He's not alone. My advice would be: - find a better workplace (with more sophisticated and demanding co-workers, or possibly, start up your own company, and

He's not alone. My advice would be: - find a better workplace (with more sophisticated and demanding co-workers, or possibly, start up your own company, and even compete with your ex-employer!), or - be more pedagogical (which is often harder and slower to give results than it may sound). Indeed, the problem this situation denotes is that we're surrounded by incompetent and unknowledgeable people. It's not necessarily their fault: economic and time constraints prevented them to get a good education, or to learn on the job. Sometime people don't want to learn and actively refuses to do a better job, but this is not the most common case, at least in IT, programming. But then teaching and raising the competency level of a team is a whole different job, and you still need to be allocated the resources to do it: while you're teaching and the coworkers are learning, you're not implementing the next user story; what's more, eventually all this teaching would have to be disruptive. Once you teach iteration to a coworker who used copy-and-paste, you now accumulated technical debt since the team will have to rewrite all those occurences of copy-and-pasted code with iterations! Users stories will have to wait. Never mind that using iterations you will increase productivity and be able to implement _later_, ten user stories in the times you implemented only one, the product manager sees that this will occur _later_...