The Curse of Mr Fixit

There are two kinds of programmers. There are those who get back from work, shove a frozen pizza in the microwave and scoff it down while coding their own LDAP server in a little used but cool language. Then there's the motley assortment of CS, physics, history and language graduates with a life that doesn't only involve computers. In the first category you will find Mr Fixit (I have yet to come across a Ms Fixit).

Mr Fixit has a voracious appetite for new technologies. He has a l'art pour l'art attitude when it comes to information technology, where writing your own LDAP server for an address book with thirty entries makes perfect sense. He likes to think himself a free spirit. Anything that impedes his artistic flow (like coding standards and testing procedures) he hates with a passion.

He likes to disparage lesser operating systems and programming languages with a destructive zeal comparable to that of orthodox Muslims looking at a sacrilegious drawing of the prophet Mohammed.

He relishes the kudos that comes from getting a job done, not necessarily from getting the job done properly. He´s not afraid to use duct tape to stop a leak, but the duct tape is never replaced by proper solder. Where's the fun in that? He shows great stamina when solving a nasty classpath issue in the web server, but he'll often be curt and impatient explaining his solution to lesser mortals. That's because he likes to be smarter than you.

However, our Mr Fixit is a person of flesh and blood and writing your own Microsoft killer in the wee hours of the morning is going to tell on you one day. When Mr Fixit suffers his first major burnout the company will realize what trouble they are in for not having kept him in better check. Suddenly everybody realizes how they have relied on Mr Fixit and nobody remembers where he left all these nifty undocumented Perl command line utilities to reboot the Oracle servers and archive the log files.

As a manager, you should not always avoid hiring a Mr Fixit. He can be extremely useful when facing a tight deadline, working ungodly hours when the rest of the team would rather save their marriage. But you cannot let him get away with the feeling that therefore the rules don't apply to him. If every programmer in your team has to provide unit tests and documentation, so does Mr Fixit.

Secondly, be aware that anynew software technology or working method has a learning curve. Programmers are smart people with usually a fine capacity for self study, but we can also be very conservative in our adherence to doing things a certain way and be prejudiced towards anything newfangled. If you let Mr Fixit install a new source repository and a new build server without proper training and evangelism within the team, you have made him the de facto guru and everyone will turn to him for the most stupid questions. Now you really pissed him off!