How to deal with passive-aggressive text communication from your subordinates | Hacker News Reader

How to deal with passive-aggressive text communication from your subordinates

respectfulleadership.substack.com

18 pointslkrubner12 comments

As I read it, the actual problem during the initial Slack conversation was that Pei did not understand who the author was and why he was there. And it's completely the author's fault! He started the conversation with deliberately obtuse corp-speak:

> I'm eager to hear your ideas about how the company should move forward. What are the biggest problems? What are the biggest opportunities? Can we schedule some time to talk?

Instead he should have started with the plain truth, something like:

> I am a hired gun working directly for the CTO. To be quite frank, I am here because senior management is extremely concerned about state of the company's tech stack, and they want an outsider's perspective about what changes should or should not be made. In a couple of weeks, I will write up my report which will land directly on the CTO's desk. You are the most experienced Rails engineer in the company, so any insight and suggestions you have would be invaluable. I would like to schedule an hour's meeting with you within the next few days to pick your brain.

Not to toot my own horn, but that second example is almost verbatim how I talk with engineer, and pretty much anybody who knows how to specify a problem and devise hypotheses for solutions.

I’ve been told that this is approach is completely different and depending on who you are either refreshed unnerved shocked excited etc…

Generally, the people that have the hardest time with this kind of direct approach, have the least capacity or ability to actually build or change or implement something. Think along the lines of chief of strategy, often times it’s a COO, most likely though it’s somebody within the sales BD realm who is non-technical, or somebody in the operational side who is not technical but was put into a technical leadership role.

Alternatively, people who really love this have been waiting to be empowered to do what they know is correct but have generally been impeded by other people who have opaque goals. These are mid-level software engineers, junior software engineers, often times though it’s most impactful to senior engineers who are super cynical or burnt out and just playing out the clock.

That tweet at the end is the real lesson:

    You "highly educated" folk have built a bizarre world of human interaction that isn't human in the least. I read the entire article. If someone is negatively affected by that interaction, they do not understand what real conflict is. Like, at all.

People who get offended by passive aggressiveness as benign as what was described in the article, do one simple thing. Please go visit another part of the country. Or the world. See how they talk. Different cultures (even subcultures in the US) are more direct and blunt. Other are very circumspect and shy with criticism.

A person from one side of the spectrum will find it grating to interact with those on the other side. But that feeling goes away over time, with one simple tip - assume everyone has good intentions. Because most people do.

I've been a manager for quite some time. This person shouldn't be in software management.

This is just how a lot of software engineers talk. They are factual, direct, and speak their mind from their perspective with no regards to your feelings. If you can't handle this, you shouldn't work on the industry in any function required to work with SWEs

> They are factual, direct, and speak their mind from their perspective with no regards to your feelings.

Passive-aggressiveness is the opposite of being direct.

I'm fully in support of being factual, direct, and speaking one's mind.

Pei was arrogant, condescending, and behaved in a cowardly manner.

In my opinion, it's the manager that is being arrogant, condescending and behaving in a cowardly manner.

Arrogant: shows no respect for the senior programmer's knowledge of the system

Condescending: saying things like "Fantastic!" and not allowing Pei to speak up

Behaving in a cowardly manner: instead of being open to switching to Kubernetes if that is the better option, he acts like he will have no discussion on the topic and that his opinion should be respected no matter the truth.

> How well do you know Ruby On Rails? There is a kind of Zen to Ruby. Some people get it and some people don't. Let's plan at some point some practice sessions to make sure you are up to speed. If you plan major architectural achievements that require us to work together, you'll find Rails will be a good playground for that. I'll make sure your skills are current and you are able to work in Rails.

The programmer starts this message by challenging the consultant’s expertise.

They go on to cast themselves as the superior, there to evaluate the consultant’s performance.

It’s a bizarre exchange demonstrating the programmer’s arrogance.

—-

The first message from the consultant was about welcoming ideas so I do think the way he dismissed Kubernetes was wrong.

The reasoning against is sensible but it’s only revealed after pushback on the initial shutdown.

He also shows himself to be out of touch with the comments on how Pei could have earned that money himself. Once a company has assessed your value to them, it’s heavily anchored and difficult to move.

The message is arrogant but it seems very direct to me. He directly asks if you know what you're talking about. And assumes you don't, offering a way to help.

This is blunt and uncaring, but is in no way passive aggressive. The engineer probably didn't even mean to be aggressive. I read this as he fully believes the consultant has no idea what he's talking about.

> To be clear, this company paid me an absurd amount of money to come in and help them reorganize. They paid me so much that afterwards I was able to take a one year vacation, to sit out the rest of the pandemic and focus on personal projects.

The real problem here is that the CEO and CTO were unable to marshal the resources of the company to address core business problems and they consequently wasted a lot of money on an outside consultant.

That's low competence. The CEO and the CTO should both be sacked.

Do people really describe their team as "subordinates"? I lost any sympathy for this person just from the title. Maybe 'immediate inferiors" might work, or maybe just plebs.

Sounded like the solution was to tell them that they've been out-ranked. That's the part that was missing from the text conversation. After that, of course they'll be meek.

"We won't ever run Kubernetes ourselves.", incompetent moron.

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