True, but I don't think very relevant in this case. You can always link to a transcript on another service, or your own hosting, but it doesn't have to be on twitter. On the other hand, twitter adds an opinion almost by default. Which sentence you choose, how you cram it into 140 chars, what do you normally tweet about, where you tweeted from, who you are - these can be used to guess your opinion in almost every case.
Either you follow them more closely or let them go.
As a lead is your job to put them on the right track, so you should try to understand their way of thinking and weak points.
If even after trying hard you still can't get them to perform properly, let them go. It might be that they're too "scatterbrained" or that you weren't able to find the right way to approach them, but, either way, if you've been through, it doesn't really matter.
YMMV, but the point is: you're the one supposed to 'bend' more to make the collaboration work. If you can't, you still should try to solve the situation (for the sake of all parties involved, not only yours) by letting them go, having them reassigned, or something else.
I like how it describes the negatively reinforcing cycle of closer scrunity which results in worse performance etc. I'd also suggest personal coaching: don't tell your devs what to do, get them to realise what would be the most expedient method of proceeding (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GROW_model).
It's arrogant and unfair to just consider the option to let them go if things in the end don't work. It might be that another lead could make things work.
I agree. If I were you, I would try to understand why they behave as they do. They may be distracted because of reasons outside of work (such as an illness in the family, or a divorce lurking around the corner etc.). Or they may be overwhelmed with the complexity of the task and so they just try to do what they think they can instead of working straight towards the solution. After all, we are all people with ups and downs, and limitations of our own. The follow-up should depend on what you find.
>I wouldn't think too many as the arrow is pointing up and not down as it would be for expanded comments.
People might think the arrow doesn't indicate the comment thread state ('expanded') but the action that will be performed when clicked ('collapse'), which might also inlude the top-post (that would be consistent with the 0-replies case).
Do you care at all about what your company does?
What did you hate about your startup experience?
While I'm not in your position, I fear that I will one day end up in a situation where I'm working on something that I don't care at all about and regardless of what the job gives back in terms of money/prestige/experience, I won't be able to 'unsee' the fact that I'll be wasting my life for the benefit of a third party.
As of now the only thing that really keeps me motivated is a combination of a challenging problem (not being 100% sure to be able to solve it elegantly) and working on something that I care about personally.
Unfortunately it seems to me that this kind of combination is most likely found in the startup world, which means you also have to deal with its generally awful culture.
Maybe you too can find a way to keep motivated, although having a family surely reduces your possibilities.
A side project maybe?
If you can't change your working situation then you must find a way to 'recharge your batteries' outside of work and since you have a kid on the way you might also want to consider something that you can share with him/her in the future.
Schools should really start teaching the concept of Turing completeness to kids, otherwise we'll get to the heat death of the universe with non technical people still thinking that this kind of crap is an acceptable solution.
A funny thought: this is a very obvious thing for people who follow the competitive scenes of (valid) multiplayer games. There are lots of cases where progamers get to a high level of skill after an amount of practice that absolutely would not be enough for other people. In the end it's not dark magic, they just tend to already have the right mindset (and experience from other games for example) to make the most of their practice.
An iconic example is the team (Na`Vi) that won the first big DotA2 tournament. The game was in closed beta and professional DotA1 teams got a key at different times. Navi got their key just 1 month before the tournament while other teams got theirs way before. Still, 1 month was enough to beat all other professional teams.
There's a lot of interesting things that one can learn from esports, even just from the sheer amount of data generated (dota2 has almost 10M unique monthly players).
Quality of practice is also important, and probably a major factor in your example. My knowledge and skill will be vastly different if I spend 500 hours playing against the best players in the world, compared to spending 500 hours playing in Bronze league (does Dota2 have a bronze league?).
In my opinion you should not use apps as a teaching medium.
Apps are not that cool in the end and while some hackers might build apps, building apps for sure doesn't help you become a hacker in any way.
Hence, my recommendation:
Python, raspberry/arduino, legos, and a 3d printer maybe.
For conceptually higher level programming: a turtle graphics framework like netlogo or pythonturtle.
Nothing beats being able to program things that interact directly with the physical environment, hence the hardware recommendations.
The only reason why this teaching approach is not universal is that sometimes you might want to try things that require too much effort or resources to be done 'for real', like a robot fighting arena, for example.
Turtle programming is nice because its syntax is agent-oriented. This way you express things like path finding, competitive behaviours (robots shooting lasers at each others, pew pew), and other things that are cool (not only for kids) in the most natural way.
Maybe your nephew won't be able to write bounchy interfaces, but if he can learn how program a robot to make it understand where it's located and how to outsmart other robots, he'll already have half a CS degree in his pocket even before going to university.
