Ask HN: How to deal with a manipulative coworker? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How to deal with a manipulative coworker?

11 pointsb0rsuk19 comments

I have an allergy to manipulative and insincere people, and he makes my hair raise. I get an impression he's aiming for a team leader, too. See if you can spot a pattern:

- makes hurtful jokes and says you have no sense of humor if challenged,

- his "I don't know" is sounds like "blah, blah, blah, oh, you need to look up more in documentation",

- mostly talks about topics not related to job or even IT,

- spends lots of time talking about behavior and motivations of employees at the foreign client,

- said he tries to instill conditional reflexes in his girlfriend,

- asks quite a few personal questions, but says very little about himself,

- pretty often says he's busy when you ask him for help,

- once he manipulated me into helping him with cURL and POST requests, using words like "ah, but I thought you knew that",

- conspiracy theories are his hobby,

- when his pal was repeatedly calling me a dick etc, I told him I could wiretap it and take it to the boss, or he could stop. The evil coworker called me a black-mailer.

- spends a lot of time talking about money, or working directly with the client

- gives tips like "it's cool to go to a ZOO when it's closing,they don't check if everyone has left",

- sometimes when you explain something to another coworker, he's making jokes and fun of you to distract people,

- cracks many jokes and is quite charming, but his jokes are much sharp towards me,

- when boss is not at the office, the coworker enjoys taking charge in our weekly videoconference (just going through Jira tickets),

- clearly fascinated with ways of manipulating people, he talks about stuff like Pavlov's experiments, negotiation techniques, serving negotiation partners sweet and good food to make them sleepy and off-guard, etc...,

- never loses control, you get an impression he would make a good spy

Since apparently nobody else wants to tell you: your very high levels of passive-aggressiveness and silent grudge nurturing lead me to estimate it around 70% likely that you are the problem. How do you think he would describe you, if given the opportunity to respond? You should think about it.

Care to elaborate how exactly I'm passive-aggressive ? People have been telling me I'm blunt and direct. That's what I attract girls with. When I try to correct that guy's manipulations, he turns it into a joke, says I'm argumentative, makes a personal attack, and keeps badmouthing me behind my back.

As for how he would describe me, I can tell you. He described me as sensitive, eager to please others, and a blackmailer (when I told his openly racist pal I'd record him repeatedly calling me a dick and take it to the boss). He criticizes my choice of tools (Bash, Vim) for being ancient without pointing out anything he can do better with a modern editor - quite the opposite, I see him struggling finding something that would be very easy to grep. What he says and what he does simply doesn't add up which is the definition of manipulation.

He gives another coworker advice on Javascript and one framework, but he didn't know what type 'var x;' is. Anyone who played with Javascript for more than a week should know beyond doubt it's undefined. Or out of the blue he says one of Python's advantages is high development speed and he hasn't considered that (but he was kind enough to blast it for being slow in the past...no, he only had brief contact with C++).

And it's only the 1 guy I have problems with. Boss likes me, the young and trusting programmer likes me, the racist pal has some respect for me because I work out and we can talk about exercise.

By the way if you are the person who flagged my post, I'm not mad at you but I would like to know why.

I have left a job because of a coworker like this, and ended up at one with a manager like this. Left that and found another job with a coworker like this. The point is people like this are pervasive, want to win at any cost and have no sense of fairness. The thing that keeps them in their place is power, if possible. Confidence matters a lot too. Don’t seek validation from him, just don’t care about his opinion of you, and make sure he knows it. Don’t be rude, or give him any leverage, just look at him like he is your friends obnoxious kid.

At the very least, hold a personal meeting with your H.R. department and let them know you feel uncomfortable working with this person. Perhaps they might serve the company better in the mail room instead of being outright let go?

It's a very small (5 people) outsourcing programming company working for a grown up foreign startup (30 people, now setting up a beachhead in another country). There is no HR, my boss does the job interview himself, and he believes HR are crooks.

I just don't think I can prove he is a malicious manipulator, much less a psycho. It would become my word vs his word. Unlike his pal, who used to liberally sling racial slurs, he watches his words. If his remarks are consistently demeaning towards me, you'd still need to listen to perhaps hours of wiretapping to pick up a pattern.

I see a lot of name calling, he certainly knows how to push your buttons.

Take a step back, distance yourself from him, focus on doing the right thing and others will follow. Learn to ignore him and learn about your buttons so they can’t be pushed so easily.

Fight fire with fire. I have found these types of people tend to gravitate towards those who are unlikely to challenge their behaviour.

The cynical answer is to get him on your side. Figure out how he is motivated and manipulate the manipulator. That doesn’t mean calling him a jerk back, it means showing him that you have control of his success.

I think he would beat me with experience. And I have an idea what he wants - he wants to become a team leader, and perhaps replace my current boss as the head of our outsourcing company (several times he openly wondered how it would be to work directly with our client, to be treated better and earn more, and - apparently - half-seriously offered his pal to start a company).

Knowing what he wants is only step 1. You also have to know what he needs to get there and his own limitations to do so. He has to impress someone to get to where he wants, and he can’t do that simply by being a jerk, he’ll need to show results. You’ll need to figure out what those results are, and how you figure into them.

If this person is not leaving, you should leave asap. For your own sanity and safety. I've never seen sociopaths get better, I've only seen them hunt and hurt other people.

Perhaps first document everything, daily, with timestamps and no emotion. Provide the documents to HR. If they side with the sociopath, then leave the company and document it on glassdoor so that others are less likely to go there.

I used to think the same. In my experience, documenting and reporting to HR does not solve the problem. You're more likely to be further hurt and disappointed.

That is entirely possible. Each person will have to decide based on the environment they are in if this is advantageous or not. If you are swimming with sharks, perhaps skip directly to glassdoor and finding new opportunities.

Generally good advice, but with 5-7 people we're still at the stage where we communicate nearly everything face to face.

But the job is otherwise nice. I'm 34 and was unemployed for for 7 years total. The most pleasant job I had except for that guy. My boss has been programming for 20 years, still enjoys learning new languages, respects me, I respect him (for instance he just left for a holiday and told me he would use that time to learn Rust... I intrigued him talking about it at the job interview, his main programming language is C/embedded and he likes functional - Erlang, Elixir).

I think I can just focus on work, put on headphones, tell people they can still ask me for help, and demonstrate that I'm a good and motivated programmer. Let the work do the telling.

The only thing I really worry about is that he becomes a team leader and gets to manage me. I would like to prevent that if possible without dropping to his level - if possible. I don't have illusions that I can make him like me. When we're the only 2 people left in the room, we don't talk unless necessary.

Well, when he does become a team leader, you can still look for another job. Preventing the promotion of someone else sounds like a futile undertaking.

I was also thinking of moving into another department. We currently have 5 people in 2 rooms, soon to be 7 people in 2 rooms, working for 2 branches of the foreign company. I know boss is looking for some C/embedded developer, and I'm FAR from being useful at that post at the moment, but in a half a year or a year if I program Rust in my spare time, I may be.

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