Ask HN: How to handle a workaholic colleague? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How to handle a workaholic colleague?

91 pointsSoulMan78 comments

How to handle the situation when the grown in the company (Salary raise, Bonus, Stock, Promotion ) is measured by "relative performance" and you are stuck with a workaholic team mate who keeps sending update emails at weird hours in the night . Its good for team productivity but not for general team health and peer's growth in company.

Update - I am been rated above average in the current appraisal system and quite happy with the work I do. Changing job would be resetting all the good will and trust that I have built here. But after advent of this colleague, I see everything declining as exceptions are changing, sometimes portaged as "irresponsible". I can work like donkey but I like to continue to spend tine with friends and family and follow all my hobbies unlike the peer.

I don't really want to portray my peer as bad(He is mostly nice on the face), just need honest opinion if this job is still a right fit for me.

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I work a lot. I'm working right now (took a break to read HN). I just enjoy getting things done and it's paid off well for me. I've learned though that my ability to work many hours and my drive to do so doesn't mean I should enforce that on others, so I don't let my teammates know when I work outside of normal hours. I don't send emails at night or weekends. I don't send code reviews on nights and weekends. I try to stay invisible outside of normal work hours to avoid creating an environment where people feel like they must work as much as I do. I realize that also means it might look like I produce a lot more code during my 40~ hours, but I think that's better than the team receiving non-stop emails and code reviews from me.

I figured I'd work hard while I have any bit of youth and energy left and relax later in life.

Define later. I'm 42 and I still work too much.

If you're like me and not starting your own extremely successful company, or possibly seriously working on your career in the true sense - in order to get economically independent, you won't get much slack to relax in "later" regardless of what you do...

I've quit consulting and got a boring job at a large boring company in order to spend more time with my family, but somehow I find something that triggers me anyway, and I work too much, which probably affects my health.

This is the right answer without really being an answer.

I work a lot too, its not uncommon for me to 2x the hours my coworkers put in. And i don't care because I enjoy it. I'm passionate about the work I do and the company I'm contributing to.

I do need to be more mindful of the hours I send emails and slack messages. My current justification is that while I may send outbound communications 24/7, I only follow up during work hours. I could use a tool to queue messages and make me seem less active I guess.

I don't really know what OP is expecting, but if OPs colleague is open to feedback, maybe a quick aside to let them know how they are being perceived is in order. Short of that, VW shuts off email after-hours, maybe OP could do something similar:

http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-16314901

What motivates you to send emails 24/7?

Unless you're actively involved in incident response, I find it hard to imagine a scenario that necessitates sending regular email at 3 in the morning.

I guess it's convenient when you've eg. fixed an issue at 3AM in the morning to send an email to affected people right away (so you can focus on the next thing) instead of remembering to send the email in the morning.

There are solutions to write and 'send' an email now for scheduled delivery. Gmail users for example can use Boomerang: http://www.boomeranggmail.com/

Wouldn't this potentially result in the same person receiving multiple emails from you at 8:01 am (for example)?

I would think a better solution would be a manual summary email early in the morning of everything you did since the office closed the prior evening.

> Wouldn't this potentially result in the same person receiving multiple emails from you at 8:01 am (for example)?

Boomerang lets you set the time the email will be sent differently on each scheduled email. Or you could go with "send in 8 hours" for each, and they will be spaced out by however long it took to write each one.

Nothing necessitates it. But if I'm actively working, id rather draft and send the email while it's fresh.

Sometimes I'm working at 3 am, but mostly 90+hour weeks translate to 9am to 12 pm 7 days a week. Those aren't egregious hours to be communicating, they are egregious hours to expect an immediate response though.

> I figured I'd work hard while I have any bit of youth and energy left

Some would argue your youth and energy is better spent on things outside of work.

Most of the comments in this thread are ridiculous.

Just as you (hopefully) get to choose how many hours you work, your coworkers also get to choose how many hours they work.

I'd ask yourself two questions:

1: Are you happy with your current work/life balance?

2: Can you achieve your career goals at your current workplace while maintaining your desired work/life balance?

If the answer to either of those questions is "no", you should have a conversation with your manager.

Seconding this suggestion. These are the sorts of things managers are expected to deal with, and it's important to engage them when you're unhappy with your team's situation. Knowing what's expected of you will make it easier to decide if changing jobs is the right choice for your career. If you don't feel comfortable talking to your manager about this, that's also a data point worth bringing into the decision.

I think the issue that OP is getting at is that his coworker's work habits are impacting the second point.

How to handle him? Ignore him.

If the company evaluation process is so bad that one person on a team signalling - plausibly or otherwise - how hardworking they are with a few late emails reduces your salary raise then you should probably consider moving to a different company anyway, depending on how much you care about that raise. It's not that individual's fault the process is broken, and that individual changing their behaviour isn't going to fix it. If the company process isn't that bad or nobody in management bothers to read the timestamps on his emails when they read them the following morning anyway, then who cares about his showing off (or unusual pattern of organising flexible work)?

tbh if you have remote email access and sending the odd late email actually counts in your favour, and you actually care about the internal politics of appearing to be harder working than you actually are, it's not that difficult to hit the send button on an email you drafted in working hours after you've sat down at home and had your dinner. Or use a plugin to automate the process with some email systems.

Sun Tzu: When you cannot win the battle, deny the field.

Switch teams or departments, or mention to your manager that you're getting discouraged by how the incentives are set up in your company. Most managers are happy to have a hard working team member, but not at the cost of their other 5 good team members leaving or getting discouraged.

This seems to be paraphrased. Is this the quote you meant?

"If you cannot win the battle it is better to withdrawal and think of another plan rather than losing."

I can find that in a google search, but not yours.

To me:

1. If there is a direct correlation between hours worked and productivity for the team, then compensation is not relative.

2. To the degree that emails late at night is cast as toxic office politics, so are attempts to normalize the productive efforts of the coworker.

3. Pathologizing a coworker as 'workaholic' delegitmates the person and their values. It tends to provide an excuse for treating the individual poorly 'for their own good' rather than accepting the individual as what they are: a hard worker.

Pathologising a preference for sustainable pace provides an excuse for treating everyone poorly "for the company's good" rather than accepting all the individuals as what they are: ordinary folk.

Good luck.

To me, that smells like a management influenced workplace culture issue not a coworker issue.

In my experience, workers send emails late at night to explicitly demonstrate that they work more than others. I believe that it's unhealthy and it's pretty clear that it's not correlated to work quality.

This may be due to any number of reasons – from proving false a manager claiming that they don't work to impostor syndrome to office politics to actually compensating that they don't really work – but that's probably something you want to address directly with the mate. That's also a reason for which a number of places/teams I've worked at/with tend to normalize reports to once per day or once per week. That and the fact that managers just can't cope with twenty reports per night.

You also want to address the issue with the manager and make sure that you are not judged by number of emails but rather by actual impact. If that fails, you're probably working in the wrong place.

P.S.: When I write "in my experience", I've been the "worker who sends emails at all hours of night", in my case because of an abusive manager and an ongoing burnout.

And when all else fails, it's time to learn how to use your emails software's tools for scheduling when you send your email updates.

In my experience managing people I find a much prefer predictable, low noise, task completion. Every time someone who reports to me sends something I have to read it because it might be a critical issue that needs to be immediately addressed. As a result I appreciate folks who limit their off hours communication to more urgent matters, and I would rather something be done, as committed too, in a couple of weeks to someone trying to get it all done in a week or less.

But I also try to establish that understanding with folks I supervise early on. I have known managers who use someone in their group who is really over working to "get everyone to be more productive" (usually by praising the level of output of the over working employee). It always blows up the team in my experience and they wonder why nobody wants to work for them.

You'd be surprised how little weight hard work carries relative to positive attitude coupled with an acceptable amount of work (former manager here).

Performance reviews aren't usually that objective. If you're getting dinged, it might be a problem with your attitude vs your performance. It's unfair, but you're working with humans, not vulcans.

Said another way: If management likes you personally, and you work hard enough, you're not going to get bad performance reviews.

If this coworker is a ball hog, that's a different story, and management will pick up on it over time. The best thing you can do in the meantime is worry about your own output and do good work with people who do want to work with you.

The problem isn't that your co-worker works much more than the rest of the team. Based on your description, it sounds like the "relative performance" evaluation has a serious flaw in it. For the purposes of raises, bonuses, and stock, you should be compared to your peers at a comparable level of promotion only, not against people at a higher level. Likewise, for the purposes of promotion, you should be compared to your peers at the level you'd be promoted to, not people multiple levels higher. If your workaholic colleague has received a promotion, then after that happens they should be at a level where the rest of the team's compensation and potential promotions no longer depend on the now-promoted person.

If your company's evaluation doesn't work that way, you need to have a talk with management about why it should.

(Also, if your co-worker is working long hours but not actually more productive, and your management can't tell the difference between those two but you can, you may need to have a conversation with management about that too.)

From a fellow workaholic:

Talk with him and see what really excites him. Suggest that you work together with him on an open source side project (possibly related to a something your team is building). A piece of the project he can get excited about and occupy his excess energy.

Help him promote it so he can get him some recognition / feedback outside of just the internal company employees. And your team might still get some additional benefits from the open source project he's working on.

I should note for future reference, we are not each other's alts.

In my opinion, you need to understand the difference between hard work and smart work. Software development is like an art. A person may spend 18 hours a day to create something that just works while another may spend just 8 creative hours to create a masterpiece. There are many disadvantages of being a hard worker / workaholic:

* The expectation of your manager will get elevated and if one fails to be consistent in working for long hours, it's a negative.

* One does not have much room to accommodate something else at times of need. Think of an outage, you have already worked for 18 hours and fail to deliver at that crucial time.

* It's very difficult to innovate in an insomniac state.

Remember, doing hard work is easier that smart work. It requires much more learning and thinking. But, if you are able to do it, you will be able to contribute much more.

Appraisal based on relative performance: This sounds logical. If a person contributes better to the company's goal, he/she should be appreciated for that. Think yourself being that person it should make sense.

Note: I am not taking the political aspects of your office into consideration. If your manager loves late night availability, long emails at weird hours, it is his weakness. Probably, you can be smart and automate sending 'corporate bullshit' emails at night ;)

Or just find yourself a right workplace.

>Appraisal based on relative performance: This sounds logical.

I don't think it does. People should be rewarded based on the absolute value they bring to the company, not on their relative ranking.

For example, relative ranking means that you always want to work with the worst possible teams (so you are relatively the best) not the best. It also means that politics becomes more important than ability.

I agree that total value is a good ideal, but it's really hard to measure in some cases. Forgetting the inaccuracy of things like LoC, # of bugs fixed, etc. How do you measure the performance of someone who isn't directly on the product value chain? graphic designer delivered, office manager, technical writers, etc. Sometimes the most quantifiable and accurate method is by comparison.

Well your relative performance is worse, so either tolerate that or work harder. Nobody's work-life balance is someone else's decision to make.

That is a very american attitude, I'd say =)

I consider it a management duty to stop people from working too much (which is a rather european attitude :D).

I only think that it's an issue when someone is working harder than their tolerance. I agree that management should take a role in the general welfare of their team, but in this case it seems like the poster is mostly concerned about someone making them look bad.

>> That is a very american attitude, I'd say =)

It always amazes me that most people here don't know what Mayday is, or why other countries have it.

I mean I'm a Canadian working in Germany and to me it seems like Mayday is very similar conceptually to the American/Canadian Labour Day idea, but I will agree work-life balance is better here.

Management and the union. That's what's really missing here.

Not trying to be snarky, but I really believe this is part of why Apple, Google, and Facebook originated in the US.

"Nobody's work-life balance is someone else's decision to make."

Unless one is self employed with at least emergency funds in the bank (or better yet, "fuck you" money), I can say with almost certainty that one's work-life balance is someone else's decision to make in America. It has been at every single job I've ever worked at, even remote ones, and it certainly is the case in this post.

True, but in most cases moving to a different company where that pre-determined balance happens to be more in line with your professional and personal needs is a viable option, especially if you happen to live and work in a state where non-competes aren't enforceable.

Create your own company and hire the guy.

Becoming an astute businessman :)

That he works long hours doesn't necessarily mean he is good value for money

The whole team bands together and gives your teammate their full support, so that he/she is promoted into management as soon as possible.

So once he's promoted, he can now email/text you all night and 'improve' your productivity.(Being Sarcastic, of course)

No, at that point you get HR involved because they are creating a hostile work environment and demoralizing the team (bonus points if any of you have significant familial obligations such as caring for an elderly parent or other relative).

Mandatory sensitivity training FTW!

Exactly. Do your best to fulfill the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle

I am reading so many different opinions here.

I wonder what would you all reply to an "Ask HN" thread like "I am working day and night and sending emails even outside business hours, but my colleagues do not reply unless it's business hours and that is really bugging me".

Btw, did you all consider that maybe that guy just needs or wants really hard that promotion or that salary level-up and is "just" working as hard as he can towards such goal? He/she/They might have duties you do not have (kids, family members, health expenses or other stuff).

@OP: I'd say, as long as you feel honest about your output and feel you're working fairly hard for your company you are okay. You might just want to take a break and think if there is any way to improve/optimise your output.

Ask HN and you shall receive: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12722587

Likewise ! interesting comments over there.

Woah that was totally unexpected

Here on HN you must expect the unexpected!

Or, I suppose you could expect the Spanish Inquisition.

No one expects the Spanish Inquisition!

Our chief weapon is surprise, fear and surprise; two chief weapons, fear, surprise, and ruthless efficiency!

Er, among our chief weapons are: fear, surprise, ruthless efficiency, and near fanatical devotion to the Pope!

Um, I'll come in again...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nf_Y4MbUCLY

It's not about working hours but your value proposal. You can't compare yourself to him in hour to hour comparison unless you work some mundane job where your appreciation and productivity is only measured in terms of hours of work put in.

Since it seems like you want compete with this guy but not put in the hours (and I don't think you should) you need to work smarter. Look up some posts about value proposals and find a way to increase your value for the team. I.e. focus your efforts in increasing your output per worked hour.

>> I am been rated above average in the current appraisal system...But after advent of this colleague, I see everything declining...as "irresponsible"

I see this as a huge red flag. It is clearly evident that you may not be marked above average for the next appraisal. Obviously being marked as irresponsible shows that the upper level is expecting you to work like a donkey!!!

I would just start preparing for my next move.

>> Changing job would be resetting all the good will and trust that I have built here.

To this, I can say from experience, that our job is to look for the next better job. While this is a bit sarcastic maybe, but really, as we know, that companies won't think of that goodwill when the next round of letting go people comes along. And going by your description, your goodwill is because of your quality of work, so if you plan/prepare/put the efforts for the next move while you are in this job, you will really be better off.

>> I don't really want to portray my peer as bad(He is mostly nice on the face),

Most likely and I think you imply politely that he is not nice really and he understands the game being played and is playing it. You don't want to play that game, which is fair enough, but you will lose as a consequence.

So overall, just my opinion, is that now this job is no longer the right fit and moving on seems the most sensible thing to do.

You and him have different aspirations. You want to put minimal effort and still somehow progress in your career. He want to put maximum effort and advance faster. Clearly he is going to become your manager even if he do not have seniority. You will stuck in the same position or hop to new job. He will get exploited by organisation and discarded when not needed.

1. Losers - the biggest group of employees. they are easy to manipulate and will easily follow the lead. These people trade their life for paycheck and are worse off in economic sense. Over productive losers get promoted to Clueless.

2. Clueless is group of employees usually middle management that personally believe in organisation. These people will put insane amount of work because they what company to succeed. Even if they are only getting slightly more, they carry way more responsibility.

3. Sociopaths/Founders/Stakeholders is top layer in any organisation. They want organisation to be predictable, It don't matter if organisation fails they will succeed anyway. They need Clueless as insulation layer to Loser.

http://www.makingitanywhere.com/escape-your-job/

I think you should raise the issue to the team (most likely they feel the same as you) and in a meeting raise the issue to him as well.

However, if this is going for a long time, then it's just bad management.

I recall that I was working on a project and was hooked, I mentioned in the meeting that I'm planning to do some extra work while on vacation. My lead engineer specifically told me absolutely NOT to do so and he went as far as assigning the task to another engineer while I was gone, mostly to avoid having me do any progress. He knew that I was killing my self trying to show off my work and was trying to protect me (from myself). I admire him deeply for his conduct, he set a great example.

Just when you talk to the guy who's doing such damage or to other guys, be away that might be feeling that he needs to prove himself. I might be wrong of course as each one has a different personality.

If you're working at a place where your "performance" is determined by the number of emails that you send at a given hour of the day, then you'd do yourself good by finding an alternative.

(If you really love the place and want to fight your "workaholic" team mate, start scheduling a couple of your emails at random times during weird hours.)

Welcome to life. A place where there is always someone who works harder or smarter than you. If your workaholic colleague is bringing more value to the company, she should be promoted faster and receive larger compensation than you.

The key word here is value. Take a big step back and consider what value your colleague brings to the company. What "jobs" and "roles" does she fulfill within the team? Is she staying up late fixing random bugs or doing things others don't want to do? Is she staying late making sure a release goes well or delivering insights to execs to push the product forward?

You used the phrase "stuck with" which suggests negativity and possibly a sense of "it's unfair to me". Is she actively working against the team or is she outperforming others?

Consider what value you bring to the team. Do your manager/people in charge of your compensation recognize the value you bring?

As with most "soft skill" conversations the details of a situation are key.

Set your Don't Disturb settings properly, so you won't see it at night, only during work hours.

Accept that he wants to be better.

Overall the end product and performance will be measured, not how many hours were needed to make it.

This discussion reminds me of something an Indian poet once said. It’s along the lines of: No country has any proud history. The entire history of human race is awash with habitual exploitation of others.

Send Later plugin. Write emails and set them to go at 1:15AM, 2AM and 4AM.

And a SaaS was born

And that SaaS is called Boomerang.

The problem isn't your co-worker, it's the company and how they relatively value that. I'm definitely a workaholic, but my coworkers who work "normal" hours are equally valued. (but we're a small company, so we don't have a rigorous review process, and soft skills are highly valued)

In general, and true in my situation, when you work crazy hours, other aspects of your work life may be subpar (for instance, another team member may be a better communicator or a thoughtful architect)

This kind of reminds me of clients who send emails late at night. My general policy is to just make myself unavailable, or simply send a polite reply telling them I will address it first thing in the morning. I figure if I do that enough, it will nudge them toward understanding which times are appropriate and which ones aren't.

I recently wrote a blog post which might change his perspective on things: https://medium.com/@jeremycabral/how-a-5-minute-ignite-talk-...

I think sometimes people need something shocking to happen in their lives to force them to change for the better

Everyone is very nice and proper on this thread. There's another option if he's affecting you negatively -- burn him.

If he likes to work, arrange to dump the worst, tedious gigs on him. Nitpick random bullshit. Blame him for stuff. If you don't he'll set the benchmark for everyone.

Well, I'm a bit of a workaholic, and I do tend to do things at all hours of the day. But it's more related to the fact that I have terrible sleep patterns, and I've worked 6am to 3pm, to about 1pm to 10pm, and so on and so forth. I've just explained to my team that I have horrid patterns, and to not look into it more than basically tracking how I'm sleeping.

Sometimes people just wake up in the middle of the night and have trouble falling asleep so they send emails or do other boring stuff, so they can fall asleep again. I've done that on occasion. If it were me, I would just concentrate more on my job and less on what my coworkers were doing.

I have met people that have God complex. They feel that things cannot run without them.

I think it's really up to the manager of the group not to normalize the workaholic's behavior. It's possible to not let someone "break the curve" while still appreciating the extra work that they put in.

Don't assume that late-night emails/updates are bona fide. I've had colleagues who bragged that they would write emails during the day and then send out late at night.

Hint: emails to execs throughout the night are mostly unwelcome.

:) but they measure hard work with volume of text and charts contained in all the emails combined

How does that align with their business goals?

Changing jobs doesn't reset good will and trust. When you change teams, you get to build even more good will and trust with others.

You want to stop people from working too hard because they want to get ahead? This is like un-american.

Changes jobs.

I think that's not your problem, but your manager's. They should discourage that kind of behavior at work. Also, you can talk about it with other team member, I am sure there will be more people who think the same.

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