How to Collaborate with People You Don’t Like (2018)

This happens more often in family business, although there are lots of blue blood in many large enterprise as well.

Sometimes I just want to get the job done, I dont want a full blown internal war with another team.

Someone who is not well-intentioned would rank very low on the "Interest" scale. Where they rank on the "Power" scale is independent of their intentions.

As far as I am concerned, pretending that bad actors simply do not exist has allowed some of the greatest problems I've seen plague organizations, drive out good people, and so on. I have noticed that saying you have a bad actor reflects poorly on the people doing the hiring (this insulated one of the bad actors until all of the relevant hiring parties left), but so much of it seems like willful disregard. I find myself sometimes amazed at how easily greased people are by snake oil salesmen selling largely themselves and a kind of "don't even worry about it" optimism.

Intra-group politics are magnified by the presence of potential earnings, and if you aren't savvy at the game, you're losing.

Sounds like the old phrase "you can't understand something if your salary depends on not understanding it" applies. If the boss of the company spreads misinformation that impugned you, his reports will believe it.

As others have pointed it out they were not your friends in the first place.

I’m lucky as I have managed to gain a true friend through work, but it takes a lot of time spent together, I’m not sure if it is even possible remotely.

If you are remote ppl can also use you as a scapegoat for issues they have that you are not even remotely responsible for.

I’m sorry you had this experience.

>> "(I had held off charging till the company was on more solid ground)"

>> "Am I the 'bad friend'?"

Those comments are a red flag to me that you are confusing business with personal relationships, it will always cost you money. I'm curious to know what your upbringing was like. I am speaking from experience here. I'm not saying that you fit into this model (I don't know you), but, it has been my experience that people from codependent families tend to fall into this trap.You are a gifted programmer, but, you struggle to understand how to appropriately bond with people.

You are woking in the same physical space, you see them, you know about their lives and families so you assume because of that you are 'friends'. You may be friendly but you are not there together because you are friends. Your bond is that you all earn a living there, that's it. Later, you may become friends, but that takes time.

A better way to conduct yourself is to put on a 'work persona'.

You are not the same person in every situation right? You do not walk around town in your underwear like you might at home. You do not drink soup from a bowl in a restaurant like you might at home. You don't talk to your mother like you do a stranger right? You are many different people already. You may not consciously choose to change your speech when you talk to your mother or a baby or a dog or a cop or a stranger but you do it. So recognize that ability and use it.

Your work persona will have a different vocabulary, wardrobe, everything.

Your work persona should be professional but warm. Professional means good manners and doing what you are supposed to do even if you do not feel like it. It does not mean cold and without personality.

If you are acting like a professional you have every right to expect others to act like professionals and you should interact with them like they are a professional.

It is at this point (pro to pro) that the lack of payment should have come to a head. When you are not being paid, stop working. Do it in a friendly way, don't shout or storm out. Give a company a small grace period (maybe a week) but even that is pushing it. Then simply say to whoever you report to: I'm unable to work here without pay, I'm sorry. If you can pay me I will continue work. If they say "we will pay next week please keep working" You say: 'I will keep working next week when I am paid'.

Seriously, even if you GET THE FEELING like you aren't going to get paid (like you said) that is the point to start saying something.

Someone here mentioned a lawyer. Let me tell you something from experience, don't rely on that in place of speaking up. Even if you have an airtight contract written by the best lawyer in the country and everyone in the company signed and agreed to it, A CONTRACT IS NOT MONEY. In fact, enforcing that contract is going to cost you money. It costs $250 to sue someone in America and 99.9% of all lawsuits are settled before they go to trial. That means the only thing that matters is who has the most money to fight over the contract. If it is you (a person) versus your work (a company) you probably do not have the money to fight over a contract. Start speaking up early and leave if you aren't paid.

I'm going to go out on a limb here and say what I actually think happened. I think you rewrote their code without explicitly being asked to do so. Programming is fun, you saw that you could make a big impact so you just did it yourself and it worked! However, from their perspective you did something they didn't actually ask you to do, so, they feel it doesn't have value. You also didn't press for payment which further fuels their feeling (not fact) that you did not contribute value.

Also, the product existed before you and there are a lot of people who make that product work regardless of who wrote it: sales, support, management. Remember that, they sure do.

If you are so talented that you can rewrite an entire production grade codebase: go work for someone who pays you or work for yourself.

Honestly, and I mean this in the most sincere empathetic way I know how to say it: you sound a bit inexperienced and a little immature. This experience will help you grow. Remember how it feels to be disrespected and not paid and use that horrible fucking feeling to protect yourself in the future. I'm not saying be jaded and cynical, I'm saying just act as a professional (especially when it is difficult to do so) and you will be amazed at how things like this stop happening.

One final point and I will hit 'reply' and count the downvotes: How long did it take you to be able to do what you do? A thousand hours? Five thousand? Ten? More?

Whatever it is: THAT is what you are selling; your experience.

It is confusing because programmers are used to just spending time at a computer without any expectation of being paid. We read and code and try things and chat online about it, all in a self-education mode learning on our own because it is fun. Then we go to work and, again, I sit at a desk, I open my favorite editor and write in my favorite language and I'm having fun again! I'm just in a different building. So when I don't get paid it actually feels kind of OK because I am used to doing this for free. Oy.

The difference is now that you are working for someone they are getting the benefit of all that sweat equity. Name another industry where someone has a thousand hours of experience and they are expected to work for free. It doesn't exist.

Ask for payment, you earned it. If you do not get paid on time then walk. If you see a coworker not getting his rightfully earned pay, that company is broken and if you don't move on you will eventually be next to not get paid.

You are a talented developer, businesses need talented developers so they hire them. After that, your experience there is largely up to you.

Be a professional and walk if you are not paid in timely manner. Always speak up for yourself, look out for yourself, and if you see others being treated poorly (and it's permitted) find another job.

The idea that one can just move to another job is a luxury in many places. Many areas have only one or two employers, so there’s simply no place to go.

There’s also the fact that no matter where you go, you will likely always find someone you don’t get along with. Learning to deal with those people is a life skill.

Honestly, I'm approaching this point myself. The problem isn't chemistry or letting go or whatever. The problem is when the other side is extremely inflexible and has a position of power over you. They get to comfortably sit in an ivory tower and tell you what's wrong, and there's nothing you can do about it. Its extremely soul-crushing and trying to fight it with their higher-ups is generally a waste of time for a myriad of reason (cargo cults, echo chambers or simply pride aka "surely this senior knows better than his subordinate!"). And 9 out of 10 times, these discussions are absolutely trivial in nature and only break the flow of the person waving at the ivory tower along with incurring the cost of switching contexts. Rarely, if ever, do I get a discussion which results into an actual new insight or actual transfer of knowledge. And at the end of the day, the company wonders why they can't keep any employees or why their workforce is burned out, yet somehow they still manage to survive despite making these poor choices.

Of course, this is just personal experience and is by no means a generalization.

I would think in this case some self-reflection would be useful. Not caring may cause someone to gloss over the why they are not liked by so many.

Obviously not everyone will like everyone. That's just how the world works. But, if there are a large amount of people at a workplace who actively do not like someone, that person should think about why that is.

I kept a text document in which I listed who's who and what's what, and what their relation was to the organization I worked for. Nothing too fancy, just names, organisations, contact info and a few keywords.

It's a useful exercise to do at the start of a new position for several reasons. For instance, you want to ensure you didn't skip or include the wrong people when sending out an e-mail. Or you have to attend, or organize, a meeting, so you want to know who's going to sit around the table and how they tie into the goal of the meeting is.

When the lay of the land shifts fundamentally, it's useful to revisit the exercise.

If you're in a purely operational role and your territory doesn't extend beyond your team or your office floor, there's not much point in doing such a formal exercise.

I've also heard of it being used in situations with difficult colleagues or excessive office politics. Of course, by the time you are writing a stakeholder management plan just to deal with your own manager and peers, you probably need a new job, but it can be useful to keep you going for a while.

He's still on the same team, but fortunately I'm working under someone else (the other teammates got the sense that he was a dick).

Your personality is unique to you and you'll find external advice fitting your personal style in a believable AND effective way less often than you might think. Even from the same sources, you'll find better and worse pieces for yourself, like for example I adopted the super easy question from Joel Spolsky's "Guerilla Guide to Hiring Engineers" because it's a super good predictor for me, while I found his brainteaser utterly useless after testing both a few times.

Lots of pieces on HBR are rather abstract and handle topics in a meta way, which I did not find very usable. As for me, I'd give my former self this URL for starters and then tell them to dive right in and find out for yourself:

https://www.defmacro.org/2014/10/03/engman.html

Then again, that's the right advice for my own (very pragmatic) personality, so YMMV.

I read the 10 Must Reads on Communication book last week and 4 of the 10 articles were particularly good, the rest were quite milquetoast. I wrote some thoughts here: https://www.jacquescorbytuech.com/reading/hbr-10-reads-on-co...