[iroh2727]

Oh god. I'm afraid to say this sounds kind of...hopeless. I don't think it's a lack of management ability on your end. It's that it sounds like they don't even have good intentions. If they had good intentions, you could at least work with them to improve their skills. But if they don't or have some ego issues, what can you do? That's not really in your power to fix.

Can you find new team members? And in the meantime, perhaps do more coding yourself?

[toqti]

I'm doing as much coding as I can but the project management stuff takes time. I'm keeping the critical system coding for myself.

Can't find a new team, manager says this is it and no time/budget to get others.

You're right there is nothing I can do. I'm thinking of keeping the project locked down until I come back. They can still make feature branches in the mean time.

[sneak]

Give your subordinates clear and specific written instructions, eg: "Don't use x technique here, it is unnecessary.". You are the lead, part of your job is to overrule people sometimes.

If they ignore you, or fight with you, that is a different problem.

What this could be is a teaching moment, or series of them, depending on how cooperative or not the team members are.

[toqti]

I get fought and ignored a lot of the time. Hence the back and forth on the PRs. They'd rather show off some cool thing they saw on stackoverflow, having no idea what it does, than learn to do it properly.