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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.""
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.