Hard to work with | Hacker News Reader

Hard to work with

lethain.com

366 pointsjger15185 comments

My first leadership lesson looked like this: as a junior engineer I had an abysmal quarter or two. My manager asked me what was going on. After I gave them an assessment of the situation, they said that they believed me and went to bat for me.

Because of that manager's trust and belief in me even in the face of irrefutable evidence that I was doing poorly, I immediately became fiercely loyal to that manager and the organization, and I wanted to work harder for them.

I'm no 10x engineer, but any time I get frustrated with someone else's poor output, I think about this.

That's an important lesson, but as devs mature they probably shouldn't react like that.

Ideally you want to be able to keep your head on straight and obviously it's easier to work harder for someone who 'believes in you' ... but that's a bit emotive. Just do a good job, be professional, expect the same knowing you're not always going to get it and that's that.

Instead of someone 'going to bat' you really want someone who's just communicating and helping you create the outcomes necessary.

> Just do a good job

Easy as that, huh?

I think the comment was about what to do when you aren't able to 'just' do a good job for whatever reason, which could happen to anyone. They posted about how to handle a problem and your response was 'just don't have problems'.

I don’t think GP was saying “just don’t have problems.” Rather, they were saying that as an experienced professional, having someone believe in you shouldn’t be the determining factor in whether or not you do a good job. You should believe in yourself and your experience.

"As an practioner of IT, the domain of pure logic, I don't have emotions like other people"

There's a reason this profession has the issues it does because the most drama heavy people are always those who think they're perfectly rational automatons.

This is more about building sufficient experience in something rather than being perfectly rational. For instance, think of the color green. You know green when you see it. Why? Because of the numerous experiences you’ve had that have reinforced your knowledge of the color green. Such reinforcement applies to all your other experiences as well, including engineering. After some time, you should know whether or not you’re a good engineer without external validation.

Maybe they don't need to go to bat for you; maybe they just don't jump on the chance to throw you under the bus.

This is a fantastic example because your manager did essentially the opposite of what this author would have wanted. The author wants managers to have no tolerance for people who perform poorly, moving to do something to get the poor performers off the teams of the high performers.

Yet that's short-sighted. Teams and expertise are built over time. It may not be ideal for people like the author of this article who believe themselves to be high performers who shouldn't have to ever put up with low performers. However, the real high performers are the ones who can accept that no team is perfect and nobody starts out as a superstar. They make the effort to work with people, mentor, and lead by example.

It is much easier to think "we should fire that person" instead of "how can we improve this person."

you have to do both. seriously do your best to help them improve. but if they are causing problems for other people, you have to give up after some time and get them out of the way

this.

> but if they are causing problems for other people,

This is the crux of the issue: The definition of "causing problems for other people" isn't as well defined as it may seem.

Someone who is constantly driving the team further apart than together, struggling to work with other members of the team, and being openly dismissive of others would fit the definition of "causing problems for other people".

From another perspective, it would also fit the definition of the "hard to work with" person in this article. That's the point: Even when someone is falling behind, as an employee you must find a way to at least try to work with them and lead by example.

I've seen a lot of examples of this, having been parachuted into a few failing teams. The most effective means I found of getting "hard to work with" people who genuinely wanted to be better, is to give them some freedom.

One pattern that I saw quite a bit was one team member being a bit more technical (rather than business focused), so they tended to cop a lot of the internal questions that caused them to context switch a lot. It increases their frustration levels and drops their performance. One effective way to solve that is to acknowledge what is happening, and put in some boundaries so the other team members know that (for example) Tuesdays-Thursdays you need to really be stuck before you bug XXX about your problem. It makes XXX feel better about the situation because not only has it been acknowledged they are a key team member, it also makes sure they get some quiet time to really get stuff done at their own pace without having to switch jobs all the time.

The other team members, knowing there are a few boundaries now, tend to become more self sufficient so you end up with a better performing team overall, and one that isn't so dependent on a single person.

Obviously there are other patterns that end up creating "hard to work with" people, but the example came up so often I think it's worth writing about.

That's a good point. You can have a person who is amazing at their task, but doesn't communicate and doesn't get documents and info to others that need it. Even if you're the best in the world at writing code, that's not worth a damn if you're withholding the materials and knowledge about a project that other people need to do their work.

If you're too busy thinking what an amazing worker you are and everyone else is dragging you down, there's a good chance you feel vindicated in behaving in a way that makes your coworkers' jobs harder. Why should you help them out? They're not even trying to do things right and they're making you look bad.

Change the people, or change the people.

I'm not sure this is true in practice. Thinking about firing people is already kind of hard, so a lot of people think about and do other stuff they hope will improve the person. What's actually hard is doing something effective to improve the person's performance.

In what world is it easier to fire someone than to fix them? Because in any sort or management I’ve been involved with here in Denmark it’s always the exact opposite.

When you fire someone. You tax HR and yourself with the process both of letting someone go and finding their replacement. You have to pay their salary 3-6 months going forward as well as all the paid vacation they may have saved up. Most importantly you tax your team with the added resource drain of covering the tasks as well as integrating the replacement. You also risk damaging morale, and worse, you risk increasing employee anxiety as even the best employee can have inferiority issues.

That being said, the basic mantra in management should always be that you can get rid of anyone, it’s just a matter of cost. So if you need to fire someone, then you need to fire someone.

Personally I prefer building people to the point where they will leave you themselves, but, that’s a style or management that isn’t present in a lot of companies because it takes a corporate culture that is very hard to maintain in large organisations and require quite a lot of management talent in small organisations. It’s also something that is incredibly hard to do as a single manager if the culture is against you.

>In what world is it easier to fire someone than to fix them?

In the U.S - where you generally don't have to pay as long a severance pay if at all.

on edit: as in most things 'in the U.S' this varies on state by state basis.

Not really true, it is actually a constant lesson that you need to fire more because the bias is always to do nothing.

>In what world is it easier to fire someone than to fix them?

You clearly haven't met Austrian management. It's nearly at will employment (in theory it's not, but in some domains many companies know and do skirt around the law to get rid of employees quickly without getting sued).

Once the management decides they don't like you anymore, you're given your standard one to three months notice, then you're gone. I asked a lawyer, and they said the employer can fire your without any reason as long as they give you your contractual notice period.

My favorite example is them using Jira velocity charts to fire the one with the slowest curve. You get a warning (p.i.p.) telling you your velocity needs to catch up, then after two sprints you get your notice handed to you.

OTOH, there are other EU countries where firing people is really difficult. Here it's just a rubber stamp thanks to decades of pro-business politicians elected in power who eroded workers' rghts.

Swede here, it is a different world in the US. Firing is easy, two weeks at the most to get someone out. The other way holds true though, it is equally difficult to find replacements but usually once you do, they can join sooner than in Scandinavia since employees too can leave within a days or at most 1-2 weeks.

In Iceland there's a mutual 3 month termination notice for most positions. I just switched jobs and had to do a whole lot to be let go 6 weeks after I gave notice. My employer absolutely had the right to retain my services for the full 3 months thou.

I'm curious how this works in practice. A conscientious employee will honor the 3 month term, of course. But if there is animosity, or a lack of trust, or a feeling of betrayal etc. etc. how does the company keep the employee working for those 3 months? As opposed to having a desk vacation?

We have 2 month notices here. Most people do knowledge transfers in their notice period. It's harder to slack off if your task is pair coding or explaining stuff to your peers. We waived this period for a few people, because they were negatively impacting morale, but they still got their salary. It's just the cost of firing someone.

Nobody wants to leave on bad terms if it isn't strictly necessary. In the best case a hire will be made and some overlapping time will occur so a hand-off can be executed.

Germany also has 3 months notice starting from the next month you give it or something similar? I work remotely in a german company and i was shocked to hear this. We have new hires from Germany who we were expecting them since xmas-January..

>Personally I prefer building people to the point where they will leave you themselves

Does Denmark not have constructive dismissal laws? Making changes that force someone out is an easily winnable unfair dismissal at an employment tribunal, at least for the UK. And that costs more than just firing them for bad performance.

Denmark absolutely has such laws, but I think OP meant that they seek to develop their employees to the point that they outstrip their original role, not to constructively dismiss them

> You have to pay…all the paid vacation they may have saved up.

Well, that’s time (or deferred pay) they’ve contractually and morally earned, so that part’s entirely fair.

Yes, and the employer is going to be paying it either way, either as a lump sum or as wages while the employee is on vacation.

I’ve worked under very trigger-happy leaders in startups here in the UK. I think in the first two years of employment it’s fairly easy. Given typical engineering tenures, this basically describes everyone.

> You also risk damaging morale,

If someone really should be fired but isn't, that also damages morale.

> In what world is it easier to fire someone than to fix them?

In many English-speaking countries is not difficult to convince an employee to quit.

Unless you're a sociopath, as a manager it's never easy to think of firing a person (where the alternative is improving them - sometimes people do things that make it easy). It's usually sleepless nights, stress, alcohol, sometimes counselling or therapy.

Maybe I read it differently but I think the bar that one can hold and the performance against that bar("high"/"low") can be two separate things. Sometimes they correlate but not always.

My read on the article was more on a mis-alignment of values and what is considered success. High bar / low "performance"(which is a subjective thing and can vary based on external factors) are those who want to learn because they know they aren't at that bar now but they want to be.

"Low bar" / high or low performance means that you have different goals and different measures of "success". If you don't resolve those first then that leads to the friction and the pattern the author outlines.

This can be in a bunch of different areas(security, performance, maintainability) and sometimes if you have two people who hold velocity and architecture separately as their highest bar it can appear that they don't value each other's bar since they are in direct conflict. It's been my experience that if you can ground it in why people hold certain bars and that the goals are actually aligned then the sum of the team that hold a high bar in different areas is greater than the parts.

> This is a fantastic example because your manager did essentially the opposite of what this author would have wanted. The author wants managers to have no tolerance for people who perform poorly, moving to do something to get the poor performers off the teams of the high performers.

This is not how I read it. You have to do your best as a manager to train your employees and live up to what Andy Grove said in High Output Management. You must set a high standard and it is your job to get your reports to that standard the best you possibly can.

But when your reports cannot or will not get to that standard despite a huge investment in training and clear direction, you have to move on.

> As you look at enough of these scenarios, you can back out a common pattern. The main character is trying to do their job effectively, but can’t due to the low performance of a peer. They escalate to the appropriate manager to address the issue, but that manager transforms the performance issue into a relationship issue: it’s not that the peer isn’t performing, it’s just that the two of you don’t like each other. Instead of being the manager’s responsibility to resolve the performance issue, it’s now the main character’s responsibility. By attempting to drive accountability in their peer, the main character has blocked their own progress (“they’re just hard to work with”) without accomplishing anything.

Emphasis mine.

The problem he's focused on is not the tolerance for the peer performing badly. It's the blowback for the main character who points it out.

Precisely, that's the point I was trying to demonstrate.

The problem with software engineering management nowadays is the ubiquituous 18th century sweatshop mentality. In those sweatshops, the worker that completed more pairs of shoes is the highest performing one. But when you try to apply that mentality to more abstract endeavours like software engineering, it doesn't work.

Let's imagine there is a problem that requires to need to implement 100 classes to deal with 100 different types.

A 18th century person would say: I have 100 classes, 5 workers, I am going to give 20 classes for each worker to implement.

A person that actually knows what's going on would simply write template <typename T> class FuckYou, done.

In the wrong hands, software is misery.

And the generation Z version in case you are wondering is

  function FuckYou(T) {
    return class {
      // something with T
    };
  }

Because you can return classes from a function.

in C++? or JS or ...? :o

zig

My self reply was JS

I don’t think OP is advocating for having no tolerance for low performance. He’s just saying that it’s the manager's job to do something about it when it occurs and can’t be resolved otherwise, else it negatively impacts the rest of the team. “Do something” could be training, coaching, shifting scope of responsibilities, whatever. Doesn’t necessarily mean firing people.

Mentoring and leading by example are great things to do, but they do nothing to solve the actual scenarios that Will gave as examples in the OP. There are some situations that you can’t resolve by being a good colleague, and the manager needs to step in.

> He’s just saying that it’s the manager's job to do something about it when it occurs and can’t be resolved otherwise, else it negatively impacts the rest of the team.

Managing peers is not their job - the author tried to spin the lack of action by manager as poor management, but what if the manager has more context and good reasons for maintaining the status quo? IMO, this is management equivalent of tech debt, and hr is demanding that it gets addressed immediately without caring about other consequences outside their own narrow window into the org.

> The author wants [...]

Here we have an excellent example of the straw man, nice to see still practiced these days.

I didn’t get that from this at all. His complaint seemed to be when the organization wouldn’t address a problem, period.

In his shoes, I’d be thrilled if the response was “you’re right, we’re going to coach this other person to improve, because they’re valuable in a lot of ways, but need improvement there so we can succeed.”

In @koof's story, @koof recognized he was performing poorly.

In the other situations an employee is performing poorly, not recognizing it, and neither is the organization.

I believe OP is talking about keeping poor performers in high positions for sake of fake harmony.

I remember the loyalty I felt as a junior engineer to that first manager that actually showed empathy and helped me.

I stayed in that role longer than I should have and cost myself a lot of growth and money by not switching jobs every 2 to 3 years like I do now.

Loyalty to your the manager and loyalty to yourself are not mutually exclusive things.

True. And I do think it taught me a valuable lesson that needed to be learned so I wouldn't say it was a bad thing all together staying longer, just expensive.

Totally get that. I want more money and growth too, but this taught me I need a good boss.

And honestly if the whole company was like your manager an argument could be made you still made the right choice. Just wanted to share my experience :)

Switching every two years?

I just start to get going 1 year in. That's when I've learned enough to start having instincts for what is going on.

How do companies survive with that sort of turn over?

> How do companies survive with that sort of turn over?

Unsure, but it's a conscious and calculated decision not to pay market rate for current employees.

I don't like it, but it's the case that if you're not moving every couple of years then your wage will deflate compared to peers, and I've never worked anywhere that gave more than a 2% pay increase (and that's with good performance) without a promotion.

As the saying goes: We judge ourselves by our intentions and others by their behavior

You were quite fortunate to have a manager that believed in you and it's good that you're paying it forward

> We judge ourselves by our intentions and others by their behavior

This is so true! If only we were consistent and picked one or the other all the time! The world would be a better place.

> I immediately became fiercely loyal to that manager and the organization, and I wanted to work harder for them.

Did you improve? Did you provide the results needed by the organization? Did you work better (not simply harder)?

Forgive me if this seems like an overly familiar set of questions, I'm not quite sure how else to frame them.

It's great to be loyal; it helps both parties make long term investments, engenders trust, and ensures stability.

But loyalty to a bad manager is no good. Similarly, loyalty to a report who is over their head and continues to be unable to improve at the speed needed is not good.

Source: I have both been over my head and had reports in over their head.

Regardless of the outcome, I believe this trust is a necessary precondition for someone to turn it around. So this relationship doesn’t guarantee success, but lacking it does guarantee failure.

Agreed you need to have trust for it to work out.

Unfortunately, sometimes you can trust and it still doesn't work out.

It took me a long time to realize I wasn't a great fit for every job. Now I try to lean into my strengths and acknowledge my weaknesses. For instance, please never hire me for my design sense (see my personal blog at https://www.mooreds.com/wordpress/ for proof of that).

It's really hard to acknowledge weaknesses, especially when employment/$$$ are at stake. But it is important to do so.

I think if my meeting with my manager went another way I think I might have spent more time looking for an escape route rather than focusing on the tasks at hand. Someone who thinks they're going to be fired can sometimes cause a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Thanks for the reply, totally get that the manager averted a self fulfilling prophecy of losing a valued employee.

Did you end up succeeding at the job because of the trust offered by your manager?

Yes, I don’t wanna give too many personal details but I gave them a lot of solid work for years after that.

Some in the comments suggested a differentiator about my performance gap was my self awareness that I was doing poorly - I certainly had an anxiety problem in general that was getting in the way beyond work too, but knowing my manager really had my back went very far. I knew of course that I could still get fired, but it meant a lot to me that no one was jumping at the chance.

The problem is someone else pulled your weight as well for those two quarters and probably got burned and bitter. As a pure numbers game, its worse for an organisation to have a top performing employee going sour than letting go of an under performing employee.

One possible take from this is that having faith in your subordinates builds loyalty and loyalty is the currency of advancing in an organisation. At some point that might also mean giving leeway to those that might not deserve it to start in the game yourself.

Seniority matters here - of course a junior is going to have weaknesses, and a poor fit could easily result in two abysmal quarters. But I believe seniority comes with a responsibility to proactively raise any higher level issues blocking performance, and move on if they can't be fixed.

Overworking makes me think of falling into a hero/rescuer mode of the karpman drama triangle[1].

Basically the idea is you can really disempower others if you constantly do the work yourself to rescue them from their own mistakes. And the other person can take the role of victim in the relationship, in need of rescuing instead of being responsible the consequences themselves. Or persecutor - blaming and casting out against others.

1 - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karpman_drama_triangle

Interesting wiki article, very insightful! As a manager myself, I think it's very important to be aware of whether you are playing the "rescuer" and perpetuating dysfunction, or acting as a "coach" and helping others to actually change and learn.

Don’t fool yourself - most managers would fall into Persecutor camp not the Rescuer ime.

It is incredibly easy and ego-inflationary for people playing the persecutor role to see themselves as rescuers.

Definitely tracks with the human tendency to judge yourself by intentions, and others by actions

The wiki covers that scenario. The rescuer uses their role to say they "tried" and then justify negative feelings to the victim. Essentially becoming the persecutor

A lot of organizational problems all reduce to ego. The second you have someone on your team that isn’t empathetic or humble, it tends to lead to major problems.

I’d take someone that’s not that good at their job but has a lot of humility and is willing to learn over arrogant masters (arrogance is the sign of a false master) pretty much any day. The single exception is probably cases where stuff really does just need to happen and happen quickly without mistakes, but ideally you’re managing projects in such a way that you’re not in that situation to begin with (though of course it can happen).

I've seen this many times and completely agree. Nearly every issue that I've had managing teams that hasn't easily resolved with communication has come down to ego. I'd go so far as to say that weeding out ego during the hiring process is the most effective thing you can do.

This sounds like you are exactly the manager the article is about: who will not identify poor performance for what it is, and reframes it as an ego/communication/other character problem (usually on the part of the high performer).

This leads to a highly-agreeable, low-performance team.

A team of high-performance individuals with low agreeableness does not constitute a high-performance _team_.

It is possible to be disagreeable in a constructive way, combined with a “disagree-and-commit” attitude where the team’s success is the priority.

However, I agree with you that it is also possible for a bunch of high performing individuals to have toxic personalities and to form a totally dysfunctional team.

You have to hire people that don't have big egos, and are also high performers. Some people will obviously be higher performers than others but without egos communication works. If someone is not performing well, everyone should feel open and trusted enough to communicate about it and find a resolution.

If you hire even one person with a big ego communication breaks down and you are in for a really bad time. Pretty much every high performance team knows this and put a lot of effort at weeding these people out.

A lot of it is also setting a good example once you've made the hire through your team and company culture. Hopefully when someone joins the team they will see how others communicate and carry themselves and it will rub off on them. Everyone should have enough respect and trust in everyone else not to have a huge ego even if they might have had one at their previous job where people treated one another poorly.

> It is possible to be disagreeable in a constructive way, combined with a “disagree-and-commit” attitude where the team’s success is the priority.

Disagreement is absolutely key to making a team work. Disagreeing with humility, and trusting others to take disagreement without having their egos involved, is what is needed. Being overly agreeable happens when you don't trust the other person to take your disagreement without ego.

> highly-agreeable, low-performance

Sounds like the effects when a company is blessed with good business for a long time but fails to adapt to upcoming required changed. I have experienced such places and it's real horror to change this situation.

Seems like the cause for decadence.

> weeding out ego during the hiring process

Quite difficult to achieve, unfortunately: many people that want to be in a position of power do that to satisfy their ego.

Sometimes master’s arrogance is pure ego, which is always counter-productive to expertise.

Other times, though, arrogancy is more of a moat that saves time and resources by warding off bikeshedding or harmful suggestions coming from insufficient expertise, it is intended to be broken through if you have an actual point and underneath the personality is open to new ideas and cares about delivering the best outcome. (Moreover, if all you have is expertise, and a clueless but very politically adept team member suggests a Very Bad Idea, you may not just lose time fighting but lose the actual fight—so you’d rather put it down before it grows.)

There’re also all the individual ways of expression where a person may seem arrogant or rude just from their choice of words, whereas in fact it is a sign of friendliness & means of reducing social distance in their world.

I don’t mean this to come across as elitist, but if you don’t know what it’s like to be very good at your work to the point that other peoples decisions are often absurd to you, it’s not hard to confuse it for ego.

Interpreting conflict as ego is exactly the kind of reframing the article talks about and runs the risk of leaving the problem unaddressed.

Had the exact same reaction. There is nothing worse than objectively being right, and seeing very clearly the reasons why everyone isn't agreeing with you, but because they didn't "logic" themselves into those reasons, you can't "logic" them out of them. Over time this absolutely destroys your soul, and everyone simply calling you "egotistical" or something when you're simply trying to do your best and herd cats at the same time is tantamount to gaslighting.

For example, I'm currently dealing with a situation at work where we need a system up and running for a hard deadline next week. This was just dropped on us.

There's a pre-existing, battle-hardened system that meets 90% of requirements and would require a day's worth of minor tweaks for it to work, so my position is that we simply take that route. Everyone else has for some reason convinced themselves that, no, we need to rebuild everything from the ground up. Rebuilding it is apparently my job, even though it just...isn't. At all. The guy whose job it actually is, is, conveniently, the one who is advocating that it be rebuilt, and also pushing for me to do it.

Any sane third party would A) see that I'm right, that we should just re-purpose the old reliable system, and B) the other guy just wants a new shiny toy and wants someone else to deal with the hard work of getting it up and running...a week before it's needed. To be clear, I don't disagree that the old system should be replaced...eventually. Just not literally a week before it's needed. That is madness.

I am (I would hope understandably) annoyed, and haven't exactly kept that a secret. I haven't been a dick, but I've been curt and straight-forward that I think this is direction is just asking for disaster. This has been interpreted as ego, slacking off, etc. The other guy plays other people's emotions with shit ripped right out of How To Win Friends And Influence People. It's absolutely transparent to me and yet it still captures everyone else.

Fuck me for wanting to work smart and not hard, not do someone else's job, standing up for myself, and being honest rather than kissing ass.

I just want to work with adults who can actually put ego aside and do things that make sense. Instead it's just constant manipulation, and pointing it out is the quickest ticket to being accused of doing precisely what you're trying to combat.

Shit like this just makes me want to move to the woods.

The main character is trying to do their job effectively, but can’t due to the low performance of a peer. They escalate to the appropriate manager to address the issue, but that manager transforms the performance issue into a relationship issue: it’s not that the peer isn’t performing, it’s just that the two of you don’t like each other.

It is quite hard to find the line between performance issue and relationship issue. I ran into this myself when I had a new manager who wanted to institute policies that to the tech leads seemed nonsense, and I chose to not do what they asked. They took it as a performance issue to the +1 but the +1 turned it into a relationship issue and this was the right call. The problem is that by that time we were both so set in our view that the other was obstructing the way forward that we couldn’t find a middle, and eventually it came down to a hard choice which I “won” by pushing them out of the company. In hindsight I could have made more of an effort to build a personal rapport and get on good enough terms to find a middle ground.

> I chose to not do what they asked.

I'm shocked this manager didn't have you fired. I would never tolerate someone doing what they want instead of what I instructed them to do. When the leader says follow, you don't choose a different path, even if the leader is wrong. Eventually, if they genuinely are incorrect, they'll be dismissed due to poor decisions and performance.

I tell you this as an older person because you won't be able to push out everyone. You'll make this mistake with someone, somewhere, in another company, and they'll fuck you six ways from Sunday for it. I had to learn this lesson the hard way. I lost one of most enjoyable jobs I ever had by doing not only what I wanted to do, but what I knew was correct. I was even proven correct, but I ignored my boss and in doing so sealed my fate.

You're definitely correct to have put "won" in quotes, because what actually happened was you got lucky.

The other side of this coin is that if you are are forced into actions which you "know" are wrong and just accept it, then maybe the job is already dead for you anyway. By fighting back you are testing a number of stress points, like the conflict-avoidance of your management and the belligerence of the person you know to be "wrong". The important part is having the maturity to understand the consequences of being mistaken yourself, and being able to decide whether the fight is worth having even if it is going to have drastic results. In other words, is this a hill worth dying on?

No hill is worth dying on for a company, unless perhaps its an early stage startup and you're running out of cash.

I have a family to support, and saying "OK" to bad decisions from on high has never threatened my livelihood.

> I have a family to support, and saying "OK" to bad decisions from on high has never threatened my livelihood.

This doesn't necessarily work out in practice. When bad decisions have consequences many people will look for scapegoats, and blindly following orders can still make you a scapegoat.

In my own past I’ve pointed out issues non-confrontationally. But I smile and go along with it if the feedback is discarded. I’ve seen tens of millions of dollars lost to bad tech decisions. Occasionally someone will mention that I predicted the failure a year or two prior, and I shrug.

> No hill is worth dying on for a company

Wish I got this advice much earlier in my career

Though on the flip side, don't sit and eat shit from your company when you have extremely high value in the fastest growing industry in the world.

Pushing back against bad decisions is in my opinion a responsibility and not something to avoid. You do it one to one and not in the middle of a meeting or in public and you steel-man your arguments, assume that there are compromises etc. but this top down view of shifting all the responsibility up is incredibly brittle and wasteful. Also the best leaders are the ones who respect that, or even want that.

Choose your battles though, not every opinion/issue is precious.

A manager is not necessarily a ‘leader’, just someone hired at a different level of the abstraction pyramid. Turning that into a hard authority structure is a fast way to a hostile workplace culture. New managers should actually have humility and listen to what their team is telling them, because they have all the details.

And on the other hand, I’ve been asked “why did you do it if you knew it was wrong?”. I always voice my reasoning about why something is wrong and it would be better for the team to not do it, or do something else. Just following like a sheep doesn’t help the team overall.

I don't think it's always as simple as that. Some wrongs are more important than others. The little wrongs, wouldn't be worth that mark on your career as being seen as unreliable, other wrongs would be worth it.

I forgot I’m on HN and used the word “always”, my bad.

> I'm shocked this manager didn't have you fired. I would never tolerate someone doing what they want instead of what I instructed them to do. When the leader says follow, you don't choose a different path, even if the leader is wrong. Eventually, if they genuinely are incorrect, they'll be dismissed due to poor decisions and performance.

All of the worst organizations I’ve worked in have been chock full of people who had this mindset. It’s good for job stability, not so good for actually doing good work. Maybe that doesn’t matter. Personally I hate having my fate assigned to the whims of incompetent management. I think the culture of treading the line between making bad leaders feel like they’re being listened to and doing what is actually effective for getting work done is actually much more common than you’d expect.

" When the leader says follow, you don't choose a different path, even if the leader is wrong. Eventually, if they genuinely are incorrect, they'll be dismissed due to poor decisions and performance. "

Disobedience is one of the most important civil and moral duties. Maybe it should even be regularly trained... The people you call for, the Yes-Men, are superb for demonstrating the Milgram experiment and what it stands for.

So NO.

Disobedience in the face of a direct order is insubordination, and grounds for summary dismissal (IANAL).

As GP says, some bosses avoid direct orders; Robert E. Lee was famous for vague orders with lots of room for "discretion".

Unless you are a junior, then any decent boss will expect you to give him advice - maybe strongly-phrased. If the decision is delegated, you don't have to discuss it with the boss anyway. But if you do discuss it with the boss, and his reply is "Do as I say", and you don't comply, then for sure you are "hard to work with", and also insubordinate. Time to polish your resume.

There are worse things than getting fired. And companies are not the military. You are not obligated in a legal sense to comply with most orders from management. Without knowing the situation, it's hard to know for sure whether the original commenter made the best move for their career.

> I'm shocked this manager didn't have you fired. I would never tolerate someone doing what they want instead of what I instructed them to do.

In addition to other sibling replies here, so much middle management is "fire and forget" - they really don't care much what you do as long as you don't make them look bad, and not doing what you're told isn't relevant. They can report up that they "took care of it" and in our transactional world if something bad comes as a result, they'll start fresh with another tack (or sometimes the same one) and then can report they took care of double the number of issues. Big raise.

There's a spectrum from a manager not expressing an opinion to a manager giving a direct order. I have had managers that never gave a direct order that I witnessed. Usually the implied meaning when they "told" you what to do was, "I really think you should do it this way, and if you do it a different way and things go badly, the responsibility is entirely yours." The closest they came to a direct order was when you could tell they thought something was so colossally stupid they would fire you on the spot for doing it. If they thought it was only mildly stupid, the consequences would not be absolute unless they felt it was part of a pattern.

I've also had bosses that gave orders, so I'm not saying it's always that way, just that it's not always black and white.

> I'm shocked this manager didn't have you fired. I would never tolerate someone doing what they want instead of what I instructed them to do.

You seem to think it is the job of a manager to instruct people what to do.

Moreover, you seem to think that if a manager manages someone, that person is automatically a subordinate.

This is not always the case, especially for more senior positions or in organizations such as certain tech companies where engineering has most of the power and may well be at the same level as the manager.

Managers and bosses are not the same thing.

Moreover, some people are unwilling to do bad work, even if they are told to do so. Sometimes these people are harder to replace than a manager, especially one who defaults to trying to fire people that don’t do what they say.

> Eventually, if they genuinely are incorrect, they'll be dismissed due to poor decisions and performance.

I'm not saying it doesn't happen, but I've never seen it happen. Managers don't tend to get fired for making the people under them miserable, unless it's causing problems for the company's bottom line.

And even then, I've seen such managers who are excellent at blaming the people under them.

You have to ask yourself, "Is this worth getting fired over?" Sometimes the answer is, "yes."

> I'm shocked this manager didn't have you fired. I would never tolerate someone doing what they want instead of what I instructed them to do.

A manager is not a boss. If a new manager isn't able to get a team to do what they ask, either the team is horribly incompetent, or the manager isn't very good.

Furthermore, if a new manager suddenly wants to fire people from the team, it looks very bad. (Unless the team has a reputation for underperforming.)

In the OP's case, I suspect that the +1 had a lot of respect for the team and its past accomplishments; or that the OP had a good reputation with the +1. In some organizations, underperformers are left to simmer in hopes that they leave voluntarily; I suspect that the "interpersonal conflict" approach was a way to nudge the bad manager out the door.

> I'm shocked this manager didn't have you fired

I'm shocked this sir-yes-sir mentality still lingers around in 2022

doing what you're told is for robots, most of the managers I had should thank me that I did not do exactly what they asked and saved their stupid asses .

If I did what they wanted, they would be the ones to be fired for giving stupid directives that failed miserably.

There are situations where N disobeys N+1 but N+2 knows the value of N, which makes N+1 unable to fire N.

Just to be clear: I agree with you that I handled it badly. I disagree that just because a manager says something you automatically should do it, but I’ve learned to play ball and sometimes make the best of a bad situation instead of swimming against the tide. There are some policies that I disagree with at my current job, but I explained my disagreement to the right people and then moved on and followed them anyway. In my opinion knowing when to push back and when not is something that depends a lot on internal politics and personalities involved, less on technical “objective” realities. There are usually many ways to get to the destination, and the long way around may be the quickest if all the right people are bought in to that approach. I failed to appreciate these subtleties at the time.

> they'll be dismissed due to poor decisions and performance.

This is a joke right? Poor leaders get into their positions by blaming everyone they work with, they will just blame their poor performance on you.

> I was even proven correct, but I ignored my boss and in doing so sealed my fate.

Your boss was a bad leader, firing you for making the right call doesn't make them a good leader. You have picked up their bad leadership and taken it with you.

> get on good enough terms to find a middle ground.

Why? If the non technical person is injecting them selves into technical areas so they can spew nonsense then the middle ground is still a bad out come for the whole, it just makes that idiot feel better about themselves.

One thing that this article doesn't discuss is that performance is rarely something objective, and is unfortunately very subjective at times.

I've managed many smart people and it is common for Person A to complain about Person B's performance and to be wrong about it.

Another situation is that if a manager's only evidence of a performance problem is the word of another teammate, it's hard to distinguish between performance problems and collaboration problems.

Any tips on the best way to discern the truth?

Ask the complainer to show some documentation.

Examples:

If the underperformer is a developer, the complainer should be able to pull up examples of bad pull requests. Another way would be for the manager and complainer to plan to look at the next pull request together; or for the team to suddenly decide to pick a few pull requests to review in meetings.

If the underperformer was a support person, the complainer should be able to show emails, tickets, ect, where mistakes are made.

---

Do you have reasonable documented processes, and train newcomers in these? (IE, information to collect when interacting with customers, coding style guides, ect.) Audit the underperformer (and a few others) to see how close they are to the processes. If they diverge, hold an open discussion with the team (all stakeholders) about how reasonable the processes are. Assuming they are all reasonable, now you have your evidence.

I see a lot of good answers here, about leading by example and such and I've been in many instances where that's worked. But I'm in a new pickle.these days , I have a team with two duds...like absolutely no performance. I used to think they were willfully gaming the system but after a few frank conversations I feel like they live in a alternate dimension. Person A , senior by experience and pay grade couldn't sharpen a pencil if u gave him an electric sharpener and you could tell person B to meet you in the caf for lunch and he'd get on a bus and call you from butchers. I have no idea how these people.got where they are... We work on somewhat safety critical systems in a hot industry so you would expect some level of competence. But Nada. They feel....entitled to payment but feel no obligation to deliver anything. Have no sense of work ethic, workmanship, quality, barely communicates, no sense of teamwork. I'm at my wits end. I complained but that only turned into to more work for me to manufacture work they are willing or able to do and the tracking the progress. I gave up on that pretty quick. Talked to both of em 1-1 and learned a lot and reviewed some horrendous code and decided that it was better to have them not do anything. Pulled them both off deliverables and gave them meaningless tasks. This is all while the team is chugging away. Just today we have a pitch coming up and I had given A the task of making the deck, mind you not the content...just the .PPTX file and chasing people to get it done , and he managed to pick some god awful pos theme, so I told him "hey you know this theme isn't very presentable" ...and he told me to change it if I didn't like it. And to B I gave a wild goose chase. I could have either of them touch the code before the release. HR and management didn't like this...they want me go give em real work...so they can mess it all up...because the rest of us can always undo it...

The people who hired them and refusing to fire them are a bigger problem to your organisation than those two people.

I’m a great interviewer but burnout quickly. I wouldn’t criticize the org for hiring someone, but I agree they should be criticized for not firing.

I think it’s one of the most important questions you can ask in an interview (as the applicant): does the organisation allow poor performers to stay in their roles? How is performance measured, and how is poor performance treated?

Then you can decide if you like the answers. For me personally, an answer like “performance is evaluated on (X objective criteria). Poor performers are given 3 months to demonstrate improvement on said criteria and then managed out” is good.

A refusal to answer, or waffling about how much we believe in our people, how our process ensures we don’t hire bad performers, how we develop people, etc. is bad.

Devil's advocate: Why is it a bad sign if the situation doesn't come up often enough for a formal process to have emerged?

(I'll also note that this query will lead to the interviewers wondering things like "Are they trying to figure out if they can game the system? Or are they going to try and get people they disagree with fired? Are they trying to play any games in general?" etc...)

> Why is it a bad sign if the situation doesn't come up often enough for a formal process to have emerged?

It isn’t necessarily, like if you are about to be employee #1. But even then you want to hear that the person (presumably cofounder) you’re talking to has considered it and will move useless ppl on.

It’s not black and white. You would be looking for a better answer from a more established team.

Consider Netflix famous presentation where it states right in there what they will do, because “it’s a sports team not a family” and they understand the massive collateral damage a single bad performer can have.

> Are they trying to figure out if they can game the system?

Yes it’s possible but a senior person at a company that does in fact have high-performing management probably won’t think that, especially if you ask it tactfully and with context. (“I have had some previous experiences where a single poor performer really dragged down the performance and morale of the whole team, how would you handle something like that here?”)

if you are responsible for something (and accept that responsibility, and sincerely try to be accountable for it) but you don't have actual control over it, then you're on a ship with a hyperdrive to burnout town.

This part stuck out me:

"It’s a truism that you always want to hire folks with very high standards, but I’ve seen a staggering number of folks fail in an organization primarily because they want to hold others to a higher standard than their organization’s management is willing to enforce"

Throughout the article the author talks about underperformers but whose standards are they underperforming by? The company/management's or the authors? If the "underperformers" are in fact performing adequately by management's standards, just not by the author's then it is in fact a relationship problem because it's the author forcing their view of performance on others. If they want to have higher standards for themselves fair enough, but other people didn't sign up or agree to those standards. You can encourage them to do so but it's completely unreasonable to expect them to meet your standards (rather than the companies) and then complain to their manager when they don't.

I'm not saying this is the case in all of these situations. But author openly states they're a workaholic who has higher standards for those around them than the organization does. And that's very much a problem of their own creation, not a problem caused by those around them.

I read it more as there being a mismatch in promises: the managers promised that their teams are held to high standards, and promised that they expect high competence from their reports.

If going in you believe your definition of high competence is aligned with your managers’, and then discover your manager actually meant “destroys more value than they create” as “highly competent”, I think it’s reasonable to place the blame for the misunderstanding with the manager. It’s true this isn’t necessarily the value-destroying person’s fault, but it is the fault of the manager in avoiding dealing with the fact that they have a report who hurts their team.

However as the article points out, once you realize this dynamic you can use your energy to work around the problem rather than spend effort that goes to /dev/null.

I've found it much easier to "vote with your feet" when it comes to faulty leaders rather than attempt to work around them or risk being labeled "difficult to work with" as from my experience it seems to be related to the manager's ego (assuming your not a dongus and are flagging valid things when necessary).

Within any large company, an internal move is fairly simple stuff and an external move will always be more lucrative in terms of compensation.

I agree. Don't stay at a job with bad management. It's not worth it.

I can work around one bad manager. It is when you get 2 or 3 stacked vertically over each other that you know things are not only never going to change, but that top level leader has tanked all other departments underneath them, and it is time to move somewhere else.

I used to not worry about higher level leadership in large companies because I thought I was too low level to really be impacted by them. I no longer think that way, and I look into as much of the leadership as I can before accepting a role.

I was at a place for many years where the CEO was quite bad. He had few skills, both technical and interpersonal. So many people in the organization had strategies for dealing with him, distracting him away from important work. I was always disgusted by the wasted efforts of the entire organization finding ways to route around this CEO, and leaving was one of the best things I ever did.

Article rings very true.

Happened to me in one of my positions in the last ten years. Never was able to sum it up exactly this well.

I can totally relate with this article.

Peers have not delivered and disappointed me this past year. When even a hint of my disappointment leaks out it's immediately met with suggestions for more relationship building or communications process changes.

No, just no, people didn't do what they said you were going to do. I have genuine affection for some of these people. Somehow "I love you, but you didn't execute" is perceived as hostile and heated.

I also agree with the the authors sentiment about how to fix and I've also learned it's better to steer peers towards constructive ends in a positive way, than confront or express displeasure about performance.

I feel like it’s a little bit of a flag in the latter section that they’re taking it for granted that someone is “just underperforming” and that it’s obviously not some other issue.

Like idk, I do buy that managers might sometimes taper over what are “really” performance issues as if they’re relational, but I feel like you should spend some time addressing the seemingly obvious possibility of “are your managers right and this is a relationship issue”?

Reading some of the comments is making me double-down on this. A lot of it reads like “yes, finally, someone who understands that the problem isn’t me, it’s everybody else”.

Again, a lot of this stuff is subtle and I hesitate to paint with too broad a brush, but the real flag for me is not having the awareness to be like “look I know how this sounds but I really do think I was in the right”.

If one person you meet is an asshole, that is unfortunate. If every person you meet is an asshole, you may be the asshole.

This is how companies plateau and become stagnant. The issues described do not spur action (e.g. "these two just need to collaborate better"), they fester, and eventually, a non-trivial number of internal teams are "captured." They won't burn the company down, the under-performing individual is not likely to do anything to warrant actually being moved/fired, and so, the status quo remains...and spreads.

And then we wonder why large companies simply cannot innovate or execute on broader change initiatives?

Makes me think of the Peter principle. Pretty depressing conclusion though: a large company is bound to be an environment with many distractions by underperformers. Any way out?

Found your own company, be successful and start experiencing the same growth decline pattern.

Maybe it's a cycle to stop expanding human groups in excess?

It's just entropy, honestly. Growth = complexity/debt/escalating coordination cost. Success = complacency/greed. Like a cancer, the fruits of growth and success eventually burn the house down.

It's just the way of things, apparently. I try hard to not worry about it too much and instead side-step it as best I can.

This is called reading the room and realizing that you're the fall guy. If you're unhappy with being the fall guy, you're violating your manager's expectations of you and thus, pretty literally, hard to work with.

And the solutions are, obviously, you either magically make something out of nothing and upend the pro/con balance in your favor, or you leave what is obviously a disadvantageous position.

If you're interviewing for some role and the hiring manager mentions that they need you to tame some chronic problem, run! There's a good chance that the problem is chronic because internal incentives are sustaining its existence.

I enjoyed the post as there are invariably problems; seniority is learning how to solve more of it. Soft skills side becomes more important the higher you go and the bigger things get. The article is just one of many ways to manage up -- in this case, excitement.

You can always leave, but that's the difference between consultants and leaders. That's totally fine, but should at least be aware the tradeoff is being made. Being able to manage & lead isn't easy!

One of the hardest things for me is walking away from a solution I know is right. It's hard to realize that you will have to deal with a less than ideal solution because of internal politics but at the end of the day it's not worth it. Go home to your family and work on projects you enjoy and when work makes you write slop give it to em just as sloppy as they want it. Hopefully you work at a company where you don't know what in talking about but many of you in sure know exactly what solution you went to bat for and the various irrational reasons it never got built and to those of you out there I sympathize.

I’ve had poor performing peers. Then I had enough situations where direct reports (through human bias or lack of context) were wrongly convinced that their peers were holding them back.

First I realized that perhaps I had misjudged my own peers.

Then I started focusing on providing more context and cognitive bias (behavioral economics) training to my teams.

It’s too easy to just think your boss isn’t holding someone accountable.

I have seen both. I worked in environments that are conflict averse.

One example: There was an infrastructure team with one person just not doing their work. At the end for nearly three years This led to good people from the team leaving as the additional work of these "slackers" had to be done by someone.

Neither the direct team lead, nor the manager above them, nor HR after learning from the reasons for people leaving through exit talks did anything.

And I also saw situations that was framed as similar, but the situation was very different once the context became known.

There was a person seemingly slacking. And objectively that was true. Not visible was the fact that this person was bullied by a coworker, was mentally abused. They tried their best to still deliver, but were just not able and sabotaged as well.

Solving this solution was a mess for the people involved.

Basically it isn't always as it seems. But also that there sometimes are people slacking.

I've had a few situations treated as "interpersonal conflict." It's always happened right before a lousy manager was pushed out / fired.

In hindsight, IMO a way to handle this situation is to have a 1-1 with the underperformer, and clearly explain your expectations. Bring notes. Don't be afraid to "explain common sense." You might need to have repeat meetings every 2-3 weeks.

Give periodic summaries to your supervisor, occasional summaries to your +1. Reiterate that this isn't an interpersonal conflict situation, but that the other person truly isn't doing their part of the job. If you're generally happy with your job, wait out the situation. Otherwise, this might be the que that it's time to seek greener pastures.

Furthermore: When someone isn't pulling their weight, it will show with other people. Feel out your other teammates to see what they think of the other person. If they aren't happy, make sure that they express that to their manager and +1.

Remember: All companies make bad hires from time-to-time; and good management is hard. It's okay to tolerate a few management mistakes when, overall you're happy with your job.

is there any article/book/blog about this +1 system?

The +1 is the boss's boss

2'nd reply: That's a good idea, maybe I'll blog about it someday.

Although it's not exactly what you're looking for, "The E-Myth Revisited" might help you understand some of the thinking that's needed for dealing with underperformers: https://www.amazon.com/Myth-Revisited-Small-Businesses-About...

The book is targeted to someone running a small business that needs to hire in order to grow. Think of a restaurant, RV rental business, flower shop. The mantra is to write down how you do everything, and then train everyone. If "how you do your job" changes, then you need to update the process and re-train everyone.

This is what I meant by "clearly explain your expectations" and "Don't be afraid to 'explain common sense.'" You're giving the underperformer a chance to improve, working on your "interpersonal conflict" issues, and building a set of objectives expectations that can be used to measure performance.

(In my case, the underperformer quit the day after I explained all of my expectations; and the replacement that was hired was AWESOME.)

Thanks for the details and the recommendations. I'm in complete agreement with them. Especially the explain the common sense part. A lot of people are ridiculously bad at communicating their expectations (both managers and managees(?))...

This is really good advice. It also forces you to figure out what you want exactly. For example, someone might get frustrated by poor performance (real or imagined) of a peer, but what they're really looking for is a promotion and they see the peer as an obstacle to that. Figuring out the positive outcome you want (promotion, successful project, etc) and then working with management on that is a good tactic.

"Success is finding a path forward among the options that actually exist."

..just so simple and elegant, particularly given the rise in hindsight and purely principle focussed cultures, that are developing in tech.

Yeah this sentence hit me.

If I really think about it (or frame it as such), A LOT of my stress in work AND life is from wishing that non-existent paths existed.

I remain continuously impressed with everything Will is writing on the blog lately.

Something feels odd about this article, like the examples don't really make the point or the framing is off or something.

I guess I would try and rephrase as "you want to work way X and your manager wants you to work way Y." I think you have three basic options: say yes, say yes with reservations, say no and quit/get a different manager.

There are all kinds of culs-de sac this odd formulation leads us down: who's right, is this a subjective relationship problem or an objective performance/personality problem, etc.

I guess I would add that, if you're a manager and something like this happens to your team members, try and take care of everyone? There isn't always a solution that does that, but the article outright says only the team member pushing for higher performance should lump it. It feels better to make everyone lump it equally haha.

I'm struggling with this exact thing at work, but the problem is that I'm terrible at "generating excitement" for my direction. I treat all my coworkers as peers, with full respect and compassion and without telling them what to do. Whenever I try to gently nudge them in my direction, I get a heap of pushback. If it's not clear, I'm also terrible at persuasion and influencing people, so I don't really know how to fix this situation. I like my company and my boss, but my brain is screaming "CHANGE YOUR ORGANIZATION OR CHANGE YOUR ORGANIZATION" 24/7.

Any suggestions?

Disclaimer: Unfortunately I believe that engaging others is always a case of emotional intelligence and communication skills. There is no amount of rational arguments that can bring them on Your side if they do not feel that You are right. With emphasis on feel - we all are highly irrational creatures and almost all decisions are emotional. If You do not understand what kind of feelings Your communications (both verbal and written) generates in Your team mates than You will never be highly effective with convincing anyone to bring on any kind of change.

Having said that, can You describe what kind of direction You are talking about? What type of change do You want to see and why do You thing there is pushback?

I'll try to do it without doxxing myself too much.

The team is criminally prone to overengineering. Feels like they read GoF and Uncle Bob's stuff, stopped there and concluded that engineering is a solved problem, with no tradeoffs involved. They're writing 2003-style Java in a language that's not particularly conducive to OOP (Javascript). Any time I solve something by writing a plain old function, my MRs are brigaded with kind suggestions that have an undertone of condescension. "Do you think this would be better solved by implementing the [Strategy pattern]?", "This hashmap seems a little out of place, have you considered adding some encapsulation here?" etc.

The signal to noise ratio in the codebase is woeful and finding out how anything works requires a JetBrains IDE and spelunking gear. I don't mind that, I love brownfield projects. The problem is that we keep moving in this direction and that I'm being forced, or at least firmly suggested, to keep producing more "brown".

The lead agrees that the codebase could be improved, but believes the churn (a couple of longstanding members with a revolving door of people) is on par with the rest of the industry and since the company is happy with us why fix what isn't broken. The team lead also don't code pretty much at all, so it's hard for them to perceive it as a priority. And the company is happy with us because the specific work we're doing is incredibly valuable -- we could be doing half as good. and still blow every other team out of the water because of the intrinsic value of our work. As long as our production doesn't go down every other day, we're the starchildren :\

Is this overengineering attitude coming from those few longstanding members? Because if so, I don't see how You can convince them of the value of simplicity (and that any kind of abstraction have a cost) if they themselves does not see value in it. This intuition can only come from long exposition to consequences of adding to much of accidental complexity. And what is more by openly contradicting their intuitions You directly threaten their status in company (because Your solutions will be directly opposing their way of solving things).

There is of course second possibility - are You sure that the problem is not You ? Are there other team members that also complain? OOP style of programming takes a lot of time to get used to, but sometimes it can work if programmers are familiar enough with it. The use of strategy pattern can be good if there is enough variability in parts of algorithm that is being implemented.

Personally I hate this style but its because I lack imagination (which is necessary to select proper patterns and create proper abstractions). I can only create them as an afterthought (by extracting them from existing codebase). But I know that there are people that can do it up front and hit the right spot enough times (and refactor if not).

It might be another century before society as a whole is ready to confront "toxic conscientiousness". For now it is addressed at a last resort through acqui-hires, the bankruptcy court, etc.

> What I’ve found effective in these cases is to lead with constructive energy directed towards a positive outcome. Even if you can’t get your peer’s performance addressed directly, you can often overcome your peer’s bad performance by generating excitement in the direction you want to go. Enough excitement will give the resolution avoidant manager a way to solve their problem without actually engaging with the situation that they’re unwilling to address.

The author arrives at a valuable conclusion in a somewhat roundabout way: The real solution to most problems, including low performing peers, is to step up and lead with a positive example.

Years ago I would have agreed that the authors' dismissal of "hard to work with" is unfair and inaccurate. None of us wants to believe that we are the one who is hard to work with. Everybody else is wrong! I'm not the problem, it's my coworkers who aren't doing exactly what I want them to do!

Yet as a manager, I've learned that the realities of hiring and managing people are very different than my overly idealistic standards when I was a junior IC. In retrospect, my ideas that it was my manager's job to ruthlessly punish or remove anyone I didn't feel was performing up to par or that I shouldn't be forced to navigate difficult social situations were unreasonable.

> It’s a truism that you always want to hire folks with very high standards, but I’ve seen a staggering number of folks fail in an organization primarily because they want to hold others to a higher standard than their organization’s management is willing to enforce.

Having high aspirations for yourself is great. Helping raise the bar through leading by example and mentoring your peers is great.

Running to your manager every time you feel dissatisfied with someone else's performance and arriving with only complaints is, however, not great.

No team is perfect. Hiring is hard. Nobody starts out as a superstar. People learn and grow at different rates. If you want to contribute, lead by example and help people out when they fall behind. As a manager I'm actually well aware of who's delivering and who's struggling, but we don't fire people the second they fall behind. We also notice who's helping the team reach the next level and who's simply in it for themselves.

If your only solution to every problem is to run to your manager and demand that they do something because a peer didn't do exactly what you wanted or expected, I'm first going to ask what you did to help move the situation forward on your own. The first question is usually "How did it go when you talked to them about?" The first answer of the difficult to work with people is "Well... I didn't talk to them about it".

This is tough because there are two situations that present identically to an outsider:

- Peer is a complete non-contributor, but keeps their job through lying and social manipulation

- Complainer blames everyone else for their problems

Telling the difference requires either intimate knowledge of the team, or a pattern of behavior.

If on 3 teams in a row, you were grouped with someone who was "hard to work with" the odds are that you're the one who is hard to work with.

This is also why standard interviewing advice is to never blame your previous team or boss for why you are looking for a new job; 9/10 times someone says that, it actually means that they are the real problem, and nobody wants to make that bet when hiring.

[Edit]

After reflection, I like this article even more, because it will allow people prima-donnas who are hard to work with to become easier to work with despite lacking the self-awareness that they are the problem.

True, it would be better for them to develop more self awareness, but anything that makes it less painful for their coworkers in the mean time is a win in my book.

> Having high aspirations for yourself is great. Helping raise the bar through leading by example and mentoring your peers is great.

> Running to your manager every time you feel dissatisfied with someone else's performance and arriving with only complaints is, however, not great.

There's a problem with this framing. The two are not exclusive. Complaining to your manager doesn't mean you are not leading by example and mentoring. The other problem is assuming the person complaining to the manager fits this profile:

"Running to your manager every time you feel dissatisfied"

While I'm sure such folks exist, most people who complain do so rarely, and lumping the two together equates to dismissing legitimate concerns.

There are no clear cut rules on what the right answer is. I believe that each person should set standards for work, and stick to them. If a problem arises, there are 3 choices:

1. Try to solve the problem (ideally in a positive manner).

2. Change jobs.

3. Make a compromise and live with it.

In my experience, most people choose 3, and it inevitably just means lowering your standards over and over again. These are the people who complain most about their jobs yet do nothing about it, and will have a lengthy narrative about why that is.

Choice 1 is the highest risk, highest reward scenario. It takes a lot of skill (social, political, etc), so be prepared to learn those skills. But if you succeed, that experience gets you very far and those skills are valuable.

Choice 2 is usually low risk, with medium reward. I've never regretted leaving. Every time I intended to leave, I was told I should suck it up, toughen my skin, and it will be crap everywhere. I always ended up at a better place. Also, see https://xkcd.com/1768/

From the comments here, I think people are projecting a bit too much. Take some real examples:

You work in a SW team, and a peer who has many more years of experience than you is the lead for a particular project. He doesn't want you making branches for different experiments, as "branches complicates things". Instead, there will be only one development branch and you have to make command line arguments with switches in the code for all the various experiments you need to do.

The customer (also a SW person) was in the meeting and politely points out to the team lead that he thinks SW development would be much easier with branches than with lots of command line options, and the code would be cleaner. The team lead disagrees.

What do you do?

In this case, I didn't complain. But leading by example wouldn't solve the problem as he's the tech lead. Instead, I engaged in some politics to get myself off the project. I was the lead in some other projects and I put my efforts there. Better to work on projects where you can contribute 100% than work on ones where you're hampered.

In a team I was once in, there were a number of "problematic" people, but one of them was particularly a pain - interfered with lots of projects he was not involved in, enforced solutions in those projects without understanding the problem domain, etc. Within a year I could see from the manager's interactions that he very clearly was not willing to address any behavioral issues of any person. And it was evident without me even bringing this up to him.

Folks: Don't lead by example in those situations. The best option is to leave. Such a manager becomes a magnet for problematic people. If you have enough clout, you can go to senior management, but if you're a junior person like me, you won't have that clout, and those who stay long enough to have that clout clearly are OK with the status quo.

Some years after I left the team a former coworker who's still there is having serious issues to the person, and it's becoming borderline harassment. While I didn't witness clear harassment in my time there, I did have the foresight to document everyone's poor behavior - so I got the word out to the former coworker that if he wants to take formal HR action, I can supply them with what I've witnessed.

He did complain to the manager, and as expected, the manager is treating it as merely a relationship issue. The point? Managers who are unwilling to address these issues have a higher chance of getting seriously problematic team members who will exploit the reluctance to their advantage.

> You work in a SW team, and a peer who has many more years of experience than you is the lead for a particular project. He doesn't want you making branches for different experiments, as "branches complicates things". Instead, there will be only one development branch and you have to make command line arguments with switches in the code for all the various experiments you need to do.

It would not be my first choice, but committing on master and having feature flags can potentially be a good fit if you run tons of experiments. A company I used to work at did this and it ran very well.

Some of the flags "interfere" with one another (i.e. are mutually exclusive). So you have to find all the relevant places in the code and put "if" branches.

If you have 6 flags, you now have 2^6 = 64 different possible inputs to the program, and your code better handle it well.

And these are all temporary. Once an experiment is over, you have to remove the flag and related if conditions.

You certainly can design it well this way and abstract out the complexity, but that takes skill, and if the tech lead can't handle branches in version control, it's a good guess they won't be able to handle the abstraction needed to make it a good design either.

I agree with you. I am not recommending it. It has all the problems you mentioned. I wanted to share that out there there are some decent companies doing this and it works for them / it does not need to be a red flag.

Yes, I too have experienced teams that compensate very well for poor SW practices, and even enjoyed some of them. I've even been in teams that didn't use version control and things worked out fine. But frankly, I'd rather not be in a team without version control, and I don't think many would fault me for discouraging others from joining such teams.

There's a limited amount of time I have on this Earth, and the less time my brain spends on managing unnecessary complexity, the more time it has to do more useful things.

I haven't found a team that's perfect, so there are always some compromises. I treat them as temporary compromises, though. Just because I put up with weird X behavior in a prior job and it worked out doesn't mean I should/would put up with it in future jobs.

> Nobody starts out as a superstar.

The superstar is a dictator with a strong halo effect. Think of any superstar developer and look into how they achieved that status. It's almost a certainty they were left alone to their own devices for great lengths of time. Which neatly coincides with...

> We also notice who's helping the team reach the next level and who's simply in it for themselves.

Capitalism relies on a contradictory stance: that the best employees are actually socialists that believe they are capitalists. Which is to say that a company wants employees that believe in the greater good (i.e. the team) but the employees need to feel like they are participants in capitalism through their efforts at their job. Otherwise they will realize they are simply being screwed (and probably demand real socialism, or a seat at the big boy table of capital). Adam Smith's self-interest is an inconvenience for the company. We even talk about such people with disdainful language such as "ladder climbers" or "sociopaths". We feel cheated when we see someone get a promotion by not playing by the established rules of the commune. Which is pretty much how all promotions happen. Similarly, few people get hired by going in the front door.

Businesses abhor competition. They get the government to rig their markets and carry their losses. They desire monopoly. So you have the socialist employee aspiring to be a participant in capitalism while the capitalist corporation aspires to socialism.

But let's cut to the chase: what this entire topic is fundamentally about is how to make your labor more predictable. More uniform. More interchangeable. And, ultimately, replaceable. Because, if labor was treated less like cattle and more like creative, responsible, independent adults we would not be having this discussion. The discussion we are having now is about how to babysit. That's literally why management exists. To manage. Human resources. Managers don't want employees messing up the production schedule and HR doesn't want employees messing up their legal standing. In addition, managers concern themselves with threats to their job.

Corporations want labor that is stupid enough to play along but smart enough to get their job done within the specified parameters. The illusion falls apart once labor realizes it and is powerless to change it (manifested as burnout, apathy, or rebellion). Then the stick comes out.

The absolute worst managers I've had were in the service industry. There, the stick comes out faster because it's much harder to convince someone they are getting a fair deal making $6 an hour. We, in the IT heavens high above Metropolis, don't often feel that type of oppression. But the dynamic is the same.

This may be one of the best posts I've read on the Internet in the past 20 years. It's easily in my top 25. Thank you for writing it.

This is one of the reasons I am glad I don't have a family to support and can work for myself. For me that tends to result in not having a lot of money, but it also means there is usually no one to hold a project back other than myself. Except the clients themselves sometimes. But overall much less stress with smaller projects on my own.

If I had other people to support then I would probably be dealing with whatever job I could keep that really paid the bills, regardless of what idiot peers or bosses I had to deal with.

Hello

This is a great post; it hit home and I expect it'll come to mind many times in the future for me. It highlights an interesting problem very well.

Will, if you’re listening, there are two follow-up posts that I’d love to see – how (and how long) to execute the “be positive and generate excitement” strategy as the main character, and how this problem can affect companies and what leaders should do about it.

My experience is that if the EM tried to draft a better product roadmap than the PM had made, it would dramatically worsen the relationship (for example). Being "extra positive" while "leading by example" can come across as being a fake, competitive show-off who doesn't know how to lead by uplifting (especially for someone who is more talented than some of their peers). Not saying the advice is bad necessarily, just that it can be really hard to do well (or that perhaps I don't understand it), and I'd like more advice on the execution.

Even still, if one did this really well, it would mean good things for the main character's career at the company - no question. Stay positive, stay in your lane, do the best you can with the people around you, don't rock the boat, be inspirational - there's no question that'll help you thrive within a company (based on my observations, but counter to the intuition of a young programmer).

However, sometimes this goes from a few isolated problems to a growing culture of mediocrity that punishes pursuit of excellence, and it can be harmful for talented people to stay in those environments for long, as it saps them of their passion for quality that is both hugely valuable in the right context and drives meaning and purpose in their life’s work. How long should the main character stay in a context where good ideas lose out to bad ideas, and mediocrity rules?

Of course, allowing mediocrity to flourish is probably very bad for a company, especially when it pushes the best people down (and ultimately out). This post didn’t touch on how (and why) leaders should handle the avoidant managers in question, and I’d love to see one that does – getting the very best out of one's organization is one of the most important jobs of a leader.

Needless to say, I'd love pointers to extant pieces that address these questions!

> the EM tried to draft a better product roadmap than the PM had made, it would dramatically worsen the relationship (for example).

Absolutely. But "to lead by example" the EM could ask the PM to sit down and improve the existing one until it's acceptable for the team (or for the EM).

But let's look at the exact scenario that the blog post mentions:

> Both are pushed to “collaborate better” but the team’s impact remains poor

How are they measuring team impact? Why is it important?

Again, leading by example, if impact is important for the EM, then they should find a job where they have that. Our world is changing fast, most people have a status quo bias, tech sector are even crazier, putting all of that together it's no surprise that almost everybody in tech is not exactly where they would like to be. Dealing with this discrepancy is hard (and even that's quite the understatement), but the only true ways are internal change (acceptance, eg. changing with the environment) or taking action. (See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acceptance_and_commitment_ther...)

> can come across as being a fake

It's very important to find the environment where you can be authentic. Including being a beginner, doing something that you're not 100% sure of. (IT/tech is again an extreme outlier in this regard, because it's full of people with self-esteem & confidence issues. Needless to say these issues can manifest in different ways, and both kinds are of course bad: impostor syndrome and the arrogant know-it-all.)

> How long should the main character stay in a context where good ideas lose out to bad ideas, and mediocrity rules?

It depends. If the main character finds passion outside work (let's say side business, family, whatever) and can just treat work like a means to many ends, then it doesn't really matter. If they cannot, because they want their work to be meaningful, impactful, they want to have professional pride in their work, etc... then they usually need to move :)

Managing humans is complex. Sometimes, bias & other unconscious traits derail our thinking. We can have good practices like go with data, forgive once & give everyone another chance etc., But there is no clear formula to make it perfect.

Can someone explain the first VPE example? I just don't understand what it's talking about.

There are 2 obvious candidates for VPE; one candidate gets it as an interim role. The CEO refuses to make it permanent because the other candidate throws a tantrum. When the iterim VPE points out the immaturity of the other candidate, it's used as evidence that the interim VPE doesn't have sufficient "people skills" to be VPE

Wow. Okay. I was leaning toward something like that but I felt like I must be taking crazy pills! What a weird corporate culture!

There are lots of people who never want to get between two people arguing. Some of these people become managers or executives.

More common than you think. I’ve seen it happen more often than not when a startup grows quickly and the original “CTO” doesn’t want to manage people, so they hire an outside manager.

CEO doesn’t want the original CTO to lose face, so there’s a bit of an awkward period while the new manager on boards. Not an ideal situation but life isn’t always ideal, definitely a surmountable situation though.

I’d now take it as a red flag if a founder holds the CTO title but doesn’t do the job. Shows the individual and org is too precious with ego for no reason. You get to be an IC, have insane autonomy, 100x the equity of a normal IC and still have the title of Founder. If you can’t give up three letters to help the business, doesn’t look good.

Interesting! I was not aware that this was so common.

Is this in response to this discussion:

How to work with me https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30841486

Exactly the kind of politics that is so uninteresting and draining working in companies like this. And all of this on top of the actual job itself. It just isn’t worth it.

>It just isn’t worth it.

whats the alternative. consulting?

Yeah. Unless the alternative is "retire", aren't you just replacing one brand of bullshit with another, potentially worse brand (entirely dependent on the person, I guess)?

Possibly, but you're equating "contractor" == "employee" when in reality you have more options.

1. No one said you _had_ to do that job for that client. You don't have that flexibility as an employee.

2. Don't feel like putting up with all the bullshit? Keep raising your rates until a) it's worth your while (I personally can put up with a lot of BS for $400/hour) or b) until they decide you're too expensive and let you go. This is not an option when dealing with your employer.

3. Having downtime as a consultant in between clients is seen as normal. Between employers, it can be a death knell.

Knowing, and willingly to execute, these options gives you a completely different perspective than being an employee. Which means you handle the situtations differently (better?).

nope unless you're solo and work gigs.

So much of consulting is effectively digging in dysfunctional organizations and circumventing their people problems..

For example, coordinating between team A and team B, because they are unable to (or refuse to) communicate effectively; or submitting a convincing report to management with data/conclusions/proposal that some team in their company effectively had already a year ago, but were unable to get the management to implement the proposals because they cost a lot of money and they wouldn't believe their own people unless outside consultants said that this really needs to be done.

And of course there's sales. And pre-sales, and post-sales followup that's effectively sales for the next, much bigger projects... No, consulting is definitely not a way to escape politics.

Start your own business. I always thought I might like to have an ice cream shop.

Where there’s people there’s politics.

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