Dear Bob ...I agree with most of the points you made in "Encouraging Adulthood," (Keep the Joint Running, 2/6/2006), [which suggests that holding employees accountable is the opposite of leadership and of asking employees to act as adults]. I have a few comments and point of dissention.First off, bonuses, at most places nowadays these are kept strictly confidential as the HR geniuses think that there will be dis Dear Bob …I agree with most of the points you made in “Encouraging Adulthood,” (Keep the Joint Running, 2/6/2006), [which suggests that holding employees accountable is the opposite of leadership and of asking employees to act as adults]. I have a few comments and point of dissention.First off, bonuses, at most places nowadays these are kept strictly confidential as the HR geniuses think that there will be dissention in the ranks if the disparity here was known between the top performers and the bottom performers. In some ways they are correct, as the politics sometimes gets in the way of actually rewarding the top performers instead of the top brown nosers. Second, some employees need to be treated like children as they really have not grown up. I had a very smart programmer who worked for me, but he was terribly lazy. He hated the coding standards as they made him type more and think of other coders’ interaction with his stuff. Since he was the de facto tech lead due to his knowledge and intelligence, the other programmers followed his lead down the path of buggy, unreadable code that had multiple styles. I had to enact weekly code reviews, with grading, and have it directly impact everyone’s review scores to get this fixed. In other words, keep it up and you will not get a bonus or a raise no matter how many weekends you spend here working yourself to death because your latest fix broke more stuff again.– Managing semi-adultsDear Semi-manager … I’m not sure how much we disagree in practice. Among the questions to ask is this one: Is your smart-but-maverick programmer doing more good than harm? Which is to say, if you enacted weekly code reviews, not because you think it’s good practice but only to keep this guy in line, might your organization be better off replacing him with an equally talented but more disciplined professional?Please also understand that I’m not advocating an environment in which employees work without oversight. That’s asking for trouble for a number of reasons, the most important of which is that without it, employees figure you have no interest in what they’re doing. When you send that message you encourage slapdash work, because why should anyone put a lot of effort into work that isn’t important?Then there’s the matter of process management: Whatever the nature of the people working for you, if you’ve instituted processes and procedures to guide their activities, you need feedback loops so you have the information you need to keep the process healthy. Lots of development methodologies include code reviews – not because of distrust, but because a second pair of eyes on code reduces the possibility of both defects and misunderstandings regarding the nature of your coding standards. – Bob Technology Industry