Creative ways to punish (or just curb) laziness in coworkers
- by FerretallicA
Like the subject suggests, what are some creative ways to curb laziness in co-workers? By laziness I'm talking about things like using variable names like "inttheemplrcd" instead of "intEmployerCode" or not keeping their projects synced with SVN, not just people who use the last of the sugar in the coffee room and don't refill the jar.
So far the two most effective things I've done both involve the core library my company uses. Since most of our programs are in VB.net the lack of case sensitivity is abused a lot. I've got certain features of the library using Reflection to access data in the client apps, which has a negligible performance hit and introduces case sensitivity in a lot places where it is used. In instances where we have an agreed standard which is compromised by blatant laziness I take it a step further, like the DatabaseController class which will blatantly reject any DataTable passed to it which isn't named dtSomething (ie- must begin with dt and third letter must be capitalised). It's frustrating to have to resort to things like this but it has also gradually helped drill more attention to detail into their heads.
Another is adding some code to the library's initialisation function to display a big and potentially embarrassing (only if seen by a client) message advising that the program is running in debug mode. We have had many instances where projects are sent to clients built in debug mode which has a lot of implications for us (especially with regard to error recovery) and doing that has made sure they always build to release before distributing.
Any other creative (ie- not StyleCop etc) approaches like this?
