[rdtwo]

So i work with this person that is really slow. She should have accomplished a task in 2-4 weeks and it took her 6 months. We gave her 3 months to accomplish it. So at some point you do need to point out that a task should not have v taken as long as it did and ask the person why it did. Was there some sort of unknown issue that caused the task to take 4x longer than expected

[kmonsen]

(1) I don't think you can reliably say after the first suck project. Some people are a bit slow at picking up new things, but become very productive after a while.

(2) Others pick things up super quickly, but never become super productive as the first group.

And of course lots of variations of people that don't fit neatly into either group.

I am in group (2) I think, but in my experience you really want people that become strong experts after a while. They are the ones I have seen do the best over the long term.

[milesvp]

Salman Khan talks about this a little. He said one of the things they learned from the Khan Academy is that you can sort of group everyone into either "convex" or "concave" learners and they all basically get to the same level of competence by time T, and it's more a matter of do they plateau at the beginning or at the end.

He seems to be very careful about placing value judgements on which is "better", and he's also very careful to crop the graph near time T. His big push is to make sure that teachers understand that people that are categorized as "slow learners" actually often take just as long to get to the same level of proficiency as "fast learners".

[kmonsen]

Yes, agree with all that :-)

[nlh]

This is a great example - thank you. Rephrasing as a "you should have", it would read:

"You should have been able to finish this in 2-4 weeks, but it took you 6 months. What went wrong?"

That's actually useful feedback, I think. It highlights that the giver believes the recipient has abilities that exceed the demonstrated result.

[41b696ef1113]

My one quibble with this example -I sincerely hope there was feedback given the entire duration of those six months. Being told far after the fact that you are doing X thing poorly is a kick to the self-esteem.

[rdtwo]

Oh absolutely, it was pretty clear that this person wasn’t on track 4 weeks in. And after that you have to keep communicating that we were expecting more progress… what are the issues will you make the deadline etc.

[democracy]

Try to break down the tasks so that their single task doesn't take more than a day/two, see how it works out. Some people seem to operate better on short, simple tasks with visible understandable impact.

Also a 4 weeks task for a member of a larger team is something that turns them into their own development shop and it's probably not something you want to have in a team.

I also understand some will say "a senior dev should manage such a long task on their own" - well maybe they should and some might, but in the end it's not their business and they can jump the ship 2 weeks before the deadline of a 3 months task (seen that) - that's why good project/tech/team management is a skill ))