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> I asked Reddit and TeamBlind how to best deal with this kind of situation > a lot of them, 99% of the answers go along these lines "Who the fuck cares man > So, that was my wake up call

Let me get this right, you discovered your team was mediocre, you then asked the clinically cynical folks at Reddit for advice, people you don't even know and people who certainly don't know you, and the conclusion you walked away with was that it wasn't worth caring because there's cynics on the internet?

If you're adopting a "Who the Fuck Cares" attitude, the highest form of it you can reach is not giving a flying fuck about what anons on the internet say.

Now, as an anon, I won't bother to give you advice, but I'll tell you what works for me. I found a team that is intelligent and passionate and enjoys their work, and a startup with talented founders that I respect, and I am far happier than I would ever be working at a mediocre company or team. I feel better as a person, I learn better, challenge myself more, and feel more accomplished by surrounding myself with other highly competent people.

+100 get advice from people in your life who care about you and can contextualize your situation.

But that's the same answer? Like, the answer you're giving is still a WTFC answer - it's just "leave".

The things that are broken at that company, which are the things people keep reacting to in this thread as "why is service X so bad?"... they're going to stay broken. It's still not caring.

In the tradeoff between [rest and vest] vs [leave for higher standards], I think the second option is better, and “more care-y”. At the very least, it shows the company that there is a problem, and doesn’t squander talent. You’re right that there are even more care-y paths though — potentially op could continue to escalate the issue, train all his coworkers, or work crazy hours to fix the problem themself. There is a limit to what an individual can do though, so I don’t feel anyone is obligated to take the most care-y paths

But this thread here has either misinterpreted or willingly ballooned the problem up, into this strawman of an unfixable culture or a terrible company which no one engineer could possibly fix...

The OP here, basically has a simple (and common!) 3-way collaboration/communication problem:

- OP did not get along with 1 single fellow coworker that he was assigned to work with; this coworker reportedly does not listen to reason, does not read the research or background info that OP shared, etc.

- OP tried to seek help from a manager/lead type person, but that person was also not useful (i.e. not able to force a course-correction towards better collaboration).

Note: OP did not actually indict his entire team, or the entire eng organization, as all being hopelessly useless. OP said he had a problem with 2 specific people, and asked for tips to deal with that (small!) scenario. But instead of giving "small" advice for a "small" (and again, common and usually fixable/at-least-improvable) problem, both the toxic hive-mind as well as the HN commentators here have completely avoided trying to solve the actual root issue (which isn't nearly the impossibly-large-turnaround effort that everyone's making it out to be)... What we have here, is fundamentally an XY problem (https://xyproblem.info/), in that OP asked for help with X, but got advice about Y.

EDIT: Okay so I guess I should offer some concrete advice to OP for what I'm calling his "small" original problem -- usually there are 2 categories of options from this point: either escalate again, or try to resolve interpersonally without escalation.

- Escalation route: OP tried the 1st manager/tech-lead, who couldn't bring a resolution... that's... pretty common actually! So escalate 1 more level, calmly and professionally. Whether it's a skip-level director/VP, or a project manager, or whichever stakeholder is appropriate in OP's context -- explain politely what steps you have tried to solve the problem so far, why the counter-proposal / alternative is bad or won't work, and emphasize that you are still happy to collaborate further, but you are currently at an impasse and need a more senior person to weigh in. Then, OP needs to be prepared to "disagree and commit", if the decision doesn't go his way. NOTE: if the decision doesn't go his way, it could mean 1 of 2 things: a more senior person brought in extra context or expertise that OP did not know about and hence made a better decision that OP can learn to appreciate, OR it could mean everyone is an idiot and OP is the only sane person in the company... there's no reason to jump to the most negative conclusion as the only one, but certainly I acknowledge it's possible (I just don't think it's good advice to assume the worst, without even trying a simple +1 extra round of escalation... OP could at least try 1 more time).

- Non-escalation interpersonal route: OP can find a professional way to say to the problematic coworker, "frankly, I still disagree with your approach, and it's my job to document my disagreement with our manager(s), but at the end of the day, if you insist on doing it your way, then go ahead". Sometimes, the only/best way to learn, is to let someone else try and fail. This isn't callousness or retribution, this is actually a common lesson for mentors who might otherwise struggle to try and protect their mentees from ever possibly making a mistake or being wrong about something... an overbearing/overprotective mentor would need to learn how/when to take a step back, to let a mentee try and fail and learn-how-to-learn from their failures. Of course, OP is not this coworker's mentor, and does not need to feel obligated to assume that role, but I am simply pointing out that letting someone go off and do something you disagree with, can actually be an act of caring (rather than a form of not-giving-a-fuck).

Ya, I agree with you. I don’t want to malign op without context, but I also worry that they might be overconfident, or over indexing on an unimportant detail. I think it’s hard to give detailed advice without more info

That's not WTFC. The WTFC peeps were telling them to collect a check and not bother caring.

If you care enough to leave, you actually do care about the quality of your work. No, you can't fix other people, but you can change your environment.

i think most people are gonna follow advice that they tend to agree with - if the reddit advice was "drive off a bridge" i'm sure he wouldn't. he probably read the opinions, realized he had the same opinion, and adopted it

The problem is that if you start caring too much when other people don't you become a target. People blend in because it works. You can't fix a fucked culture, you just can't. So either leave or become one of the pact.

Companies, for the past 50 years at least, have greatly incentivized little worker bees over revolutionaries. They don't want someone to fix things or tell them they're wrong. They don't want superstars, they want drones, they want yes men, they want useful idiots. And, well, they got it.

In my first job after graduating I've found:

* programmer that worked maybe 2h/day, but was otherwise very important to one of the oursourced projects, so he got away with it and was publicly laughing about it without ever getting reprimanded

* devops guy that insisted on using his magic copy-pasted shitty shell scripts instead of any popular config management tool at the time, simply to make it harder for anyone else to take his duties, also no monitoring, just call him when something breaks

* junior dev, that routinely spent 2-3 days on a simple bugfix, that later had to be reassigned to a senior that fixed it in 15 minutes without any context from the junior dev, that situation was apparently okay for the company, because a clueless client paid by hour and had no idea it keeps happening all the time

* tester, who after half a year figured out that his manual testing isn't quantifiable at all, as long as he claims that everything is working to make management happy, so he found a second job

So, I'm in the WTFC camp since, I guess, a month of working in IT.

It sounds like you should be able to run the table with so little competition. Why not engage, take on more responsibility, and obviously stand out to get more money and influence?

Because, as has been mentioned innumerable times in this thread, going through all that extra effort does not get you more money. It gets you more stress and a target on your back when you make a mistake.

Bingo - sorry, this was a mostly rhetorical question.

When you perform well at work and you do NOT get a share of the profits then all you shall be rewarded with is more work. Why? WTFC???

Because you won't be rewarded with money and influence while still having the same risks of layoffs.

At this point you're better off working on your own thing because the company is usually, always with few exceptions mind you, a dishonest actor that is openly hostile.

The elites can't blame the state of the world on workers when they've created out hellscape of treadmills to delusion and abandonment.

Yep. The only reward in a place that doesn’t care is time.

I am in a proper place now, but I regret not getting a second job in my previous fintech job.

Why do you feel the need to work a second job, why would that be better? Wouldn't you rather be a part of your local community and put effort there rather than a private enterprise?

Two jobs pay two salaries.

There's more to life than working. Why do you feel it's necessary to work two jobs in an industry that typically pays more than the median home income in 99% of cities in the US?

There’s more to work than getting a salary.

Yes but wouldn't you rather get this through your community, family, and friends? You know the things that don't have dominion over your ability to survive?

Not necessarily.

What can I say, I enjoy programming and making stuff with a group.

Yeah, that's also an option.

Allow me to give you a different viewpoint. And this is coming from someone that has an _amazing instinct_ to be in the "Who The Fuck Cares" club. I use that instinct to protect my mental health but nothing more than that.

What I noticed when I checked out at work is that it also makes me check out in my personal life (PL). It bleeds in. Generally, in my personal life I'm not checked out. That bleeds into work.

So work bleeds into PL and PL into work. I found that it was painful for work to bleed into my PL like that since I'm switched on and I just had this hint of "ah... whatever who gives a fuck."

I give a fuck.

I give a fuck because it's my life. I do it for myself. I don't do it for my boss or my colleagues. I do it for me.

I've found that this attitude is way more helpful to me as two things happen:

1. I'm more productive at work so I don't have to cover my ass at all. When I was in the "Who The Fuck Cares" club, I needed to cover my ass once per month (read: I didn't do anything for like 3 days and people were expecting results on day 4).

2. Since it's in service for my personal life, I don't go too far. The moment I notice that work encroaches too much upon personal life, my instinct comes back immediately and I pay my visit to the "Who The Fuck Cares" club, and party as long as I want to.

That's the balance I'm currently taking.

I think this is reasonable. Came to the same conclusion. I need to at least pretend to myself that I care, but I will not allow it to bleed into my PL. If it does I check out and chill for a bit.

I think this is a good attitude, but it does point up that doing this requires a conscious choice and involves a certain amount of sacrifice in that you have to sort of accept that you're "wasting" effort. In other words, this is the healthiest response to an unhealthy situation in our society.

One might be “wasting” effort but the alternative is becoming mentally numb. And I find that way worse as it will yield stunted development in all areas of life, even regressive in many cases

I think the 3rd or so time that all the work I'd been doing for months or years just got thrown in the garbage, having never provided more benefit than it cost, or even without ever providing any benefit whatsoever due to never having been released, through no fault of my own, was when I decided giving a shit was for suckers.

We're just human parts of some weird business-metaphysical Plinko board—and we ain't the ones dropping the chip or winning the prizes. Truly, who could possibly maintain any amount of giving-a-shit after years and years of that? All that's left is pretending, which is, transparently, the same thing "leadership" does.

I find there is middle ground between "who the fuck cares" and "I got to fight for what is righteous". Do the job best you can. Accept resources, including skilled human beings, are what they are and unless you own the place there is very little you can do about it. Try to do the best work you can with the resources you are given is all I can say. It does give pleasure to at least try to do a good job.

Yes, I am saying you should be cleaning the decks of the Titanic with all the care you can muster but without being obsessive or neurotic about it. Don't do it for the Titanic, don't do it for all the people who are about to die. Just do it for you.

It's possible to do both: you can collect your paycheck WHILE looking for a better job (because this one is toxic). And now you know to interview more seriously the people at that potential new employer.

An essential part of "the job" is to get done what the company wants you to do. Even when that's stupid. Fair. But toxic jobs are still toxic to us, and staying is still our decision. Pending finding another better job - but sometimes even before having found the better job because sanity matters.

But you never know what is the new team untill you started your work.

No one will tell you during recruitment process about shit show they have or crazy manager. Or even if there was a nice team you've been interviewed to, after onboarding you could be reassigned to the toxic team to fix legacy code.

Never? There are companies that don't tell which team you will work with, or even what you will do. From what I hear, this is such a minority that they stand out. But it's true that Google's example might make this more common as we go. Most companies still try to interview for a good match with the team you will work with. Meaning, interviewing with them.

(To be fair and for background, Google did not invent this - but perhaps pushed it much further than it was before. For example some variations of this at Wall Street firms in the 70s?)

The only way I worry about a coworker is if it directly impacts me. I'm not a tattle tale, it's up to the company to have in place a system of determining the quality of someone's work. I will not take blame for a person and I'll call it out as a member of the team if I get blamed for something the less skilled person did. That should be enough to limit bad people, the onus is on the company and management.

There's more than just technical ability at play when comes to what to do with a bad performer. Because if you hired them, or pushed for their promotion, or whatever and it doesn't work it makes you look bad too. Hence its actually problematic for someone to complain about poor performers because it makes them look difficult and possibly as though they're not people-oriented enough to manage relationships.

> and go Leetcode.

I wonder whether, by refusing to Leetcode as an IC, if you weed-out proportionally more companies of careerist people just going through the motions.

(Compared to companies of people who care about what they're doing, not just about jumping through hoops and receiving money.)

I recently switched jobs, and this time I decided that during the first phase of any interview cycle I would ask if there were going to be leetcode-style questions at any point in the cycle. If yes, I ended the interviews there. If no, continue on. I was of course happy to explain my logic and that I was happy to demonstrate technical prowess in a way more useful to the proposed role.

One company lied, I completed the leetcode-style portion of the technical interview, and politely declined their offer (with an explanation that I don’t like being lied to, and beyond that, I don’t want to work for a company that believes leetcode is a useful skill indicator for regular development work).

So far every company that I’ve worked for doesn’t do leetcode bs, and end up being great companies to work for (genuinely caring about employees, good salary/benefits, actual CoL adjustments in addition to merit-based raises, equity, etc). Small sample size, I know. I also know that every one of my tech friends who has worked at a leetcode-interview company has had some kind of issue with colleagues, management, company structure, or something along those lines (not necessarily at every company, but each person has encountered those sorts of things at at least one company).

To me, avoiding leetcode is a very good way to select for “actual good” companies to work for.

I would describe it differently - "another day, another dollar" - where work is done as required - no more no less. Corps know this, and try to incentivize employees to bring some passion to work - via equity ownership - so, incentives are aligned. Another way is to pretend to have a mission statement like "organize world's info" which can fool employees to align without any monetary reward.

> Anyway, I asked Reddit and TeamBlind how to best deal with this kind of situation.

They gave you terrible advice. Vote with your feet. Don't enable posers. Find a better team or a better company. It takes time but it's possible. And when the new place drifts, vote with your feet again.

But remember to keep quiet about it. If all the competent people did this, natural selection would do its magic.