One of my first jobs in the early 1980s was at IBM in Boca Raton Florida. Our team was comprised of about 10 juniors/interns mainly from nearby Florida Atlantic University (FAU) and we worked primarily in industrial automation (robotic arms, CNC machines, etc). It was a rigid environment where sometimes it seemed the primary objective was to badge-in before 8AM and leave at 4:42PM on the button.
Our group was named 5J3 and we took our informal name from an IBM publication that we came across from the 1970s. Its title was "What To Do About The Lazy Pro" and so on all our login screens from then on you were presented with an ASCII art logo with the tag line "5J3, The Lazy Pros".
The article was interesting as well. It was the cover story for that month's run and had a photo of a young bespectacled fellow with a crew cut and pocket protector, examining an oscilloscope. He was the classic geek which was the predominate view of programmers back then. Though 'Human Resources' initially thought it would be the mathematicians and physicists who were best suited to learn this new science called 'programming', in reality it tended to be students from the arts and soft sciences (like psychology and philosophy) who migrated over.
The article took an almost algorithmic approach to the issue where it gradually worked its way down to the final solution; termination of the cancerous employee, though it did remind the reader that this was nothing new (it was a well understood problem in the manufacturing sector as well) and that there were already performance improvement programs in place for these sorts of things. As was often the case back then the approach was more negative management than motivational, with a goal of protecting the company from this unproductive resource being the primary objective. Almost like dealing with a faulty robotic arm.
The problem with this approach is that programming tends to be a more creative exercise then manufacturing (though as Kanban has proven this approach is inferior even within the manufacturing sector) and positive reinforcement can produce better results than negative management when dealing with creative individuals. In most cases the lazy pro isn't so much lazy as bored.
I had the good fortune to manage a team of superior quality Javascript programmers around 2010. It was a virtual office with programmers scattered across the globe. As is often the case, one of the owners was not a programmer and was what I like to refer to as your classic 'Marine Corp manager'; 'the beatings will continue until morale improves'. This individual would monitor the social media feeds of all employees and whenever, during business hours activity was detected I would get a call cajoling me to fix this problem.
In my mind this is where a manager earns their pay and can save the organization money. Management is not about controlling people but rather an attempt to get the most out of the resources at your disposal. This requires the manager to get the coder any resources they may need to get their job done more efficiently and to provide guidance when needed. Removing obstacles is a big part of the equation, but so is motivation. In fact many creative types (myself included) will work for less money on projects that are more interesting, or as I often hear "you couldn't pay me enough to do that".
Many will counter that motivation comes from within and there is certainly some truth to that but de-motivation is an external force and it is this we must be vigilant against. Putting an employee on notice is a de-motivating scare tactic that in my opinion is a short term solution to a long term problem. If you have hired correctly the employee is probably just bored. Boredom and burn-out are common concerns in the software community and addressing these head-on is typically the best way to deal with programmers.
For the sake of brevity I will not get into various motivational strategies available, however, it is imperative to avoid the death spiral. You are in or entering a death spiral when you are resource constrained and all projects seem to be behind schedule. This leaves little time for motivational strategies (like education, cross training, etc) and tends to de-motivate engineers. Proper planning should not only take into consideration execution estimates but also the intangibles like cross coverage of skill sets and motivational exercises. Creative resources liked to be challenged even when the job requirements might seem to offer none. Put succinctly, managers of creative resources need to be creative squared.
