People are Funny
I have worked with all kids of people... I've even been all kinds of people over my 39 yrs. of life, so I think I'm pretty well exposed to my middle-class group of humanoids. Yet once and a while you meet someone that represents such a skew in your data, that you have to stop and study this person more.
I have worked with a person we'll call Steve (that's not his real name) for about two months now. He has shown himself to be a pretty reasonable developer. He seems to know the code he's delivering, and while his vision very rarely extends outside the box, he seems to be adequate for the job. Then came today.
Today, Steve came to my office to see that his code was running terribly slow. First off, he didn't believe me that it was, and in the all-too-often stance taken by some developers "it works fine for me", he had to see it. So I showed him. As it turned out, they weren't using very similar data for their tests, so that there was every reason why the results would be significantly different. That wasn't enough, oh no...
Steve then proceeded to sit in my office for the next several hours learning absolutely nothing because the tools he was using weren't going to tell him what his problem was. I tried to, but had he listened to me, he wouldn't have been here in the first place, so it wasn't likely that he was going to take my advice at this juncture.
Oh... and did I say that Steve has a serious personal grooming problem? Yup... probably hasn't brushed his teeth in... Oh... let's call it six months and be safely conservative.
So I'm trying to work with a guy that doesn't really listen to me - though I've been right every time, doesn't realize when he's got to go back and fix something, and carries with him an odor that almost makes my eyes water.
So today hasn't been a great day of personal highlights...
What I want out of this is at least a glimmer of a sense that he takes back the realization that there is a problem... that it's not us... and that they have the wrong data model. With that, and enough time, I'm guessing that they will figure it out. But that's my hopes... life rarely lives up to our hopes for it.