A new study of rudeness in the workplace | Hacker News Reader

A new study of rudeness in the workplace

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58 pointspseudolus77 comments

In 25 years of working in the software industry, I have never witnessed somebody's assholity defended by their performance. I have also never encountered... NEVER encountered... an asshole who was also a top performer.

In contrast, the top 7 performers I can think of off the top of my head were to a person kind, generous with their knowledge, patient with those less talented, and generally Good People, both to work with and to be around in general.

So there's my anecdote to counter yours.

I will note that although I have never met an asshole who was a top performer, I have met many who were convinced that they were.

>I will note that although I have never met an asshole who was a top performer, I have met many who were convinced that they were.

Definitely this. I find that insecurity also correlates strongly with the above description.

So what do you label someone who does most of the work while other contribute little to nothing? How to they profess that and not be labeled an asshole?

You are either involved in hiring and can remove useless people or you are not and shouldn't care what others are doing.

Im the executive who oversees all of UI/UX, Product, QA, Devops, and Engineering. This is one of the core aspects of my job hence its my job to care and puts me the fair position of giving a top down view of such issues.

edit: wow down voted into oblivion over this... I came for a reasonable debate. Its super clear now why "rude" people rule and all the passive aggressive do is down vote me over a reply.

Just trying to be helpful but mentioning getting downvoted attracts additional downvotes, in part because it is also against the site guidelines (2nd from the last one).

> So what do you label someone who does most of the work while other contribute little to nothing?

Most of the time: the guy that’s going to leave an overly clever undocumented, unmaintable mess. Bonus points if it’s in a language that none of the rest of the company uses.

Contemporary development is a team sport.

My former boss summed up to a T.

Depends. Sometimes such a person is on a team of juniors or truly inferior colleagues. I've seen the former a few times but never the latter. Sometimes, and more often in my experience, such a person simply thinks they're superior, they take much more than they should or can, and make every one else's job harder.

In the case where the individual truly is more talented they don't need to profess it aggressively. It will be quite clear in feedback from colleagues to their boss and by the quality of the their output.

The word for someone that truly does most of the work while others contribute nothing is called a patsy. If you're stuck in that situation it's usually hopeless. And you should leave.

That is different than a control freak that refuses to leave other peoples work alone.

The comment I referred to was very clearly talking about the case of people who are not actually top performers, but who think (wrongly) that they are. That does not sound like the situation you're describing, so I'm having difficulty understanding the relevance of your comment, either to my comment or the one I replied to.

To be clear there are under performing assholes just they usual get the ax quickly if management is competent.

How would those 7 top performers act if placed alone in a situation of failure? Where its obvious the company is failing and is clear is certain individuals? Is it not "rude" to point that out? Or are we defining being rude or assholity differently?

I personally seen many times people who push back or raise justified criticism of anything be labeled as "rude"/"toxic"/"assholish".

There's a huge difference between saying someone sucks at their job and being able to point at specific failures and illustrating a pattern of behavior. One is constructive, the other is rude.

Save it for performance reviews. Be a professional.

Sometimes it's about being professional, but more often than not it is about taking and ignoring mountains of problems. You get called for being a whiner if you constructively point out problems, and a problem case of you try any solutions that are smarter than whatever your middle manager(s) comes up with. Worse, if they perceive you as a threat. Or fail to play office politics - you will be that guy who does most of the work, or hardest work with no renumeration. Favorite of all hiring teams until inevitably getting psychologically damaged if you're normal in any way. (Especially crude way is to give someone a problem insoluble by one person or overload a small team.)

Isn't Linus Torvalds a pretty strong counter-example to this?

Yeah, that's totally on point. Discussions about Torvalds show the opposite of what I claimed. I wonder what he's like in person.

Same. Not quite 25 years, but 20+. I've worked with assholes who thought they were the top performers, but I've never worked with top performers who were assholes. It's part of what makes them assholes- to them, it's just some heroic narrative about how they're no-nonsense 10xer straight shooters who get things done and don't tolerate fools, but what they're oblivious to is how much different that looks from the outside looking in. How other people see them is very different from how they see themselves, but part of their identity is intentionally rooted in not thinking about that. Nobody sees anyone's internal monologues or perceptions of the world around them or their heroic life narratives that they tell themselves about themselves, they only see someone who thinks they've magically earned the right to be a jerk based on their perception of their own awesomeness, which (at least in my experience) they aren't.

> I will note that although I have never met an asshole who was a top performer, I have met many who were convinced that they were.

I thought I was an asshole, but then when I read descriptions of assholes vs descriptions of not-assholes I think I fall under the latter

How do you know that you don't recognize the achievments of assholes because you dont like them?

I mean, I find it very natural that one would overestimate the qualities of the people he likes, und understimate those of who he dislikes.

> I will note that although I have never met an asshole who was a top performer, I have met many who were convinced that they were.

Totally agree, although the trickiest times in my career haven't been when some IC is convinced they are a top performer and everyone should follow them, but when that person's manager also thinks the same. When it's both, it's almost untenable, as going to that person's manager makes some think you're a complainer going that high up the management chain.

How do you define being rude? From what I read and experienced in my career the real reason "rude" people get away with what they are doing is simple.

They tend to be top or above average performers who don't like when co-workers who are sub par are treated and rewarded as their equals.

I have met many sub-par workers who love to throw around the word "toxic" to define and attack such people. I have seen such "rude" or "toxic" people work fine along other exceptional and/or capable co-workers and reject those who cant perform.

"He/she is an #@$hole... but he/she is doing most the work and objectively in the end they are not wrong in anything they have said." Are words I have heard echoed across so many different leadership meetings at various companies.

The Pareto principle is very real in terms of workforce and what we should really discuss is how we can focus on honest constructive conversations that allow the successful to succeed and give critical feed back to those who arent.

This sounds like something a coworker would write. Unfortunately the individual was not actually a top performer—just convinced that he was. He would consistently say things that were objectively wrong (lot of math in our field... pretty easy to verify with certainty whether someone knows what he’s talking about), but the rest of us were polite enough not to point his misunderstandings out very often as he would freak out and throw a fit if we did. He was basically above average, convinced he was several standard deviations above everyone else, and more or less humored by everyone else so we could get work done instead of managing his ego outbursts all day.

Slightly above average and a generally sane, nice person will likely be beloved by all coworkers. Slightly above average with a complex... not really

So why wasn't he terminated if he had sub par performance and was also someone who causes friction? Did no one speak up about the issue... or is that "rude" behavior?

To me is sound that 1 of 3 things are happening:

- Management sucks and cannot objectively see who is successful as doing what.

- The person is not subpar and that is your own personal feelings

- Most of the company's full of "nice guys/girls" and the building could be on fire and they would still applaud any small insignificant win while the whole place burns. They fail to deal with anyone failures and issues including the rude person and so they just deal with it and complain via whispers.

> Slightly above average with a complex...

I don't think this person would get fired anywhere I've worked. It's difficult and expensive to fire someone. You open yourself up to possible legal action even if you put them on a performance improvement plan. The best is to try and manage them out, but if the work you need to get done outstrips the people able to do it, you'll keep that above average person who thinks more of themselves than they should.

You case dose not match the parents claim, but i get that your situation seems tricky. I will also say this sounds like a management failure if 1 person is so critical they can get away with being disruptive to others. The leader of that person should focus on getting anyone else up to speed and co-ownership of the knowledge that makes the disruptive person so valuable.

You’re missing the point. I directly quoted the original response because you misread it and said subpar. The person in question is not subpar. The person is also not so valuable that others need to emulate them as you just put forth. The person is simply above average but thinks they’re amazing and acts accordingly.

> He was basically above average, convinced he was several standard deviations above everyone else

From GP's own words, this person was _not_ subpar, just not nearly as good as they thought they were. I don't think most comapanies would fire someone for that.

My experience is very different. The rudest people I've had to work with are generally incompetent to mediocre at best, often believe themselves to be far more competent than the evidence suggests, and end up significant drains on the company as people go to significant inefficiencies in order to avoid having to deal with aforementioned rude incompetents. The actual best performers tended to be quietly polite and unobtrusively competent, getting on with their work smoothly; given that being rude to people causes problems, being rude isn't just a sign of incompetence - it is incompetence.

> people go to significant inefficiencies in order to avoid having to deal with aforementioned rude incompetents

This can also make them seem more competent. E.g. if one rude person is an obstruction that everyone else has to work around, the rude individual is the only one working unimpeded. Unless the difference in competency is large enough to account for that, the manager might consider the rude person more competent.

I have certainly worked with what I think of as "negative employees"; people who have the same effect, when joining a team, as a competent person leaving that team.

If this is the case, your hiring and evaluating process has a deficiency, which should be an easy fix.

However, assuming a decent hiring process, people generally aren't rude from the get-go. The bigger question the study doesn't even tackle is how does rudeness evolve over time, and - again assuming rudeness isn't some intrinsic attribute - what factors lead to an increase in rudeness.

If somebody is truly incompetent, sure, fire them. But incompetence is rarely so cut and dried, and points to a failure to invest in a person's or team's abilities.

I don't think it's a stretch to see the proliferation of incompetence as a management failure in any case. If percieved incompetence leads to a lack of respect and therefore rudeness, it should come as no surprise why leaders who allowed such an environment to be created would be unable/unwilling to assess it accurately.

From my experience rude + under-performing = termination, if those people who you work with are not performing why does your companies management keep the around?

I didn't put it in my original post but incompetent managers who use "boasting" as a success metric instead of objective metrics can lead to such an issue as well.

if those people who you work with are not performing why does your companies management keep the around?

I'm asking this question presently as a team lead.

We have a contributor who is a drain on just about every aspect of our team's operations. They frequently miss meetings, they don't seem to take instruction well (example I brought up once to another team member, this person will ask for help, cut you off constantly, suggest their way is better, or do the direct opposite of whatever recommendation you offer and spend days on a problem set delaying sprints), have delayed multiple projects, caused numerous production outages so on and so forth.

All of this combined has made trying to train this person or help them improve difficult and frustrating--very few on the team wants to work with them anymore.

It's not a secret among the team that this person just is not the contributor we need, and it's pretty evident from his reactions a few times that our department head is not pleased either, but he doesn't seem interested in letting this person go--none of us are quite sure how to have that talk with our leader that we think this person should be cut loose and a replacement found.

Suggestions on broaching that topic?

As team lead are you the persons manager? If so you should have every right to go to hr to either terminate or start a performance improvement plan.

If your a team lead with no hire/fire power you need to go to your department head (and rally those whoa agree with you to do the same) and be blunt. "X is is not performing to expectations on top of that the way X is not performing is disrupting, impeding, and alienating other members of the team and its now become not just a performance issue but one of employee attrition".

This makes it about X vs the rest of the team/department and allows him to clearly see what is actually at risk. Its very unlikely 1 person is so valued that a manager would accept major turnover in their department.

"From my experience rude + under-performing = termination, if those people who you work with are not performing why does your companies management keep the around?"

So many reasons. Outside the US and inside parts of Europe, it's actually often a lot of work to fire someone for being so rude that they're damaging the company. It's possible and not actually difficult, but it requires the gathering of evidence and uncomfortable conversations and so on. Far less work and easier to either ignore it, or try to shuffle the person sideways. If they can't be shuffled sideways, there's always the option of promoting them.

Additionally, these people often look like hard-driving, no-bullshit "get it done" workers to management. Look at Dave there, he didn't mess around; he simply told everyone else that they're idiots who don't know what they're talking about, and then he left the meeting and started furiously rewriting something independently at his desk. What a guy.

Great engineers make everyone around them better. Bad engineers put down their co-workers and dismiss them as incompetent.

Almost every great engineer I have worked around has been nice, patient and relaxed. Because they know you can catch far more flys with honey than with vinegar.

“Top or above average” in what? Apparently not in being a team player. And I don’t think “writes excellent code” is the only criteria in any serious performance evaluation.

In any population there is going to be a bell curve in terms of performance. Often those on the left may simply not be as smart or talented. Being rude to them does nothing to make them better.

>management says he or she is an ahole but do the most work and everything they say os true

Now the question is whether management has a clear picture of what is happening on the floor. Do they know who the top performers are or is management just taking whining and anti social behaviour as a false marker of diligence and competence. In my experience it is more often the later. A-holes tend to be better at sucking up and managing up rather than actually being good at the task.

> They tend to be top or above average performers who don't like when co-workers who are sub par are treated and rewarded as their equals.

What exactly does this mean? They don't like when juniors are treated well? You will always be working with team of varying skills and knowledge and if you insist that other people are treated with disrespect, then you are asshole.

> I have seen such "rude" or "toxic" people work fine along other exceptional and/or capable co-workers and reject those who cant perform.

That is being intentionally rude toward members of team you are supposed to lead, teach and give appropriate tasks to. That is toxic no matter how you slice it.

> what we should really discuss is how we can focus on honest constructive conversations that allow the successful to succeed and give critical feed back to those who arent.

You cant have constructive conversations nor critical feed back when you are rejecting and being rude. The constructive criticism is not possible in that setup.

Constructive criticism is possible with good faith interactions and when emotions are away. The people you described turned impersonal into emotional by being rude and "rejecting".

Think about a dynamic where one person in team is hyper obsessed with work and refining his work.

While there are other members in team who have different hobbies or even have a family.

Natrually, the one who spends more time refining the work is often rewarded assuming the members of the team were equally qualified and probably fall within same IQ range.

Now, is it not natural for their supervisor to expect from other team members?

Team members will recognize who is pushing the bar up and will be bitter towards them because now I've to make extra effort.

It doesn't make a lot of sense to discuss things that are totally subjective and can't be defined with a certain specifity.

- What is the definition of rudeness?

- How can rudeness be quantified and measured?

- What did the interviewee perceive as rudeness?

- Is the shown behavior correctly observed and classified as rudeness?

>Notably, those employees who reported being victims of rudeness were largely perceived by their managers as perpetrators of rude behavior.

The article and research abstract [0] doesn't appear to address the most interesting point. I want to know why the victim blaming persists.

[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30640491

My guess is that it's related to the saying, "If you run into an asshole in the morning, you ran into an asshole. If you run into assholes all day, you are the asshole."

There's victim-blaming and there's victim-playing. They're both real phenomena, and I wouldn't want to assume I was looking at one and not the other without having a closer look.

I'm generally friendly with people at work but I've noticed that there is a strange inverse in kindness to people's response to my kindness. When I'm more terse, they respond kinder. When I'm kind, they tend to be more terse.

For example, if they ask a question and I give a longer, more friendly response like, "No, I don't know the answer to that question. That's not really my department." They may just respond with, "Ok." But if I respond with something more terse like, "Don't know," they will respond with, "Ok, no problem. I'll figure it out."

Huh that's a cool observation. I think there might be more ambiguity there though. For example, I could (and in my case would probably) also interpret the second response as not being "friendly" exactly but as defensive and irritated. Only someone who is worried about being regarded as inferior or believes that you're acting superior would make that kind of overly demonstrative response. A peer would probably just echo your tone and just say "Ok". Not saying you should psychoanalyze too much or that your interpretation is wrong but be on the lookout (especially via written communication) for when kindness isn't actually kindness, but deference or defensiveness.

I like your ad-hoc verbal experimentation. It reminds me of a study awhile back, something about how we use rhythm in our communication to keep things flowing. Along with the subtle power dynamics of short and long responses, there seems to be a human need to have some minimum amount of communication in an interaction to keep us from perceiving it as unpleasant.

This study falls a bit short. Where does the rudeness come from? They've already identified that rudeness leads to lower engagement and more burn out. But does lower engagement or more burn out lead to mode rudeness? What happens if the leaders themselves know the environment they're creating leads to these things?

Context is key. I've seen fake, high-pressure environments created by management too often. It isn't a life-or-death situation, it's your shitty incentive structure.

I refuse to believe most people are intrinsically rude (in a workplace setting). Because almost nobody is rude directly after you hire them (if they are, your hiring process sucks). No, it's more likely the environment or team is dysfunctional and rudeness is a manifestation/poor coping mechanism.

In that way, it's unsurprising management is unable to gauge the performance of individuals accurately, rude or not. It could even be a root cause.

> Almost nobody is rude directly after you hire them ... No, it's more likely the environment or team is dysfunctional and rudeness is a manifestation

I think this can be true, but new hires might just behave differently because they are new, and any changes are reversion to the mean. E.g. new hires are excited to start their new job, don't have responsibilities yet, are trying to impress their colleagues, etc.

What stops anybody from fostering that attitude further into their careers? People should be given opportunities for new project and be excited to do the work... unless they already know it's going to be a shit show (impossible deadlines, clueless management, etc). If switching jobs induces such good behaviours initially, what does that say about the previous job?

Again, not trying to defend people who are truly rude. But I'd like to think the vast majority of people aren't like that.

People can inhibit their negative behavior when they are trying to get people to like them and gain social status. If they feel empowered by having some status or a promotion, they may begin to "punch down".

Workplaces are a frappe of personality disorders and mental illness. People who were raised to be polite, people who weren't, and sprinkle in one psychopath and one or two sociopaths per one hundred people. Think about all the crazy people you've ever known? They all cause just as much trouble at work as in their personal lives, and they all have to work somewhere.

Even relatively well-intentioned people are usually insufferable. To say nothing of power politics, purposefully toxic environments, etc.

Politeness is the lubricant of social relationships, but rudeness is a powerful signaler.

I am normally polite, but unafraid to be rude or aggressive when politeness fails. Most often, rudeness indicates some portion of the social contract has not been upheld (treat me fairly, and I shall do so). Is it wrong for an employee to be rude to someone who is secretly undermining them? To a boss whose using them?

Rudeness is simply a social signal. I think it is more stressful to be polite all the time.

I could write a book on the crazy shs I've had to work with.

This is fair. I don't think anyone can claim they have never been disrespectful towards anyone in their life. People are sometimes unbearable and sometimes you are too. Learning to deal with your own and others crazy bullshit is a part of life and how you grow as a person.

Question: I may not verbally greet people I don't directly work with or interact with. Is that considered rude? I am just not a good small talker,but I am not sure if my intention with small things like this will be misunderstood.

Stack Overflow has a “workplace” topic that is great for this kind of question.

I don't really use SO but thanks. I thought it was on topic for the post,my apologies.

I didn't mean to imply that you were off-topic, I've just found lots of useful answers to this type of question on SO.

I never post on SO myself due to the really wacked out incentive structure over there leading to excessive lawyering and nitpicking. The stuff that manages to not get closed for bs reasons is really high quality though so I just treat it as a read only resource.

I'll answer your question, it's not rude. But developing communication between yourself and people outside your immediate work is helpful in getting a bigger picture about what's going on in your workplace.

Having a bigger picture can make you more effective and useful.

Thanks much for the advise.

I'm interested that this article was posted by kungfudoi to Hacker News in the afternoon 18 days ago (not on a Saturday morning) and garnered 2 points and zero comments. This posting misrepresents the title/headline of the article and acquires 33 comments and 42 points. I bumped into the article today and was about to post it, but noticed that it had already been posted. Perhaps I should follow pseudolos's lead, and post it anyway. My earlier impression was "don't repost", and "don't rewrite titles or headlines."

I've been working in a small team for a while now, and even in this small group I've encountered rudeness in a way that I've never seen before. I'm generally very friendly with people, but being at the receiving end of someones rude behavior takes a toll on you mentally. Combine this with the fact that the bosses don't know how to control their employees behavior, and you have a toxic workplace.

Rude people suck plain and simple. I was once young and overbearing, and since then I've been on the receiving end of that and it's total bullshit.

I'm not saying we should coddle people in the professional world, but we sure as shit shouldn't have to deal with coworkers psychological and anger management issues.

I'm quite often rude to others at work and I freely admit it.

Reason: ofc I feel I am justified to be so. Just like everybody else I feel I am right.

I am not rude to everybody. Just people who don't want to carry their weight but want an equal share of the pie.

I am rude to Project "Managers" who only assign story points in jira. To product owners who always side with the external client and dump the technical team under a bus for the smallest things. With managers that think we can maintain full speed all year round. With hiring people who only care about getting the head hunting fee. Etc.

I am also a 3x productivity wise. Have not been matched in any of my jobs. (Spoiler: never worked at google or anything like that). Always on the edge of burnout.

Am I toxic or am I just blunt? Depend on who you ask. Am I to be promoted or fired? The same. One thing more I should note: the same people who make HR complaints behind my back ask me to help them with things that are not in my job description nor are documented work.

You sound exhausting to be around. Your comment about burnout is either a humble brag or an admission that this isn’t even working for you.

You get one life. Stop glorying in being a jerk. If you’re as brilliant as you say you are then humility and kindness will make you even more brilliant.

I am not brilliant. That's why I said I never worked at Google or anything like that. But I am hard working and care about the company and people's income besides my own gain. I and I hate when I see somebody who doesn't.

There's really no excuse for being rude in the workplace. Please get help instead of trying to justify it.

If multiple people have made HR complaints "behind your back", you are not competently performing your job. (This directly affects your claimed 3X performance because you drag down your coworkers.)

Then why do those complaints get buried and I get a talk with management approx: "we couldn't find anybody else for that job, try to tolerate them as best as you can for the time being"?

My coworkers are the engineers by my side who never complain about me, quite the contrary, they cheer when I put down middle management leeches.

You got down voted by the hamster wheel engineers here.

The reality is there is two types of engineers:

- those how give zero shit about there company or product and use their currtent job as a platform the jump the their next job with zero care given about how it trufly effects the person paying them. (aka we NEED kubrentes, SPA, mircoservices, ect).

- and engineers who care about being REAL engineers... and providing the best technical solutions to the companies issues and/or problems.

One track leads to lead, manager, director, VP, CTO, and the other leads to a dead end bitching how management (aka those who give a fuck about hitting business goals) have more power then the spoiled self centered engineers who are mad the company wont pick the next flavor of the month tech stack to help them into their next job.

This comment breaks the site guidelines. Would you mind reviewing them and using HN as intended?

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Really curious what exactly in his comment is not according to the guidelines.

"Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading."

It's hard not to break that rule when one sees something posted on topic and in good faith turning gray.

The one about name-calling and the one about commenting on downvotes, for starters.

Being rude to anyone is unkind, tech is a small world, and people remember.

Self-centered reason to cut it out: Sure, you might hand-pick your references for that dream job, but what happens when the hiring manager at said dream job checks out LinkedIn, notices that a college buddy worked with you, asks about you, and that was someone you were rude to.

People I am rude to never get to pick who is hired, promoted, etc. They are just freeloaders who stay out of the light as much as possible.

To play devil's advocate a little bit contrary to what other people have commented: you being rude is just an efficient way of filtering out unnecessary interactions and social niceties. If you were polite like everyone else, then you end up wasting more time with watercooler chit-chat and having to maintain all these subtle relationships. If what you're doing works for you, then by all means, as long as you are conveying useful information and not actually insulting other people.

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