A serious discussion merits at least the use of a source code versioning tool, like SVN or Mercurial or GIT.
And now for a more serious answer: How do you know that the lack of productivity is caused by lack of skill when it could be just because of lack of perceived proper compensation?
Some of these guys could be working at home creating software that can make your company obsolete.
Some of these guys could be working at home creating software that can make your company obsolete.
Very very rare. Orders of magnitude more will have e.g. families that they like better than computers. Of the remaining, few will have business-killing ideas in the first place.
I agree that morale can play a part in the amount of effort and/or sophistication a given employee will put into their job.
As for SCMs, there are plenty of companies in the middle. I've seen companies whose deployment process consists of running "svn up" on the production server.
Perhaps I forgot to mention, this is the .Net world, those versioning tools are not at all popular; doesn't mean one isn't used but versioning and publishing to production have little to do with each other.
Can you use a pull from version control to do an automated build and deploy it, sure, but that's an unnecessary hassle for a small team. It's more productive to simply build on your machine and push up the new version. An automated rsync deploy is more than sufficient.
A serious discussion merits at least the use of a source code versioning tool, like SVN or Mercurial or GIT.
And now for a more serious answer: How do you know that the lack of productivity is caused by lack of skill when it could be just because of lack of perceived proper compensation?
Some of these guys could be working at home creating software that can make your company obsolete.