Negative Developers and Team Stability

In my experience if you have a situation where an increasing number of developers are going "negative" the core of your problem is not a single "negative" developer who started it but rather something else is very wrong with your organization, usually terrible management or just bad company vision and the person you pin as the "negative" developer was simply the first to catch on.

I will admit there are certainly developers with naturally bad attitudes, but I've never seen their attitude spread unless there was something very wrong with the company to begin with.

Let's see what the tell-tale signs are (as described):

* "general attitude to their current project"

* "pushing back against work requests"

* "attitude that doesn’t gel with the general ethos the team is aiming for"

* "it’s a developer who doesn’t get involved with the daily meetings"

All these also could point to a messed up crazy work environment where "work requests" are unreasonable, with stuff like "ticket #345 - implement flux capacitor". Anyone not pushing back against such things is either stupid or desperate.

Daily meetings? There another problem. That's enough to turn good people who want to work and concentrate on a problem into being "negative". Make them have daily meetings, morning and afternoon, for good measure.