilful one is an awesome asset. I just need to direct this enthusiasm in the right direction. and this is elementarily solved by administrative methods, if it is not possible to figure it out among themselves.

Answer 2

Dismiss and all

Answer 3

Perhaps he has quite selfish goals - he can work for a portfolio, for experience, believing that in the future he will be able to find a better job faster. Or maybe he expects to become the favorite of someone from the leadership at this job.

Most likely, he is a very chsv-shny person, although he may not openly show it.

You don't have to measure everyone.

He may not even be too lazy to take out his achievements in re-usable libraries - again, either with the goal of really making everything cool, or with the goal of later showing someone how cool he is at 21 and how many libraries he wrote and how many stars they have on github.

What is it, what is it - in both cases, he does his job well. Here's the f**k!
In fact, you got too good an employee, and you do not have enough qualifications to competently use it.
Answer: either study or go up to him and say - so and so - you are too good, and I'm a shitty mentor / manager, you will have to be fired. It would be a pity if such a person would waste his time.

Answer 4

If he has time at work for other abstract tasks, he needs to be directed in the right direction.
Such a person will either adapt in a few months, run out of steam (because at the beginning there is a lot of work you can take, and then he gets tired and starts doing less), or quit.
If he is a smart fellow, why not raise him for yourself? Direct, give more tasks, teach somewhere, let him help others.
What can be seen from the question is that he works well, does what they don’t ask, so he’s incomprehensible and how to rein him in ...
If he doesn’t suit you, talk about dismissal on your own, if you don’t initially have a relationship with such a person, then he may not stay long, but he and you will lose more energy to fight it.
It's hard with perfectionists, but if you find a common language and common tasks that direct his energy in the right direction, then we can say that you have won a super prize.

Answer 5

Learn to prioritize.
1. Give him a specific backlog of tasks, set an impossible deadline.
Then periodically check the status and set priorities. How the priorities are set - ask the status in the first place for these tasks.
2. Load it with bureaucratic work. So that he cooks in the cauldron of managers, and understands that it is possible to make ideality in code, but in principle it is impossible in bureaucracy. He will either leave, or he will understand that he needs to let go.

Answer 6

I was with one person on the project, his favorite feature was - rewriting the code on the weekends. You come to work on Monday, and they tell you: I partially rewrote your code there, I decided that it would be better with my changes. The code was not buggy, not buggy, it was just that a colleague did not like it due to some internal criteria.
And yes, constant processing on his part, which is rather strange, because. it was difficult to make a career in that company, and everyone was paid a fixed salary, excluding overtime.
I don't know what it was, I met it for the first time.

Answer 7

There is no benefit in this. The speed of development is important, and not some nonsense for 30 lines of code on websockets.

Answer 8

A person expresses his disagreement in this way.
Passive aggression always develops into active, if the cause is not found and eliminated.