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I agree, this is a really difficult balance. In the real world I think Tyler would have said "Ok, I'll try and be nicer to those other folks" during the one-on
by kcy 18y ago
I agree, this is a really difficult balance. In the real world I think Tyler would have said "Ok, I'll try and be nicer to those other folks" during the one-on-one meeting then returned to his original behavior w/in a matter of days or weeks.
So, do you compromise the technical strength of the team by firing Tyler or do you compromise team unity by keeping him?
My thought is that this is not a simple one way or the other answer. The post took the middle ground of talking with Tyler, which I don't think would really work out the way he wrote most of the time. Is there something else he could have said?
If you've had several conversations and this behavior is just the way it's going to be then what are the boundary conditions around when it's best to keep Tyler around vs firing him?
- bestes 18y agoI was a manager for many year and ran into this situation. I tried many techniques and found that: 1) My company really likes people to get along. It was very difficult to promote and pay my star developer more. 2) It did have a huge impact on the team. More than one person actually quit in a direct response to the less-than-subtle criticisms. 3) Having a group of mediocre to good programmers means that you simply cannot do certain things. The memory management issue was a good example in the article. It is a slippery slope and one I'm simply not interested in following to the bottom. I kept (and am now trying to recruit for my startup!) this star simply because truly great programmers are hard to find and once I found one, I would do almost anything to keep them. To answer the actual question, though, yes I talked with this person often, sent them to classes, read books and sought advice on how to teach them better people skills.