Dont Train Anyone

Category AntiPattern

Related to the SoftwareLabourers AntiPattern

Problem: Hiring new people is expensive. You already have a team of experienced Gurus in place to do all the 'difficult' stuff, you just need to find a way to keep all the SoftwareLabourers in their place. The Gurus are also highly protective of their position.

Solution: Under no circumstances offer any opportunity for training or self improvement. Skilled people have a nasty habit of demanding more money, or even worse they might leave to work somewhere else. Bonus points for creating imaginary job titles that create the illusion of self actualisation.

Resulting Context: A demotivated workforce. Still, who cares - as long as they put in the hours and keep digging their software holes, all is apparently well. Keep stroking the Gurus and hopefully none of them will leave.

Feel free to expand/edit if you've seen this pattern before. I just know you have.

-- JayBell 26/11/02

A close variation: You don't want to say you don't train people, so instead you require everyone to have taken X number of hours of training a year - and then don't provide any training materials or allow people to charge training to their work timecodes. (And, of course, you 'forget' or don't have a training charge code.) You can now prove that you support training, and even have numbers to show that training actually happens, but whether anyone has actually done any training is an open question.

Compare SharpenTheSaw (but that's not software-specific)