Ask HN: How do you handle an employee who complies but never delivers? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How do you handle an employee who complies but never delivers?

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I'm managing a long-term team member who has become very difficult to manage. They appear polite, cooperative, never openly push back. They acknowledge requests, attend meetings, and respond professionally.

But in reality:

- Tasks come back half-done, again and again

- Feedback is acknowledge and then ignored

- Bugs get buried in vague responses like “works on my side”

- Messages are not replied to sometimes, or they claim “was busy, didn’t see it”

- They never say “no,” but everything gets stuck in this slow grind

They’re not openly insubordinate. Just draining.

We can’t fire them easily as they're here for over 10 years they haven’t broken any rules or gross misconduct.

But they’ve made themselves completely unreliable in the last few months.

Anyone dealt with this kind of passive resistance?

How do you actually move someone like this — or do you just sideline them and minimize the damage?

An employee doesn't just suddenly go awol for no reason if they've been a model employee for over 10 years. This is burnout probably triggered by something big that happened in their personal life. Maybe a death in the family, a broken relationship, etc. It's no joke.

That's gonna make them really wonder about the meaning of life. If you haven't been paying him well or been providing increases to his salary, then that's gonna trigger an even more avalanche of existential thoughts.

The guy needs a break, let him have it. People aren't machines that are oblivious to external pressures outside of work. You can ask if everything's ok, but don't push it as it's people's personal lives. Propose he take a long vacation in your next 1:1, at least one month break. If he doesn't have enough vacation to cover, then just grant him special permission to take it under the table. He's been there for 10 years, he deserves a rest.

Don't be like shitlassian. https://shitlassian.com/ The fact that management is already considering firing this person for slipping after 10 years without any consideration to the person themselves, but can't because of some 'technical company rule' is pretty toxic IMO.

I’ll admit, I’ve shown some of the same symptoms you’re describing. Not out of malice, but as the end-state of long-term burnout and disengagement, at an old job, many years ago.

In my case, it was a slow, creeping decline. I started out hungry: shipping quality work, stepping up for projects well beyond my role and pay grade, even leading teams through fire drills and heroic launches. And the reward? A generic "atta boy!" and more work. Never the raise, the title bump, or real recognition.

My attitude over the span of years regressed considerably, shifting from a bright-eyed aw-shucks happy-go-lucky get-it-done engineer, and asymptotically approached, "dude, please leave me the fuck alone" whenever I heard a Teams ping or an Outlook inbox notification.

Really just smells like symptoms of extreme burnout, the input of which can only be determined by talking to this person. Could be 10 years is far too long in one job and they just want to coast now, could be personal reasons like a divorce or death of a close relative, could just be mid-life crisis, could be "I've got 1.8mm in my 401k, what're you gonna do, fire me?"

It sounds like they have little skin in the game. Does your org reward hard work and hitting targets? Is the company doing mission critical work or feature farming? I dont think there's a company I've ever worked for where the status quo wasn't a full on regression to the mean average of the culture of the place. Conway's law? They were hired for a reason but no one can be firehosed with bullshit for long, before simply giving up if there's no compelling reason to continue striving.

So, have you spoken to them? Or, put them in a position where there failure to deliver will have real world negative consequences to people on the team they care about?

For me personally, I seem to only operate well under intense pressure and heavy load. Maybe they're bored. Maybe there's confounding variables outside of work they need to put time and attention into before they're unblocked and consistently in a high delivery flow state. (Or, perhaps, you need to tell them: we want you to try harder to fail.)

Edit: also, work expands to fill time. Intellectual and creative work accomplishes things in leaps and bounds or fits and starts IMO. Punching a time clock is terribly draining... Is there a shared team vision?

> Does your org reward hard work and hitting targets?

We have a flat team structure so there is not much room for progression, especially as they are here for 10 years so already maxed out promotions. But thats something I cant control.

Yikes, as an employee, "not much room for progression" and "maxed out promotions" aren't really phrases that I'd want to hear spoken aloud. I was going to comment that the behavior described sounds like someone who doesn't see any future growth potential in the company, but here it is, spelled out!

Every job I've quit, I decided to do so when I realized that I had hit a (visible or invisible) ceiling that the company was preventing me from breaking through.

You're going to have to either fix them or get rid of them. You can't keep them as-is.

Fixing them may not be possible. You actually need them to fix themself; you can't actually fix them. But you can try to find out what's going on, and you can try to motivate and coach.

Getting rid of them will probably require a paper trail and a formal PIP process, and will take a while.

Disclaimer: I've never been a manager. These are just my impressions.

> You're going to have to either...

Yep.

And even if there are no technical grounds for firing, HR and/or a few higher-up managers should hear about the problem from the direct manager (you), and know that you're looking for solutions.

And from "the last few months", I'd say those conversations are overdue.

Might your jurisdiction be one where being fired is a better deal (gov't benefits, whatever) than resigning?

If they've been there for 10 years, I would try to find what changed in the past few months. Is it an issue at home, or maybe something that happened at work? I feel like you have to find the root cause to fix it. It could be something where they're going through a family illness or a divorce and need some lower complexity tasks for a couple months.

Also, being somewhere for 10 years doesn't make it hard to fire someone. You could fire them for performance issues easily if the stuff coming back is low quality and half done. You can give them metrics to hit on a PIP and if they fail, they're gone. But I wouldn't want to do that until I knew what was going on that caused the change. It could be a temporary thing or an easy fix.

Figure out the root cause first.

- Burnout

- Family/personal issues

- Loss of interest in job/company

- Actual incompetence

Have they in the past demonstrated the skills that you'd want for someone in their position? "They've worked here for N years" means nothing. Plenty of people are experts at navigating company politics and showing value to higher ups during performance reviews while doing absolutely nothing day to day. Yes, even for a period of 10 years or longer.

If you truly do want to keep them around, make a plan to get them back on track. Give them work they are interested in. Set and monitor concrete targets.

Otherwise just cut your losses and show them the door. Of course the latter is more of a legal than an engineering question, so reach out to your HR department.

Very likely they are planning to leave. There’s a small chance that they have some family issues or burnout though. You will want to have a conversation about the latter. When people zone out, it usually is the former though, in my experience.

My first thought was the person might be trying to work 2 remote jobs at the same time. But it's usually a more boring reason.

This is a very interesting thread.

OP comes up with a problem that he is facing, only to be shown the other side of the story that he may have completely overlooked. It raises questions for OP and their organization.

This also shows that in such threads, on HN, people are more likely to empathize with the employee ( which seems quite fair in this case ).

Hopefully OP got some pointers that they can go ahead and work with.

I’ve worked with several of these types over the years. Complaints to management yielded little. One guy did get put on a PIP but he had already found another job and left pretty quick. The problem is these individuals create additional work for the rest of the team, affecting morale.

You are a bad manager.

> We can’t fire them easily as they're here for over 10 years they haven’t broken any rules or gross misconduct.

You don't have rules about, you know, actually doing the job reasonably well?

You would think so, right? It often turns political and into a CYA game, meanwhile team morale continues to plummet as non-performers are tolerated and drag down everyone else.

OP, are you my manager by any chance? /s

This resonates with me a lot, I can try to show you my perspective.

Been there 10+ yrs, started as “graduate” and never officially got a promotion but I’m now considered principal. This is mostly because I own responsibilities for a big chunk of the core technology. I used to put in 60+ hrs/week and implemented the shiny new products we’re basing our revenue. Salary wise I’m in a mid tier (lower bound) and thanks to our flat hierarchy I don’t have anywhere to go on my career path. More senior engineers to learn from left and we don’t hire juniors to mentor.

I used to be a 10x engineer, delivering 10x. I still am but now I work 1/10th to deliver 1. Pay isn’t great but it’s amazing for how much I work. I think I have golden handcuffs after all. You know, life gets in the way and all of a sudden pushing configs for a saas becomes way less important (and interesting) than, say, spending time with family.

Add all those useless bureaucratic wrapper around any process (I spend 50% of my standing desk time on meetings) and the infinite friction against any new proposal from my side. It’s like they want to kill instead of fostering innovation.

Sorry for the rant, but while looking for a way to sac the guy, you better look also at your organization.

ps the market is horrible at the moment, I’m not leaving just because it’s not that straightforward

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