I can't seem to get people motivated...
I supervise them closely - they complete one task a month.
I leave them be - they complete one task a month.
Did I just hire poor developers?

What do you do to take the temperature of your team? (1-1, retros, ...)

@DevLivesMatter Both. Everyone super happy, love the company, excited about the tech -
But not making progress.

@Nihil75 are you doing your 1-1 at the office usually? I'm asking because I used to have the same issue. In my case, a different setting produced a different feedback than the usual « everything is great ». Since then, I always go to a café nearby, juice shop or even bar if it's late.

In that specific case, they were just slacking off because they were not « invested » in the company.

Could be anything really, from incompetence to feeling overwhelmed or just slacking off because being faster doesn't do them any good but add up more load.

Are they aware it's an issue or are you trying to figure out on your own (to avoid frustration in the team)?

Are you my teamleader?

Are they underpaid? Because if you pay a senior as junior, or a junior as a garbage man, they will only put in as much work as they think you value them as

also is it possible the project codebase is something old, legacy, tangled, that changing tiny things just takes longer than it should?

are they working from home or an office? are they depressed because of it? If from home, do they have families?

Were they pushed too hard recently and could they be burnt out because of working over hours or weekends or something?

Do you have 3-4 meetings a day that constantly disrupt their workflow?

@Hazarth - They are compensated extremely well. Especially for an early stage startup. both a great salary and equity.
@DevLivesMatter - We're all remote, which I think is part of the problem.

Overall I feel as if their not invested in the company. Everyone stays in his lane, works on his tasks, and very slowly at that.

I feel things would be better if we were back in an office.

A task a month?! Either they're doing sod all or the tasks are way too big.

I've seen it from both sides - I've had managers that have just given me "one task" involving writing a whole complex, well tested backend, and I've seen devs take a trivial task and sit on it not doing anything for weeks.

Try to get some structure going. Get the team to break tasks down into tasks they think they can do in no more than a few days. Have daily standups, manage a WIP board, get them to talk about what they'll do today, all that sort of stuff.

@Nihil75 Do you use Agile?

I know most people say it's a meme, but for me and the teams I worked with the idea of finishing tasks within a sprint (2 weeks usually) gives us good soft deadlines with enough time to work on the estimated work

Also, do they estimate their work, like SCRUM or something? or at least do you have a Kanban board or something like that going on? Jira filled properly maybe?

@Hazarth Full Agile, Scrum. We do refinement, backlog grooming, sprint planning, review, retro.. the works.

Tickets either get pushed to next sprint, or are completed at a very basic level. no thinking outside the box/beyond the ticket.

A dev will write a function (very slowly), but won't think at all how it's to be deployed, integrated, or help the bigger picture.

From your description it seems there are no skilled seniors on the team to remove blockers and give good code reviews.

Generally speaking, a team will grow, but not surpass, the skill level of its most experienced developer.

@Nihil75 hmm,

Do they give you any reason why the tasks are pushed into the next sprint? Any blockers reported? The devs need to be held accountable if a sprint (or several) is falling behind. They need to be able to answer questions like. What has slowed you down? Are the estimations off? Were you waiting for someone else to finish something?

I mean delays and mis-estimates happen sometimes, that's normal, but for this to happen repeatadly with no reason behind it is unacceptable...

Is this all Juniors? Who's responsible for the "big picture" regarding code? There should be a tech lead on the project that should be able to understand the delays from a tech standpoint...

I mean It's no shame for a junior to misestimate a task, but he has to be able to explain it. Best to a tech lead in case the PM doesn't understand it.

Work should be transparent even without you breathing down their necks. You should hear about important stuff in stand-ups in the morning