Ask HN: What should I do about a lazy and unproductive programmer?
At my startup there is a three person programming team. There is one team member who has been working here for about a year - I&#x27;ll call him Rob - who is very competent, but has had issues that I think stem from laziness.<p>The most experienced programmer on Rob&#x27;s team has complained to me that Rob will take 3-5x longer to finish a task because he lacks the work ethic to get it done sooner, and he has also complained numerous times (including once on the public team Slack channel) that Rob often pushes buggy or sloppy code to production with the hopes that someone else will clean it up for him.<p>I was skeptical of this claim at first (a lot of the stuff Rob&#x27;s worked on was experimental in nature and hard to efficiently track) but after paying closer attention, I now agree completely with this team member&#x27;s complaints.<p>The only discussion I have had with Rob so far about this came during his performance review at the beginning of the year. At the time I didn&#x27;t quite appreciate the extent of the issue and told him very generally that he excelled with the big picture but needed to needed to be more detail oriented. So although Rob&#x27;s team member has called him publicly I don&#x27;t think Rob even remotely realizes how poorly he stands. This startup is small (8 people) and very close knit, so I&#x27;m worried that if I simply let him go it would come out of left field and hurt the morale of the rest of the company (with the obvious exception of Rob&#x27;s disgruntled team member).<p>If the issue was simply him pushing buggy code live I would sit down and discuss the issue with Rob and make clear that this is not appropriate and needs to be changed. However the issue seems far deeper than that, and he has already lost the confidence of the best programmer on the team.<p>The only time I&#x27;ve had to deal with a poor performer was a much more cut and dry situation, so I feel a lot of uncertainty right now for such an important decision. So Hacker News, what do you think I should do?