At my last job, everyone was always bitching about the young developers. After months and months of hearing this, I started pulling the new guys aside for an hour a week to do mentoring sessions. We'd sit down and do some coding on a simple topic (how to sort a datagrid, how to hook into the event that fires when a row is created, how to standardize your data validation and error messages). The big take away for them was they got see the process, how a more experienced developer works. Stuff like did you know that shift-control-b builds your solution... you should be pressing that every 5 minutes. Or coding up a quick and dirty solution and using simple refactorings to turn it into something more real (mostly extract method and rename).
I'm not going to sit here and say that there is no such thing as a bad developer that is beyond help. I do think in some cases though it is a matter of people not doing their due diligence in helping people out. I can't help but think that part of it is that we developers spend a lot of time on the internet where the base mentality is that everyone is either a n00b or a pro. Either I agree with what you said or you are clearly a moron. It is important to not let that kind of stuff trickle into our 'real' lives.
This is really important – I think every organization should do this. At my last job I learned so much from watching more experience people code and asking them questions. Now I volunteer my knowledge to others whenever I can because I know how much it helps.
I'm not going to sit here and say that there is no such thing as a bad developer that is beyond help. I do think in some cases though it is a matter of people not doing their due diligence in helping people out. I can't help but think that part of it is that we developers spend a lot of time on the internet where the base mentality is that everyone is either a n00b or a pro. Either I agree with what you said or you are clearly a moron. It is important to not let that kind of stuff trickle into our 'real' lives.