I'm about to take over a small team of developers. Over the past few days I've been sitting in on their daily standups and attending various project meetings, getting a feel for the group and the status of ongoing work.
It's become apparent to me that one of the developers is a prima donna. He's been with the team for about a year, and during that time he's virtually rewritten every project he's worked on (because the old codebase was trash, of course), he resists learning anything about the other technologies in his projects' tech stacks, and his views on customer feature requests are utterly binary ("easy" or "stupid").
The developer really is talented, for those technologies in his wheelhouse. He is probably the best developer in that group and I can see why his current manager hired him. However, the friction is ... considerable.
I've read many articles and blogs about handling prima donnas on a dev team. Some of those were good, some less so.
HN, what is your experience? Have you had success turning a dev like this around? What did you do? I would love to hear from non-managers as well: How is it, working on a team with a prima donna? Was it a problem, and was it resolved well?
Thanks!
It's become apparent to me that one of the developers is a prima donna. He's been with the team for about a year, and during that time he's virtually rewritten every project he's worked on (because the old codebase was trash, of course), he resists learning anything about the other technologies in his projects' tech stacks, and his views on customer feature requests are utterly binary ("easy" or "stupid").
The developer really is talented, for those technologies in his wheelhouse. He is probably the best developer in that group and I can see why his current manager hired him. However, the friction is ... considerable.
I've read many articles and blogs about handling prima donnas on a dev team. Some of those were good, some less so.
HN, what is your experience? Have you had success turning a dev like this around? What did you do? I would love to hear from non-managers as well: How is it, working on a team with a prima donna? Was it a problem, and was it resolved well?
Thanks!