How do you motivate the 80%
You always have 10% of the people that are rock stars, 10% of the people that are deadbeats. How do you turn more of the 80% in the middle into rockstars? ...
leadership
What else does one need on top of programming skills to be a good Technical Lead?
I work in a team that was decent until about 3 months ago when a senior programmer, colleague of mine, was officially appointed "tech lead". He is a great programmer but he basically sucks at leading. We all respect him and think he would be great as an architect or something along that line but he needs a lot more of "something" to be ...
What to do if a team member is not performing well?
What can be done if a member is not performing well in your team and because of him the whole team is suffering. Who is to be blamed, the team? Should the team cover his work or should the team manager be blamed? ...
How do you move from being a developer to team leader?
I have been programming for about 9 years and want to move into leading a small team. I have a good technical knowledge & qualifications, a number of successful projects and have decent interpersonal skills. I like the comapny I work with and do not want to change jobs. Most other team leader jobs seem to want management experience any...
How to deal with an inept and self-centered programmer?
This is a sensitive question, hence I post this anonymously. Over the last year, I have been working as the senior programmer for a group of existing and new scripters. This group is lead by a separate lead. I am the programmer of the code's script interface the script programmers work with. One of the new guys has caused me countless h...
How do I help senior team members improve?
I have a pretty good team. We are all friends and get along well. When a problem does occur it is usually patched up rather quickly. However, one of the senior members of the team has become a little reluctant to suggestions for improvement. And in an angered moment lashed out with "It always has to be YOUR way!" I will be the first to ...
How do you bring a failing project back on track?
You must have heard the archetypical story of a failing/failed project: A team of inexperienced programmers work 24x7 Bugs are fixed only to introduce new bugs Customer is screaming that he could not even do the basic stuff (Saving/Querying) etc. Programmers used to having the spec handed down struggle to improvise No automated unit te...
Moving in to a designer/programmer Leadership Role
I've been working with my manager to move myself from a designer/programmer role in to a lead designer/programmer role. I have several years experience in programming. I've not became that "super" programmer that I've always wanted to be but my manager said that he thought I'd make a good team lead; I’ve since been put in charge of a c...
Examples Of Great Team Leadership
I'm thinking of moving into team leadership role some point so I'd like to hear your stories of great/inspirational team leadership. ...
How to get team member to stop interrupting?
I'm the lead programmer/manager for a team of 6 programmers. There's always one programmer who needs far more attention than all the others and comes by my office to talk to me as much as all the others combined. Some of these things are unimportant, but some are real questions. I don't want to tell my guys not to come talk to me, but...
Maintaining a healthy development team as a manager
As a manager it is your job I think to remove obstacles so that the development team can keep going. You must also try to keep some level of respect within the team so that when you have to take a tough decision the team respects it. Many people say you should stop coding, others say you should keep your hands in. My question has a sli...
How do I keep my team involved and motivated?
I am currently a grad student, but I was in the industry for a few years before going back to school. I am in a class which involves teams of 4 working on fairly ambitious projects. As a result of having been in the industry, I have a lot of "software engineering" experience my fellow teammates lack (they are using SVN for the first t...
How do you manage your time as a team leader?
Where I work, my role has been evolving from a pure development role to team leadership. I find that this suits me, and I'm generally enjoying it. One aspect of the job that continually vexes me, though, is time management. My day used to be pure coding. Now, I still have a largely full plate of coding duties, but I'm expected to mentor...
What do Team Leaders do?
It's been a while since I've taken over the responsibility of leading my team and I'm probably doing a reasonable job at it. However, I get the feeling that I am not getting enough exposure to the real-world responsibilities and activities that Team Leaders engage in. On the other hand, it might be I am doing much more than an average Te...
Team communication (especially via email) - open or closed by default?
I am a reasonably experienced C# developer (about 5 year experience) that has recently been put in charge of my first development team as technical lead (varying between 3-5 other developers). Over the last 4 months in this role, one dilemma that keeps arising is trying to find the right degree of sharing awareness of the communication t...
Communication patterns for senior developers
I've been running a weekly "tech lead" meeting at our company for several months. It's become quite mundane, and more of a status update than anything else. I'm looking for ideas to make this more dynamic: These are the guys who I think can generate great ideas and vision They also have depth no one else has in a particular domain and ...
Will successful team projects get derived from simple strategies?
Learning a lot in my few years of programming that the best projects are the ones with a clear ‘strategic plan’. That means understanding the goal and research, Research, and RESEARCH! The most important concept that teams has to realize that it’s not the ‘goal’ to show how smart you are or use the most complex design patterns, but havin...
What should be the differences between the team leader and team member in a internal development team?
What kind of characters can promote the person more likely to be a leader in the team ? Also, what do you think the responsibilities a leader should have? ...
How to deal with managers who always seem to know best?
Hi All, I am Team Lead for development and systems admin within a small company. I answer directly to the Director of the company. She is fairly difficult to work with as she almost always knows best, regardless of her level of technical expertise. She changes her mind on what should be a priority and consistently comes up with new grea...
Does team leader have to take blame for subordinate errors?
In a software company, does the team leader have to take responsibility for every error the subordinates do? The client sent an angry email because some parts of the code were incomplete and not all logs were set into place. The error was done by one of my subordinates and he's the type of person that writes code in a hurry just to fin...