My friend has been managing for some time. He assigned an engineer to a project. He was very hands off, and the project took 3 months to complete.
He claimed he would’ve been able to finish the feature in a day. I couldn’t resist teasing him about Captain Hindsight (was he really able to code that fast?) And if it wasn’t done in a day or even a week, why didn’t he say something? I don’t think the feature was too critical to allow for 90 days of development.
Whether he could finish the job in a day or two is a different story. The importance is he knew how to do the job. His engineer was new and struggled through the work.
He did nothing.
We agreed to have my friend teach by example.
He will work on the project, and involve the new engineer at every step. They can shadow, observe and learn a few things like available tools and code style. This falls along the lines of pair programming, but one of the engineers is clearly more experienced.
Doing the actual task will cost him time, but he needs to train his own engineers to make them more productive instead of letting them figure it out.
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