Got a offshore guy just like that. Constantly committing his whole project where most files are out of date and only the few he worked on are not.

There's no reason for him to commit javascript files he doesn't even work on the front end. It took me forever to figure out he wrote over my files the other day.

Sounds to me like he may not actually understand how git works, or he's following bizarre conventions that I've seen before from overseas devs I've worked with to just overwrite the entire project every commit

He must be using push --force in that case.. which seems like a bad practise.

What they're doing is something like branching off a very old version of master, making changes to file A then trying to merge into the latest version of master, which already has a load of changes to file A. They then resolve the conflict by picking "ours", thus ignoring all changes on origin/master in favour of their own old version of master. This doesn't require a --force.

Oh, that seems even worse!

Sounds like one of those new git conventions that becomes hot every little while. Scripts are written that automate a 10 line git process which along the way gets mangled or copy-pasted wrong and you end up there.

If he still does that after a stern talking to, you should take his commit privileges.

I am curious - wouldn't your Version Control system catch this and warn him that "file xyz has changed since you last checked it out, ..." etc?

DVCS systems like Git and Mercurial will require you to merge, but if you use a GUI VCS frontend it's really easy to choose the "use my local stuff" button. Been there with some university projects groups. (These people also liked the "force push" method of merging.)

You turn this capability off. I did and I sleep much better since!

maybe it does, then he just hammers the "yeah yeah proceed" option to ignore that and make it hurry up and do the thing he wants it to do

There is no warning.

    Pull
    cp * ../work
    cd ../work
    Work
    (cd ../src && pull)
    cp * ../src
    cd ../src
    Commit

Code reviews people! Proper code review system in place prevents this!

Why are you allowing "force" on the master branch? Don't do that!