...aren't people supposed to listen to their boss?
You're kidding, right? Being a manager of really smart people that can easily move jobs is not easy.
You're kidding, right? Being a manager of really smart people that can easily move jobs is not easy.
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?
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.