I’ve dealt with plenty of difficult people in the dev world, but they’re just difficult people like any other people.

This author seems to have VERY specific complaints about VERY specific toxic work cultures. I have experienced some DIFFERENT toxic work cultures / personalities much more than I’ve experienced this laziness / gatekeeping that’s being described here.

The sins of my particular difficult devs have been:

• Arrogance: “I designed this, I need to be in charge, you need to write code the way I want you to and if you don’t I’m going to go over your head and complain about you.”

• Paranoia: “I’m the only one who can do this project. I don’t need help, I don’t need support, I don’t want to work with anyone else, I refuse to attend meetings or write comments / documentation. Management should fire EVERYONE but me and let me build the whole app myself.”

• Malice (dealing with this one right now - not targeted at me but REALLY poisoning the team): “I hate $OtherDev. I will lie about them to others, insult and taunt them to their face, put them down, belittle their code, claim they don’t know what they’re doing and otherwise do everything I can to make their life miserable. And management can’t fire me, because I’m the only one who understand $ImportantBusinessProcess, so I know I can get away with being utter poison.”

• Code Shenanigans: “I write jokey, unprofessional shit into my code / comments and give zero fucks. I am acidic and accuse management of creating a hostile workplace when asked to stop.”

Funny story about that last one. I once led a team building an HR application. I got a call from the HR director of the customer saying they had a VERY pissed off job applicant who had threatened legal action. The jokey “fun guy” goofy dev and named all his functions / classes in lolcat language. So they were called things like “longStringIsLong()” or “uCanHazEmailz()” or IBroughtedYouAJobApplication()". A bug in the code, introduced by a totally different dev, caused function / class / variable names to sometimes get rendered as a string in the email body when a string (usually a first or last name) in the database had unusual characters (Arabic characters would trigger it every time). The jokey “fun guy” had written a function for sending rejection form letters to job applicants and had named it “uCanHazNoJobKThnxBai()”

So some Saudi Arabian job applicant had gotten an email that said something like

Dear $firstName $lastname

We have reviewed your application and regret to inform you that we have chosen to move forward with other applicants. We wish you the best luck in your future endeavours. Sincearly $companyName.

uCanHazNoJobKThnxBai().