title: How to demonstrate to management that mediocre developers are hurting team
body: <p>I am in the precarious position of "managing" a team of developers at a small company. I say "managing" because although I assign work and provide feedback on their performance I have no recourse in actually disciplining an individual. </p>
  
  <p>Some of my team I don't know what to do with, they are unable to work on their own, require massive amounts of hand holding and when left along generally wreak havoc on the project usually to a point of failure. When failure does occur I am left to salvage the project and push it (some times limping) across the finish line. </p>
  
  <p>These developers not only lack skills with programming concepts, but generally ability to formulate a solution to a problem in code. Simple things like writing loops are tough for them let alone designing and implementing a solution to a problem.</p>
  
  <p>We have tried pair programming, offering to pay for classes, buying books, allocating time during the work day to training and even taking whole days to train the team.  </p>
  
  <p>The other senior developer and I do not know what to do, but our productivity is being throttled with having to deal with these individuals day to day. Management is forcing us to give them work and their major complaint is how things aren't getting done quickly enough.</p>
  
  <p>None of our management team works directly with any of the developers other than myself and the other senior developer. Management is non-technical and believes every developer is created equally, and that we obviously need more people on these projects to get them done faster.</p>
  
  <p>I am already preparing a document with sections from "The Mythical Man Month" and "Code Complete" to send to management to hopefully illustrate with statistics that what is really hindering us is having to drag the mediocre folks through the development cycle.</p>
  
  <p>What other resources are out there? Books, articles, general advice anything would be helpful.</p>