What to do with a junior programmer who is self-taught and not from this planet?

Question

Work organization

Seriously, a person, of course, is not an alien, but has a strange fate and it is difficult to understand in the end whether he is good or bad.

I will try to divide his problems into two categories.

Category #1.
His hobby has always been not only programming, but also technology. He makes everything with his own hands, invents, designs. That 's all . He can get into a completely unfamiliar business, carefully prepare and do it well. And from the first time. Otherwise (what is the difference from programming) there will be a waste of money on materials and parts, and he is from a poor family, so it’s better to experiment a little more on cats and take the time until a cool idea comes. What problems arise from this?
- inability to work with changing technical specifications. With him, there was never a boss who could make an incorrect UML, if only on time, and then he would redo it and force the developer to redo his code according to this UML.
- inability to do something on time, but not quite understanding the task, and then redo it. Above him, however, there was never a boss who demanded reports every day to make sure that the employee was not doing anything.
- attentiveness and good memory. He was not used to doing everything in such a way that it was easy to check the absence of errors. After all, he is able to check his product for a long time. And if you customize it, then there will be a bunch of bugs.

Further worse.

Category number 2.
Stress tolerance.
As a child, the dude was a lot of hooligans, lied to his parents, etc. Therefore, it is extremely tempered. The customer has already lost his feet, he is pulling us all the time, we are pulling him all the time, we have already fired him (once again) and we only ask to finish the debts, and he (pulling out our last strength with excuses in the spirit of "the customer is an idiot, well, we didn’t have time we are close to the deadline, so anyway the code needs to be finished and it needs to work! don’t bother me!”) sits and calmly digs into the code, fixes something that doesn’t work, while smoothing out all sorts of small jambs that can’t be smoothed out, even if the project burned down and we are on fire.
At the same time, he himself does not understand why we are also not at war with our superiors, with the customer, because then there would be a hundred times more order, and less work. After all, how many deadlines have already been broken, and the customer is still with us and everything seems to be normal. Only here we are not special forces, but simply a development team. And we can’t trade our nerves like that, our heart is fooling around, our head is spinning ... So you can die in the workplace.

Category number 3.
Introversion.
He tends to keep the entire problem in his head and think over it alone. And that no one is distracted. Discussing a task with someone, even just chatting in a corporate chat during the working day - all this does not seem to give visible problems, but it can be seen from it that this annoys him greatly.
In general, there are no unsolvable tasks for him. But there are also not enough tasks to be solved on time.

Answer 1

Firstly:
It is necessary to share personal qualities and professional ones!!
(What difference does it make that he is poor or a hooligan ....)
Second:
If professional qualities suit you, then let the person work and do not interfere with him.
If you are not satisfied, then look for another specialist
Third:
Failure to meet deadlines is not only his fault or someone else's. It often happens that this is a common fault: the customer changes the TK, the management promises deadlines, just to grab the order, the technical director does not delve into the process .... As a result, everything is hung up on the junior.
And further:
Programming is a creative profession. It is not an operator to work for 8 hours according to a certain algorithm. Here you need to think and delve into and work out individual moments. It is necessary to create conditions for comfortable work, and not to press and stand over the soul. But so that the relaxation does not drag on, even debts need to be planned.
Next, you need to understand why delays occur:
If this is a poor time planning, then let him work as he likes (at night or in the evening), if delays occur due to lack of knowledge, then they need to be tightened, including courses or the help of mentors.
AND:

He tends to keep the entire problem in his head and think over it alone. And that no one is distracted. Discussing a task with someone, even just chatting in a corporate chat during the working day - all this does not seem to give visible problems, but it can be seen from it that this annoys him greatly.

It also annoys me to be distracted every 5 minutes by messages that do not apply to me at all. And endless discussions can be endlessly discussed.
Got to work - work. Letuchka 10 minutes every day in the morning. 60 minutes on Monday. And that's it. For neh.

He never had a boss with him.

The boss is not a team. The boss may not be a mentor, adviser, assistant.
It is more valuable when there is someone to tell.

because then there would be a hundred times more order, and less work

There would be less work if you, up there, decided everything among yourselves, and then came with your Wishlist, and did not change your shoes every day with your TK "I don't know what I want."

Answer 2

If one June leads to regular failures of deadlines and something else must be completed after dismissal, otherwise we will miss the deadlines again, then it is probably he who was lucky to be overboard this boat, and not those who remained in it.
Leave the person alone, let him deal with himself, you yourself have problems up to your throat.

Answer 3

As already mentioned, the problem is primarily in the manager, and not in the development, although he is not a gift either.
What to do? Change processes.
For example, in the task tracker, when changing the status of a card to "In Progress", the developer must set the expected execution time. If it is more than 8 hours, then the card is divided into several. Any subtasks longer than 2 hours are decomposed through a checklist. If the card is not made on time, then this is an occasion to discuss with the manager what the problem is, what solutions, how much more time is needed.
See also Friedman's Centering Paradigms.

Answer 4

All of these symptoms are easily treated by teamwork experience.
If a person cannot work for a result in a team, then dismissal is an adequate and logical move.
It is very strange that for a long period no person (team) was found who would start effective support and update of the project.
Code review (code review) and the adequacy of the developer should preferably be carried out every day. A running project and an inadequate coder will recoup a hundredfold on your nerves and deadlines.

Answer 5

Let everything be done step by step.
He will write down the architecture and hand over each module (first - the logic, then - the working code). Part of the modules - you can entrust others to do. (resolved 2 problems)
Communication: here is a constructive question. Perhaps you (the team) want to monitor the correctness of his decisions and the chosen algorithms / technologies, or perhaps just chat about the project and pretend that work is in progress and everyone is working on their tasks in close communication on the project.
You need to look specifically at the details of communication and identify the reasons.