Life's good being a s/w developer (at the leaf level in the employee hierarchy) 'coz you have a set of predefined tasks with clear instructions and guidelines and you can always give an excuse saying, "this is the first time I am working on something like this !!" The only one that can screw you is your team lead. Being a developer you tend to think that "Life would be cool, if I were a team lead" as you think that all that the lead does is just "delegate" ;-) It doesn't take long for a developer to realize the fact it's tough being a lead than being a developer and in this post I try my best to give some of the kinds of developers that you interact with, being a team lead and how you deal with them for an enjoyable working environment.
Variety 1: Developers who take quite some time to understand requirements.
You seldom run into a case where you end up explaining a requirement 'n' times and you feel that it's faster to implement on your own than wasting time explaining the same thing again and again. If the developer is not sharp, it's not a fault, let's try and help understand and think smart (if possible). But if the developer is asking smart questions, then all that you need is patience and the capacity to answer those questions :-)
Variety 2. Developers who are scared of/reluctant towards trying out new stuff.
Some developers think that learning new things might require hell lot of time or may be they won't get adequate support esp. when run into issues. For such developers, the lead should inculcate a thinking to experiment new things and this can be done by encouraging them to develop POCs, let them attack small yet challenging requirements.
Variety 3. Developers who overestimate their calibre.
In s/w, one can't be compared to the other.Now, some developers tend to think big of themselves and set the same level of expectation with the lead, and when it comes to accomplishing a task, they fail to match the expectations. It is a bit tough to deal with this variety and the pill for such developers is "appraisal" ;-)
Variety 4. Smart and enthusiastic
This is the "ideal" pool a team lead would love to work with and the key action item for the lead is to keep this pool busy all the time (you figure out how !)
If you are a lead - I hope you must be facing atleast one variety in your daily life at work and
If you are a develepor - I wish you fall under the last category :-)
Happy leading...
1 comments:
Expecting all the developers to be of the last type is wishful thinking and life as wonderful as it is always gives you a mixture of the good and the bad. So the biggest challenge of a lead is to be able to identify each developers strength and weakness and understand how to leverage these strenghts and weaknesses to gain the best out of the team that you have.
I think a lead who says at the end of the project that he did not have a good team reflects very poorly on the lead for not understanding his team and leveraging their abilities to meet the challenges the team has.
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