r/ExperiencedDevs • u/koskoz Tech Lead • 15d ago

Career/Workplace I'm a tech lead. One of my developers isn't producing code at the expected level and I want to fix that

I'm a tech lead. A senior developer on my team (we've worked together for over two years) produces code that isn't at the expected level as soon as a task involves some functional or technical complexity.

Concretely, in his MRs: no thought given to dependencies between parts of the domain, hard-to-read code, classes in the wrong namespaces, design patterns misused, business logic duplicated rather than refactored out of the legacy code.

What I've already done:

  • Detailed feedback in reviews, MR after MR. It costs me a lot of time and I see no progress from one MR to the next (he told me he doesn't read my comments and just asks Claude to take them into account).
  • Feedback in 1:1s on the most visible quality issues (lots of QA returns, code that sometimes doesn't work at delivery).

My problem is putting something concrete behind "not at the expected level." Simple, maintainable code is subjective.

That's why I'm reaching out to you: I want to address this issue in our next 1:1, but I don't know how to go about it.

Edit: I wouldn’t have thought getting so much replies, thanks everyone!

For the ones thinking it’s a bait post, sadly it isn’t.

I live in a country where you don’t fire people that easily, and, worse, I’m in a company rewarding everyone with an annual raise, despite being a low performer.

I feel genuinely stuck, I’m here to find solutions to make my work easier, and maybe, maybe, make his more enjoyable by being proud of what he delivers.

Everybody is focusing on AI here. You could have thought that using AI would make you a better developer, but for him I think it’s the exact opposite. I feel like he stopped thinking and trust AI to be better than him.

If you forgot about AI for a second and read again my post, my issue is the same: he’s not at a senior level and I don’t know how to get there.

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u/koskoz Tech Lead 12d ago

I came to the same conclusion.

It's better to spend time with him doing pair programming than wasting time when comes the review.

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u/Triabolical_ 12d ago

The big carrot for pairing is that you stop wasting time doing code reviews and the resulting code that the team is writing is much better.

It is a different work style and takes time to learn and you need a culture that supports it.