Dev loudly complained about older colleague, who retired not long after

The graybeard wasn't doing a great job and morale improved once he left. How would you handle this?

Who, Me? It's hard to confront the start of a working week, but each Monday morning, The Register tries to keep the weekend fun going for another few minutes by delivering a fresh edition of Who, Me? It's the column in which we take your tales of your most ticklish moments at work and share them for the amusement and/or education of your fellow readers.

This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Aidan" who told us about his experience working on a software development team charged with delivering a major project to a tight deadline.

"We had to hire new people to do all of the work," Aidan told Who, Me? His team was also augmented with a couple of "experienced" developers from elsewhere in the organization.

To Aidan, "experienced" meant "high-ranking, so expensive," and therefore perhaps best suited to mentoring and guidance rather than hands-on coding.

He rated one of the experienced team members "excellent."

He didn't like the other one, whom he told us was in his late 50s, had an inflated sense of his own abilities, and "enjoyed coming round for long chats" rather than knuckling down to work.

"We quickly learned he had been passed to us because he wasn't very good," Aidan told Who, Me?

Aidan and his manager therefore devised a plan. The chatty coder was asked to write a routine that reported on the value contained in a specific file. The file's name never changed; only the value it stored. How hard could that be?

A week later, the task was perhaps a quarter done, and the direction the elder developer had taken did not suggest he would produce an elegant or reliable solution.

Aidan says he took over and got the job done in two hours.

Not long after, the elder developer's boss called him in for a "career chat." Aidan understands some home truths were delivered in a very unsentimental style.

The day after that chat, the experienced dev confronted Aidan – in the middle of an open-plan office – and complained about the task he'd been given.

Aidan pushed back, saying it was a simple job that should have been finished quickly.

"The rest of the team kept their heads down, happily listening," Aidan told Who, Me? The graybeard developer tried to find someone to support his cause, but nobody spoke up.

"A day later, he decided it would be a good time to retire," Aidan told Who, Me?

A replacement was hired and the team Aidan worked on delivered the project on time.

Aidan later fielded a query from a colleague: Why had it taken management so long to realize the newly retired developer wasn't up to it? Everyone else had figured that out within a week.

Have you called out an underperforming colleague? Or used your political capital to have someone reassigned, or nudged towards retirement? Are you proud of having done so? Click here to send your story to Who, Me? We'd love to give it a run on a future Monday. ®