How do you motivate peers to become better developers?
- by Brian Rasmussen
In my experience there seems to be two kinds of developers (if we simplify matters a great deal of course).
On the one hand we have the developers, who may do a perfectly acceptable job, but who do not really care about the computer science part of their craft. They usually know few languages / technologies and are happy to let things stay that way. For whatever reason, they don't try to improve their computer science skills unless this is required in their current position.
On the other hand, we have the geeks or the pragmatic programmers if you subscribe to that idea. They play around with other languages and technologies and usually have knowledge about several topics outside the technical domain of their current job.
I would like to see more developers, who are enthusiastic about software development. If you share this point of view, what do you do to push your peers in that direction?
Edit: follow-up question inspired by one of the answers: As non-managers, should we really care about this? And why/why not?
