Prove the badness of coworkers at your own risk (2012)
rachelbythebay.com
rachelbythebay.com
So, it was up to her because everyone was responsible for the system as a whole. That includes her. She is clearly in the wrong here.
What "experiment" did she think she was running? I see no experiment here. All she did was not address the issue until someone higher up complained. That's it.
She made zero effort to find out why this happened, who did it, etc. She assumes her coworkers are wrong and bad and lazy. Maybe they were busy doing other things and didn't notice this issue. If you are more competent than your coworkers and not getting paid extra or whatever, that can be aggravating. But management doesn't care about your petty BS. They care that the system runs properly, not which individual routinely has to catch and correct the anomaly while pouting about doing their job.
She even indicates it was incredibly trivial to resolve. So this post sounds like someone looking for BS reasons to be wrapped around the axle about something.
"Once, at work, I spent vastly more time conspiratorially complaining to my boss and then faux monitoring the system than it would have taken to just fix the problem that it was my job to fix because I had delusions of grandeur and wanted to indulge in some completely pointless witch hunt."
Wow, honey, get new hobbies. Fucking with coworkers for giggles and then blogging about it does nobody any good at all.
So she conducted this passive aggressive "experiment" and then got mad when she was called out on it.
This is just an example of a communication breakdown resulting in bad team dynamics. Worst of all, IMO, the author concludes not to disengage in her anti-social behavior, opting to continue doing it but this time in secret.
"Let me tell you about that time I kindly stood idly by failing to do my job as an experiment to graciously let my bad and lazy coworkers grow and they completely botched it. Thousands of dollars in damage done and servers had to be replaced."
"Let me tell you about that time my male coworker decided to steal my thunder and get promoted over me by doing my job when I couldn't be arsed to because sexism is clearly alive and well!"
People who spend two months looking for some BS excuse to fingerpoint instead of spending 30 seconds fixing the problem are going to find something to complain about. She not only spent two months pursuing this at work, she then blogged about it. She invested all kinds of time and energy into this bizarre little scenario in her head.
She clearly has Big Feels about something. Why? I don't know. But that is the real issue here.
If you read up on the author you get a much better picture of the orgs she's been a part of, the work she's done, and the problems she has done troubleshooting on, I think you might adjust your opinion a bit.
She suspected her team was underperforming and unfortunately the quietest way of verifying that is just not to be the one to step up. There was no "witch hunt" here.
Perhaps it is just bad writing that neither stands on its own nor indicates that there is additional material needed to fully appreciate it. I don't feel any personal obligation to do a lot of legwork here to bend over backwards to give her the benefit of the doubt, especially since I see no reason to doubt my conclusion.
That's because you clearly haven't worked in a technical role that involves babysitting, ma'am.
If you can't spare the effort of researching somebody before calling bullshit, please continue that trend and spare the effort of spouting off. :)
This is how these things get started, people label each other in a bad way then force them to stick to labels. (In a soft way or more explicitly.)
There is no good way out of such situation. If you point it out you're labelled as disruptive, because status quo is God. Even more so if you escalate. If you take initiative, get labelled toxic and evil. If you quit, you're a quitter or job hopper.
I'm actually interested and not being obtuse here.
Arguably, there is a time to not forgive, e.g. 'Three Billboards'. But that level of line in the sand stuff should only be used rarely, not on a regular basis.
> he just said "the documentation sucks". My response to that was "uh, well, I figured it out, so how bad could it be?".
Isn't common sense to update the documentation for how to do semi-obscure dev-opsy things and disseminate this information to the rest of the team?
There will always be some plumbing thing that you are the most familiar with; if you want the team to take shared responsibility, it's kinda up to you to bring it up and suggest rotation or whatever needs to be suggested to systematize the workload distribution.
Rather than sulking and running sociopathic "experiments", I've found it to be more effective to keep advocating for more attentiveness to docs (by discussing it as a task prioritization item with the team, by setting examples, via code reviews, etc). If you continuously call it out when people drop the ball, and give constructive feedback when they attempt to take on the task in earnest, you gradually see better results.
She wasn't asking an honest question. She was trying to do a gotcha.
My ex had some great expression along the lines of "It is a when did you stop beating your wife? question."
In other words, the assumption of guilt runs so very deep, even when nominally trying to give you credit, it is damning. The framing does not allow for the possibility that you never stopped beating your wife because you never were a wife beater to begin with.
She set out to prove her coworkers were bad. In other words, their badness was a foregone conclusion in her mind. She wasn't checking to see what they would do.
It's entirely possible she had crap coworkers. But if she isn't management, managing her coworkers is not her job.
Setting out to prove you have bad coworkers is unprofessional and just not a good thing to do. I had a really lousy coworker at my corporate job. I hated being assigned his botched files when he took the day off. Management figured it out for themselves and eventually fired him.
If you have so little faith in management that you think they won't find the bad eggs themselves, you should be job hunting, not setting up little experiments to prove they are bad. If she was dissatisfied with always being the one doing this 30 second job, there are far better ways to try to address it. This is not it.
The post is several years old. Hopefully she now feels "Gosh, I was young and stupid and can't believe I did that."
> "Oh, well, you always take care of it."
I've found that it's almost never the case that there is no division of duties. Sure, there may be no explicit division of duties, but there is almost always an implicit division of duties. If Person X is always the one that handles Task Y, then the team will come to view Task Y as a duty of Person X. Other team members may then just simply assume that Person X will take care of it, or they may even actively avoid it to avoid stepping on anyone's toes.
I have to wonder if structure is actually evolving away, or if it's just a side-effect of the internet birthing so many businesses that management skills are rare in general so people just figure they might as well do without. I'm not nostalgic for the Mad Men era and rigid org charts, but there has to be a better way. If careers are just going to be one long Choose Your Own Adventure game, we all might as well go contract and freelance.
If a particular person typically handles it, trying to do it for them without explicit instruction that you need to because they are out sick or something can actively cause problems.
If that workload becomes an inequity, the solution is to raise the issue and work on resolution. Shaming people and blogging about it feels petty.
The way to do that is to have a communal backlog of work that people pick up tasks from, and to have an on-call rotation. Both of those things are rudimentary software engineering best practices nowadays. No one should be quietly maintaining things in their own corner. Situations like the ones described in the original post should be made part of on-call duties, or, even better, automated away.
She one day told me about some 'experiment' she's going to do, I don't know what she meant. We received a complaint 2 months later, it turns out it's because of Rachel. What is wrong with her?
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It can take some time for idealistic, intelligent people to understand how other people may not be into system admin, or into programming, or managing, or whatever their job is. They stumbled into it, realized they don't really like it, but don't want to uproot their life, to 'find their passion'. They just want to work, and go home.
Those people are not to be hated, despised, or complained about. They are not happy. It would be like getting angry at someone in a wheelchair for taking up so much room on the bus. They are in a wheelchair, you're not. It is up to you to accommodate and help them if you can, because you actually have that ability in you, they're just getting by.
Empathy does not come natural to everyone, and usually comes with age. I hope Rachel has moved on to better things.
If the manager was going to object to this plan, the time was then. Having a whinge about it months later while taking no responsibility and trying to make it sound like she'd just skived off? Nah.
You can spend your entire life thinking other people should act a certain way and say things like 'the time was then'. I understand the smug satisfaction of thinking you know better than somebody else. I also know the loneliness and frustration of living in a world of perceiving other people as being wrong, less, or better etc. It's exhausting for you, it's at best exhausting for others to deal with you, so who is winning?
I know the ego-trip side of thinking you're right is feeling like it's a winner. Go see if your heart and gut agree - the gut will communicate by clenching or being relaxed, the heart by being closed or open.
I know there are plenty of people walking around with a clenched gut, a closed heart and a very busy mind that's gleefully judging everything in sight and gossiping about it with other minds, posting on HackerNews etc. I just don't know anyone who's happy, engaged in that lifestyle :)
A potential side benefit is that you can teach more people the "right" way to do things.
Also, the comment about the docs was a really poor choice of words. A better comment might have been "Yah, they need work. Feel free to update them to make them better."
When I get that from a project where I report a problem I immediately think "feel free to keep your buggy docs/code".
A straight but assertive answer is IMO much better: "we don't have time to do X, could you please help?" or "we have higher pririty bugs that we need to work on, but we could sure use your help if you have some time". Heck, even "let's take 1h and work on improving it together" would work for me.
Bottom line is that unless there's a clear responsibility involved, other people don't have to perform certain tasks, so they should be politely asked for help...
1) Letting an incorrect configuration persist without either notifying the team or manager is irresponsible (and, no, her "chat" wasn't informing the manager; if anything the writing indicates it was deliberately light on information as part of her "ruse").
2) Engaging in a passive-aggressive experiment to "prove" laziness is demoralizing and hostile.
3) Failing to address a co-worker's concerns (however poorly or inappropriately articulated) about documentation by helping him over his issue or updating the docs is itself lazy and irresponsible.
This person passed an opportunity to exercise leadership by setting an example and act as a member of a team and instead chose to be aggressive and hostile toward her co-workers. If I were her manager I'd have dinged her in the performance review, possibly worse than she was dinged.
The manager missed an opportunity to improve what's likely a problematic working environment.
I would agree that the manager has done a poor job of managing to let things get to the point where this person felt the need to act as she did. Even if he didn't miss an opportunity from this, he seems to have missed many previously.
I had this once with answering questions for a new dev. He asked a lot of stuff. I first answered happily but after a while I realized that he didn't even try to find out things himself but instead asked me immediately. So I stopped answering and promptly got a complaint from his manager for not helping with critical stuff. Thank God I got support from my team so it was no problem.
Lesson learned: Be selective in taking on things that are not directly your job or could be done by somebody else. Set some boundaries.
That way you can't be accused of not helping, and the person is developing their critical thinking skills. Unfortunately our Western educational system is still based around rote learning, which can really hamstring some folks when converting facts into actions.
If they have spent 10 minutes trying to find an answer, they are allowed to ask that question.
Bonus points for having a metric that showed improvement over time, and extra extra bonus points for creating automation to remove the human element completely.
At the end of it, you can demonstrate a clear result of how you improved reliability and increased knowledge across the team.
Aside from removing the human completely though, agreed!
That could have been a nice chance to say "Oh cool, I implicitly got this new responsibility? Let me solve this, get to the bottom of it, own the solution, present to the management. Maybe ask for a raise later?".
Part of the the road to success is taking situations like that and turning them into your favor.
> He took what I had set up as a little pseudo-managerial experiment to see just how lazy these people were and turned it against me. Meanwhile, nothing happened to the actual people who were lazy!
Now come to think on it, I wonder if she was the experimental subject after all. Notice how people expected her to handle it. I wonder if somehow the manager turned "the experiment" around into another experiment "I wonder how much time she'll waste running the experiment instead of fixing the problem?".
My advice? Don't do that, no matter what your boss thinks of it.
EDIT: I can't type.
An employee should be comfortable going to their manager and their manager's manager about problems like this, and a manager should "nip it in the bud" when an employee begin running such "little pseudo-managerial experiments" on their colleagues instead of voicing your frustrations directly. What even is a managerial experiment? Colleagues and subordinates are not experimental subjects.
Problem was your boss cause one could easily retort "oh okay, you accepted what I had mentioned I was going to do and you later go against it, saying it was the wrong decision"? (obviously he's your boss so you're stuck and saying that wouldn't have helped much)
Finding fault in others seems to be a conscious strategy for this woman. She has even written a book called "The Bozo Loop".
Who in their right mind would choose to hire someone this toxic?
The authors point is valid: It is necessary to be aligned with your team leader. :(
I think that this author has had a key misconception about their team. Regardless of what the 'official policy', it turns out that that the team is happiest (excluding the auther) so long as this author is continuously monitoring certain issues. It's less efficient for multiple persons to be doing the same monitoring.
If I were in her position, I would attempt to divest myself of the menial task of checking/monitoring and write some code to do it instead.
(And automatically deal with this "extra master")
In my case, I was just transferred to another position and I was required to maintain some production machines for clients. These machines are all hosted on the cloud running their own CRON. My job was just to ensure everything was smooth and no downtime happened. This person, SSH-ed into the instance, removed the CRON tasks on one of the machines and let the system on. I was still fairly new and I was only a few days into this new position. Eventually I found out based on login logs that this person did something and when confronted directly, she said she wanted to see if I would do the work diligently in the right situation. Almost like what Rachel did, except she didn't go out of her way to do something nasty. I think you don't have permission to do these things to your colleagues because you're exactly just their colleague and not their boss.
We had some heated arguments and my ex-boss sided with her because she played the minority woman in tech card (no kidding) and it affected my appraisal as well.
Just a note to any of you reading this really bad article. Just don't do this. There is no win win for anybody here. If you feel you have a problem with someone, directly confront with them. Don't do all these indirect things which may have serious consequences in your career in the long run (eg. Management's Perception of you). What Rachel did is exactly what you're not supposed to do at a professional work place. Don't do stuff like this and play the victim card. It's really uncalled for and annoying.
In the end, a lot of people left the company because of this one nasty colleague and management wouldn't take any action because of her gender as they kept her to maintain the gender ratio. About a week ago I learned that about 7 engineers quit this position over a span of a year for the very same reason.
These kinds of actions are the foundations of passive-aggressive behaviour and culture rot and are breeding ground for politics. Please don't do this.
Figure out what your problem is. Are they doing something you don't like? Are they not doing something and you really think they should? Why don't you like that? Why does it make you feel that way?
Figure out what needs to change so #1 doesn't affect you. Are you upset because you're doing a bunch of menial work with no end in sight? Ask the team to pitch in more. Is your coworker not writing enough documentation when they submit pull requests? Tell them that, and tell them that you're frustrated by it if you need to.
Talk to the people you are having trouble with. Tell them what your problem is, why it's a problem, and be really clear that you own your emotional response but that you're hoping they can change the things that are upsetting you.
Be willing to negotiate. Be open to alternative solutions. Take ownership of things that you have agreed to do, and don't be afraid to remind others to take ownership of the things they've agreed to do.
Also, don't be afraid to leave a place where people aren't paying attention to you and basically don't care about you. There are plenty of other companies in the world. They don't all pay the same, but it's possible to value more than just money. Sometimes the best way to signal that conditions are bad is to leave.
Warning sign 1.5) Manager didn't consider this a problem.
Warning sign 2) Manager burned you, the employee trying to do things right.
Given my experience, at this point I'd leave. The department, or the organization, if I believed the problem went higher or would continue to haunt me.
I've spent way too much time and energy making up for others willful deficiencies.
Move one. Let them put themselves out of business.
She's setting herself up for a win-win. Either somebody fixes it and nobody else notices and she gets to escalate the severity/subtleness of her testing of teammates, or else nobody fixes it and she can yell about something that she thinks should have happened. It just seems like she's setting other people up to fail.
I generally don't play those gotcha games. There is no winning path. If your coworkers play these games, LEAVE.
One thing to consider is the environment in which these machines were running. If the group Rachel was working in is getting phone calls about mis-configured machines in one of the clusters they manage then perhaps there was a lot at stake - the description of the cluster setup would seem to indicate this was the case.