We have recently hired a new mid-level QA person, and the in the first few weeks, he did fine and seemed to catch up decently in training/learning of the product.
When we finally assigned him "real" tasks, he did not seem to be able to do it himself. It has been the third month, and yet, he still needed people to tell him what to do in order to finish his assigned tasks or to sit through with him in a product-beta testing session and to tell him exactly if there is a bug despite the fact that we have presented him with docs detailing the expected behavior.
"he's new and needs more time"?, fine, I can live with that.
But things has gotten so frustrating to the point I honestly believe it's adding negative velocity.
The first "major" mistake that got me to pay attention was when he resolved a merge conflict in the strangest way I had ever seen in my entire life.
He was working on some tests in a fairly outdated revision of a branch. And for whatever reason, he modified some source files (ie., product code, not test), which itself was already a no-no. Inevitably, when he tried to merge his change back, it got a conflict. And what he did was, to check out a fresh version of the branch, then to COPY AND PASTE all the files in his directory into the new checkout and then committed the change WITHOUT telling anybody.
(Now I can tell you how this is so wrong at so many levels, but you probably get the idea)
Another similar incident is when an test suite wasn't passing on a specific machine for a branch, which turned out to have an older version of java that the branch no longer supported. And when the dev who owned that part of the product had specifically instructed him to upgrade to the required jdk. But he, instead, reverted the change the deprecated the version to get his test suite passing, and obviously we did not notice that until very recently.
When we (another dev and I) confronted him about these, instead of acknowledging the mistakes, he claimed he "did not do it on purpose.", while pulling his manager into the conversation to defend him. (At our organization, devs and qa teams report to different managers)
QUESTIONs (sorry for the long rapport)
Should I bring this up again to my manager, given his manager was already informed? (I'm concerned it'd feel like "going behind his back" to retell the story to someone else) But if I don't, it just frightens me to think of any future damage that could take place.
What is the most polite way of asking him directly "What else have you done? Please tell us now rather than later!" (I'm younger than him, which is why I've had some reservations)