Slashdot Mirror
Ask Slashdot: How Do You Deal With Programmers Who Have Not Stayed Current?
skaffen42 writes "The recent Ask Slashdot about becoming a programmer later in life got me thinking about a related question. How do you deal with programmers who have not stayed current with new technologies? In the hiring process, this is easy; you simply don't hire them. However, at most companies where I've worked, there are usually a few programmers who have been employed long enough that the skill-set they were originally hired for has become irrelevant. At the same time, they have not bothered to stay current with newer technologies. They usually have enough business knowledge that they provide some value to the company, but from a technical perspective they are a slowly-increasing liability. As an example: I work with a developer who is 10 years my senior, but still doesn't understand how to write concurrent code and cannot be trusted to use a revision control system without causing a mess that somebody else will have to clean up. On top of that, he is really resistant to the idea of code reviews; I suspect he dislikes people he considers junior to him making suggestions about how to improve his code. So, how do my fellow Slashdotters handle situations like this? How do you help somebody like this to improve their skill-sets? And, most importantly, how do you do so without stepping on anybody's feelings?"
It's not that new if you came up in the HPC world working with something like Erlang, but I didn't see it until 15 years after my first CS class when I went back to school to learn C++ (When I started, it was C that I learned and then I ended up working in Eiffel later on). I have never seen nastier harder to track down bugs than when we shifted to a concurrent model while chasing lower latencies in GUI's... I will give it to the young guys who came in after me though; they seem to live and breath this stuff. I got out of the way and became management. I drove them crazy with forcing UML and unit tests and strong code review (they wanted to move FAST), but they are all much better coders than I ever was. I can still kick their butts designing algorithms, though. Different skills for different targets. I hope the fellow grey beard in the OP realizes the change like I did and find a different role where his skills make more sense. Good luck.
[RIAA] says its concern is artists. That's true, in just the sense that a cattle rancher is concerned about its cattle.
I really don't get this POV. Businesses don't have the POWER to take your money, save for total monopolies with some product or service you can't do without - and these can't exist except at the pleasure of the government. They have to convince you to give it to them. If you let yourself be brainwashed, there is nobody else to blame.
Now, governments CAN actually take your money. That is a completely different situation.
None of this is to say that businesses do not engage in corrupt and evil practices just like governments - but they can't "take" your money.