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In my experience there seems to be two kinds of developers (if we simplify matters a great deal of course).

On the one hand we have the developers, who may do a perfectly acceptable job, but who do not really care about the computer science part of their craft. They usually know few languages / technologies and are happy to let things stay that way. For whatever reason, they don't try to improve their computer science skills unless this is required in their current position.

On the other hand, we have the geeks or the pragmatic programmers if you subscribe to that idea. They play around with other languages and technologies and usually have knowledge about several topics outside the technical domain of their current job.

I would like to see more developers, who are enthusiastic about software development. If you share this point of view, what do you do to push your peers in that direction?

Edit: follow-up question inspired by one of the answers: As non-managers, should we really care about this? And why/why not?

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Arghh! I appreciate the answers but I just discovered I'm out of votes for today. – Brian Rasmussen Jan 8 '09 at 21:01
That's fine. I've hit my daily limit anyway. – EnderMB Jan 8 '09 at 21:21
Why the down vote? Please explain so I have a chance of improving my question. Thanks. – Brian Rasmussen Sep 19 '09 at 5:09
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possible duplicate of Inspiring People – MichaelT 2 days ago

migrated from stackoverflow.com Feb 8 '11 at 3:50

closed as not a real question by gnat, BЈовић, MichaelT, Jalayn, Bart van Ingen Schenau 2 days ago

It's difficult to tell what is being asked here. This question is ambiguous, vague, incomplete, overly broad, or rhetorical and cannot be reasonably answered in its current form. For help clarifying this question so that it can be reopened, see the FAQ.

1 Answer

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In some situations, it may be a good idea to scare them a little. If they are afraid of breaking something, they will pay much more attention to what they are doing.

Forcing them to interact with customers or simply make them work in a customer environment may be a good way of teaching them what the real job is.

Making a programmer see and understand what he did wrong is the best way for him to learn. On the other hand, show them what they did right. There can be a lot of motivation coming from a well-done job.

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