Seeing people evolve around you gives you a fulfilling. Even more if you were there for them giving advice, sharing ideas and links, lending a book, explaining principles, answering to HOWs and WHYs, making up a step-by-step plan to help them better organize themselves.
If they’re unemployed, maybe you help them get a job. If they’re coworkers, you push them to ask more from themselves regarding the big picture of the project, how to search for help, how to detach sometimes from their mindset and try something new.
And very important, you make them ask themselves how others solved different situations and why they applied some principles. You help them identify needs and track down bugs.
Or…
You can just hire them, “raise” them, teach them “things are done this way”. And they get really good at “doing things this way”. They do their job, the project goes on, customers are happy.
Then, one day, you find the project in some kind of deadlock. It lives on, work is being done, but it hurts everywhere. Issues come up, business needs are slow to implement. This part is difficult to work with and it seems too late to change, that part is slow and you’re afraid of changing.
Still, you try to take better actions, you want to change, you want everything better. And you’re going to do it with the same people you raised. By now, they know the project and they could do a little better. Just a little, just enough to solve some really big issues, just enough to get you closer to one day when you’ll find the project in some kind of deadlock. It lives on, work is being done, but it hurts everywhere. Issues come up, business needs are slow to implement. This part is difficult to work with and it seems too late to change, that part is slow and you’re afraid of changing.