Difficult Developers? We understand you Mike…

We aggregate a lot of blogs internally in the Galactic Empire - mostly to stay on top of various planets and their rumbling. It takes awhile to get a Death Star in place, so when we detect uprisings about to occur - instead of a long drawn out battle, it’s just easier to blow it up…

We came across a posting by Mike Britton, who writes about what’s important in hiring a software programmer. Skills play a role, but as Mike points out - with the wrong attitude, it’s all for naught. There’s a class of uber geek that is so incredibly talented that what they are CAPABLE of is VERY attractive - but if it comes with an enormous amount of management, are you really getting your values worth?

If you have to spend 40% of your time as a manager keeping things politically stable, or the team stable… you have to factor in that the cost of this guy is his salary plus 40% of yours. The uber geek doesn’t think in business terms - they don’t relate that there has to be a net return on investment, otherwise you’re losing money… and eventually will run out of it.

There are those that only want to win as an individual, but those who realize that winning as a team yields greater rewards. From a management perspective, whether it be your top coder, or top sales guy… if he/she is de-motivating the rest of the team, the price is too high.

The Sith have found that it’s far more productive to have a group of people with the right attitude, and generally high skill - and totally not worth the egocentric uber geek.

Quotes:

• “You can be the most prolific blogger and consultant in your field, but if you fail to come through, people will understand and remember” - Results, Results, Results!

• “Approach life with the assumption you are without knowledge and you’ll be far wiser than someone who thinks they know everything”
• “Approach your work with an open mind, and ask questions of people you may feel are subordinate.  They’ll appreciate the feeling that their experience matters, and you’ll be more likely to learn something.” - Collaborate!
  
• “Avoid gossiping and backstabbing.”
  
• “Understand that your goals are not always going to be in line with those of your company.  Your job as a developer is to write code that addresses a problem domain.” - You’re paid to to support corporate objectives, not yours.

Attitude + Aptitude = Great Employees

The formula for a great employee is actually quite simple, you need a positive and winning attitude, and you need the skills (aptitude) to go along with it.

If I’m taking on a new apprentice, he may be a really positive dude, but if he has no sense of The Force, then it’s game over. And vice versa, you can have someone who has strong powers with The Force, but with the wrong attitude it’s a management nightmare.

That doesn’t mean that these two things alone will equal success, it just means you’ve got someone with massive potential. It’s still up to you to provide an environment or framework to enable them to succeed.

The attitude is going to give you someone that’s open to constructive criticism, change, and self improvement. It’s going to give you someone that’s naturally into knowledge sharing and collaboration. They’re empathetic, care about other people, and know that there’s more success in winning as a team vs winning as an individual even though the team loses.

Having the right attitude paired with the skills to back it up is going to get you the results. Whether it’s hardcore skills in technology, or in the ways of the The Force… they’re innovative, fast, and at the top of their game. They can isolate and resolve issues, and have the intellect to absorb a lot of information and assess the situation. They have expert level skills in their areas of expertise, and are well known for it.

These are the types of employees you want to have, but they’re extremely difficult to find. It’s easy to find people with lots of positive attitude, but are technically weak or slow. And vice versa, you can find some extremely brilliant and talented folks within the Empire, but with a negative attitude… you’re constantly having to fight that and institute processes to work around it.

So, if you ever do come across one in your walks of life… steal them. Whether they’re in another Department, or from other Empires (including vendors, partners, etc…). Do what it takes to lure them over. If you’re interviewing, you do what it takes to make it happen.

How important is a degree?

Many people view a degree as a worthless piece of paper that doesn’t prove anything, and that the true test of someone’s ability is their performance on the job. Sure I’ve seen Imperial Guards with little formal education who were just as proficient as those who went to Ivy League Imperial Guard schools. Real-world experiences trump academic any day.

But a degree is important in the sense that certain assumptions can be made by those who have one and those who do not. It’s true, a degree doesn’t guarantee any level of proficiency, but those who do have one have proven that the can stay committed to a goal long enough to complete it. They also tend to be more structured in their work and personal life, and took their career seriously from a young age.

Though those who have achieved a moderate level of success without a degree says something too. They’re passionate about what they do, and do what they do is out of passion (vs. just a job). Though because they don’t have the formal training, learning is done through hacking and a lot of trial and error - where as the educated person would approach it in a methodical manner.

One isn’t necessarily better than the other - but you’d be wise to make sure you have a good mix of both and not let yourself become overweighted with just one type.

The Imperfect Perfectionist

The Imperfect Perfectionist Employee Type is often a subset of other negatively oriented types that carries this unique personality.

This type of person is obsessed with finding imperfections with everything, and their personal results work flawlessly. But, the work itself is imperfect, meaning that the flawless results are achieved through painstaking testing and regression analysis… They check, double check, and re-check the output, information, and requirements.

But they are often resistant to change, because change requires admitting to ones own imperfections. And to the Imperfect Perfectionist, your life is built on pointing out everyone else’s faults - so how could someone like this ever come to terms and deal with their own?

So even if change is good for them, for example if they adopted a new technology, process, architectural approach, or methodology they may be able to cut their testing time in half.

What’s interesting about this type of character is even though they’re resistant to change, they campaign for *DRASTIC* changes at the same time. Wouldn’t that be a conflict of definition, or a major inconsistency in the observation of this Employee Type?

There’s a good reason why they do this. They view everything and everyone around them as imperfect, so the reasons they’re not able to achieve perfection with parts of their craft is never their fault (in their eyes), but the fault of the technology, tools, people, etc… Therefore completely abandoning such faults is the only logical way (in their mind) to rid themselves of what causes the imperfection. But the reality is that it’s a subconscious move to deflect the inner realization of their own perfections.

Create a Skills Inventory to measure overall strengths & weaknesses

Say you’re in a team that specializes in using the Force to electrocute captured rebels, or run a Network Engineering team. When it comes to hiring your instinct is to focus on the obvious and primary skill of the team.

Need to fill in an electrocutioner position? Then you’re probably looking for someone who’s learned how to channel the powers of the Force into electricty. Need to fill in a Network engineer position? You probably are looking for a hardcore networking/router/firewall guy.

But look beyond the obvious and evaluate the skill sets that the team has as a whole, and identify where you are weak, and where you’re strong at. Sure it’s great to add even more firepower to what you’re already strong at, but don’t let that lead you into becoming unbalanced skills wise.

What skills you need depends on your long term staffing plan, which is related to your long term department/company/empire goals. If you want to grow, what skills will you need in the future? Growth is only possible if you have people will the right skills and personalities to achieve it.

Hiring ONLY for your needs of today is great if you never want to progress beyond today. We’re not saying ignore the needs of today, there are short term needs and they’re important, but keep the future in mind.

To assist you in this, put together a skills inventory list. It’s just a simple table of all skills needed by today and in the future, along with your staff and how strong they are in those skills. It will help you highlight where you’re really strong at, and where the weaknesses lie. So, you’re hiring strategy should try to fill in for those areas where you are vulnerable. E.g:

Category	Skill	Importance	Darth Sidious	Darth Vader	Darth Maul
The Force	Electrocuting	High	10	4	0
The Force	Psychokenetic	Med	10	10	4
Management	Empire Planning	High	10	7	3

How many sick days should a healthy employee need?

2 per year. The flu only hits once a year - and worst case you’ll get hit with a fever, the peak of which lasts for only a day.

Parents however will have kids who get sick all the time, and use up sicks day for that.

So what is sick enough? Well a 102F fever or more is. Anything else, the employee can work at home if they need to. Otherwise coughing, upset stomachs, back pain, and all that… please, get back to work.

That’s why the Sith believe in the PTO system. You get a lump sum # of days, use it however you want. Otherwise allocated sick time gets abused.

Ingredients to Successful Teams - Trust

There has to be trust between team members, and trust between staff and their manager. Without it information won’t flow properly, productivity will suffer as people go into Chess mode trying to out maneuver who they view as their “opponent”, protectionism sets in and information becomes well guarded keys to job security,  etc…

Trust comes through honesty. Being able to openly say what you have to say in a constructive manner,  being able to voice opinions without fear of reprisal, and being able to admit to ones mistakes.

Trust also needs to be earned; but the nice thing is that most people are initially willing to give the benefit of the doubt and afford another individual a high degree of trust.

Trust is also easily lost and extremely difficult to  earn back once that occurs. If a person trusts someone and that trust is compromised, it will take an enormous amount of effort to regain that trust as now the shields are up, precedence has been set, and that person will always be suspicious of that someone again. Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me…

The Cancerous Employee

The Cancerous employee doesn’t have Cancer, they ARE Cancer. They affect whatever is around them in a bad way - and overtime the cancer spreads outwards. As the tumor grows what would be healthy productive employees eventually become demotivated by the Cancerous employees around them.

Like real Cancer, the Cancerous employee is difficult to remove. They become entrenched in the organization through other people, technology, and subject matter expertise.

Getting rid of the Cancerous employee is just as challenging as real Cancer - you have to localize where the Cancer is and hit it hard, and chances are you’re going to affect good tissue (e.g. departments and teams in this case). Cancer doesn’t go down easily, it infects in as many places as possible, and it’s difficult to know where all those areas are and know if you truly eradicated all those areas.

Characteristics

• Negative attitude.
• Usually doesn’t collaborate with the team.
• Hoards information.
• Actively (even if subconsciously) demotivates others.
• Chronically complains.
• Sees only the negative side of any situation.
• Unable to admit to ones mistakes.
• Extremely resistant to change, new ideas, etc…
• Emotionally unstable.
• Has few allies in the team.
• Complains about others weaknesses, even when they share the same weakness (this is because they believe that the rest of the team exists to serve them).

Recommendation

• Like with real Cancer, you have to bite the bullet and get rid of the disease - it only can get worse.
• Isolate him/her so that the collateral damage is minimized.
• Cover your bases in all the areas that the person is involved in.
• Have an extremely well thought out contingency plan in case this person leaves before you are ready.
• Have an extremely well thought out plan to remove this person.

Should you manage your employees’ career?

Everyone knows the adage that “if you aren’t promoted in 2 years, you should find another position”. They also say the fastest way to gain salary increases and titles, is to change companies every 2 years. This of course applies to the employees who are highly motivated and have career goals. Not all employees are like this, many are quite happy to stay in the same position for decades.

The situation:

• You’re a highly motivated professional and have been excelling in you position. You are a superstar.
• You haven’t been prompted in 2 years and the company is content with you in your current position.
• You’ve received small inflation based pay raises.
• You don’t see a career path/room to be promoted in the current department/organization.
• Your next job may be your manager’s position.

In this situation, if you’re itching for a large pay increase, direct reports or that “Senior” moniker in your title, what choice do you have? If you discuss it with your manager, you may just confirm what you already know, that there isn’t a new viable position available for you. It will also create an uncomfortable atmosphere at work, if your manager thinks your looking for a new position and will be leaving soon. On the flip side, your manager may value you, and work to give you what you want.

Now that the foundation is set, how should you as a manager handle this situation? Should you care to actively be concerned about your superstars leaving? How do you answer these questions?

• Who is a superstar and highly valued?
• Which superstars are highly motivated to move-up?
• What if your organization doesn’t have available positions?
• Do you consider your superstars as numbers, and do not concern yourself with their careers, but just with what they can do for you today?

There are 2 schools of thought on this: Have a visible career progression path for all positions. In this case, the company is active in managing career paths and retaining superstars. The other option is no policy/action from management and let the chips fall where they may. In a large and profitable company, managing careers is possible, in a smaller company; it’s very difficult. Concrete solutions? I encourage discussion on this topic.

Identify the Owner

You’ve heard the saying, “Too many Sith Lords in the Command Ship”, I think you earthlings have a similar saying of “too many chefs in the kitchen”.

Collaboration is great, and should be a natural part of your organization’s culture - but issues and confusion will arise if owners of areas aren’t clearly defined.

Whether it’s fighting a crisis, issue resolution, routine tasks, domain areas, to projects - there has to be ONE owner. Otherwise it’s unclear where information ultimately needs to flow up to, and what the chain of decision making needs to be.

Is your technical staff on-call? What if that pager goes off, but it’s not in that persons particular area of ownership or expertise? The person on-call is the owner - the owner of the alert, and they have the power to rope in the subject matter experts needed, and/or the owners of such areas. Ultimately the resolution of that alert is theirs.

On a Project, there has to be a single-owner. Don’t confuse this with sponsors and supporters of the project. The owner of the project is ultimately responsible for getting the project done.

Do you have a Database team? There has to be someone who owns the maintenance plans, data architecture, schema design, database change policy and processes, etc… It doesn’t mean they have to come up with all the ideas, and all of it could be the result of the team collaborating on what the best practices need to be. And it doesn’t mean they have to do all the work. But the owner is responsible for making sure that that collaboration occurs, gets documented, and somehow enforced.

When fighting a business crisis or a technical one - make sure the owner is clearly defined. Otherwise people are going to naturally float decisions up their management chain, it won’t be clear whose making the decisions in the first place - so you get this decision confusion that results in latency as everyone tries to sync up on who decided what.