It’s Hard for Me to Know When to Draw the Line
Today has been a really hectic day of a lot of issues in the testing brought up by someone that's a decent guy - kinda like a beer-drinking frat boy - lovable, but you'd never want him dating your sister, but ultimately, pretty useless. I'm getting partial sentences from him about bugs, he's clearly very frustrated with the process, and I believe he's closed himself off from learning another thing about this system. It's funny… the same things that made him a useful tester - able to find bugs because he gave no thought to what he was doing, is really his personal undoing. He's really frustrated. It shows.
I'm trying to cut him slack. I know he's capable of doing more than he is, but at the same time, every time to acts like an angry frat boy, it's hard to have patience for him. Really hard.
I have said many times - "This is hard. I know it. It's hard, but you can do it." only to pump him up enough to get through the next 15 mins and then have him come back to earth crashing even harder than before. He seems to have no patience for the learning process, or at least no interest in what it takes to learn in a place like this. There isn't time to spend several hours with him and take him back to programming basics. He's got a little of the basics, but not enough, and he wants to know more, but he's got no foundation to base it on.
It's not easy. This is clearly over his head, and he's being given an opportunity to move out of the simple QA role, but it's up to him. And in my way of looking, he's not making it. But it's not because of his ability - or lack of it, it's his attitude. He gets angry as I try to explain something to him. I can see he's angry, and I ask him if he's interested in listening. He says "No, I hate this", and walks off.
OK, choice made, ignorance retained. It's his choice.
But at some point, I simply have no more patience for this. I just don't. But it's hard for me to know when to draw the line. I know people that would have had stern words with him already. It's a zero tolerance policy for them when it comes to willful ignorance. But to me, I don't want to make it harder on him than it already is. I'm hoping that when he has the patience, he'll listen, and it'll sink in. But I'm beginning to have my doubts.
In the end, I don't know that it'll matter. In the end, I think he'll self-select and that will be that. It's his choice, after all.