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Comment by alphazard | Hacker News Reader

Most of the time, complainers are a exhibiting a personality trait (or learned behavior as the article says); let's call those "unserious complainers". Some of the time (maybe 10% IME), the person complaining knows how to fix a problem, and is confused why no one is taking them or their suggestion seriously. It could be that the problem has existed for so long that the team has a cognitive blindness, or the team is swamped and has no capacity to think strategically.

A good way to partition the complainers into serious and unserious groups is to ask for a written plan. Unserious complainers backoff quickly, while serious complainers will be glad someone is taking their suggestion seriously.

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That's a great call but it should be paired with a promise: you present your great plan and then we'll put it to a vote. Otherwise you are just trying to get rid of them with busywork.

I think many long-time managers can recall some time were they really just put up busywork for them to not have to deal with that team member. It's not the best solution but sometimes it eases political conflicts.

I think that's unfair.

I wouldn't recommend this. As I mentioned in a reply to a different post: A good idea, widely visible, must be addressed by leadership. Failing to do so makes you look incompetent as a leader. That doesn't mean it has be implemented immediately, but it needs to be referenced in the larger plan, along with a rationale.

Vote? By the same people who created this mess in the first place?

It's a sure was to demotivate a serious complainer. He knows the vote will be turned against him.

The only was to give him confidence is to promise that the plan will be judged objectively, not democratically.

Well, that's part of politics. To get people on board the complainer will then have to try to build some consensus. If you start out from the premise that the vote would be turned against him then he should simply leave for a company that is worthy of his talents instead.

Objectivity in tech is more often than not in the eye of the beholder.

I've found that it's enough to just widely circulate it. As you point out, it's important to have some guarantee, so that the writing seems worth it.

If it is really a good idea, it will attract the attention of other serious people and become common knowledge in the organization. The shift in common knowledge is the most important change because the problem goes from something that many think they have to live with, to something that has a solution. At that point it becomes something to prioritize against everything else.

This does present some risk to leaders, it's much easier to seem incompetent when there are solutions available that are not being put to use. Leaders need to specifically address why known solutions aren't being implemented yet, and rationalize the decision.

> Some of the time (maybe 10% IME), the person complaining knows how to fix a problem,

Knowing how to fix the problem shouldn't be a hard prerequisite to raising an issue. I've seen situations where everyone on the team is aware of a problem, but the only people with authority to solve it are sitting around waiting for it to work itself out without their intervention.

Of course the natural thought is "raising an issue constructively isn't complaining", but there's a kind of viewpoint bias on both sides of this. Sometimes people who are too wedded to some idea or way of doing things view any criticism at all in a reflexively negative light, just as some people tend to air grievances as a hobby without a constructive outcome in mind.

Reality check.

Complaint: tickets created by the QA team for developers, even seemingly trivial ones, stagnate in Jira for months and sometimes years without anyone looking.

Written plan: Hire somebody who will be actually responsible for planning and prioritization. Hire more developers, so that the existing ones are not overloaded.

Reality: "This is not a realistic plan. There is a budget, and you are not the one who makes hiring decisions, so shut up and stop creating tickets unless there is something really serious".

So - is the complainer above serious, or not?

(all of the above is pure fiction)

> A good way to partition the complainers into serious and unserious groups is to ask for a written plan

This can be good but I've seen it weaponized before by an incompetent cto to deflect and delay any change. He would ask for written proposals on the most minute details until people just gave up trying to fix anything.

As an obscure stand-up comedian once said, "initiative has to be punished with following it up".

There's rude, but precise Russian saying: "Initiative f*ks the initiator". This approach is a good way to ensure that there will not be initiative people in the team.

Yeah, that's a later vulgarization of what Zhvanetsky said.

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