How do you educate your teammates without seeming condescending or superior?
- by Dan Tao
I work with three other guys; I'll call them Adam, Brian, and Chris.
Adam and Brian are bright guys. Give them a problem; they will figure out a way to solve it. When it comes to OOP, though, they know very little about it and aren't particularly interested in learning. Pure procedural code is their MO.
Chris, on the other hand, is an OOP guy all the way -- and a cocky, condescending one at that. He is constantly criticizing the work Adam and Brian do and talking to me as if I must share his disdain for the two of them. When I say that Adam and Brian aren't interested in learning about OOP, I suspect Chris is the primary reason.
This hasn't bothered me too much for the most part, but there have been times when, looking at some code Adam or Brian wrote, it has pained me to think about how a problem could have been solved so simply using inheritance or some other OOP concept instead of the unmaintainable mess of 1,000 lines of code that ended up being written instead.
And now that the company is starting a rather ambitious new project, with Adam assigned to the task of getting the core functionality in place, I fear the result.
Really, I just want to help these guys out. But I know that if I come across as just another holier-than-thou developer like Chris, it's going to be massively counterproductive.
I've considered:
Team code reviews -- everybody reviews everybody's code. This way no one person is really in a position to look down on anyone else; besides, I know I could learn plenty from the other members on the team as well. But this would be time-consuming, and with such a small team, I have trouble picturing it gaining much traction as a team practice.
Periodic e-mails to the team -- this would entail me sending out an e-mail every now and then discussing some concept that, based on my observation, at least one team member would benefit from learning about. The downside to this approach is I do think it could easily make me come across as a self-appointed expert.
Keeping a blog -- I already do this, actually; but so far my blog has been more about esoteric little programming tidbits than straightforward practical advice. And anyway, I suspect it would get old pretty fast if I were constantly telling my coworkers, "Hey guys, remember to check out my new blog post!"
This question doesn't need to be specifically about OOP or any particular programming paradigm or technology. I just want to know: how have you found success in teaching new concepts to your coworkers without seeming like a condescending know-it-all? It's pretty clear to me there isn't going to be a sure-fire answer, but any helpful advice (including methods that have worked as well as those that have proved ineffective or even backfired) would be greatly appreciated.
UPDATE: I am not the Team Lead on this team. Chris is.
UPDATE 2: Made community wiki to accord with the general sentiment of the community (fancy that).
