Our Senior Developers Aren’t Writing Code Anymore!
You’ve installed the 6th Sense Analytics toolset and discovered that your most senior developers are spending less than an hour a day writing code. This concerns you since you know these guys love coding and left their last job when they got pushed out of code.
The first step is to find out why your top-tier team isn’t writing code anymore, so you drop in to talk. That’s when you discover that the recent round of hiring you did had an unintended side-effect. All the new team members are spending their days asking your top talent to help them. So instead of writing code, your best team is spending their days doing ad-hoc, time-intensive, inefficient one-on-one mentoring.
As the team’s manager, you’re faced with a dilemma. The new team members need to learn, but the existing team needs to get work done. Both are important, but the team isn’t striking a balance on their own.
There are several practices you can introduce to help find a middle ground.
One is the peer code review (link). A peer code review pulls the senior and junior team members together, but on a more infrequent basis. It forces the new team members dig in on their own to learn, and then find out if they were right before committing the code. It’ll also free up your senior team members to actually do what they love: write code.
You might also try to set up blocks of time that are only for coding. No talking, no phone calls… no interruptions allowed in the office. If you have to take a call, use your cell phone and walk outside. If you get stuck on a hard problem, set it aside and move on with another one. 37 Signals calls this Alone Time. They even turn off email and instant messaging. Maybe your team wants to set aside 10 to 12 in the morning and 2 to 4 in the afternoon, or maybe they prefer different blocks of time. Or different amounts. The details don’t matter nearly as much as having the time set aside.
The Alone Time will let your senior team work undisturbed for at least part of the day, while still providing junior developers access.
What can 6th Sense Analytics help you discover about your team?
2 Comments
Peer review, Seniors & Juniors « Being just me ( 2008.25.01 5:58 am )
[...] Filed under: IT — Sankar Khrishnamurthy @ 9:58 am From 6th Sense Analytics on why some senior developers are not writing code anymore, One is the peer code review (link). A peer code review pulls the senior and junior team members [...]
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