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What if the programmer has nothing to do constantly?

When approaching your programmer, do you constantly notice that he is messing around? Does he not do what you want from him, or does his productivity leave much to be desired? What could be the problem and how to solve it?

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Hi


Due to my duty, not so long ago I had to take up leadership of the June and everything would be fine, but I noticed that his work efficiency was lower than we expected. I wondered why. By nature, I often ask myself “What am I doing wrong” and not “What is he doing wrong?”, By the way, I recommend that you often ask yourself about it, because often the problem is really not in other people, but to you. Especially if this question relates to training and leadership, as the old Japanese wisdom says: “There are no bad soldiers - there are bad generals.”
Look for the problem in yourself, not in people. If a person does something different than you want, maybe you are doing something wrong?

What is the reason for the low efficiency of the programmer? We have a small startup and many processes are not debugged, in particular, management issues. As a rule, we discuss tasks every few days, while we discuss not just one, but a lot at once, setting goals. We don’t write down goals, but simply keep them in mind.

Here, obviously, we make a serious mistake, because far from all the moments we remember and after some time only a general idea remains in my head and when I get down to business I have to take up his discussion again. My experience suggests that we are not the only ones with such a problem, many small projects also sin similar, because the programmer’s hours are not a penny, the director is constantly busy, and it’s too expensive to hire an individual person to record tasks. But what is another important plus of maintaining a list of tasks?

People and programmers in particular are divided into 2 types: initiative and non-initiative. As a rule, there are always fewer first ones, if your team has at least 5 people, then, as a rule, you will have a person who does not show great interest in the project. How to identify such people? The main features of a person are as follows:

  • A person will strictly divide working time and personal life. He turns off notifications and completely avoids thoughts about work as soon as his working day ends.
  • He is constantly waiting for instructions on what to do.
  • He rarely takes on the improvement, revision or writing of something until a direct order has been received about it.
  • At meetings, he listens more often than offers ideas.

It is clear that the rules are not universal. As the first type may possess them, so the second may not have any habits. People are different.

Does this mean that the programmer is bad? No! Such a programmer can be compared to a soldier. It is not typical for a soldier to do something without a direct order from the leadership, more often it is punished, even if the result has led to positive consequences.
As a rule, such programmers are professionally in no way inferior to the initiators, but can be even better.
A non- initiative programmer is not a bad programmer

So what is their plus? They carry out their work efficiently, follow a strict plan and are not used to retreating from it. While the initiator, according to the result, shows the option that he sees, the soldier will show what was required of him, so if you have strong technical and creative directors and they know exactly what is best for the project, it is more useful to have working soldiers.

Can a soldier become an initiator and what is needed for this?


I will say right away - yes. Why so confident? Yes, because I was a soldier, but after changing my job I became the initiator. Why did this happen? For understanding, I will describe both works:

1. My opinion on most issues was not very interesting. There is Vasya, he is a middle man or senier, he knows better, and what I say there, few people are interested. What can a person who has little experience say? The tasks were discussed by the management, I was just there and listened to their thoughts. In the end, as a result of the discussions, I had porridge in my head. What they came to is not known. In connection with this, the leadership concludes that I fly in the clouds, but in fact I hear a hundred thousand options in 30 minutes, and I don’t understand which option they came to. I did not burn the project, for me it was just work on which I fulfill the requirements set for me. It was there that I was a programmer who was constantly waiting for a task. If they told me to do something, I did, having done I reported it,and asking the question "What's next?" received a dose of negativity with the words "Do you have any more tasks?" We discussed half a day yesterday, did you even listen to us? ” Over time, I did not begin to go deeper into the meeting process, I just stopped asking the question “What to do next?” and was waiting for direct directions from outside. The situation was heating up and after the phrase from the director “Well, let's tie it to the battery and let it sit until it understands what to do”, I left (it really was so, here we had such superiors).Here is our bosses).Here is our bosses).

2. Arriving, I was the only programmer, my director was the exact opposite of the first. He understood that his technical base could be outdated and in some aspects I could know better than him, although he himself was a highly qualified programmer in the past. Because of this, he listened to me. Now I chose tasks and ways to solve them. I must say right away, unlike the previous place, I immediately liked this project. Now I worked not only during working hours, but always. He lay down with thoughts of improvement, got up with ideas. Now I have become the initiator.

From this experience, several rules can be distinguished that will lead to the programmer becoming the initiator.

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  • Give the programmer free will. It is clear that there are cases when you need to do something right now and his “I don't want” is not very interesting, but if he is firmly convinced that something needs to be done first, let him do it. Leave your pride, if what he does leads to a positive result, it will be a plus for both of you, if to a negative, the programmer will understand his mistake and listen to you more carefully.
  • Respect the person.

How to work with soldiers?


But suppose you don’t need an initiator, you are sure that you know better what is needed for the project or you have a big team and it will be physically impossible to listen to everyone’s opinion. How not to get to the stage of attachment to the battery?

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  • Distribute tasks immediately over a long period of time. Write down what a person should do during the week. Each time a soldier finishes work, the next task will be right at his fingertips. Moreover, you can easily control the development process. If you ask a person to approach the boss for a new task, there will be situations when the boss is busy or out of place. In this case, the programmer is sitting idle, and his watch is dripping.
  • Respect the person.

It would seem that all this is obvious, but many teams still do not follow these principles, which is why they lose not only money and time, but also programmers.

How to understand who you need?


Everything is pretty simple here. There must be at least one initiator in the team, he, as a rule, over time becomes the lead, 3-5 soldiers should be on one initiator. You will not go far on some initiators, and in the end some of them will become soldiers.

Thank you for your attention, waiting for your opinion in the comments.

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