How do you handle Ineffective Programmers?

Question

How do you handle a programmer who is on your team but is extremely ineffective and ends up wasting the time of the rest of the team.

I don't mean lazy, but I mean a person who has such weak problem solving skills, that they require a lot of hand-holding to get them to complete the simplest of tasks, that even a student fresh out of school can do with one hand tied behind their back.

This person is a very nice person, who is genuinely trying. We try to give them all of the resources that we possibly can for this person to improve, but they simply just don't "get it".

We don't like to throw people out, and we genuinely want this person to succeed. Have others encountered this in their career? How do others handle this sort of situation?

Answer 1

Find some simple regular activity for him that will not require high problem solving skill.

Then try to gradually change the tasks to those that require more problem solving. If he copes - fine, if he doesn't - go back and try later.

Even if he never improves I'm sure that you can find some job for him that he will cope with and that will be beneficial for the project.

Answer 2

1. Find out what talents he or she does have. Everyone has some sort of talent.

2. Figure out how your company can use that talent.

3. ???

4. Profit. :)

Answer 3

Reassign him to be czar of the all important developer documentation.

Answer 4

I have run into this before a few times.

One time we gave the developer assignments as a white-box tester. Eventually he gained the coding chops he needed to be a positive contributor. (Sometimes people find they are more attuned to QA than development, and there's no shame in that either. We need all kinds.)

Another time, we tried white-box testing. We tried assigning him a mentor full time. We tried classes, but eventually he was costing the rest of the team a lot of productivity. He was a nice guy; everyone liked him; but after a year of trying to make it work, we had to let him go.

Answer 5

Well, it might not be the answer you're looking for, especially since he's a nice person, but are you in business to hold hands or in business to get projects done?

Answer 6

Sometimes you have to let such people go. They simply cannot do the job they were hired to do.

I saw this first hand in a previous job. We were a very small software house and we were looking for additional programmers. This guy interviewed well, IIRC, and was a nice person, but he did not have the mental abilities to program our application. At the time, we were (experimenting with) pair programming and for that to work you need people at nearly the same level. So it only took a week or two to realize he was just not suited to the job.

He understood. He'd been getting frustrated, too.

Answer 7

All of the suggestions here are good.

If you are interested in this person, you have a duty to be honest with him or her. Tell him that although you and the team likes working with him, that his poor performance is hurting the team. Offer assessment on each of the things that you have tried to improve the situation, and ask the subject how they believe each of those things went.

At the same time, you have a duty to do what's right for the rest of your company. If your teammember is not able to contribute in a positive way, in spite of all their effort, you will need to cut them free.

Honesty goes a long way, especially when there's a clear and obvious way that you show that you're actually trying to fix things, rather than putting the burden solely on the subject.

If you are up front, then this person may realize that perhaps they should consider other options and might find another opportunity before you get the chance to (really, are burdened with) laying them off.

As far as what you should be doing for your team, you should be taking care of your best workers, not your worst. That is very hard to do, but its definitely the best. Your time will be spent where it does the most good, your most productive will be made even more productive, and the (pardon the expression) losers either rise to the level where they meet the example set by their peers, or just fade away.

Answer 8

I had such an experience where one of guys in my team was a complete non-performer. He tried very hard, would put in more hours than others, wouldn't take breaks and was generally much more dedicated than anyone else on the team. However, he was just not able to find solutions to the simplest problems without being spoonfed.

To complicate matters, he was from a very financially underprivileged background and had a family to support. I was aware that he would find it very difficult to get employment elsewhere given his lack of communicative skill.

I also had a few arguments with my management who were hell-bent on firing him. However, I felt that he deserved a decent chance and I was adamant that he be given that opportunity to improve.

I took the following steps to handle him:

1. I had a one-to-one meeting with him and enumerated his negatives to him. I also told him about his strengths and firmly communicated that if he did not show concrete improvement, I would not be able to convince the management to keep him.
2. I gave him simple problems at first and coerced him to develop his own logical thinking. I encouraged him to come up with ideas and not to hesitate to voice his opinion.
3. I gave him tips to improve his communicative skills and be more involved in the team effort. I always tried to make him a part of the team.
4. I made sure that any work assigned to him was not a show-stopper for the work of the other team members.

It took me six months to groom him enough to be acceptable to the management. He left recently to join a great company. I think of that period as one of my triumphs.

Of course, you should note that not every Team manager has enough time to dedicate to the grooming of one individual. Businesses cannot afford to be emotional and so do not carry dead weight around. However, it is upto the Team manager to recognize potential and nurture it.

Answer 9

Unfortunately, a poor performer brings down the morale of the whole team. If you don't do anything, your stronger performers might look for work elsewhere - the talented ones can always leave for greener pastures.

You need to get him out of his current role where he is wasting the teams time. You can try training/mentoring/etc., but unfortunately some people just aren't cut out to be programmers. Try to find a role on the team where he can contribute, such as some level of QA, documentation, performing your teams builds and running test automation, and so on.

However, if you don't see him being a positive contributor to the team in the not so distant future, you really need to let him go.

Answer 10

I could try really hard, but I'll never play in the NBA. It's a sad story but at some point you have to make a decision, is this a business or is this a group of friends getting together to work on some code? I suspect your boss thinks it is a business.

Answer 11

Make him a tester.

Listen to Stack Overflow Podcast#43

...where Joel and Jeff discuss dealing with incompetent programmers, whether salaries should be public, dealing with technical debt...

Answer 12

If they are fairly new, keep them focused on 1-2 projects. Not more than 2 otherwise they will become lost. They'll lose confidence and their performance will suffer as they struggle to grasp loads and loads of code. Pair programming at this stage can really bring them up to speed with things as well boost their confidence and performance.

Answer 13

Ineffective programmers can be handled like this:

1. Try to get them work effectively by working with a task list.
2. Give a deadline for the task to complete.
3. Then monitor the activity on daily basis. Try SCRUM sessions where every morning at 09:00 everyone has to tell in 2 minutes: what did you do since last SCRUM session, what are the problems since last session, what are you doing next?
4. Try to get the team collaborative, define interactive sessions where everyone can learn from eachother.
5. Critize ideas, not people.

Answer 14

In fact I don't handle ineffective programmers, the resource manager just moves them to a different project.
Moral of the story: Problems are usually not solved they are passed on!