I 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

I 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.