From: Todd Gillespie Date: 2001-10-26T09:44:36+09:00 Subject: [ruby-talk:23386] Re: Bruce Eckel's opinion of Ruby On Fri, 26 Oct 2001, Eric Lee Green wrote: > On Thursday 25 October 2001 10:44, you wrote: > > Eric Lee Green writes: > > > Yeah, sometimes you must cope with people who are, uhm, less than > > > stellar, in order to get a product out. You assign them to all the simple > > > drudge tasks that even a moron should be able to do, and cross your > > > fingers that they won't screw it up, because it can take 6 months to get > > > a good replacement (as vs yet another less-than-stellar person) on board. > > > > And then you wonder why they aren't stellar... > > One thing I learned from teaching was never to do anything that I could get > someone else to do. There's otherwise no way for a teacher to do the > 10,000,000 tasks that s/he has been assigned, everything from teaching > arithmetic to teaching kids basic stuff like how to interact with each other > with words rather than fists (believe it or not, that's a big problem in many > schools -- kids come to school without any language skills, and whenever they > get frustrated they hit somebody). > > So I have no problem with anybody who has initiative and skills doing > anything on the task list (which, BTW, is publically posted and anybody can > choose any task off of it -- if they dare). But if you assign a difficult > task to a person and it turns out that you spend more of your time helping > this person do the task than it would have taken to do it yourself, the > conclusion as to what this person's NEXT task will be is clear: something > simpler. Sh*t needs to get done, and needs to be done in a timely manner, and > if he can't do it, he can't do it. > > This may make me sound like a jerk, but it's just business. We have product > to get out the door, and if a person is incapable of the initiative or lacks > the background to learn what he needs to know in order to accomplish complex > tasks without taking more of my time than it'd take for me to write the > routine from scratch in the first place, it's clear that this > less-than-stellar person is going to be assigned drudge tasks in the future, > because he just is not being productive in more complex tasks and is sapping > my productivity. If you manage to put together a team of superstars, great. > I've worked on a team where most of the guys were great software engineers, > and it was one of the best experiences of my life. Unfortunately, that's a > very rare thing to ever have happen. > Considering this message arrived thrice, I wonder if you should be assigned simpler email tasks in the future. :) Your points are all perfectly valid, but your terms are wrong. Let me summarize your calculations here: If time of 'one time cost of training employee + employee writing code' is greater than the time for Mr. Green to write the same code once, than the employee is "less than stellar" and should be fired and replaced. To put it another way, an employee is not up to par if he/she cannot, without any training in the local technology choices, documentation, and coding styles, accomplish a task *faster* than an engineer experienced in the local variances. This is not teamwork, this is subcontracting. You are not building a team, you are seeking a person with a perfect skill match to do something specific and go away. A well built team requires time and energy to bring people to a union of minds, and has benefits above and beyond their line count for a one-off application. Subcontracting is a perfectly valid way to run a company, but you are parading it as something else, so I called you on it. And as I have no ending, I will make a little bow, and head to the pub.