If you’re in charge of an overly motivated programming team that meets all deadlines and produces high quality code you may recognize that they don’t really need you. Here are 10 tips how to regain control.

10. Set up impossible deadlines!
    Repeated failure demotivates even the most undeviating member of your team. If you don’t meet deadlines and are not trying to do something about it (like improving your software process) every new deadline will be a farce. You can be sure that in this case your team members will see every time estimation as a torture, randomly guessing some numbers, hoping that this time everything will work out. But of course they’ll know that it can’t work (you set an impossible deadline, remember), so they will be demotivated enough to get a nice vicious circle started.
9. Let them work overtime!
   I wrote let them instead of make them intentionally. Often software developers actually like to program. To make sure that they will introduce a lot of errors, which will eventually demotivate them, you just have to let them work. And work. And work. After some hours they will get tired (but will not recognize this state themselves) and will just check in some messed up code. Time works for you on this issue. If they don’t work overtimes for fun, just make them (see 2 for a more humane way to achieve this).
8. Don’t allow breaks!
   This is tightly coupled to 9. If your employee works overtime but makes a lot of breaks you gain nothing. The geeky brain has surprisingly quick regeneration capabilities (especially if a lot of caffeine is involved). So you basically have to combine 8 and 9 to get the pack tired enough. This way you maximize the error rate which will eventually yield the demotivation you aimed for.
7. Place a ban on laughing!
   You can use this tip not only for programming teams. If you want creative workers to produce nothing useful, don’t allow them to laugh or even better: don’t allow them to talk. When they’re quiet and unhappy you can be sure that you will not be able to write code.
6. Break the coffee machine!
   Programmer (n): An organism that can turn caffeine into code.
5. Don’t shield them from the dirty daily business
   Even the brains of programmers have limited capabilities. So one easy way to demotivate your software developer is to challenge him with tasks he hates. Tasks that have nothing to do with software development work best here. Make the developer lie to the customer about schedules, or make your team hold the customers hand when they don’t want to learn the basics to integrate your product into a complex environment. Often you get a nice demotivation by forwarding angry mails from other company’s CEOs to your development team or let them handle wobbly feature requests.
4. Don’t challenge them!
   Most developers are motivated when they can work on a real challenge. So don’t let them. Of course with software development being a challenge per se, this will inevitably lead to 5. But if you try to implement tip number 5, you have to remember not to give them tasks that challenge too much.
3. Underpay them!
   While paying more than your programmer is worth will usually not gain any additional productivity, you can easily get a good demotivation by paying less. The important thing is that the developer knows that he’s underpayed - this maximizes the negative impact on his overall performance. You can easily drop the productivity by a factor of two or three depending on the basic motivation level of your employee.
2. Bribe them!
   And do so generously! Promise them a lot of money if they meet some utterly impossible deadlines (see 10). You can be sure that this will motivate your programmer - to mess up. She will work overtimes (see 9), sitting in front of her computer without a break (see 8), not accepting any interruptions by coworkers that want to cheer her up (see 7) or take her to the coffee machine (see 6). She will be concerned about the figures all the time to make sure that everything is all right (see 5).
1. Infiltrate a team member who is demotivated anyway!
   If you don’t want to use 1 to 9 for ethical reasons, you can always find those people who are demotivated anyway. These are mostly people that don’t really want to develop software and just do it for the money. Since it’s mostly easy to make everything look bad, this is usually what they’re really good at. And since they don’t want to work, they’ll pull everybody around them down into their little black hole of demotivation.

Or if you really want to screw things up, waste alot of money on a project that doesn’t deliver and will cost you hundreds of thousands, choose the worst team member and appoint him as leader, and make sure its the one without any official IT training or leadership/social skills.

Here’s something really neat to try … go to any website, then in the Address bar copy and paste the following (to stop the effect, just type another website address into the address bar and hit enter):

javascript:R=0; x1=.1; y1=.05; x2=.25; y2=.24; x3=1.6; y3=.24; x4=300; y4=200; x5=300; y5=200; DI=document.getElementsByTagName(%22img%22); DIL=DI.length; function A(){for(i=0; i-DIL; i++){DIS=DI[ i ].style; DIS.position=’absolute’; DIS.left=(Math.sin(R*x1+i*x2+x3)*x4+x5)+%22px%22; DIS.top=(Math.cos(R*y1+i*y2+y3)*y4+y5)+%22px%22}R++}setInterval(’A()’,5); void(0)

You’ll see the pictures fly all over the place in a crazy tornado vortex fashion. Some sites are awesome (Amazon’s home page is a good example).

Sooo…

I have recently updated my “About Me” page with a new bio - hope you like it.

And after Jen’s advice, changing some fonts on the Greenery theme to make it more legible.

Any other suggestions?

…same as the old site (shite).

We’ve got a new look going on here, obviously.

It’s the same old content but with a shiny new wrapper. Me likey. Do You?

You can now choose which theme you like, cause all of you kept asking for different ones.

Have a look and let me know which is your fave?

“he wouldnt know programming if it came up and bit him in the tits”

hahah, thanks to the person that sent this to me, it made me laugh out loud!

looking at my stats, apparently “wave my private parts at your antics you cheesy lot of second-hand electric donkey bottom biters” is a search keyphrase to find my blog.

Insane!

It was time.

I’ve updated the design with something that I hope works well for everyone, and shows my love for the Mario.

If you’re reading this via the RSS feed, please come take a look!

So why did I do it?

* I wanted something a bit more fun looking.
* I wanted to flex my design and WordPress editing muscles.
* I never really liked the fonts of the old design.
* I wanted to experiment with a left-column layout.
* I wanted to shrink the height of the header and get more content above the fold.

I think this design does a much better job of showing people what theGeneva is all about. My biggest worry with making the move was alienating anyone in my community, and newcomers as well. It was crucial that the design be inviting and open. I think it’s both, but with more flair.

I’ve still got a bit of fine tuning to do in a few places, but I’m ecstatic with how it turned out.

But now it’s your turn — What do YOU think?

Take a poke around, look at some posts, pages, search, etc. and let me know your thoughts!

Am I the only one that remembers/used iPhone back in 1995 made by Vocaltec?

That program was fantastic. Talking to people around the world over your 14.4 connection was cool. (Well, the audio quality was like a POTS line back in the 70’s, but hey, it rocked!…Well, it rocked until CuSeeMe came along.)

There was a guy on the chatrooms who called himself ironside (he was in a wheelchair) and we used oi have such a laugh - I often wonder whats’s happened to the people who used it.

If you know of any, drop me a line - I may reveal what my handle was

Now have a Mitsubishi Diamond Plus 200 monitor at work, and I really like it!

Notice the duck-taped wrist rest (I am so damned rough on them that they keep breaking and the gel slimey goo gets everywhere, and at 30 pounds a pop (provided by myself), I am going to defeat the goo!).

Added a new photo gallery called Pre-Gastric Bypass - not long now!