Yeah, I'm glad for redprog that they haven't ran into this sort of thing, but sometimes you end up with people where you sort of have to sit on them a bit to get usable code that you even CAN code review out of them.

I even had one contractor who would, from the very start, refuse to do any work without a step-by-step list of implementation details as his 'project requirements.' First time I've ever had someone DEMAND me to micromanage them. I fucking hated it, I was spending nearly an hour and a half for each hour of billable work I was getting out of the guy. I can only assume some client in the past was wishy-washy about requirements with him, and I totally feel for him on that, but I personally feel he was taking it a bit far lol.

Only upside of that clusterfuck is that it gave me the political position to ensure that no more contractors were hired to work with my team without someone on my team being involved. The quality of our contractors went up rather significantly at that point.

If that person made it through the probation period under your supervision, that's still your fault. And if that person was there from the beginning, a senior in your team could still support them by teaching them good practices, showing them better options, etc. Or, as a last resort you could always assign them tasks that are more within their capabilities.

Micromanagement will never lead to people improving - quite the opposite in fact, they'll start to care less because there's always someone who prevents them doing mistakes.