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Comment by glangdale | Hacker News Reader

This article is overly fixated on overt assholery. Much of the worst asshole behavior I've encountered has been done by people who are outwardly polite and high functioning and have often never had a cross word for anyone.

I would much rather get a tersely worded group email (ooo) than have to do someone else's job for them.

Let's be frank. The #1 asshole thing not mentioned here is (shouting and swearing alert) NOT DOING YOUR FUCKING JOB. This is an immense source of frustration for other people, whether because they have to do the person's job for them, or because the person's failure to do their job creates disasters.

In many of the situations I've seen (or, frankly, participated in) where someone is behaving somewhat like an asshole, the root of the situation is that (a) someone isn't doing their actual job in a remotely competent way, (b) that someone isn't doing anything to fix that situation and (c) management doesn't know or care.

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> the root of the situation is that (a) someone isn't doing their actual job in a remotely competent way

Not really. I've worked with several assholes. They were all extremely assertive, and usually also very competent (but I've found also the utterly incompetent ones). The problem is that even if they're right 95% of the time, the 5% of the times they're wrong they force everybody along the wrong path, because their purpose as work is not to get stuff done right, but to assert their status. So talking them out of a bad idea is impossible, and they tend to favour solutions that serve more the purpose of demonstrating their skill than to get good results.

(As an aside, since assholery is widespread in software engineering, it is legitimate to wonder how much of the so called "best practices" floating around are just exercises in one-upping each other in a status game- "hey, you write your tests first, but you should really write them first in this obscure DSL that is being promoted by the creator of ... ")

Sounds like their bias is that they're right (regardless of ego), and if they're right 95% of the time, I'd say that bias is pretty accurate...

HAL9000 had a pretty strong and justified bias about his being right too. It didn't end very well. :)

agree and disagree here - you can have someone who is very competent and sees what needs to be done but has trouble communicating the plan

How do you know if assholery is not also wide-spread in other industries. I often swop stories with my sister who works HR in tourism. Our experiences working with people are largely the same. I suspect it's a normal distribution of assholes in all industries.

"Let's be frank. The #1 asshole thing not mentioned here is (shouting and swearing alert) NOT DOING YOUR FUCKING JOB."

This is in my opinion way worse than being an asshole who does his/her job well.

> Much of the worst asshole behavior I've encountered has been done by people who are outwardly polite and high functioning and have often never had a cross word for anyone.

Indeed, there are many ways to hurt, belittle and generally make someone feel bad or unwelcome without being blamable for anything.

Eh at the very beginning of the article, the writer states that this article is exclusively about smart assholes, assholes who are good at their job. Someone who is not doing their job is not a smart asshole and is much more easily identified and removed.

From the article:

>I’m specifically addressing the epidemic of smart assholes that are actually good at their jobs, at least on paper.

There are plenty of smart arseholes, who can do their job well (if they wanted) but prefer to be an arsehole. I'm reminded of the Sociopath layer in the Gervais Principle.

https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...

You're not really addressing my point, which is that there's a big range of behaviors that are assholic and that some of them (as described in the article) are equally likely to be viewed as reactive to the behaviors of slack/lazy assholes (who are often smart and at least potentially good at their job).

If you think that it's always easy to identify and remove some asshole that's not doing their job, well, you're either not very experienced or you've had the good luck to only be in places with way more functional management than some of the places I've been in.

This. I've been made to feel like the asshole in situations like this for "not helping" them figure out how to do their own job. Some people are beyond help (within the context of project) because they do not possess the requisite knowledge to qualify themselves for the position and we don't have the time to bring them up to competency. They were probably interviewed by an overseer of their craft rather than a practitioner or perhaps concessions were made in order to "save" money. I've seen this worsening throughout my career, but I believe that it's largely growing pains. When demand is high and supply is low, quality suffers.

"not doing your job" is incompetence, there might be many reasons for that ranging from being promoted too quickly without enough support, life-hardships that occlude performance, or just NOT UNDERSTANDING what one's job actually is (yes, it happens).

Sure, it sometimes happens that someone feels so entitled that they can justify loafing and pretend-work, that's definitely a-hole behavior, but those other explanations are far more common.

In my experience its entitlement not incompetence that's identified as asshole behavior. Oh this person did half the work and bypassed all code review and automated testing and merged their code using admin privileges. Now somethings not working, can you take a look? I'm sorry, are you not capable of handling this? Why are you being so uncooperative?

Never attribute to incompetence that which is obviously malice.

OK, what you're talking about in the example goes far beyond "not doing one's job", however, and definitely crosses into the personality defect zone of a-hole.

I've seen a few cases of that, and in those instances I resent my country's worker protection laws, OR a company's reluctance to cut off underperformers (which costs severance monies).

>Let's be frank. The #1 asshole thing not mentioned here is (shouting and swearing alert) NOT DOING YOUR FUCKING JOB. This is an immense source of frustration for other people, whether because they have to do the person's job for them, or because the person's failure to do their job creates disasters.

One additional problem that I have with this: I feel like the asshole in this situation.

I recall one instance where one of my coworkers was teaching the interns how to do things. When I was working on the code, unit tests failed totally. After spending hours figuring out what had happened, it turns out that the two interns hadn't run the unit tests locally before pushing. And then I had to round up the person teaching the interns as well as the interns and figure out what they had done and what had they had been taught about running tests.

Luckily people tend to learn from their mistakes, so hopefully the end result is that the interns remember the importance of testing with the expense that I look like an asshole.

The chain of events was really the combination of mistakes from the interns (since apparently one of them had been running tests, but with some misguided ideas), from the person training them and the management for thinking we should hire a bunch of interns at the same time and offload their training on couple of people. You can obviously form your opinions on how much of the blame is on which party.

Why would informing people about the importance of testing make you look like an asshole? You could do it in a polite and helpful way, instead of being an asshole about it.

Well, the article in question called it an asshole thing to do.

>Publicly calling out and blaming others

Automation takes this and a whole class of problems out of the interpersonal domain. Failed tests make the build fail. Who ever breaks the build buy donuts for the team. Easy, solved and no personal issues. Include a linter in the build, incorrect formatting fails the build. The team decided on the standard format (tabs vs spaces, 4/2 spaces, brace same line or next line etc). More donuts. No arguments because linting rules were decided by the team. New members adapt.

    > the article in question called it an asshole thing to do [publicly calling out and blaming others]

It's all about how it's done. In the case described above, an explanation of what happened, why it happened, how to avoid it in the future, and perhaps a little humor would be positively received by everyone involved.

On the other hand, someone could very well have the exact same situation and make it into a-hole incident by shaming the interns and making them reconsider even being there.

Setting and enforcing reasonable community standards, aka “this is how we do things around here”, is rarely experienced by the learner as an asshole action.

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