Many years ago at Microsoft, there were a couple of leads who, when a project was not running smoothly, would round up the development team and proceed to tell them that they were the worst programmers at Microsoft, that they weren't worthy of calling themselves Microsoft programmers, and other such nonsense. I'm not sure what those leads were trying to accomplish, but if their goal was to get the teams to rally and try harder, they picked a pretty strange way of doing it. As I'm sure you can imagine, those leads only succeeded in angering and depressing their development teams.
Furthermore, in every case of which I was aware, the problems with the project were management related—the projects had no clear focus or were simply too ambitious. The programmers on those projects weren't any better or worse than other programmers in the company, and berating them didn't change anything for the better—only for the worse.
- Debugging the Development Process by Stephen A. Maguire
It's such an obvious fact. But still it's amazing just how much people fail to apply it practically.
I remember how some PMs threatened and tongue-slashed a team of completely exhausted and overworked team of developers for everything from breaking the build to extended deadlines. They eventually ended up with a large pile of code that made it into the garbage.
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