Déjà vu. It was the same response to a different request. Looking back on it, I cant believe I didnt see the pattern.
John was an above average developer on my team. He was the type of guy who everyone liked to be around. He was totally easy going and had great sense of humor. But John was not accountable.
As a manager, it is much easier to implement consequences for a bad job if the person responsible is someone that isnt such a nice person.
I know. It shouldnt make a difference.
Its the managers job to treat everyone fairly. In my experience, this isnt usually the case. Its just more palatable to punish someone who is a jerk.
John was not a jerk. Not even close. And his code deliverables were all well tested and conformed to standards. His code worked as expected.
The problem wasnt the quality of his work; it was that he was consistently late with his deliverables. And I am here to say that John was an expert at finding excuses.
He was likely the kid at school whose dog ate his homework. And Im betting he got away with it. Hed probably smile at his teacher, give her a compliment Say, did you do something different with your hair today, because it looks spectacular?" And then lay on the sad story of his dogs subsequent digestive problems.
The key to his successful procrastinations was that his work wasnt abhorrently tardy. He would just turn work in a day late here and there. And as I mentioned, his code passed peer reviews and was always perfectly in sync with requirements.
The problem was that over the course of a project his disregard for deliverable dates would add up just enough to impact the overall schedule, causing problems with integration coordination and production implementation.
As a manager, if you dont deal with these types of nagging issues, they will eventually be dealt with by someone else. That someone else in my case was my boss.
Because as a manager, it was my responsibility to ensure the project work was done on time. My manager didnt care about Johns excuses. And evidently I wasnt nearly as clever as John with great excuses.
We were working on a project for a Fortune 500 company to completely redo their billing system. This was before ERPs were popular and when the big companies wrote this code from scratch. You know, the good ole days when developers could reinvent the wheel in their own unique way.
Johns assignment was the dunning module, or more simplistically referred to as the bill collections module. It wasnt rocket science, but it wasnt all that easy either because the system was being written in Cobol II.
His code had to use reference modification (i.e. string manipulation) to create an automated word processor that resulted in a perfectly formatted dunning notice based on varying text lengths. Today, this would just be a module in the ERP system that was written one time with a more advanced language. John had to write it from scratch.
My point is that it wasnt a simple assignment. However, everyone on the team knew he was most capable of creating some pretty cool logic that was quite innovative. Everyone also knew that he would likely be late. And everyone overlooked this fact because, well, they just liked being around John.
Each deliverable was clearly communicated to each team member. Each of them received a copy of the project plan with their timeline highlighted. Yet, this is how it played out.
John shared an office with Sara. They were great friends. And it showed. They were constantly chatting it up while they worked. Theyd go out to lunch and come back late. Theyd go out on smoke breaks and be gone for longer than a smoke should take. (Turned out they were more than friends, but I was oblivious.)
Next Page: "John had a great idea. He organized a mid-week happy hour..."