I did not have experience with the whole team or department consisting of such guys, my situation was just several individuals (and I could not just fire them) within overall good collective. My appoach was to be very straightforward in communications, no motivational bullshit and no teaching tone. Just straight to what I expect from them to deliver. And I tried to give them tasks that are less related to critical co…
How to manage old, unmotivated, change resisting programmers?
11–17 of 17 posts
Re: How to manage old, unmotivated, change resisting programmers?
#12Motivating older programmers is different from motivating younger programmers. They've seen layoffs, acquisitions, failing companies. They've also seen multiple project management philosophies come and go and generally aren't impressed with agile and scrum. Most older programmers I've worked with want some combination of the following: money, being able to do good quality work and good work-life balance. They're unlikely to pull all-nighters or work more than 40 hours because at this point they've seen how destructive and ineffective those are. To motivate them you can offer flexible hours, remote working privileges, vacation time. You can also check with them to see if they want to explore different roles (would they want to do some project management? UX design? devops/system administration? Also you are doing regular 1:1s, right?)
Now you may encounter some problems with these older programmers learning new technologies (I had a former COBOL programmer give up on web services even though he was using Microsoft COM apis on a regular basis). In these cases, there are two good solutions. 1) Spend extra time with the programmer, mapping the terminology they're learning with the terminology they're familiar with. 2) Have them work on different projects that are more closely aligned with their current skills.
Re: How to manage old, unmotivated, change resisting programmers?
#13If the team does poorly, most likely will be disbanded, so they'll have a vested interest to stay together and for the people who don't want to be part of it, you as a manager have to find them a better fit in another team in the company and replace them with a better fitted employees...
Re: How to manage old, unmotivated, change resisting programmers?
#14Re: How to manage old, unmotivated, change resisting programmers?
#15Let's start removing "old" from the list of things we want to filter out of our workforce. Age discrimination is real and it surfaces in the most insidious ways such that adding it to a list of negative traits just seems natural.
we don't want to filter out, but manage.
If so, do you think there is an innate difference between old unmotivated, change resisting programmers and young unmotivated, change resisting ones, or could your attitude towards the two groups be different?
Re: How to manage old, unmotivated, change resisting programmers?
#16Earlier quoted context omitted.
we don't want to filter out, but manage.
Your question implicitly suggests that you wouldn’t have problems managing young , unmotivated, change resisting programmers. If so, do you think there is an innate difference between old unmotivated, change resisting programmers and young unmotivated, change resisting ones, or could your attitude towards the two groups be different?