Tame Ducks are easy to manage, get on with the job, etc. They produce decent working code, but won't come up with the most innovative solutions. Great maintenance coders.
Wild Ducks are your innovators who will break new ground, but it's hard to get them to follow rules, comply with standards, etc. Give them the tough stuff to code.
Lame Ducks: deal with a Lame Duck by making Duck Sandwich. Sandwich the Lame Duck between a Wild Duck and a Tame Duck. They will either learn and gain competence, so becoming a Tame Duck in time, or they will Ship Out through fear of revealing their lack of knowledge.
QUACKS: talk a good project; strong tendency to bullshit their way through design by resorting to TLAs like SOA. XML and xDD. Deal with them by - again - making Duck Sandwich. The Wild Duck has exquisitely sensitive bullshit-detection capacity which, combined with their cultivated lack of tact and intolerance for freeloaders, will leave the Quack with no place to hide. The Tame Duck is there to back up the Wild Duck's assertions as to the Quack's actual performance. The Quack will almost certainly soon move on.
(Where do I fit in? ;-)
Credit: I first heard this Duck-Typing Scheme from an important mentor in my career, Nat Lunn, sometime around 1990, and so I must credit the whole story to him. Thanks, Nat!
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