--- title: "5 ways to grow great developers instead of desperately looking for them" url: "https://www.5whys.com/articles/5-ways-to-grow-great-developers-instead-of-desperately-looki.md" canonical: "https://www.5whys.com/articles/5-ways-to-grow-great-developers-instead-of-desperately-looki.html" published: "2009-09-16T20:13:47+00:00" updated: "2014-05-22T22:37:16.017000+00:00" tags: ["Growing People", "Ha"] author: "Roy Osherove" description: "One of the most common phrases you hear from managers about lack of agile adoption in their team is We don't have that kind of 'super' developer here. We just have ordinary day folks - they can't handle it. And We can't seem to find anyone…" usage: "Licensed under CC BY 4.0 — reuse, quote and adapt with attribution (Roy Osherove, link to the original page)." license: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/" --- # 5 ways to grow great developers instead of desperately looking for them One of the most common phrases you hear from managers about lack of agile adoption in their team is  > We don't have that kind of 'super' developer here. We just have ordinary day folks - they can't handle it. And We can't seem to find anyone who can fit what we look for. The real key to being a great leader is that if you do your job right, than you'll make your developers better and better  - you **will grow them** until they become the developers _you wish you had_.  > Grow your developers into their full potential and you won't have to [seek anyone](http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/FindingGreatDevelopers.html) from the outside I'm not saying it's easy. As a team lead, helping people grow was one of the toughest things I've had to do. It got me way out of my comfort zone, and i had to do things I'd never imagined doing, but that means that I also  _grew personally as a lead_ while growing other people. Today I feel more confident than ever that given a team I can start my way to making the team a better team, instead of always looking to the outside. ### How do you grow people?  Here are the the headlines (i'll blog about each separately) 1. Give them "Homework" about things that will make them better 2. Take them (and yourself) out of their comfort zone 3. Ask them to [come up with multiple solutions to problems](https://www.5whys.com/articles/growing-developers-ask-for-solutions-instead-of-giving-them.html) 4. If you're not happy with someone's current state, be assertive about not accepting it and ask them to commit to be better (management by integrity) 5. [Implement code reviews](https://www.5whys.com/articles/step-4-start-doing-code-reviews-seriously.html) and teach them to do them on their own Of course, to get all these things going there are several simple conditions that have to be met first: - You should be s[pending enough time with your team, at least 50%](https://www.5whys.com/articles/spend-at-least-50-of-your-time-with-your-team.html) - You should have full [control of the dev team territory](https://www.5whys.com/articles/step-1-claim-your-territory-own-your-team.html) - You should be fully committed to doing this - this is hard work and will add more tasks to your day --- ## About the author **Roy Osherove**: Senior Solutions Architect at AWS working on AI for production and AI-driven development; author of The Art of Unit Testing and Elastic Leadership, with about 20 years of consulting and training on unit testing, TDD, team leadership and continuous delivery. ### Sites - [RobotPaper](https://robotpaper.ai/): This blog: AI patterns and anti-patterns, AI and coding agents, and engineering leadership. - [osherove.com](https://osherove.com): Roy's personal site. Author of The Art of Unit Testing and Elastic Leadership; consulting and training on unit testing, TDD, team leadership and continuous delivery, plus about 20 years of blog posts. - [The Art of Unit Testing](https://www.artofunittesting.com): The Art of Unit Testing, 3rd Edition (Manning): readable, maintainable, trustworthy unit tests, plus TDD workshops in C#, JavaScript, Java and Kotlin. - [5whys.com](https://www.5whys.com): Roy's writing on software team leadership: self-organizing teams, surviving chaos, learning mode and the Elastic Leadership model. - [Pipeline Driven](https://pipelinedriven.org): Continuous delivery and DevOps practices: build patterns, pipeline-friendly testing, DevOps metrics and enterprise DevOps. - [Elastic Leadership](https://www.elasticleadership.com): Elastic Leadership, Roy's framework for software team leaders (survival, learning and self-organizing modes). ### Social - X: https://x.com/royosherove - LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/osherove/ ### Contact - Contact form: https://forms.gle/jQSx5KoXvrVA1JCK7 ### License Licensed under CC BY 4.0 — reuse, quote and adapt with attribution (Roy Osherove, link to the original page). License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/