Ask HN: How to encourage development team to expand their knowledge base
Background: I was a developer for 15 years. Worked for 5+ different companies, programming in 3 or 4 different programming languages. Got to work with a huge range of amazing developers, learning all kinds of things from them.
5 years ago I followed the HN thing and started my own SaaS. Had slow but steady growth, and now have a team of a few developers (+ various other people not related to this post). All of my current developers were actually migrations from other departments, they were smart and taught themselves (with some guidance of course) how to code, and are day in and day out churning out "fine" code. We have a code review process and very good test coverage and seem to generally move the product in the right direction.
The problem is - because the current developers have learned from me, I am seen as their guru. They only know the things that I know, and generally just believe what I say. I say unit tests are good, so they follow my lead and write unit tests. I say React is a fine front end framework - they nod and learn enough react to do the job. But at the end of the day, it feels like they are very much stuck as knowing a subset of what I know. Nothing new never appears, they don't throw out an opinion of like "maybe UI tests are not worth the effort due to X, Y, Z".. it's just a matter of doing what they were told and keeping the ship moving.
Another example of where this is a problem is solving a hard bug. They will work together of course and see if anyone else knows the bugs. They are very good at googling, and will google the crap out of it. But if no answer on Google and no one at the company knows? They are just stuck. Wait for me to go figure it out (which will often be like, I have no idea how this works - let me go post to a forum of react developers and get some expertise), or just spin the tires and be stuck on the current problem.
How do I break out of this cycle? I can make my next hire a senior developer with say 10 years of experience at other companies. Will this help, or will my current team just become the combination of <my skills + new developer skills>? I am happy to pay for say going to classes or any kind of training, but my developers don't even find a class they want to book. They expect me to find a class, book it for them, and tell them what days to do. I want them to grow, learn new things that I don't know. And move past knowing a subset of what I know to knowing more and different things that I do not know.
Or do I just go eh, at least I have developers to write the code I want, and I just shrug and move on?