This week in the pm-clinic discussion forum: Topic #40 – Loose cannon programmers:

I’m a team lead and have a handful of programmers, testers and documentation people reporting to me. There is one programmer, lets call him Ivan, who is the most experienced programmer on my team. He is very smart, very confident, and listens to me about 60% of the time. The other 40% he either says one thing and does something different, or refuses to compromise and just does whatever he thinks is right.

Besides driving me crazy, the functional problem is his behavior disturbs the team. When he’s frustrated, he leaves meetings (often yelling at me) or shuts down and goes silent. He sometimes does coding work that we’ve agreed not to do, or adds features we’ve never discussed – sometimes this seems done out of spite for me or others. Since he is well respected as a programmer, less experienced members take on some of his habits, using him as an example. When he’s at his worst he’s a major distraction to progress.

So my question is how do you handle a senior person who is a loose cannon? I can’t just fire him: he’s my most productive programmer. But he creates so many other problems for me and the team that I struggle with how to manage the team with him on it.

– Managing Crazy Ivan