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A Measure of Your Team's Health: How You Treat Your "Idiot"
Esther Schindler (16185) writes "Every team has someone who at the bottom of its bell curve: an individual who has a hard time keeping up with other team members. How your team members treat that person is a significant indicator of your organization's health. That's especially true for open source projects, where you can't really reject someone's help. All you can do is encourage participation... including by the team "dummy.""
Some organizations are large enough and organized enough to help employees grow in their current and future roles but some are too small and cannot afford the down time as they require expertise right away.
That said, in my experience individuals who struggle to get to the level of competence required are more loyal employees hence a reduced cost of employment long term. They are also more accepting of a slower career path.
My 2 cents.
I've had the delightful experience of being treated as the team idiot simply for declaring that the emperor had no clothes. It was one of those death march instances where a company decided to write a "version 2.0" of their extremely good program from the ground up. They brought in extremely skilled and expensive technical leads who developed a complicated new back end that was designed to be as "infinitely versatile" and then deployed a front end to match. The result was that they took a very good user experience and turned it into an arcane and slow -- but insanely flexible -- system. Client users absolutely hated the preview releases because they simply didn't let them do their work. I was the unlucky sap who had to provide feedback to the dev team. I decided not to pull punches and deliver a factual summary. The end result? The project lead declared that, "The consulting team simply doesn't understand how the system works" and proceeded to try to ice me out of the company. The organization ultimately failed because the project was such a mess. Unpleasant, but I'm glad I stood my ground and called a spade a spade. It took a while to regain my confidence after that, but my subsequent projects have all been successful and even award winning.
I've worked on teams with a variety of skillsets over the years ranging from fresh-out-of-college new grads to seasoned "dinosaurs" with 50 years experience. Everyone had something they were good at and could contribute to the project, though many times what they could contribute wasn't technically the role they were hired for.
There was only one exception: a fellow way back in the early '90s who got a job on the project I was on because he'd supposedly done programming for AT&T after graduating from Bowling Green.
The first time we reviewed his code, we realized it was bullshit. Before every single stdio function call, there was a "#include <stdio.h>" statement. Every single call!
Further investigation proved that his degree was a fraud -- Bowling Green had no record of any student by his name.
Despite that, he was stuffed in a corner and allowed to "work" the remainder of his six month contract by "reviewing" documentation and marking spelling and grammar corrections with a red pen.
He couldn't even do that -- his English sucked.
But firing him would have put the company at risk of a lawsuit, so they had him make the documentation binders.
So even the worst team idiot can do something "useful" if you've got no choice but to keep them busy with something. :P
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Mod parent to top. I'm in my 50s now, and in a management role in a fairly well-known British financial software development firm. The idea that you can rank people on some one-dimensional scale is laughable bullshit - not much more sophisticated than the phrenology of yore. My job is to find out how people work, and to give them what they need to make them thrive.
It is extremely rare for me to find someone who is genuinely dull - I'm much more likely to have a group of closed-minded people who think the "different" guy is stupid, only to find out a year later that he's a stellar performer given the right conditions. I'll go so far as to say sometimes it's straight prejudice: a few years ago we had a top graduate with very little programming experience who was constantly asking questions. He was also black and his English wasn't very good - two things that were mentioned more than once in the office by others when he wasn't around, as part of discussions suggesting that he lacked competence. Fast forward to today, and he's leading a team of financial modellers. He still slips up on engineering, but he's one of the most mathematically talented chaps we've had. He's much better at communicating than he once was, but it's really a case of his brain not thinking the same things are "obvious" that other people think are so. I've heard no nasty remarks on his heritage anymore, either - which, in a team full of public-school-educated white boys, is my idea of progress.