One developer on our team got tasked with coding some new features. It was taking longer than expected. So the team lead decided to implement some of the logic himself on the back end. However the original developer wanted to do everything in the front end. These guys are always fighting so I did not think anything about it.The team lead told me he needed to go on a vacation. However the management wanted these new features done first. So he asked me to see if I could figure out how to call his stored procedures from the front end code using OLE DB. That seemed like a trivial task. We even have other code examples in our system that does this.
It was then that I found out what the real problem was. These guys could not agree on anything. There were a lot of emails containing a battle of wills between the two developers. I just came in on the weekend to see if their code could talk. The team lead has some mismatches between his PL/SQL package specification and body. And the front end was not passing in some strings correctly. Aside from that, the code seemed to work with a minimal amount of things left to do.
I believe it is time for management to step in and get these guys straightened out. There is always time for a lively debate between developers. That’s how you arrive at good design decisions. However when it is all out battle, the whole team suffers. Right now I have a little of the pain because I need to work the weekend to deal with some of this nonsense. But I got some concessions for my extra work so I am not too displeased. We will see how this episode ends.
