He claimed his employer was trying to "milk him" by asking for a handover guide for the next person taking over the role.
I think that people hold onto information for power, to protect their position and to give them leverage over their situation.
In the case of these team members I think one comes down to fear of maybe looking daft in front of the rest of the team by saying something that they think might be wrong. The other can just be a sanctimonious prick and will ask people questions that they simply wont know the answer to, to show them up in front of the rest of the office.
So in my experience fear is certainly a factor holding a person back. However on the flip side a person lording his knowledge over other people but not sharing it in a useful way conducive to improving the general programming knowledge of the team.
They both harm the team but in different ways. I don't know how these two problems can be solved though. Maybe encouraging opinion from the people who fear sharing their points of view and being supportive of them would help.
I'm at a loss though with regards to the power-bitches that like to make people look small with their own knowledge.
What I'm guessing you'd like sanctimonious pricks like me to say:
"That particular (algorithm|technology decision|doohickey) is bad for the following three reasons, this alternative is better because it's !(those three reasons), is less work, easier to maintain and also offers us the following three affordances. I've used this in a number of other installations and can vouch for its reliability and ease-of-use."
This categorically does not work! Don't do it! It allows for zero shared credit, puts everyone on the defensive and leads to bickering and bike-shedding. In the best case, the person you're arguing with will disagree vehemently, go away for a few weeks, then come up with a new idea all by themselves that is exactly the same as what you were arguing for. This achieves the same result but isn't a very pleasant way to get there. Questions work marginally better.
In general my lines of questioning follow one of the following formats:
1. Is there a reason we're not using <a := some no-brainer technology choice> instead of going to all the effort of rolling our own <a>?
2. Have you thought about how that's going to work when <one or more use cases that are almost definitely going to happen that you clearly haven't thought about>?
3. Is <b> something we're just doing now to get it working and then planning on refactoring later? <where b := a horrible mess they just merged into master>
4. It looks like the script is running when I enter <script>alert('bazinga!');</script> as my username. Seeing as it's your commit that caused it would you mind taking a look at that?
In terms of sharing insight without offending people, that's about as polite as I can get I'm afraid.
In those situations, it is a lot less effort to allow developer B to commit whatever the hell they want into the codebase, wait until they lose interest and then go in later and clean up the mess.
Although people bringing their stapler to the IT help desk is one of those times I might not be mad if the response was "That's not my job"
Maybe give them a project that only takes a couple of hours, just creating a simple module that does some very basic thing. Try to find out how they work rather than the final result.
Writing this on computer that asshole created.
And btw, I do not know a single Genius (with uppacase G) who is not an asshole, so go figure...
By "Genius (with uppacase G)" you mean an Apple Store employee?
I do. That type of intelligence does not predetermine being an asshole. I think it's sad that people think that.
Edit: I might be thinking of this, or something like it: http://www.businessinsider.com/what-does-your-use-of-the-wor...
Specifically, in most cases it's expected that you specify the subject of a sentence, which happens to be yourself a lot of the time. There's no such expectation in Japanese for example.
I actually try hard to use I wherever possible for that particular reason. Saying "I think a message-passing style would be best for this" is more honest than "a message-passing style would be best for this".
http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2012/10/ascent_of_t...
In case you think I believe I'm always an arsehole, this isn't the case. But there have been times I believe I was. I'll have to work on it in future :(
