Incompetent but Nice
jacobian.org
jacobian.org
The competent jerks destroy team morale, make good people leave, and paralyze junior employees and those lacking self-confidence. They may be good at their job, but they make others worse.
Incompetent nice people, as long as they are not so incompetent to be a liability can at least contribute to a strong team culture and make good competent people want to show up.
Of course, ideally, everyone is somewhere in that top right quadrant, but in my experience on large enough teams you usually have at least one not so nice person on the team and one or two not so competent people on the team.
Now of course we can always exaggerate things to an extreme and compare a racist, sexist, jerk who swears nonstop, to someone who is mildly incompetent, and there are certain principles and boundaries that are worth upholding with respect to how people treat each other regardless of their productivity, but in actuality that's not really the difficult choice you end up facing.
The really difficult choice you end up facing is someone who is nice and gets along with people but is ultimately too dependent on others to do their job versus someone who works independently and does an excellent job but is very blunt and can be an asshole in regards to the expectations they hold others to. Good software developers often expect their peers to also be at a high standard and will speak in very plain, rude, and blunt language if they feel others are not pulling their weight.
And finally, I have observed that in the long run, competent people tend to prefer to work with others whose skill they respect and they feel they can learn from because they're really good at their job, compared to working with someone who is pleasant but is always dependent on others. Being nice is a good short term skill to have, but people get used to those who are nice but they never get used to someone who is incompetent.
On my teams, I don’t accept incompetence, so even the nice folks get managed out quickly.
I do have a strategy for handling the 10x assholes, though. We have a difficult problem domain (lots of math and physics) so I need those smart folks. I’m also lucky to have 2 hyper-competent nice devs too. I use them like jiu jitsu gyms use their enforcers.
When an extra aggressive 20 something shows up to a gym and starts making it unsafe to train, the gym will pair them up with a black belt who will humiliate them but be super nice about it and put them in their place.
I do the same. If I see asshole behavior surfacing, I’ll pair them up with my one of my super competent devs and have a them do a in depth code review or something like that.
Most of the time it works and the bad behavior goes away. If that doesn’t work (very rarely), we’ll manage them out.
Sometimes the 10x jerk is a jerk because he’s used to dealing with incompetence. But if you can show them competent-nice behavior, they’ll often pattern match to that.
When I use direct language, I am trying to economize the time and energy of everyone listening to me by speaking as clearly and concisely as possible. It's also a style practiced in military communication, where it's taught as the ABCs - accuracy, brevity and clarity. I don't think we as an industry should concede that this style is reserved for jerks.
As a Frenchman, many Americans find my totally France compliant speech a bit rude.
On the other hand, I find their way of calling everyone a "friend" and every single nice things "amazing" extremely annoying.
But if people are adults, having a little friction is not a big deal. We don't need to appreciate all behaviors to live together.
This is something that is well understood in jobs with harsh conditions, but in our very comfy IT jobs, people seem to sweat the small stuff way more.
A friend of mine felt it was finger-pointing when her coworker said "could you take a look at your commit `abc0123`? because it broke the test `Xyz`". When I saw the screenshot I thought it was direct but professional.
My opinion was dismissed because "yeah you think so because you're a bit socially awkward too"
This would be an interesting experiment, anyway.
Think of politeness as a social technology that allows large groups of people to live and work in close proximity. It's not that politeness is more efficient - it's clearly less efficient. It's that most people can't psychologically handle too much direct communication.
Miscommunication or negative comments can have productivity impacts.
"You made a mistake here and need to correct it."
"Please correct this mistake."
"There's a mistake here that needs correcting."
"Can you correct this mistake?"
I'd say the top two are direct and definitely impolite. Number two may seem polite to a direct sort of person, but the blame makes it impolite. Of the latter three I'd say the top one is not only the most concise and direct, but also fairly polite. These last two are more polite, but lack directness.
They won't read documentation. They won't Google for an answer. They won't look at error logs. They won't browse around in the code to see what other people have done similarly. They won't look at the git history.
You can build experience by doing these things, even if you don't have any. If you are inexperienced and don't at least try to do them... well... that's incompetence.
If you came by your understanding through bone-headed determination, you might have an inkling of how to explain concepts to someone who just doesn't seem to get it.
If you are someone who just 'got it', your ability to teach someone who doesn't might be the limiting factor.
This is the job of the manager to resolve. If that person really is incompetent rather than merely unfamiliar with the work, the manager has access to assets such as hyper-competent nice people for mentoring the less-competent, and should coordinate between the mentor and mentee to lift people out of incompetency.
My last job I could take the most incompetent beginner and make them productive. In my current one, I really can only train that social skill side.
Obviously tail behavior on either end may make training not worth it.
The problem is not the incompetent beginner. The incompetent beginner has potential for future competence.
Incompetent seniors are a bigger issue, since their future potential is usually limited, and they might still have sway due to their seniority. This is especially bad in big bureaucratic companies.
Speaking bluntly isn't what is meant by being an asshole/jerk.
What we're talking about here is the completely gratuitous, "I'm so valuable here that I can get away with it" abusive behavior that has no correlation with performative ability.
Luckily I've never hired a completely abusive and gratuitous but competent asshole but yes, I would fire that person as a matter of principle regardless of how competent they are.
But come on, are we really discussing that scenario or are we discussing the much more common scenario like someone who is about as much of an asshole as 2010s Linus Torvalds? Someone who is really competent but gets very impatient with others, has no problem stating rudely that your work is bad, that you keep making the same tiring mistakes over and over again, that you should know how to do certain things by now, that you're expected blah blah blah.
I think that's the more interesting and worthwhile discussion to have and it's the case where for my company, I decided I'll take the asshole over the nice guy.
Or we're discussing the real grey area that is genuinely difficult to deal with.
What's so difficult to deal with? You make it plain and clear to them that their competence absolutely does not give them a pass for bad behavior. And that under no circumstances will it be allowed to continue.
I've never hired a completely abusive and gratuitous but competent asshole but ... I decided I'll take the asshole over the nice guy.
What? Mealy-mouthed / "strategically nice, but selectively an asshole" is the most common type actually - and still an asshole.
Respectfully, if you think dealing with people is as simple as delivering ultimatums about their behavior then you likely have not dealt with leading teams of highly skilled professionals.
That's not what you meant. That is what a lot of other people mean.
And as with a lot of things, some people are simply wrong. Because that's not what the commonly accepted definitions of those terms are held to mean.
Can you give a concrete example of this behavior? I'm sure I can think of some, but I'd like to be more clear on what you had in mind.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35363501
Then there are all kinds of examples not specific to matters of pure and simple rudeness (e.g. all manner of politicking, manouevring and bad-mouthing that goes on), as well as not defending / standing up for others when you should, etc.
There have been plenty of serious articles written about this topic; the search term to look for would be "workplace hygiene", which is the somewhat more formal description. ("Toxic work environments", "workplace bullying" also work but tend to be more second-hand, and sometimes spammy).
Amen.
The #1 "perk" any company can offer is working with a skilled, competent team.
Birds of a feather will flock together.
The really fast moving types don't like finishing every detail of the test suite or documentation and get bored with customer feedback and meetings. They are super mega A grade ten plus ex contributors and they know what that entails, so they are always on the forefront picking up the best tools, honing them as needed, and then moving on. They know how to take credit for their lead also.
Meanwhile more modest contributors handle details and it is less easy to quantify the value of actually running through the product with customers and finding critical bugs, catching embarrassing errors in documentation, or filling in important missing test cases and so on. Some products do okay without all the i dotting and t crossing, but too much reliance on the cutting edge of tech leadership tends to show up over time in tech debt and accumulated bug overhead.
As is said, you may be capable of great things, but life consists of small things.
It’s not apples to oranges. Both should be removed, and if you have to take one or the other (and only one of each) the jerk is the bigger issue.
If you normalize the jerk level down so that the jerks are as common as the 0.1x developers, I’d take those mild jerks any day.
There's always compromises to make; just wanted to add a few more problems a competent jerk can add, long-term.
I have known a lot of insufferable people who were the only person at the company who could do what they did, but they weren't brilliant, per se. They just focused on building a moat rather than building a community. And because of that, they never really progressed past the little niche they had made for themselves (and the organization didn't need them to, so it was fine). The brilliant asshole recognizes the utility of at least having other brilliant assholes around, and so invests at least some effort in baseline social grace.
I'd wager that there's something akin to the Dunning-Kruger "mount stupid" at work here. That is, your probability of being a jerk peaks at some slightly above-average level of competence, but tapers off as competence increases, because the confidence becomes justified. Confidence can be abrasive, but hubris is always caustic.
I’ve actually worked with people who were so persistently wrong that we could generally take their assertion or approach (and they’d almost always be the first to raise a finger to start dropping knowledge on us) as definitely not the right answer, thinning the search space by one option.
It was actually kind of amazing. The one (seriously, one) time one was right about something, the room was stunned.
That said, they did not increase productivity, so we need to search for someone more perfect…
Importantly, getting rid of someone like this can actually _improve_ productivity
obviously, it's a matter of degree, but competence means paying customers because their output is externally visible and incompetence - nice or not - doesn't.
I think incompetent nice people completely destroy team culture. Competent jerks are also a problem but at least they get something done. The IT department at my company used to be full with very nice people that got absolutely nothing done (it's a bit better now). They talked nice, were good at meetings and really good at dinners after work. But at some point deadline pressure kicks in and you realize that you have to do their work if you want to finish. It causes a lot of resentment. Even worse is when nice incompetent people are gatekeepers for something you need (in this case security policies) and block your ability to make decisions.
My conclusion is that both nice and incompetent people and competent jerks need to be removed if you want to have a strong team. But if I have to choose I'll take a competent jerk because I can get at least something. Incompetent people are useless.
I have also seen an entire smallish company nearly completely collapse into itself because being a competent jerk basically became normal operating procedure and you either adapted or were bullied out of the company. Eventually the only people left were bullies and none of them could work together well enough to deliver.
I have never seen an incompetent nice employee ever do anything so damaging.
This made me realise that I'm pretty tolerant of incompetence so long as it's junior to me (where I can help them improve). But make me work for somebody incompetent and I will call them out on it, escalate it to their manager if need be, and leave pretty quickly if the situation isn't remedied.
bullshit. how many incidents are due to incompetence? how many alerts were just forgotten? how many customers churn because of low quality ux? how many additional incompetent employees were hired because your nice friend let them through? incompetence erodes culture, leads to bureaucracy and the slow death of a company.
They tend to climb management chain and then you are left with leaders who can't understand anything, that is by far worse than what any competent jerk can accomplish.
This kind of thing was something I saw when I did contract work because said competent jerks knew they could get their way.
The reason that more than half of the team were "incompetent but nice". They'd take weeks to do what other team members would do in days, and would require a lot of support too. But they'd still take headcount spots, so the team could not hire more people without firing someone first, and everyone was so nice....
"Jerk" is really too rough of a classifier; someone who communicates a bit like a jerk but is fundamentally well-meaning is someone I can work with; if you have a daily working relationship you can learn to just read over the snark or whatever.
Someone who insists on their view being forced through and will bully, insult, or use other tactics to do so is something I have a lot more problems with, as are the "this is the one true correct way and if you don't see my brilliance then you are most likely mentally retarded and should visit a hospital for an examination" type of people.
But the most common damage is done by performance not in socialization.
Large organizations are effectively superintelligences, but extremely dysfunctional ones. As soon as someone figures out how to share information and coordinate work in a large group of people, we will get our technological singularity. Even without any AI.
This sounds like many American police departments.
a) How good he was. Just like really really good quality of work.
b) How bad he was. Crying client. Regularly destroying team morale and productivity with incredible drama.
If you can't isolate the brilliant asshole in a back office somewhere, you need to get rid of them.
I'm always amazed when brilliant assholes are allowed to directly manage customer relations or co-workers.
It’s not realistic to build teams like this and this team fell apart/could not be sustained when one of the key members eventually left. But they seemed happy and delivered like crazy.
In my last job, I worked with three incompetents, none of whom were jerks, in a team of ten. I reckon the rest of us had to do twice the work to navigate their mistakes.
This is the "Please stop writing code" syndrome.
This is veering into tautological territory but "not competent enough to be useful" is where my personal definition of "incompetent" would land. ;)
I also don't want competent jerks but... neither end of this spectrum is good.
(IMO the real trick is that neither of these scales (either competence or jerkhood) is universally the same across companies. Different people interact in different ways, and different teams have different problems to solve. Putting up with bad fits on your team for too long hurts your team regardless of the precise sort of bad fit. If you've tried to coach them on what's needed for months on end already with no luck, you have to make a hard decision, and "no action" isn't actually avoiding that decision.)
And again, competence is a necessary precondition. No social skills but competent can work. Whatever you want in terms of social skills but not competent is a 100% guaranteed failure. That doesn't mean competent assholes can't fail, but they don't absolutely have to fail.
Until everybody realizes they are working harder to compensate for the dead wood on the team. The first person I ever fired was "incompetent, but nice", one of my team members said "We can always find someone who is nice AND can do the job to replace them" and that stuck with me for a long time.
If not being a jerk is such an important part of performance, maybe more company resources can be put into mental health, etc... just as training on the job skills is seen as an investment, so could that.
It's funny/strange/interesting how social skills are something that you're constantly judged on yet there are very few resources to help people with. Needing help with it is treated as more shameful than needing help with the technical aspects... at least the technical aspects were at some point explicitly taught to people!
There are some just straight up incorrigible narcissists and psychopaths, but there aren't that many, and TBH, they usually tend to have some of the best social skills... probably they're upper management already.
if you're tolerating < A players, you might want to take a hard look at yourself.
also, some businesses don't need A players bc their industry doesn't compete on technology (e.g., real estate dialers).
If their job requires a lot of communication with other people, then they're definitely grossly incompetent. If their job can be done mostly in isolation, well, they're only minimally incompetent, and maybe that can be brought along, give them a thick-skinned assistant or manager and only have them talk to that person, etc.
However, it's probably easier to train people with poor social skills in the art of getting along with others in the workplace, then it is to train those with poor grasp of complex technologies to understand them, let alone in resolving difficult bugs or finding creative solutions to novel problems.
a nice and incompetent one is common, if anything, they tend to produce more bugs then they can fix.
if I'm the boss, I will hire a competent jerk and manage him/her well, instead of feeling good with a few incompetent nice guys while the company will sink, soon or later.
the keyword is to survive you have to be competent, other things(nice vs jerk) is secondary, and that's a management's job to "fix", the incompetent-but-nice is nearly impossible to fix to me.
A competent jerk IC can be put in a corner and be productive. More or less.
That said, fire jerks and incompetent people.
Not that simple.
On an easy going project, deadlines far enough, work well defined, people know their parts, yeah you'd like a nice person on the team to have lunch with and share cat videos.
In a project with your ass on the line, real $$$ at stake, you presenting progress to management every week for a visible real promotion path, I'd bet you want a competent person regardless of how foul the language or body odor. Niceness just doesn't matter.
the $hit gets real when you find out, said competent person is just an imposter.
But there is a sweet spot though, keep the competence high, and turn the niceness knob high and low as convenient. At work, being nice is just an act after all. People can and will see through the act, but they themselves are guilty too, you're not offending anyone
Edit: Interestingly, depressed people can also bring down team morale.
And that eventually leads a team or group to stagnate. The only people who will stick around are either jerks themselves, or generally lack a back bone.
What a genius decision.
Hard disagree. They demotivate the competent. People start to wonder if they can perhaps slack off and be nice instead of delivering...
I won't. I had this dilemma before. And I chose to take incompetent people. My life became miserable. I don't care about people being rude. I feel uncomfortable with people who would like to be rude but can't because they think it's inappropriate or w/e other thing they tell themselves. Somehow, they are more disgusting than people who are open about what they think.
Plenty of posters on moderated Web user boards belong to that later category: they'd like to be rude, but try to formally obey the rules of the board and still be rude. Just enough for the moderator not to ban them.
Same kind of people who'd delete complaints about their crappy program on a public bug tracker claiming the ticket author violated their code of conduct.
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I don't like to teach. Some people get off on telling juniors what to do. Most those that I saw teaching did it to feel important in their own eyes, beside the eyes of the junior.
But when I made the mistake of agreeing to hire incompetent people, the amount of chores increased by a lot in my life. I'm also not the one to force my convictions on those I have to teach, but that led to the "students" making bad choices when it comes to the tools they decided to use. Before they've made their choice, I made it clear that if they chose tools different from those I use, it becomes their problem. Unfortunately, they wouldn't be able to deal with that problem. And so their productivity was in the negative. They would still be unable to accomplish even very basic tasks, but they would also drag me down by trying to make me solve their problems with the tools I advised against.
Instead of just being able to split the work somewhat evenly, I couldn't trust juniors to do things that required independent research -- they felt overwhelmed at such tasks and, if assigned one, would just waste my time by scheduling meetings with me to "discuss" their objectives, where, essentially, they'd expect me to do their work for them and dumb it down so that they could also understand what's being done.
I also had to report to my boss on the progress my assigned juniors were making. I felt guilty that they didn't do squat, but at the same time felt like I might become the reason for firing them, and I didn't want to be that person either. Yet, at the same time, I didn't want to do stuff like taking over their branch and finishing their task, both because I think that not even the worst programmer deserves that and because, on a personal level, I didn't want to upset them -- after all, they were nice. It's harder to be a jerk to nice people.
I don't see why based on above I need to reevaluate something about myself? Which part?
There is no incompetent nice. They are usually "nice" but they end up wasting significant time as they try to "show off their work".
There is also no competent jerk. There is bad management. Not everyone wants to train juniors or deal with them on a daily basis. There is also a set of people who wouldn't mind telling snarky comments to each other; and another set of people sensitive to any gesture you make. Put every set separate from the other.
tl;dr; There is only competent nice and incompetent jerk. Otherwise, it's a management failure.
But I got a job as a Ruby developer from resourcefulness and eagerness. It was a great company. It was clear, however, that I wasn’t pulling my weight when the intern was technically running circles around me. They do the only right thing. They made some “bare minimum” requirements in the form of an evaluation and gave me three weeks to complete it. I couldn’t do it. I was getting much better by the end of the three weeks thanks to a coworker who decided to mentor me, but it was past my ability level. When this was clear and they were firing me I said to the CTO “you can fire me, but I am getting good at learning, so I am going to just study really hard and reapply in 3 months and you’ll have to give me another chance!” I said this in a motivated way, not an insane person way. He decided he would find another spot to put me in the company.
He ended up putting me on the technical integrations team. The other person on that team was an incredibly kind human who loved teaching people. It was perfect for me. I ended up performing super well in that role and became very good at it. It was a win/win for the organization.
I will tell you one thing, however. The weeks before they gave me that evaluation were the most stressful weeks of my life. I was waking up in the middle of the night immediately stressed. It feels terrible to be bad at your job. It felt so freeing to be given the evaluation. Because it was cut and dry. I could do it or I couldn’t, but at least there would be finality. It is kind to not let someone flounder in a role that is past their abilities. I am grateful he found another spot for me to fit at the company. That CTO has passed now at a young age, but I owe my career to him recognizing my passion and finding another spot for me. Thanks Brandon Dewitt!
Mine was much smaller, just having a genuine chat with him at a hiring event without knowing who he was at the time, but it left a lasting impression. Gone too soon, unfortunately.
As someone with ADHD, I'm a solid IC and thrive at mentorship, but do not put me in an organizational role. I'm not qualified, and never will be. I still need hacks and workarounds sometimes to get the right code written at the right time, but I can do it with a bit of understanding and accommodation. The same doesn't apply to jobs that expect order out of chaos. (I'm better at going the other way, by the state of my office.)
I'll agree in principle that we can and should make space in tech for people who for whatever reason really just want to be code factories with as little human interaction as possible, but most jobs are always going to have some degree of social interaction as a requirement.
That said, "sucks if ya don't have it" is indeed a callous way of addressing the problem.
I’ve almost never seen this job switch in a company work, but I’ve almost never seen it attempted. I have seen it work many times between companies. Everyone who switches careers does it.
I think there’s a hang up around “incompetence”. Maybe it’s something inherent to the person, but you don’t have much evidence for that. The evidence is the person/job pair. So, switch up the job if the person seems good.
Sometimes when I’ve struggled with a role that doesn’t feel right and I start blaming myself I think “Not everyone can do this. What if some super smart, healthy, well adjusted person was in this role but was this bad at it. What would he do?” I imagine some baseball player, marketing genius, or renowned writer and that he ended up in this job instead of that one. I guess he’d leave? I’ve actually struggled to come up with an answer but it feels important.
It's way better than management with no technical skills whatsoever.
So no I don’t think beeing incompetent but I had not the patience and grit for software development although I loved it.
Edit: Typo
I don’t know who I’m quoting. But being able to stare at a screen for hours is the key. Relentlessly technical? Stubborn hacker?
It’s definitely not an intelligence thing. Being smart helps, but the amount of time you can passionately power through figuring out technical minutiae is often the limiting factor.
The vast majority of people don't want to have a different job than the one they signed up for.
If you sign up for engineering, you don't want sales. And vice versa. 99% of the time.
I mean if you do this, and they quit and file for unemployment, it's the same outcome as if you fired them right?
It’s illegal in Canada I don’t know about other countries. Quitting is not the same as firing, no.
Sometimes I’ve thought of that and realized how it would be wrong to label them as incompetent when they’d be a star at something else. Other times I imagine they’d somehow still have high self esteem and handle this situation super well and I try to figure what that would look like.
Compared to a new candidate, you’re getting tighter ranges on their attributes and different means. Skill is more known and expected lower. Personal compatibility is more known and expected higher. You also save a one time cost of interviewing and onboarding.
You should not usually do this. It’s just an option to consider.
They are never held accountable for hiring a bunch of pms instead of developers. If something fails, some hapless junior dev will get sacrificed for being "incompetent" when in reality the problem was management.
Yes. Using your own words "no matter the task put to them". So who is in charge of assigning tasks? How does this person assign tasks? When tasks fail to hit deadlines due to incompetent members, what happens who handles that?
You're right that there are many more incompetent nice people in general, but management is the only factor.
Incompetent team members can learn and grow from their much more competent counterparts, but not when the manager is incompetent. The manager has to actively be aware of member strengths and weaknesses to know where to assign them for best maximizing their value to the company. Without this, even competent members will wind up burning out very quickly and leaving.
I find the total lack of personal responsibility in discussions like this to be downright shocking. Again, I don't disagree that a manager can be useless, and even do active harm to a team and individuals (seen this many many times). But the notion that an individual who isn't pulling their weight, it's 100% the manager's fault... I fail to see how that could be remotely true as a general rule.
You're complaining that a manager can't be held responsible for the consequences of the most important decisions they make. I don't agree.
His quadrant scheme was Clever vs. Stupid and Hardworking vs. Lazy
"I distinguish four types. There are clever, hardworking, stupid, and lazy officers. Usually two characteristics are combined. Some are clever and hardworking; their place is the General Staff. The next ones are stupid and lazy; they make up 90 percent of every army and are suited to routine duties. Anyone who is both clever and lazy is qualified for the highest leadership duties, because he possesses the mental clarity and strength of nerve necessary for difficult decisions. One must beware of anyone who is both stupid and hardworking; he must not be entrusted with any responsibility because he will always only cause damage."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurt_von_Hammerstein-Equord
[1] what short name would you use for "General Kurt Gebhard Adolf Philipp Freiherr von Hammerstein-Equord"?
[2] opposed to hitler, btw
1. The person making the claim maybe poorly calibrated, burnt out, or have an ego
2. In so far as peers compete for political will and promotions they have a vested interest to use whatever weapons they can against others, subjective / data free ones are the low hanging fruit
3. The person being called a jerk maybe desperately trying to fix something -- the tech debt, the broken culture, overwork/oncall etc. attacking their character in this scenario is the work equivalent of victim blaming
The truth is it's maddening being the only (or minority) competent ones in the room, and with apathetic peers suddenly you're the jerk because they'd rather rest and vest than do effortful things to improve the situation.
In my matrix doing the job is the base line. Can you do the job? Are you doing the job well? Are you not being blatantly terrible? (disagreeable is fine, abusive is not) Veing able to do the job is necessary, else there's not point carrying your dead weight.
An effective strategy for dealing with this in an organisation is to move quick and minimise damage. When the shit hits the fan and this starts causing problems, its usually not because a person didnt do any work, but because they did crap work that burdened others. This is especially difficult in engineering. You can identify this and get them off the line quickly, then take the time to figure out whats happening and assist them back on track.
The development of a culture that doesn't incentive people to hoard power helps, the last thing you want is a person performing badly to be in some critical role. People should be able to back down / step up depending on their current "phase"
Source: decade+ consulting in govt.
So far in this thread I've only seen mention of:
- INcompetent and nice
- competent and NOT nice
But I as well as family and friends have also encountered the other variations, and more often than rarely. Incidentially a close relative has just had this experience in a public sector job (Health Care, Europe):
Person in question is
- competent and nice (as regards to her field of work and work ethic)
- INcompetent and NOT nice
- INcompetent and nice
- "I'll have to fire either You or the full rest of the team, but as I need hands I have only one option."
(I have seen flavours of this happening in big private enterprises too, so it's not reserved for public/govt. jobs IMHO)
There is no magic border that separates these entities, and no the fact that some are for-profit and some are not doesn't change much the day-to-day life of a cog in the machine.
I think most of the time though, someone who appears incompetent is suffering from one of three things.
1) They are being tasked with things that simply don't align with their talents. For example, there are certain tasks which are just very mathy. You can pass college calculus and still suck pretty bad at lots of math. This is a case where someone else should be doing this task.
2) They are being tasked with problems which are out of their present ability to breakdown and solve. Essentially, they haven't learned to be an engineer.
3) They have a skills gap (as mentioned in the article they need to get better with a specific tool).
I think the thing that happens by far the most with people who get managed out is that they are a #2 but people try to help them as if they are a #3.
I have been in a situation many times where I have seen other leads giving tasks to their junior engineers and then getting frustrated when their subordinates don't make progress. They try to help by pointing them to tutorials, docs, etc. but what these people often need is someone to sit with them for a significant amount of time and demonstrate how one breaks a problem down, builds small pieces that demonstrate functionality and then put those pieces together into a solution.
This is expensive because it takes time. And it takes time from some of the most skilled people on the team. As often as I have seen people fail a team, I've seen teams fail people. A Pluralsight subscription is not a substitute for mentorship. Talking about networking and career planning is not mentorship (yes I believe it is important too).
I know I've struggled in such a situation.
I say it will become increasingly common because I believe the gap between frontend and backend is growing, as frontend and backend stack choices become more complex and diverse.
The breadth of knowledge required to be a true "full stack" engineer is a multiple of what it used to be. A lot of folks calling themselves full stack engineers are kidding themselves, IMHO. I don't really see folks excelling at both aspects. Usually they excel at one half (at best) and are just slapping together sloppy crap on the other end.
It's so hard even in that case, though. And I don't just mean hard from an HR/legal standpoint (which it is). Letting someone go (and the performance improvement plan that leads to that, and the Serious Concerns conversation before that) are all exhausting, emotionally draining, and difficult from the manager's side. You like this person. This person is trying. You want to help this person. You don't want them to have to go home and tell their spouse they were fired, if there's anything you can do to get them on track. And so there's a long road ahead before making the cut.
Maybe it's easier if someone is truly 100% incompetent, but usually there's something there that will make the manager want to believe in them.
And what if this is done repeatedly for the junior engineer, and yet any initiative they show after that is still negligible?
She was in the wrong job at the wrong time. She didn't have the skillset to have a successful start. Her work patterns were unhealthy and ineffective. She couldn't learn how to unblock herself within the org, and became paralyzed by stress.
We had multiple people to compare her against who did not suffer from any of these challenges. I am sure she can find a job that will work for her, as she was nice and did have successful moments, but a fresh start was clearly needed.
Unfortunately, ADHD is not temporary. Most places will eventually let you go when you don't perform. The article is extremely generous in stating that firing is not the right choice, but for someone who is severely and permanently impaired I don't really know what the solution is either...
And like you mentioned, it's not that folks with ADHD don't want to be reliable, it's that their brains are fundamentally different. They might not be informed about any of this either, and are then left to wonder why they can't do the things they want to do.
There are things that help though, similar to the way insulin helps those with diabetes, or how glasses help those with bad vision. There are medications, therapy, and mental tools.
I'd recommend those that may suspect something like this in themselves to talk to a doctor about it. A diagnosis and treatment could change your life. It changed mine.
"People keep working, in a freelance world, and more and more of today's world is freelance,
- because their work is good, and
- because they are easy to get along with, and
- because they deliver the work on time.
And you don't even need all three. Two out of three is fine. People will tolerate how unpleasant you are if your work is good and you deliver it on time. They'll forgive the lateness of the work if it's good, and if they like you. And you don't have to be as good as the others if you're on time and it's always a pleasure to hear from you."
We're all characters. At the end of the day, some people do need to be treated a little bit differently. It's not "unfair"/"unjust", it's just called being human.
If you fire everyone who isn't some homogenous nice person we'll have pretty boring teams.
Who hasn't worked with someone a little brash, a little odd, a little immature, but if you actually took the time to get to know them is a pretty good person overall?
I worked with an engineer who clipped his nails at his desk and took his coffee into the bathroom. Socially, he could be rude. Professionally, he did not take criticism well, and liked to do things "his" way. But he was also generous with his time if you needed help. If you broached things very delicately, he could take some feedback. He was given projects to work on that allowed him to work pretty independently. And his rudeness was probably just social awkwardness, as he could be alright if you had a chat with him one-on-one.
It didn't destroy team morale. Everyone recognised he was different. He wasn't a jerk, he just had autism and/or anxiety.
Someone once said to me "meet people where they are at".
I would really like to see that article, because I've personally worked with a few brilliant jerks in my time. I'm still friends with most of them to this day. I guess I'm just good at working with them and ignoring their jerkiness, so I keep ending up working with them?
I'm not sure why the author says this but I've seen quite a few in my day.
People of this kind are really only interesting when one has the bandwidth for long, potentially uncomfortable discussions, and when one is about as smart as the other guy.
People much smarter that average usually don't have the narc-y vibe (although I'm sure there's tons of them in academia) and they usually fall under the "Nice" category. Many of these people get looked over because normal people have a very difficult time understanding what they're saying, and are hence liable to putting them in the "incompetent" category.
I don't understand. Narcotics vibe?
...as for the rest of your post the carricature that you're painting looks awfully close to ... ME. I'm quite surprised by this as I always had the perception that I was "nice" regardless if I was "competent" in my current endeavour or not.
True, I veritably thrive in the company of highly competent people with a very direct manner of speech (even as direct as to be bordering on rude/sarcasm). I've always phrased it like "I like geeks". Over the years such company has not been the typical company for me so I've worked in roles where others were less than competent too - also in roles where I was the incompetent person (typically in intro while learning).
Being exposed to multiple types of colleagues and work roles/environments throughout some decades has allowed me to "soften up" some and if I may say so myself I tend to get along very well with "the normies" these days.
I see it as, like, people have priorities. And for a lot of people what they do on the job is not a priority in any other respect than to raise the financial means for whatever they do outside of work.
So they will (deliberately or not) aim for a competence/productivity level somewhere above the level that leads to layoffs but not much more. If they're intelligent that is.
And, saying this I also have to state that it seems like competence/productivity and intelligence need not be correlated that much.
And yes, you sound like the kind of people I was describing, but you seem to be very conscentious and don't have executive dysfunction. Some of these people have (at times) crippling executive dysfunction owing to their extreme stubbornness, so if you were to ask two different people about them you'd get completely different opinions. Someone would say the guy was the dumbest idiot ever, a complete bore; the other would say that he was so very charming and full of wit. It's somewhat like a child's view of the world, giving up on keeping a mask, being direct and growig in a more organic fashion without looking for "anchors" for "self-growth".
IMO these are the best people because they intervene before a company or team veers too far off course.
This is definitely a skill. You can have, what seems to be, a bunch of jerks working together but they all have thick-skin so being a jerk to one another doesn't really affect any of them. Effectively hiring for this team is an exercise in finding people who think like they do.
Good meshing of personalities can override the predictions of the incompetent/niceness matrix in the article.
But, this person was very, very nice to everyone. It made it harder to see the problem.
How I solved this: I sat down with the person and "explained common sense." I pointed out that, when they were on the phone with the customer, the customer wanted them to solve our problem. They needed to be an expert in our product so that they could do their best to solve the customer's problem on the phone without 4-6 back and forth. I also pointed out that it was very embarrassing for us to ask for "obvious" information after the initial support contact, when they knew that I would ask for "obvious" information. (Like a clear explanation of the problem, or just very basic clarifying questions.)
I then pointed out a very clear example where the director of support really dropped the ball. The customer was trying to share something and was typing in the wrong email address. I simply shouldn't have been involved, because the kind of troubleshooting I was doing was something that the "director of support" should be knowledgeable enough to diagnose, understand, and figure out.
They quit the next day.
1. Nice, but clearly (in retrospect unfortunately) had some kind of executive function disorder like ADHD. I fired them and, later, helped them get their next job which they excelled at. They bought me a beer when they got promoted.
2. Really Nice, just had terrible long term memory, would constantly forget critical details about what they were working on. They wrote everything down but couldn't process it into long term memory, they would even forget they wrote it down. Could fix small bugs all day but couldn't work on anything that required multiple days of effort as they would forget everything by the next morning.
3. Really Nice, could not work remote. Sort of combo of the first two, bad memory and bad focus.
4. Really Nice, worked with them at a previous company, totally burnt out before coming in at the new place. I literally could not believe it was their code that a co-worker was complaining about and had to check the commit logs. Actually, this has happened twice to me.
In general, the bigger problem is nice but on the threshold between good and competent ... those people stay on forever and can drain a lot of resources as you try to move them fully into the "nice and competent" category.
I have very limited experience of running organisations. But I think that if your organisation is small, then it can't afford incompetent people, even if they're nice. That means that I think that to run a small organisation, you have to be a jerk, otherwise you're incompetent.
I failed to sack a probationary employee before the probabtion period ended; I thought he would come up to scratch. Also, I had no taste for sacking people. I was wrong, and I cost the company money. I was nice, and I should have been a jerk. Ergo, I'm not competent to run a small organisation.
[Edit] Incompetent people, however nice, are a permanent drag on everything. If they can't be taught, then they have to be removed. You can't make your other staff carry them forever.
Your decision cost the company and likely also that person. You kept him on in a position he was either going to still get fired from, quit, or cost the company more than his paycheck.
All because you didn't want him to have a bad opinion of you. You wanted to seem like a good guy so you avoided doing the thing everyone needed done. You caused everyone way more problems for your selfish ego.
That's a jerk move. You weren't really nice.
The nice thing to do would have been to acknowledge the hard truth in front of you and cut him during the probationary period.
He was a career academic, this was his first job on the coalface. I really thought he'd improve. Of course, I didn't want to fire him, because I wouldn't want to be fired myself. So there was a strong element of wishful thinking, of which I was fully aware. Basically I took the "easy path", so I was lazy, although I didn't see it that way at the time.
Your remark about my ego is simply wrong, not justified by what little you know about me from my comment, and insulting.
FWIW, I had discussed this fellow with my own manager, who was on the other side of the Atlantic. His attitude was that it was entirely my decision; I think that was meant as some kind of management training - like, "toughening me up". This manager told me that he loved firing people.
I personally liked my manager, but I think he was a jerk, and not a good manager. He was very technically competent. One day he turned against me for reasons I never learned. There was a redundancy programme just starting, and I left with a nicer redundancy package than I'd have got if I'd waited (every cloud...).
Seeing yourself in him is investing him with your ego. This is not an insult, it's the core of the behavior. It is why we do these things. They are ego-preserving actions we take. Because I'm literally talking about your sense of self and not using it in a colloquial sense.
And seeing yourself in him is what you are doing when you say you didn't want to fire him because you wouldn't want to be fired. You are saying he should feel a certain way because you would feel a certain way. You are the Platonic person other people are templated off of.
And you can deny it, but all the reasons you give circle it. We often care too much about how we are perceived by others and often try to influence that even though we have very little control over it.
One should not love firing people either. That's a whole other thing.
assholes respect competence and push out shitty performers.
we've all been sold a lie.
Two reasons:
1. At least in some cases they know they're not doing a good job and they likely have anxiety about when they're going to get let go. Ripping the bandaid off and firing them is kind of putting them out of their misery.
2. Probably the more common scenario is that the Nice Guy's incompetence starts to affect the people around them. If Nice Guy is so incompetent that other people have to pick up their slack and fix their mistakes people end up getting upset that they have to do extra work to address Nice Guy's shortcomings. If you remove Nice Guy from anything meaningful and only give them work with no deadlines or consequences for failure, other people eventually start to resent the fact that Nice Guy gets all the easy work.
Hey, am I, or we, actually talking about autistic traits vs narcissistic traits? Not sure. Wasn’t my intention going in, just wanted to point out that nice people have coping strategies too, and their incompetence might just be that they don’t prioritise trying to be good at their job and find their success in ways I personally find manipulative and toxic far more than someone being directly rude.
To reword the top comment: the incompetent destroy team morale, make good people leave, and paralyse junior employees and those lacking confidence/assertiveness. They may contribute to a friendly environment, but they burden others. Jerks, as long as they are not so jerky as to be abusive, can at least contribute to a strong team culture by stripping away uncertainty and fluff and make less assertive but competent people want to show up and succeed.
Final reword: the need for jerks increases the more BS is in the system. A system with enough BS will produce jerks out of necessity.
- INcompetent and NOT nice
"He is then told by another Official about Tortuous Convolvulus, a natural troublemaker whose mere presence causes arguments, quarrels and fights."
1. Too mentally ill to do ANY job. ( 99.9% of the time it is just untreated anxiety or ADHD they have avoided treatment for )
2. Not doing any work and deflecting when people start to smell their stink.
Either way: this "nice but incompetent" person stresses out, nay, TORTURES the rest of the team trying to wipe their ass and keep them afloat.
"They're nice but..." No they aren't nice. They are emotional vampires sucking the blood from the rest of the team. Put them on a PIP, and if they don't improve fire them.
I've seen enough ruined dreams and burned out engineers to no longer feel pity for the "nice but..." people. I cannot be atlas carrying the burden of everyone else's problems. And it is unfair for someone to ask that of me.
Coming from a poor family, with a background of financial struggles, it always upsets me how kind we all are with nice and incompetent people while they are earning their 100k+$ for no value they deliver.
They most probably both are privileged and get paid more, than 90% of world population. They are just utterly lazy. So why do they deserve the $$$$?
I unfortunately fall in the category of "brilliant asshole", based on the feedbacks. And this is mostly coming from the bitterness that is triggered by the "incompetent but nice". The other "brilliants" and "the bests" like to work with me and I also love them.
At my current job, I'm asked to work on myself on a daily basis because of this. But deep down I feel I won't ever be "cured" from it; I'll be kind to the "incompetent but nice" but will always loathe their laziness.
First of all, your feelings are completely valid. It’s perfectly reasonable you feel the way you do.
But, those aren’t feelings you need to express outwards or let other people know you have. Think very carefully about what you want to say, say exactly that, and keep your mouth shut for everything else.
Silently hate everyone in your heart - you’re not a bad person for this. But if you open your mouth about (and what do even gain from that?) then you risk flushing your career down the toilet when you run into the wrong executive
No exposure to information, no chance to reflect (rephrase my opinion) on them. Win-win for the company, the colleagues and myself.
I wouldn't go as far as I "silently hate everyone in my heart", though :-) But clearly I (we all) have to be mindful about communication with colleagues and that executive you mention, and not to think they are friends of yours who you are expected (as Plato taught) to reflect on.
Sometimes the incompetent nice person multiplies the productivity of a team through morale, creativity and by offloading simpler tasks from more competent people.
The same goes for the competent jerk, who can be a 10x in output but also 1/100 overall by creating a completely toxic environment.
(My pet theory is that the entire reason humans have such insane metastasized intelligence relative to other species is that we got ourselves into an evolutionary arms race with ourselves where we needed greater and greater intelligence in order to distinguish in-group people in our tribe from bad actors in other tribes trying to exploit us. Ants are lucky because each colony just smells different.)
We do no one a kindness when we allow someone to continue to make mistakes that could be prevented. Sometimes, the kindness is letting them fail. To feel the weight of the mistake. So they gain the experience they need. So sometimes, we need to tell someone simply "No". And some people will call you a jerk for that.
On the other hand, after you've spent so many resources attempting to train someone, continued incompetence is not "being nice". Someone who is truly nice would see that the skill is beyond them and remove themselves. Only a jerk would insist on maintaining a position they've demonstrated a repeated inability to perform. And only a jerk would try keeping them there.
Incompetent but nice does not exist. Or, if it does, it does not exist for long. Either the person stops being incompetent or they stop being nice.
Measuring performance is also not entirely straightforward and objective as we want it to be, and the two axes may blend into each other when it comes time for reviews. In a peer review scenario, that nice colleague gets a boost.
There are also varying degrees and types of incompetence. If someone is willing to learn, that's a lot different than someone who is knowingly slacking off and relying on others to pick up the slack. I'd argue that the latter is not exactly "nice" behavior.
Also, while only 15 to 20 percent of people qualify as officially disabled, studies suggest that at least 60 percent of people have some degree of impairment that would benefit from accommodation.
I suspect the above two factors are the root cause of seemingly nice people who are seemingly resistant to change and just can't get their act together.
These days, even just getting oneself adequately fed without excess time and expense seems to be a challenge for a large number of people. We have a variety of services trying to address that issue but, really, it probably needs something more like a cultural shift to address it effectively.
People need hardship in order to become conditioned to life. Depriving them of it does no one any favours. Ask your grandparents how they lived when they were in their 20s - what they ate, how convenient their lives were, how accommodated they felt by their employers. The answer here is less accommodation, not more. Sink or swim. Most people, when faced with the choice of hard work or real destitution, will choose hard work. This is the cultural shift you're looking for.
Working together and accommodating others is probably one of the strengths we’ve actually failed to foster in the contemporary context, to our detriment. The atomization of the individual and the cult of silent suffering is something they’d balk or pity us for.
The influence of our relationships, and who we know, on our worldview is certainly fascinating.
https://www.ncpedia.org/history/20th-Century/1920s#:~:text=I....
It is now 78.9 years.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1040079/life-expectancy-....
We can deal with the reality that a lot of people are alive today who cannot work long and hard yet still need to support themselves.
Or we can continue to whine about how the world is broken and unfixable and talk about UBI -- aka a universal dole -- as our imagined solution while not actually implementing it, I guess.
Your initial post referenced ~60% of people are impaired to the degree that they need explicit accommodation. They can't all be over 60, the demographics just don't work.
1. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/life-expectancy-at-age-15...
They may be incapable of doing those tasks themselves but no one acts like they should. A lower level employee who has trouble spelling may be deemed incompetent. A higher level employee who can't spell gets automatic accommodation in the form of having their administrative assistant deal with their correspondence or check their writing if they write something themselves.
There were a lot of things different in the past compared to today. In the time of President Lincoln, average education level for adult women was second to fourth grade. At one time, it was fairly common for people working on farms and the like to stop attending school after 8th grade.
With an increasingly complex society, the expectations for "basic" competency at a lot of things is more demanding than it once was. This is not about feeling sorry for a few whiners. This a societal shift and we can figure out how to do this better or crash and burn.
Companies provide executive assistants to the employees whose time they value most. I agree that our society is getting more complicated and demanding. I just disagree that it follows we should be forced to take the incapable along for the ride instead of just letting them abjectly fail. The bar is getting higher. That means the average person will have to be more capable to succeed. All of this is fine.
Re: executive assistants, I suspect LLMs will make the point moot within a decade.
Expecting people to suffer hardships and learn to work harder instead of using simple tools to improve their productivity is just bizarrely cruel.
And, generally, they do buy those things for themselves. Though plenty of employers will allow employees to expense these sorts of things, along with tools like ergonomic keyboards. They're cheap, in comparison to the cost of employees.
Hell, maybe that's the example I should have led with. Some non-disabling health conditions might put someone at a heightened risk for carpal tunnel syndrome. Ergonomic tools seems like a no brainer, compared to hardship and learning to work harder.
I said no such thing. Just making the observation that if people fail to change adequately to keep their job, there is probably an underlying reason.
I spoke of a need for cultural change in details like how we feed ourselves. You making this about an expectation that it is entirely on employers to cater to the needs of whiny, incompetent losers or something is just that: You framing it that way. I did not frame it that way.
1. This is why it's important to give as objective feedback as possible to employees, and to have it tracked over time. If someone is really nice but not performing, often times it's hard for them to see because they are working really hard.
2. See if there is a place where the person can maximize their value even if it's working on something else. I've seen people move out of software dev because they were just fundamentally slow coders, yet they thrived in other positions.
3. I think it's important to not let it fester. If it does, it usually ends badly for everyone.
The thing that's difficult is that software engineering is notoriously impossible to measure productivity in a purely objective/automatic way that can't be gamed. This contrasts with something like, for example, a sports player: if you're a baseball pitcher but your stats don't cut it, nobody cares how nice you are.
That's why I think it's important to, as much as possible, set expectations and review them frequently with employees.
The nice/jerk axis is way too vague. "Nice"... in what way exactly, and who cares? Being a "jerk" is only a problem when it gets in the way of communication. Bad communication is incompetence, so the nice/jerk scale is not independent.
If you're relying on employees to do anything, you need to trust them. If you want them to accurately report problems, then if they lie for advantage or send grudges up the chain, you're not going to get accurate information. If you want them to handle sensitive data without stalking their ex, you need to trust they'll do that.
And the task of management is to build effective orgs out of whomever you have, not some pretend ideal. Even start ups hiring the first person for each position are bounded by the universe of people. My best work experiences have been ones where a group of people united by a common vision worked well together, using each person for their strengths, built things greater than any of the parts.
You don’t get there by pitting people against one another.
A nice guy but we really didn't want him messing with the code.
He was the unofficial leader of a group of people I named "The Defect Generators".
I was billing by the hour at the time, so I viewed him (and them) as a revenue source.
There are people contributing in a real way to the livelihood of everyone else at the company. Some of them are in the bottom right. But, as pointed out here, some of them are in the top left. Without them, the company does not progress as well. Not because of their technical contributions, but on their "soft skill" contributions.
Also, there are people not contributing in a real way to the livelihood of everyone else at the company. Some of them are in the top left. But some of them are in the bottom right. Without them, the company progresses better. Not because they produce bad technical contributions, but because their lack of "soft skill" has a real bad impact.
I think that when you say "they are much more rare" is maybe because you are taking a subgroup of the bottom right: the ones that are beneficial to the company. The thing is: in order to identify a "technically super competent" person, you need 1) a technically super competent person, 2) that this person is not using his technical competence in a way that make look them incompetent because they are producing beautiful code misaligned with what the company wants to do or that breaks the efforts of colleagues. If the condition number 2 is not satisfied, this person is still part of the bottom right, but you don't notice they are part of the bottom right, because people would not call this person "competent" (because "competent" != "technically competent").
1. they have potential, but consistently get in their own way. they need therapy or a new career path, which is outside of the scope of a managers job to correct.
2. some engineers are not that talented. even the most senior of ICs can plateau — some just do it at lower levels.
3. some have no ambition to improve or aren’t invested in their jobs and no amount of cajoling or incentives will fix it.
Reject the notion that you can only find jerks to get the competency you need. Just be sure they are willing to work for the team. Some will be real nice, the rest will learn to get along. Make expectations very clear up front and be willing to fire for bad behavior.
They pitch their idea to you. It's a terrible idea that for a billion obvious reasons will fail.
What to do? Do you want to be the person to crush somebody's dreams?
It's much easier to say to somebody that they made a mistake compared to saying that they simply suck at something and don't have what it takes.
For the people that performed well, despite their personalities, my team was a dream job, unless they were so bad that they broke the team (see "stress meltdown," above). I didn't really tolerate folks that wouldn't work well with others (lower right quadrant).
I was fortunate enough to work with folks that fit in the upper right quadrant. I don't think I ever had anyone up in the corner. Most were near the middle, sometimes, middle right. My bosses tended to be lower right.
Me? Depends on who you ask. I was probably middle top, for folks that worked well, and lower right, for folks that did not. Most of the folks that worked for me were technically better than I was, and that was fine.
I didn't run a day camp, and did not insist that everyone be on the same "psychic wavelength," or whatever. I hired experienced people with diverse backgrounds and drivers. It was my job to manage each one, individually.
* You can't call them out on non-performance, "they're nice".
* You get blamed for the failures, even when they're the fault of these incompetent people. After all, they had 10 meetings with you and 50 meetings with management, you have 5. Why didn't you bring things up in those meetings (which, of course, you did)
* Obviously these people are extremely threatened if you request they do something, or call them out for not doing it. So you will get "extreme" responses and backstabbing in response
* ... and if you refuse to work for them, you're a jerk.
So can someone please explain to me how to work with these people? I've failed in this many, many times. In most cases the problem is attitude. They're incompetent because they fundamentally don't care, which I must say makes it so much easier to be nice, even I can do that.
But e.g. pointing them to documentation or courses doesn't really work and actually has negative effects on what little work they do in the short term.
incompetence erodes culture, leads to bureaucracy and the slow death of a company.
assholes will help you push out incompetent employees
The post tries to recognise that it's not as easy as this:
> you try to help them level up: pay for classes, conferences, and/or books; connect them with mentors or coaches; figure out if something’s in the way and remove the blocker.
The reason the post can't come up with an answer is that there isn't one that we like.
Because at a simplistic level, it's a blocker. Maybe they have the knowledge, but not the experience. Maybe they have the experience, but not the organisation skills to make use of the experience. Maybe they have the organisation skills, but not the discipline to use them. Maybe they have the discipline, but not the discernment to know how to keep or retrieve good useful notes. Maybe Tim's just a bit dim.
Once we know what that blocker actually is, maybe - just maybe - we can find a way to overcome it or mitigate it.
But it's hard - because however nice Tim is, every fibre of his being wants to smooth over the cracks in his ability. The nagging pain that fuels his impostor syndrome doesn't want to be found - he wants to blend in, he doesn't want to be embarrassed or called out. And even if he tries his hardest to open up to his equally nice boss, he may not be able to articulate why he gets himself into hot water. He might not even know himself what the blocker is. (Unknown unknowns, and all that.)
Traditional corporate wisdom would have Tim "fail upwards", because by the time his "blocker" is noticed, it's easier than firing him. As much as we hate this good fortune that seems to reward the incompetent, it quite often works and ends up being in the best interest of the company; the skills that are missing from a "worker" are probably not needed in a manager, and being a people-person at heart who trust his reports... well, that may make him a far better manager than many of his peers.
It's not a nice answer, but it's an answer that unfortunately seems proven to work.
I think my question will be lost due to the high amount of input, but how can I survive if I am the "competent asshole" type?
So the problem with the reasoning in the article is discussing niceness and competence as dichotomies, while in fact they are scales and you can be much more incompetent when you are nice, but there still is a limit.
This is very related, but not at all the same, as this essay I just published:
Team-oriented, outcome-oriented
https://blog.sbensu.com/posts/team-oriented-vs-outcome-orien...
Summary:
Some people are more motivated by caring for their teams, others are by achieving outcomes.
If you are operating under the "sports team" analogy, you should fire them. If you are operating under the "we are a family" analogy, you should find reduced roles where they are useful. Different organizations choose different base analogies but it is easy to tell which one you are in.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0708904/
Three problem crew; one is a hypochondriac, one is competent jerk, one is very nice but incompetent and the captain tries to fix them all.
The websites he built were so embarrassingly bad, I could only list my main customer, who I was almost exclusively contracted to, as my employer. The risk of being linked to his work was too great.
He came on early and did quite well cash-wise when the company went public. He just wasn't good at programming.
I work with a number of sociopathic-leaning assholes who vary in talent. Mostly insist they have a monopoly good ideas and everyone else is wrong. There are some nice people with talent too. There aren't any people without talent around.
(I jest. But not all the way.)
You don’t hire them, but you go out for beers with them.
trust vs performance
he’s also fresh out of undergrad, so i think he’ll get the mentorship and runway approach.
As a capitalist business, you have to fire people who can't do the work, or you can't find work that they can do, so long as you don't destroy morale by doing that.
But as a society, it's a human right to work or at least 'earn a living', even people who are not competent.
And honestly I think sometimes our current brand of rabid financial capitalism is the reason people won't do the work, seeing the owner drive a Ferrari while they struggle with rent, amid wage freezes and layoff threats.
So I don't know the answer, apart from violent revolution, lol.
A general thought is: For someone A to have a good job as an employee, there has to be an employer B who creates that good job. So, if A is pretty good, useful, valuable, etc. for B, then maybe A should just start and run their own business. E.g., the guy who used two old Dell computers as Web servers, wrote software using .NET, and, alone, built the romantic match making service Plenty of Fish. Then he wanted to sell, hired a lot of people, and sold out for $500+ million. He seems to be an example of a lot of advice including "Build and provide something people, maybe a lot of people, want."
So, that's what I'm trying to do -- build something a lot of people want. Currently my .NET code is 100,000 lines of typing and 20,000+ programming language statements. I got delayed by some unpredictable, exogenous influences but am making good progress now.
But to respond to the OP, my experience being a technical employee is not much like what is in the OP.
Here are some lessons from that school of hard knocks:
(1) Don't Be Very Good. My experience is that if work to be really good, if are really good, even if just are seen as working hard to be really good, that is commonly seen as a firing offense.
Why? If you are good, making important contributions, maybe are close to essential, then you can get some power, and the power can scare nearly everyone else. In simple terms, to some extent, an organization is a fight for power. So, it's a fight.
(2) Goal Subordination. Business schools commonly teach a whole course in goal subordination. So the idea is that the organization has goals but a lot of the management subordinates those goals to their own advantage in the power struggle. So, such managers can gain while the organization suffers. Uh, remember this if become a manager of managers!
(3) People or Things. There is an old remark, way too simple but still with some truth, still approximately true, possibly a significant factor among many others: "Growing up, boys pay attention to things and girls, to people." Commonly girls and young women are much better with people than boys and young men of the same age. So, the girls (females) can be better at pleasing others, at the OP's "nice to work with". The difference here between the genders can be extensive, say, run wide and deep.
(4) Human Resources (HR). The OP mentioned HR: It appears that somehow, to a significant extent, the people in HR can be especially skilled at working with people and especially sensitive to the related issues. So, some guy really good with technical material and things can easily offend the HR people. E.g., early in my career I was hired under a special HR program and occasionally asked HR about the promised evolution of the program. The HR response was somewhat worse than had I been proposing to drop into boiling oil kittens, puppies, and babies, in particular their babies. They arranged to get me fired. We never communicated in English what they were upset about, but still they worked hard to get me fired.
In my decades of experience, more generally, commonly in practice "easy to work with" is more about manners in a Victorian Royal garden party than anything about the actual work. Or maybe borrow from a politician who wants to make sure never to offend any group, even a small group, even just one person so always speaks in highly ambiguous statements about widely accepted thoughts, positions, etc.