Ygthkb

I'm a Software Developer with experience of more than 1.5 years. After being happy with my performance, the CTO of my company made me a team lead of 3 new employees (2 of them graduated recently).

There's an employee, the recent grad (Let's call him John). John knows only basic Java and nothing else. Now, I am mentoring them in a front-end project made up of Angular. But he doesn't even know the basics of HTML and CSS. I told him to study these subjects at home from Codeacademy in the weekend/holidays. But he didn't do it.

Now, whenever I assign them some work, the other two employees do the work with ease, but John struggles even in setting margins and paddings. His main problem is that he doesn't do the work in a logical way but always try some random permutations and combinations in order to make his flukes as a successful attempt to do the work. I have to spoon feed him for every little task. This led to the constant delay of the project which has been assigned to my team from the CTO. And due to this delay, my CTO has been scolding me from last few days mercilessly.

I didn't say anything to CTO but I talked to John once and told him that you need to study the basics of these simple subjects or you won't be able to work in Angular. I even told him to google about a concept which he doesn't know but he isn't good at even searching on google.

Now, due to increasing pressure and scolding from my CTO, I am thinking that the only solution I'm left with is to tell the CTO about him and his habits of doing work with guesstimates so that he can decide whether John is ready to work or not.

So, I want to ask if this would be a good solution to deal with this issue or is there something else which I can further do to cope up with this solution?

If I was a CTO, and a manager came to me and said,

We aren't performing because one of my team members is bad at her job

My response would be,

Why are you telling me this? You're the team lead, do something about it. What's your plan?

In other words - going to your CTO and explain the delay by pointing out performance issues on your team isn't the solution - it's not going to suddenly change anything or solve the problem. You need to come up with an action plan, not just tell someone else that the person is underperforming. Yes, you may want to communicate the fact that she is a poor performer, but the communication is just part of the process, it's not the thing that will make this all go away.

It sounds like you've done a half-hearted job of this already by telling her she needs to learn about these subjects. You may want to reflect on some other options:

• Expecting an employee to learn on their own time isn't always fruitful, as you've seen. Do you have an opportunity to incorporate the training into her working time? By having someone mentor or train her? Or allowing "development time" where she can focus on learning?


• Expecting an employee to be able to do good work in a technology they're not familiar with isn't always fruitful either. Some developers can easily pick up new languages or platforms, others struggle and are better being treated as an "expert" in one specific environment. If that's the case with this woman, you need to decide if your company needs an expert in Java, or if you need someone who is flexible. It's not inherently a problem of her being a bad developer, it may just be that she's not the type you need.


• Make sure you understand your employer's approach to performance management. If the employee isn't able to perform the job as it is outlined in the job description, you may need to start taking more formal steps. The key when this happens is following policy (ie does your HR department have a formal performance improvement process?) and documenting every little detail, so you have good backup if you get to the point of deciding to let her go because she's not a good fit.

One thing that's hard for some newly promoted leaders to grasp is that your job is not to be an expert at the tasks your team does. In many environments, your job is as much about managing the people as it is about managing the work. This is a people problem. Yes, it may be her poor skills that are causing the work to be delayed, but from the employer's perspective, that's as much your problem as it is hers.

So here's the part that seems sketchy to me: You've asked your employee, John, to do unpaid overtime work on the weekend.

• The reason it's "work" is because learning Angular is not something John would like to do in his free time, hence why he hasn't done it already (and continues to not do it), and it provides no value to John personally except inasmuch as it provides value to the company. Performing a task that is not for one's own benefit and is instead for the sole benefit of one's employer, is called "work".




• As for "overtime", that much should be clear; John is not normally working on the weekends, therefore you have asked him to do work outside of regular hours. That's called "overtime".




• As for "unpaid", presumably you have not offered John any sort of compensation for doing this work on the weekend, and presumably you do not have the authority to do so. As a result, John is not going to be compensated for putting in these efforts on the weekend. That's called "unpaid".

Now that we've got this straight, as a team leader, and particularly as a new team leader, you should not have your first impression with your new team be "please spend your weekend doing unpaid overtime work". That's not going to work for you in the long run. Don't do that.

Coming at this from John's perspective, I could equally see a question (and have seen many on Workplace SE in the past!) that goes something like this:

I recently graduated from University, and I applied to and got a job at a company that was looking for a backend Java developer. Upon joining the company, I was immediately placed into a frontend development team using Angular. I have no experience with Angular, and the interviewer and hiring manager were both aware of this throughout the interview process. Furthermore, due to these circumstances, my boss has required me to work unpaid overtime on weekends to catch up on my lack of knowledge. What should I do?

To which, and because I have seen these sorts of questions in the past, the overwhelming majority response would be "Unpaid overtime is not cool, your company does not respect you, they blindsided you with a team that doesn't match your skillset, find another job". And that's what John is going to do.

If you want to help John rather than frustrate him and make him leave, here's what you can do:

1) Do not ask John (or anyone else!) to work unpaid overtime. That's not cool.

2) If John needs to learn Angular, allow him to do so during work hours. Prepare some ramp-up tasks for him (small tasks to get him used to the framework and used to frontend development) so he can get his feet wet slowly and ramp up his comfort level.

3) Provide John with the mentorship he needs.

Failing the above, ask your chain of command to transfer John to a team which actually uses the skillset he was interviewed for and hired with, and don't blindside him by trying to change a capable backend developer into a horrible frontend developer.

I won't reiterate dwizum's excellent answer, but I have a few things to add:

His main problem is that he doesn't do the work in a logical way but always try some random permutations and combinations in order to make his flukes as a successful attempt to do the work.

Have you tried showing him more effective problem solving strategies? (Yes, ideally a graduate would know how to "work logically", but problem solving strategies are usually not part of the formal curriculum, and sometimes not taught as well as they should).

I even told him to google about a concept which he doesn't know but he isn't good at even searching on google

Have you tried showing him how to google effectively?

Also note that it will be challenging for a Java developer to google angular problems, since the programming language, build tools, and runtime environment are totally different. Understanding a random blog post by a JavaScript developer is challenging if you don't know know web technologies.

Check your expectations

I have spent the last couple years coaching experienced Java teams in their first angular projects. In my experience, only about 20% of the developers were able to make this switch without help. And yes, even though everyone attended a professional course about angular, and had access to experienced help, progress on the first angular project was slowed enough to make management nervous.

Summary

Yes, really good developers can pick up a new language without any help, but most developers will need more help than "you need to learn the basics".