Jay Kimble

#3 is completely false.  You don't need to be compassionate.  Lead, follow, or get out of the way - Gen Patton.

They'll never get better if you baby them.  

And just who said I thought you exhibited any of these qualities???  <grin />

Thanks for your response to my post, you hate monger!

Sincerly,

Your original FNG

WOW!  This is, perhaps. one of the saddest commentaries I have read in a long time.  Made sadder by how commonly accepted I believe your wisdom to be.  

Your position on #3 is made a requirement by your positon on #2.  It has been many years since I've found someone who needs coaching (most people do at some level) but won't accept it.  The problem is, to come to the position where people accept you as a coach you need to have earned their respect.  Title means nothing.  Years of experience means nothing.  They will respect and listen to you if you clearly know a whole heck of a lot more about their job than they do.

When you come to this point and then take the time to work with the FNG they won't mess up your project because a) you know what they can and can't be relied on to do and b) you have helped them avoid the mistakes that would cause them to mess up the project.

Lastly, worst case, no one should be ABLE to mess up your project.  Worst case you should need to do nothing more than throw away the work they did and start over on it.  That puts you in more or less the same position as you would have been in anyway if you gave them nothing meaningful to do.  Bad design can foil this, however.

I'm glad a couple of you took this for the fun that it was... Dave needed a salty response to his sugarey sweet post.

Sorry I haven't been back to the old blog over the weekend to approve comments... I have no A/C in my home (and I live in Florida... temperatures have been in the 100s during the day).

IMHO, I would change compassion to passion.  If you're passionate about building systems and knowing the technology surrounding it, others will feed off of it and seek you out.  People who are passionate about developing software  survive through paradigm shifts (fat-client -> web -> webservices).  People who are passionate never stop thinking about software and build their skill set continuously and they are always thinking about how to handle the existing problem better.

Lastly, I think Senior developers ruthlessly triage their risk list.  While I think formal "risk management" is a good practice, it really drops the ball on how it should be applied.  A good senior developer is constantly assessing the threats to the project and schedule and keeps alternate plans in mind.  

you are a human first, senior developer second...

"The problem is, to come to the position where people accept you as a coach you need to have earned their respect. Title means nothing. Years of experience means nothing. They will respect and listen to you if you clearly know a whole heck of a lot more about their job than they do."

is really hard for "senior developers" to accept the fact that someone 10-20+ years younger than them is smarter than them, I can write better code faster than those called "senior developers" here at work, but they won't come to me to ask an opinion