I was talking to a friend of mine last night who posed an interesting question. He works in a Perl shop and one of the programmers is a "jack of all trades, master of none". He can do basic administration of Linux and Windows boxes. He can rebuild boxes. His Perl is mediocre, at best. I was shown some of the code and was just horrified by some of it. No data validation, plenty of duplicate code, and bugs galore.

I asked the obvious question "why is this person still employed?" As it turns out, he's a really, really nice guy who is also the only in-house programmer who knows one of their largest systems. If he's hit by a bus, they're in trouble. He was constantly moving buggy code into production and the only way my friend managed to get a handle on the problem was by really getting on this programmer's case about rigorously testing his code.

Since this person has a large, albeit limited, skill set, and since this person is well-liked at the company (though everyone is apparently aware of his limitations), my friend feels that it's worth the effort to find a way to motivate this person to do better. He's looking for carrots, not sticks.

Does anyone have any suggestions for motivating someone who justs wants to do his eight hours? (to be fair, this programmer is willing to work overtime whenever necessary) The programmer means well, but the only reason he has a job is his business knowledge and he doesn't appear motivated to really get better.

Cheers,
Ovid

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In reply to (OT) Motivating the Unmotivated Programmer by Ovid

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