Ask HN: How do you improve skills of programmers in your team?
As a lead programmer, which approaches of improving skills in your programming team had the most positive feedback? I presume some activity not related to day-to-day job that may be considered boring, especially by junior developers. Local hackathons? Doing some over-the-weekend collaborative projects? One-hour-a-day projects? Forcing to reading some tech books? Examinations? Providing local classes, with or without homework? Going to external conferences?
It's interesting to hear your experience and attitude to these approaches.
Comments
I like to teach the more junior members of my team.
They may have a very basic understanding of some library or concept. I sit them down in a room with a whiteboard and go over the concepts.
I usually have a brief 1-2 page handout with some code examples as its easier to read just from the paper rather than having to write all of the code on the whiteboard.
You (or your predecessor) hired your team based on the skills they already have. Focus on improving performance, not skills.
If you try to force your employees to develop their skills in a certain direction, even if you think it's a win-win, they are going to resist or even quit. Entire teams have quit their company based on a programming language change. People don't like giving up any autonomy when their level of autonomy is already low. But chances are, they will respond positively to pressure on things like improving performance benchmarks, turnaround time on requirements, test coverage, resource consumption, etc. if you approach it in a uniform and consistent way. Programmers see themselves as professionals and experts, and if you raise your expectations, they will meet them if they can.