Should I fire someone who unnecessarily wrote 500 lines of code?

Don't know about whether the person should be fired-- but this reminds me of a guy I used to work with. He was notorious for finishing his tasks slowly; and what he would do was, if given even a simple task, end up writing a huge module for it, that was, though modularized, full of crappy unnecessary code. It was kind of a weird stubborness in him. He refused to use existing utils/methods that other people had written as well; he would not improve existing utils or use them, he would just write his own arcane esoteric behemoths even to solve simple problems. It frustrated the hell out of me but he never seemed to draw the ire of the other developers on our team. I ended up leaving that company and discovered a few months later he was let go.

To anyone being harsh to this guy I suggest you go back and look the code you wrote 5 or 10 years ago. Now think how bad the code you write today will look to you 5 to 10 years later.

Edit: I lost my train of thought. I meant to say, imagine how your code looks today to someone as good as you but with 10 years more experiences than you.

Yes, but only the second time they do it. After you've explained to them why it was a bad idea the first time.

It looks like everybody takes the claims in the question at face value. It looks to me like a junior team leader doesn't understand the code written by a senior. All code can be made shorter. It doesn't mean it's better or even cheaper. All the shortcuts you take will come back and byte you.

I would answer, but Quora has made it impossible to see any context on the question.

500 Lines- that sounds like the average electronics guy who started coding unrolling a loop with copy and paste. Yes, such a thing exists.

There are "Programmers" who do not know about basic elements of the language they use. For years.