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She obviously felt under appreciated by her team, and resented the workload that hand fallen into her lap, viewing her other coworkers as lazy. For their part, they saw she did it without complaint, and obviously didn't mind that. Sure they may have been lazy in this scenario, but the author certainly didn't communicate she viewed them that way.

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.

She went on a completely pointless witch-hunt. The odds are good that had someone risen to the occasion to track down the anomaly and fix it, we would still have some poison pen piece about the incident. She just would have found some different catty angle.

"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.

Politely, you don't know what you're talking about 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.

Her stated goal of proving the badness of coworkers is clearly outlined in the title of the piece. The piece itself in no way supports the assumption she asserts concerning their badness.

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.

> 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. :)

The part that struck me as particularly strange was:

> 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.

I interpreted her response as "the documentation is adequate, so the problem lies elsewhere."

I don't know, it could be interpreted both ways. FWIW, in my current job, documentation is plumbing I tend to own, even though it really is supposed to be a collective effort to improve it. There are people in my team that will be quick to say documentation is "adequate", even if it's missing some implicit knowledge.

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.

The problem is that witch hunts tend to find people guilty, whether they are or not.

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.

This is great, ty. I'm going to add this to my collection of 'words for when'. There are so many strange tricks that people pull on each other that are hard to concisely describe.

I don't think it was a witch hunt, I think it was just "I'm sick of fixing this crap, let's see if anyone else will show an iota of initiative."

Same, her coworker also said they were aware of the issue but did nothing about it nor were they inclined to ask how to fix it.

Why is her standard for "adequate" superior? We're to assume it is, apparently, but it isn't clear that it actually is adequate.

Well she did figure it out from the documentation, so clearly it was adequate for her. Maybe she's just that much smarter and more competent than her colleagues, and what's adequate for her is not adequate for them, but if so then that somewhat justifies the frustration that caused her to run her little experiment in the first place.

It doesn't justify her frustration at all. There is no indication she tried to help (e.g. by teaching, explaining the superiority of her method, etc.), ever. Her frustration would be justified if she'd been acting like a senior, experienced person and constantly met with ambivalence or incompetence, but there's no indication of that in this blog post. Her frustration absolutely does not justify her actions anyway so I'm not sure it's relevant.

I thought I must have misunderstood the story, because after skimming it I had the same impression. The author came across as having superiority + victim complex, and I got the impression that yes, the team has problems, but the author was toxic.

Congratulations, you've labelled the author exactly as she did other people. (Labelled, pigeonholed, same thing.)

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.

There are good ways out. The fact that she and you have no idea what they are notwithstanding.

Please name a few of them. specifically ones that will result in a good situation for all involved.

I'm actually interested and not being obtuse here.

You decline to fit the label. You decline to accuse the labeler. You treat it as a communication problem. You starve the drama of attention. You prove them wrong by failing to be guilty of the accusation. You assume the first several incidents are unfortunate happenstance.

"Starve the drama of attention". Love it.

DoreenMichele already indicated what she could have done, and what she shouldn't have. She did not take the high road. She demonstrated that she had a chip on her shoulder and chose to express that in her behavior. I'd have raised the issue with the manager in a non-confrontational, constructive way. If that proved impossible or ineffective, I'd have accepted it or quit. Even the author freely admits nothing good came of her approach, but she failed to realize that put her in the wrong, because she had a superiority complex.

It's all about intention. Her intention was to set up and take down others. Her intention was to hurt, not heal. When it gets to this point, you're not a team player anymore. You are a saboteur. I've seen people get like this when the stress is way too high (which is common in the tech field).

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.

I mean her job is not specifically to make the team function well. The person whose job it specifically is, her boss, totally flubbed this one. An engineer came up who was clearly having issues with the team and his response was to just sit back and watch it happen.

There were, no doubt, genuine problems at her job. This was not a good way for her to handle it.

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."

I would not want to work with her and would not want her in my team.