How do you deal with poor coders?

First I'd like to acknowledge how frustrating the situation must be for you.

I also want you to put yourself in their shoes for a minute. You mention they don't come from a traditional CS background. I do not think just by telling them nicely "your code sucks, you need to write better code", they would actually understand exactly how to make the appropriate changes. I don't come from a CS background as well, and I can tell you that it is not necessarily "natural" to immediately execute upon feedback, which assumes you already know 1. what the feedback means, and 2. how to make the appropriate adjustments. If you've never learnt proper clean code practices before or know how to do it in the first place, it's quite challenging. Most non CS-background folks learn to close the gap with a lot of personal effort, reading blogs/books, doing side projects, seeking mentorship and having great managers/Tech Lead that teach them (but they need to be coachable). That requires effort and willingness to learn. But the first step is to want to improve. And then be willing to put in the appropriate effort. If they don't have that (and you mention the job doesn't really *require* good code quality), they might not feel a change is absolutely required despite acknowledging their code quality is bad and slows the team; the code works after all!

Here's my perspective : I am assuming you are colleagues (same level of seniority). I don't think the problem is convincing them that code quality is important. They might know it and still not see any urgency in levelling up, or just have no clue how to improve. I think you need to gauge wether they actually want to improve and are willing to put in the appropriate effort. If that's the case you can recommend Taro courses, and start a book club to discuss blog posts/books about great practices. If you're willing to take some time to mentor/teach them on how to enhance their code quality, do so. It'll also teach you leadership skills.

If they do not want to improve their code quality or do not see the point (and are not willing to put in the work), it is going to be much harder, simply because you can't force someone into becoming a better engineer.

I'd just refer them to Taro - and then have them take the coding course

Wow your colleagues sound a lot like me when I was doing research in my Master's! My code was complete garbage. They most likely just don't know any better.

Some possible action steps:

• If it's a monorepo or not that big, you can introduce a linter with custom rules
• Offer constructive feedback. Their code works, but it's ugly. The polite way to say this is "Code works great, just a few style changes" on the PR reviews.
• Find people who are either underperforming due to the codebase or are tired of dealing with shitty code and work with them. Suffering people are the most open to change.

This does require some tact though. People don't like their baby being called ugly. Depending on how serious this problem is for everyone's productivity, the harder you can push.