For my first three years with XYZ Corporation, I, too, came up through the ranks from a help desk position.
My boss thought I had potential, asked about my background, and discovered I'd done some programming. He spent a morning giving me a "Basics of UNIX" course and another morning teaching me Korn shell, and then started giving me jobs he really should have been doing himself--I certainly didn't have the experience. However, I always got my stuff done, right and on time. Soon, I'd gone through sed and awk and settled on Perl as my primary weapon.
Pretty soon, I was really dangerous.
Our customer had several thousand stores, each with at least three big servers and a couple dozen smaller machines, heavily networked. I developed lots of stuff to run out there, in the stores and on the network.
Eventually, it came time for a job change, and I moved to another team, working for the same customer.
Disaster!
This job was not right for me--it was primarily a hardware position, and I'm not a hardware guy. I'm neither stupid nor incapable, so I hung in there and was competent--merely competent--at my job...which I grew to hate.
Our company found it difficult to fill positions in the area where we needed people, so the fact that I lived--wanted to live, in fact--right next to this customer, and that made me "valuable"...
...valuable enough, in fact, that, despite the obvious fact that the job wasn't right for me, my boss (with all the best intentions) made it very difficult for me to move to another job inside the company.
He had other motivations, all of them good, or at least innocent. He genuinely wanted to help me succeed at my job. He also was a new manager, and felt (accurately) that having someone successful fail on his team was a black mark.
He also has a screensaver that says "Money Money $$$", and, no matter how many times I told him that the raises he'd gotten me, and the raises he'd promised me, were not the way to motivate me, he could not hear this. He went on trying to motivate me, rubbing his fingers together and promising me that, eventually (which kept getting further away) he'd help me get into another job. He was a very well-meaning guy, and I liked him.
So the day came when I was called in on a Sunday afternoon to perform a very basic maintenance task--one I'd performed twice the day before during a preventive maintenance--which I performed beautifully and efficiently...
...on the wrong node, in a 128-node system of loosely coupled UNIX servers. I opened the node hot, pulled its memory board, panicked the node, restarted the system, and ended up with a three-hour outage to fix data corruption.
That's the only hardware mistake I made in over two years on the job, and it's the reason I ended up resigning.
My boss let his desire to help me, his need for a warm body on site, and his ego conspire to put me in a position where I made the sort of mistake I never made before. (I had an authorized back door to circumvent the change control process on my previous job, used it extensively for over two years, and never broke anything--ever.) The mistake was clearly my fault, but he put me in a position to make it, one I'd tried to get out of.
The moral of the story?
If the person you work with does not have the ability to program, then for his good, for your good, and for your company's good, you have a responsibility not to force him into a position where he will fail.
That being said, don't give up on him until you've tried your best--there's lots of good advice in this thread on doing that--but your best (and his best) will have to be good enough.
Good luck--and thank you for taking the responsibility to work with this person. You're doing the right thing.
In reply to True Story RE: I need a bit of mentoring advice
by adamsj
in thread I need a bit of mentoring advice
by mpennucci
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