zt: How to Keep Crappy Programmers

This is a follow-up to the popular How to Find Crappy Programmers. If you’re interested in having a team of crappy programmers, instead of those annoyingly bright and passionate good ones, you probably want to start there.

Despite your best efforts, some good programmers slip through the cracks – how can you get rid of them while keeping your coveted crappy programmers around?

1. Focus on Punctuality and Butt-In-Seat Time

Never mind that a good programmer can produce more valuable work in a 30-hour workweek from home than a crappy programmer can toiling 60 hours in the office. There’s no point in getting useful software in a timely manner if you don’t get the all-important face time.

Good products are nice, but there’s nothing more fulfilling in a manager’s life than seeing a roomful of people, heads-down, typing away in tiny cubicles at 8:00 am in the morning. Coming in at 9:30 am is wholly unacceptable – those guys are just having too much fun.

You get people on salary so that they aren’t on the clock, and that way you don’t have to pay extra when they work longer than 8 hour days. Then again, don’t be afraid to insist that they work at least 8 hour days all the time. Who cares if they have nothing to do, or if they have already gotten way more done than the guy next to them, surfing the internet? It’s butt-in-seat time, baby.

2. Set Their Salary Based on Their Age or Time at the Company

Setting salary based on your age makes a lot of sense since you, the manager, are probably old. That way you get more money. Since that’s illegal, you should base the pay on “years of experience” which equates to age for everyone who didn’t go on a 5-year+ sabbatical. Don’t worry, that’s pretty much only working moms, and you probably don ‘t want to pay them much either.

You might have an employee who’d rather be paid based on their productivity or the value of their work or even their skill level. Blasphemy! Clearly, that person is just looking for a free ride, without having to pay their dues. Say it with me people: “We care about everything except for the actual work you produce.”

3. Reduce Time Spent Coding

It’s important for developers to spend a lot of time in meetings. That way they can get a complete understanding of the minutia in the business side of things. And also, it’s more fun to have a big audience when you ramble on in meetings. Don’t worry that we won’t have any time left to do actual work (ie. coding), we’ll just come in early and stay late to get that part done.

Another fun thing is having your programmers do your desktop support. Really, anytime your Outlook or your iPhone is acting up, feel free to call them over to troubleshoot the issue. It’s so handy having geeks around.

4. Monitor and filter their Internet usage

Developers just can’t be trusted, everyone knows that. We are always hacking things and downloading illegal music and that sort of thing. So, you should definitely install a program to monitor their internet usage. You could also block sites that you deem to be a waste of time, but then that might tip your hand that you’re monitoring them.

For that matter, you ought to go ahead and dictate what development environment and tools they have to use. After all, you picked the setup with the longest feature list (not to mention the sales guy took you to lunch) so those developers shouldn’t have anything to complain about. Anyone who wants to use anything else is just a prima donna.

5. Make Them Build Crappy Software

This is the most important one of all. A crappy programmer can only make crappy software. However, a good programmer has the ability to make both good software and crappy software, right? Wrong!

Good programmers hate writing crappy software. They’re always yammering on about code design and trying to test everything, what a pain.

Force them to write inline queries, develop in VB on the command line and fix bugs in 1,000 line methods. They may fight it at first, but pretty soon they either leave or become a crappy programmer also. You’ll know that they’ve come over to the dark side when you see that empty look in their eyes and when they see a Dilbert cartoon they laugh … maniacally.

The reality is that not everyone is interested in managing good programmers. Sure they get things done and know a lot about technology … yadda yadda. They also challenge your assumptions and push to improve the system and that’s just not going to work in your business.

The fact that it’s been done that way before and hasn’t imploded yet (or lately) is good enough for you. You can use these handy tips to keep your crappy programmers while firmly excluding the good ones.