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This is a difficult problem with too many complex human factors. The guilty actor may have a conscience, but without suitable creative channels, opts instead for basic survival in the organization by whatever means necessary. Or they might just be an asshole whose crowning meta output is exposing a broken organization.

An idea I have thought about is having a culture of individual demos. Being put on the spot sucks, but taking responsibility and pride in your work is an important step to encouraging those who do to grow and shine, and forcing those who don't out of the shadows. Demos do not necessarily have to be presentations on stage under a spotlight - they can be of any format including videos, drawings, research papers, or distributed software.

For this to work though, the demos cannot just be some adjunct ritual to the organization's "real work", with the sole purpose of name and shame. The demos must be the byproduct of your entire work in the organization. What sprouts from the individual demos, may lead to improvised teams for larger projects, but the demos are always the driving force, there to empower the individual and their ideas.

I kinda like this idea. But I wonder if it overly penalizes people who are bad at or fearful of public speaking.

Have you heard of any organizations that implement something like this?

No public speaking required - demos can be code, writing, or whatever mediums you are comfortable with.

The idea is influenced by various stories I have heard over the years about Valve, Pixar, and Apple. Not sure if any company currently implements such a system.

I work at a company using something to this effect--when engineers get assigned projects they "own" them completely--from design and implementation to testing, deployment, verification, and bugs. We have a semi-formal tracking app with names attached to projects. There is never more than one person working on something. I think this instills a great culture of responsibility and accountability. It makes it very hard for someone to ride on others' coattails or not pull their weight, as you might get in a forced pair programming team, or a larger group.

Very interesting. Sounds like DRI (Directly Responsible Individual) at Apple. Are there any manager type roles (who does the assigning of projects to engineers)?

How do you handle bus factor and what not? Or are you just saying... they're responsible, but other people are helping them?

Maybe it's not an issue because it's a web company, and it doesn't take a rocket scientist to ramp up on any given module or system in the codebase.

Typical flow handled by one person is about 3 weeks from start of coding to live code, and then a couple more weeks on followup, stats, bugs, etc. After that it's just part of the codebase and others can end up working on it; but they'd probably talk to the original author to get up to speed.

> I would laugh, but I've seen this up close and personal and people like this are more dangerous than they might look.

A way in which those people are extremely dangerous if the organization allows them to thrive with such a behavior is that smart, productive employees will realize early on what's happening, and will follow suit in order to not fall behind. Entire teams can get poisoned in 6-12 months just like that.

I'd like to contrast that with current HR practices. Why is it that HR departments (as far as I can tell) focus on hiring "the best" or "the best available", while it would be more important, easier and cheaper to simply avoid "the worst" (aka this guy).

They usually looks like a "best". Or they are early employees. Anyway, they are not stupid.

I've seen this phenomenon too, and have seen entire engineering teams descend into mediocrity because the companies and their leaders tolerated such behavior and/or had no effective tools against it. I'm curious, too, what tips the HN community has to get such people exposed, mentored or fired, as the case may be.

The author seems to be blaming these employees too much, rather than the work environment. Perhaps they don't have enough incentives to be productive.

In my experience, productive people don't need an incentive to be productive - they like work. They just need people to get out of their way.

Well that's certainly true, but for the other side of the bell curve I think the environment makes a difference.

I have to agree with you on this. The places I've seen people like this thrive are big-company-cya-all-the-time kinds of setups.

Work environment, or work 'culture', are a net result of the behaviors of the employees.

Well, no. They're a net result of the behaviours of the management.

If your company is a fucked-up hellhole, there are people whose responsibility this actually is.

To be clear, when I say 'employees', I actually meant every person who works there - including both management and subordinates. It's tempting to assume that only the management is responsible for dictating what the working environment should be like, but ultimately, it's the people who you work with that determines whether the company is a fucked-up hellhole, or a productive nirvana.