I learned a similar lesson in a simpler form when waiting tables.
Some people will run you ragged, asking for more napkins, then when you return with them, more ketchup, then when you return with that, there’s an issue with the food, then so on and so on.
If you don’t check yourself, you will actually leave your other tables without any of their basics, or their food will get cold waiting in the window, because you’ve developed tunnel vision to please this one needy table.
Sometimes things really do stack up, but there are strategies to avoid or deal with that. These strategies will fail with the Truly Needy table. And then they won’t tip well, or at all.
I learned it’s better to deprioritize that table and pay the normal amount of attention to everyone else. Better for those all to tip at a standard rate and give them a good experience than to let one group drag down the whole floor.
That super needy table didn’t need half the things they asked for anyways. Those napkins are sitting there unused when they leave. The glass of water they asked you to fill at halfway is still almost full. Life goes on.
I worked at a place that had a customer ... it was Walmart.
They bought some equipment, captured the imagination of the sales team with stories of massive purchases, bought one moderate purchase and then for over a year RAN OVER the support team in an effort to get what they wanted. Problem was they wanted the world and bought an island of equipment, and claimed we should provide them free the appropriate equipment because they might just buy more.
Their IT staff was so unprofessional / prone to delivering insults rather than providing data I started hanging up on them. Fortunately my boss was supportive. This was an environment where we never had abusive customers, stressed customers but no personal attacks.
Finally someone got in the CEO's ear and demonstrated how much time and money we were throwing at a customer who was not happy, would not buy the appropriate equipment, and had never paid a dime on their support contracts. He cut them off.
Total waste of time and money dealing with Walmart. Nearly 20 years later now when old coworkers get together folks say they still won't shop there because of the calls they took...
If the customer is always angry, sometime the best thing is for everyone to move on.
We actually had some other customers we did that with where they were invited to move on (we supported them in the meantime of course).
For some of those customers after they realized the lay of the land moving to other systems, they came back and things were good (not Walmart).
Hah, I had exactly the same experience with Wal-Mart when working at an enterprise software company about 2-3 years ago. They scheduled a weekly meeting with a top support member and constantly asked for changes to the software.
(Not my main account because it would be inappropriate to speak about a customer of a past business)
I just had to chime in here, 2 is coincidence but 3 is a trend. They did the exact same thing to us, spending months telling us to solve an issue that was clearly a result of issues on their end, and despite repeated proof would push us into meetings at really unkind times, not doing the steps we recommended and being increasingly rude and accusatory while demanding time with the product team simply to express discontent.
This resonates a lot with me. Early on, I had a good mentor when going into a leadership position who basically told me: "Screw the biblical saying about the sick who need the doctors. Try to spend 80% of your time with the good ones. You'll have more fun and be more productive"
It sounded very harsh and emotionally wrong at the time, but I've learned the hard way that at least for the purpose of building a working team and business, he was spot on.
As a lead, I've learned my most precious resource is my time and attention and one thing I didn't realize until very recently is that I'm rewarding the high performers by spending it on them.
But negative attention is attention as well, and if my team gets the impression I'm rewarding the ones who don't pull their own weight with excessive nurturing and pampering, they will get demotivated and eventually move on.
This is still distinct from abandoning, as I try my best to give everyone an equal chance to get started. But I've regretted more than once investing heavily into employees who ended up quitting anyway over their perceived complaints.
Wanters will always find a way. Not-wanters will always find a reason.
The super needy table may not be likely to tip well no matter how much you bend over for them anyway. Though they are unfortunately also the most likely to leave exaggerated (or even half or more completely made up) bad reviews over the smallest detail that they see as having been wrong.
As a startup founder, I've realized that people who send very angry missives are usually people who can be very strong advocates. Although it can be tough to bite my tongue and not respond sharply to someone who sends a profanity-laced email, it's definitely the right thing to do.
Nearly everyone who curses in their first email will apologize upon receiving an email from the founder. They were probably just having a bad day and assumed that $Company was some corporate powerhouse trying to nickel and dime their customers.
There's about 5% of people who persist in nastiness.
But almost everyone ends up being happy about the interaction, many end up renewing their subscriptions, and some will even email other companies asking them to integrate our technology. Sometimes the root of the frustration was that our service didn't work better with other platforms, which is something we can't control on our own.
So having these very excitable folks sending emails on our behalf can be a powerful thing. It just requires biting your tongue instead of replying in the heat of the moment!
I can echo this. I run a smallish app with a decent following, and once in a while I'll get a "Your worthless app lost all my data, @#$% you!" email. A simple, "Hey, sorry to hear your having problems...tell me what's going on" does wonders.
I try to remember this when I interact with people in any medium (including in-person). Snark/anger/sarcasm are often just the envelope for the content of a message. If you don't let it affect you, you can respond to the content of the message, not the delivery, and break down a number of walls instantly. And as a bonus you're not giving someone else control over your emotional state.
That said, some people are just abusive idiots and you kind of have to have a sense for when you're wasting your energy.
Having worked in a few startups and waited tables, I'm confident the angry tech customers are not the same people who are demanding in a restaurant. It sounds similar but you're talking about entirely different people.
The angry tech customer generally cares about a problem they're trying to solve. The demanding restaurant patron is focused on the feeling of exercising power over someone subservient to them.
Any overlap between those groups of people is random.
> There's about 5% of people who persist in nastiness.
The thing with real stores is that all the assholes are from this group. The ones that are having a bad day may react badly to something, but do not go out of their way to create problems.
What means that real stores have many fewer problem customers. But they can't count on them changing either.
Yeah, change is harder when the timeframe is limited. I can reply to an email a couple hours later, when someone might be in a different mood. In a store, there's much less time for a change of attitude.
Yeah, the population of angry people that public-facing workers have to deal with is different than the group who writes angry emails that reach the founder. Immediate reactionary anger vs focused and articulated anger.
There is quite a bit of difference between someone caring about what is, to them, a significant inconvenience, which is I think what you are describing with those who send angry missives about services, and those who nitpick everything constantly, in many small complaints, like the overly needy customer in a services industry.
The angry message to a tech service provider can often be a last ditch attempt at resolution. An angry review of a restaurant is usually little more than a public “fuck you”: they aren't getting further business from that customer.
I find the negative reviews the most useful, not individually, but in aggregate. If several people complain about the same thing, it might actually be an issue. A well written and thoughtful negative review can also contain useful information. If the negative reviews all seem to be random bitching, however, I know the place/product/service is probably fine.
I find the negative reviews are usually the most informative. If all of a restaurant's bad reviews are about service or exceptional situations, that's a strong endorsement for the quality of the food.
Pictures of health code violations and stories of health code violations usually raise some red flags (especially if recent). Those are too easy to fake.
The most useful ones are when they go through exactly what they thought was right/wrong with the food (and a pattern emerges across the pictures and multiple reviews about different dishes).
Well, if you're talking about a 4.4 restaurant, they are probably meaningless. There's probably a couple of TRUE negative reviews in there.
If the restaurant is a 3.1, then yeah, try to find a different place - there IS hair in the food, the cockroaches are real and the waitress DID stick the hotdog up the you know what.
Do you not find the dispersion of ratings more interesting than the averages? Within most sites that promote ratings there is often a standard-ish dispersion, and an outlier is of far greater concern to me than the average. A solid 3 for a budget restaurant is of far lower concern than a bathtub distribution, which suggests your visit is a crapshoot.
Is this really a thing? I know that I'm much more likely to share a negative experience and completely forget a positive.. I'd always assumed we were all like that!
> I learned a similar lesson in a simpler form when waiting tables.
This is something everyone should be required to do. Try to last a month at it. I sure couldn't. But I'll be damned if it didn't make me 1000x more considerate towards just about everyone. We all have a choice whether to cause a fuss over stuff that hardly matters, or whether we blame someone for circumstances outside their control. There's no clearer way to see these problems and decide what kind of person you're going to be than there is from the ground level.
Fortunately, for restaurants and perhaps for everything, I don't seem to notice anybody caring about yelp reviews or ratings anymore, and that's been the case (in Austin, Texas where I live, anyway) for years now. I mean, how often do you check on Yelp before deciding to check out a restaurant? I think it's been over a decade since I did such a thing, if I ever did. It may be precisely the tendency you mention, that is the reason people stopped caring about yelp reviews.
6 or 8 years ago I used Yelp often. But when they began to insist on showing me e.g. 12 McDonalds when I searched for $Specific_Local_Burger_Place, showing sponsored results up top to obscure the restaurant I just clicked on, and tried to force me to use their app instead of their web site, I began walking toward the exit.
When I found out later how they were running a protection racket to shake down restaurants, I ran for the exit.
Nice restaurant review service you have there, Yelp. Be a shame if something happened to it. Especially if that something was your own damn fault.
Yelp is still plenty good as a rough approximation for quality for me. Anything under a 3.5ish is buyer beware and anything above a 4 is a pretty safe bet the restaurant is good enough.
I'd imagine you're also getting a pool of more impulsive reviews than Yelp, for what that's worth. People are more likely to already have an account, and you can leave reviews directly from a Google search page.
Yelp is the default restaurant rating display in Apple Maps. Between that and Google Maps, a lot of people are going to see those ratings and it does have some impact even if people don't trust them absolutely — otherwise businesses wouldn't feel that they needed to pay Yelp to hide bad reviews.
I search on Yelp when looking for a restaurant to go to. I’m more likely to go to places that show up higher in the search ranking, and the rating seems to be a big component of that.
Other the other hand, I don’t actually read the reviews at all. I do sometimes look at the user-uploaded photos.
The trouble with that though is that you are never quite sure which type you are dealing with until you are done serving them and the bill has been paid.
I'd really love to see tipping go away forever, at least as an expectation
I've been in food service so I know the pain of horrible customers (pizza delivery!). But, IME, that situation where a waiter must go back and forth is sometimes of the waiter's own doing.
Ex: The waiter only hears the first person at the table and then runs off before anyone else can speak. Or, they only bring one thing asked for and forget the rest. Or, they outsource bringing the things to someone else and those people do not bring them, and the waiter never checks again.
From the waiter's perspective, the customer seems unreasonable, but when making that assessment, they are missing information.
Tying this back to the article, people aren't perfect at expressing things. When this design doc situation arises, it really is on the author to figure out why that person objects no matter how it's approached. Fresh ideas are often hard to express and for people to process. Sometimes the objector just has a lingering sense the design isn't right but it's not quite identifiable yet. Obviously, sometimes they are unreasonable, but starting there unless they act like the perfectly logical person in the second example is a bad idea.
TL;DR: in all situations, it's best to try to identify the source of whatever's going on, not immediately assume a person is unreasonable.
> When this design doc situation arises, it really is on the author to figure out why that person objects no matter how it's approached. Fresh ideas are often hard to express and for people to process
Sure, I think I would do that for one or two rounds. But at some point I realize this is just someone who is being willfully ignorant or lazy and trying to make it seem like it's my fault.
Also, somebody starting with "this has no documentation" rather than "where's the documentation?" is probably a fairly reliable heuristic as to where things are going to end up.
This is the key aspect for me in my assessments of reasonability in another person.
I immediately see red flags when someone presents themself as absolutely certain of their pronouncements and more so when they repeatedly show that there is little or no correlation between their confidence level in making a particular statement and the amount of evidence they have or the amount of work they put into determining their conclusions. The truly unfortunate part, in my experience, is that managers typically see this confidence as a surface level indicator that these people know what they're talking about and give these unreasonable people the authority act on their over-confidence.
> If you don’t check yourself, you will actually leave your other tables without any of their basics, or their food will get cold waiting in the window, because you’ve developed tunnel vision to please this one needy table.
o/~ I guess it's true what they say about the squeaky wheel / always getting the grease o/~
> I learned it’s better to deprioritize that table and pay the normal amount of attention to everyone else. Better for those all to tip at a standard rate and give them a good experience than to let one group drag down the whole floor.
The correct business response is to petition management to staff more accordingly so that no table has to be de-prioritized (going by the book on customer service)... Also other measures can be taken, like stocking napkin dispensers and condiments on tables so that trivial requests don't over-burden staff.
Applying attention rules to customers is a hallmark of bad customer service environments, while people are already paying a set price on the goods and/or service a restaurant delivers that should be planned for by management properly. A bad customer service environment only serves to ruin business.
If we create rules like this for how to deal with customers, based on assumptions about them, it can also wrongfully reinforce bias and discourage customers from returning which often drives even some of the most popular businesses (Denny's for example) down.
Management too often plays the training tape for employees without reading their own training book properly.
I really have a hard time believing that you have actually worked in a job that requires customer service. The way you frame your argument is divorced from the reality of these kinds of jobs.
This poster isn't doing bad customer service.i have no idea how you got that idea. What they're doing is stoping one bad customer from ruining other customer's experiences!
People who deal effectively and positively with difficult customers often find the best success in business, and endure best through bad economies.
If you understand human nature, you also understand that sometimes people are just having a bad day, or feeling ignored, or on their last leg.
Ignoring, or being dismissive to, any paying customer is simply bad business. If a company does that as a practice, they're probably in the wrong business.
An employee that thinks ignoring customers is a good practice likely ends up working in customer service at Comcast as the pinnacle of their career.
Those are not just my words, they're words from the bible of doing good business, and a lot of successful CEOs and business people would agree, except for the CEO of comcast perhaps.
While it's true that putting up with overly-difficult people can be good for business, this creates a race-to-the-bottom situation and there's no reason it shouldn't change. Someone's bad day is never an excuse for abusing service workers.
For what it's worth, I was a service employee who deprioritized these people and I can tell you I'm certainly not working customer service at Comcast now-a-days... which is a reference I don't even understand (I know what Comcast is but ya...).
Tangentially, I feel that there should be a form of conscription where everyone is forced to work at year or two of customer service in their teens. While I'm sure it wouldn't discourage everyone from being a prick, it could certainly help.
> If you understand human nature, you also understand that sometimes people are just having a bad day, or feeling ignored, or on their last leg.
A more thorough analysis of human nature reveals that a double-digit percentage of humanity suffers from a serious personality disorder. Some of these disorders involve taking perverse pleasure in ordering others around for no good reason.
Most experienced wait staff that I know can tell the difference pretty quickly between someone having a bad day and a bully. The latter do not deserve good customer service.
>Those are not just my words, they're words from the bible of doing good business,
Yeah, that's kind of the problem with your whole argument: it reads like your entire understanding of the field is from an undergrad business textbook.
For one, you keep equating a job having a customer service component with the specific job of customer support as you have it in the tech field.
>An employee that thinks ignoring customers is a good practice likely ends up working in customer service at Comcast as the pinnacle of their career.
Waitstaff to Call Center is not a career path I've ever seen anyone take. Too orthogonal to be a desired career change (if not downright worse if you're in a good market for service industry), doesn't build upon the skillset you've already built, and doesn't have the allure of long downtime that draws people into Security and Reception work.
You have misunderstood the article. The problem wasn't the lack of napkins, the lack of ketchup or a problem with the food. The problem is with the customer. Even if you got all of those things correct, they would be upset with some other aspect of their service. If you had brought everything out ahead of time they would have complained "Why have you put so many things on my table? I never asked for any of this!"
If you do this kind of work, sometimes you will meet people that are completely unreasonable and there is no satisfying them.
Try working at a Toys R Us at Christmas and get shouted down by a parent because you ran out of the hot thing that season. For a concrete example, it was Tickle Me Elmo for me. It is not your fault, or the business' fault, but you can reset assured you will be the lightning rod for this.
As for serving, you can bet the people causing the most trouble are the least likely to tip. And at BEST they will tip nominally. There is some division that I don't understand between certain diners and servers that these diners consider their servers to not be their peers.
The customer is not always right, the entitlement of customers is off the charts in the past ten years. Expectations of online shopping applied to real life are very extreme. "I just want to have a good experience" style reasoning, when sometimes, things just don't go your way, and that is life. Deprioritizing a table is a survival strategy, to keep the plates moving.
How we solve this, I don't know, but I would say top down thinking is assuming that customers are 100% rational all the time, and I can assure you from the trenches it is not.
Another solution is “fire the bad customers”. You can’t do that in a literal restaurant while a party is eating, but in most businesses, there’s a slice of your customer base that isn’t profitable to serve, never will be, and when you find them rather than staffing up to serve them, consider sending them away.
If you can gift them to a competitor, you can double the win.
> Another solution is “fire the bad customers”. You can’t do that in a literal restaurant while a party is eating
You can absolutely do that in a literal restaurant while a party is eating, though that's normally for customers who harass and disrupt other patrons, not karens.
In about 6 years of waiting tables I cut off exactly one party from alcohol… they threatened to shoot me in the parking lot later. Probably was the right decision, but not an easy one to make.
> The correct business response is to petition management to staff more accordingly so that no table has to be de-prioritized (going by the book on customer service)... Also other measures can be taken, like stocking napkin dispensers and condiments on tables so that trivial requests don't over-burden staff.
Nonsense. Such customers are a huge cost and will always find reasons to overburden services.
The correct business response is to find ways to identify and eliminate them as customers, but that is rarely possible, so barring that you absolutely have to limit them to avoid their power of nuisance.
They are not people you can satisfy, or even want to: doubling staffing requirements in case one of those head cases swings by is not affordable.
> Applying attention rules to customers is a hallmark of bad customer service environments
That’s exactly what you’re advocating for, and what GP is advocating against.
Nah, working with the public enough shows you some people are never satisfied. The "Correct business response" may be to completely cut people like that. Your definition seems to rotate around your personal morality rather than profit motives or even other people's wants and needs.
> Also other measures can be taken, like stocking napkin dispensers and condiments on tables so that trivial requests don't over-burden staff.
Condiments and napkin dispensers on the table are hallmarks of fast casual and otherwise down-market restaurants, aren't they? Last time I waited tables, I had a few customers like the ones the GP described, and the best you could do was give them whatever time you could spare after giving your other tables the attention and service you would normally give. If I had asked the chef/owner to put ketchup bottles on every table, I would have gotten a long lecture on the joys of fine dining and the importance of maintaining a luxurious atmosphere.
>> The correct business response is to petition management to staff more accordingly so that no table has to be de-prioritized (going by the book on customer service)... Also other measures can be taken, like stocking napkin dispensers and condiments on tables so that trivial requests don't over-burden staff.
Not so sure. Trying to accommodate the worst case customer seems a fools game. You're suggesting escalation, from running the server around to running the management around (and more work overall). Adding napkin dispensers at the tables may go against the entire aesthetic they're looking for, while not doing anything about the ketchup, water, and other frivolous requests.
>> If we create rules like this for how to deal with customers, based on assumptions about them...
There is no choice but to make assumptions about them (even just a generic model of a customer) unless you want to form some kind of relationship with them, which is not really possible in a restaurant setting (with the exception of regulars). Besides, the idea of simply deprioritizing them is quite sound - keep the other customers happy but don't deliberately insult the difficult one. You can not please everyone, so have rules that allow you to please the majority and let the others go.
Without attention rules you're constantly rewarding people who seek out unneeded attention. You need to give employees an out when they perceive someone is abusing their attentiveness.
As a former waiter I agree with both OP and you.
Yes there are people that are difficult to deal with, and yes a system ought to account for that possibility.
It's funny how that is playing itself all over again over a varieties of issues where people seem to be holding opposing views where in fact they don't have to be. Proponent of better systems can acknowledge indivual's flaws without renouncing to reforms. Morals-oriented people can acknowledge that shaming and or moral postures do not actually work without having to renounce to their feelings.
Of course here, it's about economics. Better overworking employees rather than paying one more salary. That is the economic incentive is stronger than the "aim at the most efficient system" one.
I upvoted your comment however I disagree with the first part of your statement - it’s not an assumption when you see “abuse of service” happening already.
If you had a client that insisted on uploading terabytes of data to your small “unlimited” text storage app, you’d likely tell them to knock it off, instead of buying more servers. This is a similar case
The service industry truth is that some customers are jerks. That doesn’t excuse poorly ran restaurants, but the good ones will occasionally fire the customer. It saves your mental health, and helps keep a healthy client base.
different tiers of restaurants come with different implicit SLAs. you don't get to monopolize the attention of one out of three employees working at a pizza place just because you spent $3 on a slice of pizza. the restaurant simply can't afford to appease this kind of customer. if it's a fancy restaurant where you're paying $100+ per person, things are different.
What I find scary is that if you work in a sufficiently toxic environment/culture for long enough, that very behavior that you try to fight against and change begins to seep into your everyday actions. I've seen myself go from "positive and helpful" to "apathetic and helpful" to "not caring at all" to "chippy, negative and unhelpful" before. You hope that this is something you can pickup on, but when the culture of a work environment is like that, there isn't really anyone to give you feedback and catch you from sliding down this slope. Then when you do notice, the climb back up just feels so much more overwhelming.
> if you work in a sufficiently toxic environment/culture for long enough, that very behavior that you try to fight against and change begins to seep into your everyday actions
It can carry through a person’s career, too.
I worked for a company that hired a lot of people out of a big tech company famous for being a grind, having a lot of PIPs, and generally keeping employees in constant fear of losing their jobs.
Some of the ex-employees of that company were wonderful to work with and appreciated working with us as a breath of fresh air.
However, a lot of them were clearly scarred by their experience at a toxic company. The worst of them were constantly in fear of being perceived as ranked lower than their peers (even though we didn’t rank!) and would make a lot of dumb moves to try to sabotage other people’s reputations. One guy went so far as to keep a long Google doc of what he saw as mistakes and missteps of his peers and managers, which he would then pull from as leverage whenever he thought someone might be a candidate for getting promoted past him. Another would have a emotional meltdown any time there was an issue with something he was accountable for and would rapidly write up a “post-mortem” that was really just a narrative that blamed someone else for the failure and demonstrated how he fixed it.
We didn’t have these problems with high performers we hired from anywhere else. It was something about this company that chewed people up and left some of them scarred and defensive.
This was definitely a part of why I left my previous job - after enough time that stuff really started to leak outside of the office too. After a day full of this type of "support" where nothing was enough ever the smallest request at home was a big challenge. I thought it was burnout (and it probably was a bit) and I needed to change careers, but after a few months at a new company things are going much better.
Yes, it's not a great situation and no body's perfect. But so long as we're alive we can change for the better, and change is arguably a constant in this universe until well off into the future (i.e. trillions of years, heat/entropy death of the universe stuff). What's even weirder, though, is surviving toxic situations can require all sorts of odd "contortions." So go easy on yourself and try to identify toxicity early.
I can relate so much. I have a coworker that is a lot like the coworker described in the submission and I notice myself behaving very similarly towards that coworker and it bothers me.
I totally know that feeling. This is why I really cherish my current, by now 3 years old, job because sort of the opposite exists here. In fact, if I forget sometimes or make a mistake, my coworkers are more likely to fix it for me in the wiki or docs than they are to use it to complain or stop me from doing something. Working in a helpful and collaborative environment has had an enormous quality of life improvement for me. It is also the most productive teams I've ever worked on. I'm not writing this to gloat or anything but offer up something I didn't know before working here: Don't just hire for talent; do not hire jerks no matter how good they are as individuals. Software engineering is an inherently collaborative venture. When building an engineering team, really do build a team instead of a collection of individuals. It's fine for engineers to be critical but don't just stop there. Find fault but also offer up a solution to help the project move forward. I can't work in the type of environment the author described anymore. Now that I know functional, collaborative teams exist I will always want to be on one.
I think programming attracts a certain type of perfectionist and controlling personality that has trouble admitting that nothing is ever going to be perfect. It’s basically narcissism where the only source of truth is whatever this person says it is, and they judge other people for not doing things the same way they would.
In reality no documentation is ever complete and all code has major flaws. Using that to tear down other people and raise yourself up is counter productive to everyone.
I'm painfully aware of this type of developer. Usually they really are very smart and talented, which is what allows them to act this way. In my experience, they are initially respected, then they eventually lose that through constant conflict and then leave with a bad reputation.
That sums up pretty well how I acted right out of school. Immature, controlling, impatient and off putting. It took a lot of humble reflection to see that I was being a pain in the ass, and to take the steps to be a better team mate.
In my case it didn't help that our Dev manager was insufferable himself, but that's no excuse.
Now people complain that I'm not assertive enough, go figure :)
> In my case it didn't help that our Dev manager was insufferable himself, but that's no excuse.
Maybe it did. I seem to make the most progress when confronted with the same behavior that I exhibit, which sooner or later leads to asking “is this really how I make other people feel when I act like this person?” (The answer is almost always yes)
Should add that this sort of character may or may not be a competent engineer, so not only the competent type who makes stringent demands for perfection, but also the incompetent type who fights tooth and nail to maintain the status quo that they have a grasp on and feel empowered by.
Indeed, perfect is the enemy of good! Once worked with a purist (think uber-perfectionist) and there is just no way to handle that. Somewhat related, managers often think things are more simple than they really are, it takes a lot of effort to make them understand.
Agreed. A brilliant jerk is definitely worse than a below average good person. I can deal with lazy, I can deal with lack of skill, I can deal with lack of education. Jerks or liars, though, they're net negatives, sometimes greatly so.
Thank you for this. This is why I tend to work alone. There has been a slow, steady cultivation of the perpetually helpless, antagonistic weiner personality over the last 10 years that is an absolute teeth grind.
That said, it's good to learn how to differentiate between people who are being genuine and just need guidance/attention and someone who's a wet noodle. It's easy to accidentally discourage the former mischaracterizing them as the latter.
Yea, here's how what you observed in your coworkers changed my behavior. I used to share my free time projects widely with coworkers. Stuff like arduino robotics projects, fun sites I would build for silly reasons, etc. Some coworkers wouldn't enjoy it and instead pick it apart for any reasons that usually starts with "why didn't you just..."
It wasn't everyone, but I started to realize that I was triggering negative feelings in some people.
I'm still trying to figure out how to explain it. Basically, take an IDL like proto/thrift. Then add in the ability to transform the data. Then add in a sense of privacy of who can see what. And boom, the foundation is laid for a document transform language.
The reason to do all of that is because the state of the board game requires a great deal of care. For instance, wouldn't it be great to offer Undo? What if you hook a socket directly up the document and then differentiate state changes after privacy checking?
Right now, it's a mess, and I'm forking efforts to work on a board game web ide where people can build board games online. Adama is the foundation for the IDE such that it starts collaborative from the get-go.
...multiplayer is hard, but some sort of replay-log of the messages is my current thinking of the only rational outcome. If you're looking to make an online boardgame IDE, then focusing on devising a game notation (which may include privacy) would be helpful.
I think the author is referring to a somewhat different personality type. While wet noodles will ask you to basically do their job for them, there is another personality that has a confrontational, zero-sum perspective where they are constantly trying to dominate other workers.
I've experienced it firsthand, and I eventually found a term for it: a "high conflict" personality [1]. There are a few ways google says you can deal with these personality types, the main one being: do not interact with that person.
If it's a persistent pattern and not just a result of stress and poor culture - not always easy to tell - they're likely on the Dark Triad spectrum.
Or at the very least they don't like you personally and are trying to bully you.
It's not usually about the presented issue. The relationship dynamics are the real truth.
Everyone has bad days. But if interactions consistently take this direction - especially to the point where anticipating them causes anxiety - it's time to consider moving on.
> It's not usually about the presented issue. The relationship dynamics are the real truth.
Absolutely. I was on the wrong side of such a dynamic until recently, by the end of it (thankfully I switched teams) it was a straight up bullying situation.
And much like an abusive romantic relationship, it escalated slowly in a way that was difficult to notice.
My point is, yes, do whatever you can to stay away from these kind of people.
If it's possible to take a positive out of it, it should mean that the signs are easier to spot earlier if, god forbid, the situation occurs again later in your career.
I'm currently (this weekend) going to be applying for jobs to extricate myself from what I recognise as the early stages of exactly such a situation.
It seems so unlikely to me that large swaths of people who act this way can make it to a place in any industry where they're surrounded by more resourceful peers. How does this even happen? I just want to make sure that I'm not creating a view out of reading exaggerated anecdotes, and that this actually reflects reality.
College degrees or plain salespersonship conferring an inappropriate amount of merit. This is the unfortunate corrolary of impostor syndrome: some people really are impostors.
I think if we want to start pushing more people into trades and de-emphasize college education: (1) we make it much harder to graduate college and (2) make college much cheaper so that pursuing that risk isn't ruinous. Then a student can explore a college path and pivot to something more suited to their attitude and skills to remain a productive member of society if it doesn't work out.
Combine that with the Pareto Principle and you start to get a fairly accurate picture of "why the world is the way it is." And this applies to all industries, not just tech.
If you look at it through a nihilist lens, it can bum you out quick. But, if you look at it like "I was given the gift/responsibility to do this well" (sans God-complex, elitist "useless eaters" attitude), it makes it a bit more fun/tolerable.
I've personally encountered this quite a bit circling around tech, in most of the cases I've seen it was due to _deeply seated_ insecurity more than anything else. Usually it corresponds with folks who find themselves in a position that they're a poor fit for but for whatever reason can't move on. They bounced into a position they can't exit and their 'value add' is applying this sort of tactic under the guise of being helpful externally.
Hmm, I suspect it’s best to decide upfront what you are willing and unwilling to do. Then others can have whatever “type” of personality they want, that’s their business.
The truth is, there are always return volleys you can make, depending on how petty you want to get, or how many cycles you feel like burning with a person like the article describes. For example any statement of the form “you should…” implies a belief in a particular policy, so you can then inquire why they think that should be so. Any question can be answered directly, or you can start asking questions about why they asked the question, or you can just answer a different question entirely. Et cetera.
At some level this stuff is war and if people aren’t going to bring their thinking caps, a change in tactic is appropriate.
Maybe it’s just me, but I notice a difference in response from the author that I personally try to avoid. To me these two things:
> There are no docs for [this thing you're doing].
And:
> Coworker: I have (specific concern) about [thing you're doing]. I couldn't find anything about it in that group post or on the wiki.
Would receive a somewhat similar response. Sure it’s annoying when people can’t find something, or when they don’t bother looking, but we also work in a field where someone might ask you something in a very hostile sounding way simply because they aren’t very skilled socially.
Telling them “yes there is”, sort of escalates the conflict in my book and while it’s totally understandable (and I’ll do this myself on my less good days) it’s also just asking for things to go south. Which is something I have learned not to waste time on.
If they continue being hostile after you respond openly, helpful and defusing, then sure, they can go fuck themselves. Just be sure that you use the corporate-speak fuck you instead of what you actually want to say to keep your hands clean.
> Telling them “yes there is”, sort of escalates the conflict in my book and while it’s totally understandable (and I’ll do this myself on my less good days) it’s also just asking for things to go south. Which is something I have learned not to waste time on.
no kidding. if you're going to be that abrupt, then just send them a link to the docs as the sole response.
i usually also ask "where did you try looking for it, so that i can put links there?". and then i put links there.
> i usually also ask "where did you try looking for it, so that i can put links there?". and then i put links there.
This is a seriously helpful move. When I remember to, if it takes me a while to find a link I will go back to the first place I looked for it and then add a link there.
And similarly, if I forget the password to something, after going through the password reset process I set the new password to the first thing I tried to guess initially, since apparently that's the password I already have in my head.
Valid, but thats not the point of the article. The point of the article was broad vs specific and people having a predefined outcome for a conversation.
i.e.
Q: There are no docs for home page redesign.
A: They are right here
Q: I have question about the color choice of the header on home page redesign. I couldn't find anything about it in that group post or on the wiki.
A: Ah, yeah sorry, it is buried here. If it's still not clear, let's have a chat about it.
Yeah, but I think OC’s point is the first coworker isn’t impossible to deal with if you treat the first interaction with care.
If you get an off putting response, instead of hammering them with facts and trying to prove them wrong, maybe back up a minute and try to uncover what’s really going on.
Maybe you haven’t done your job on telling them why X is important to them or the company.
If I know how important something is, I don’t mind doing a little extra leg work to understand what you’re trying to tell me.
Personally it seems kind of rude to me to ask someone to review something that’s disjointed or missing info and expect them to search for the missing pieces. Most people I know are fairly busy at their jobs and you’re adding one more thing on their plate and you’re not even their boss.
If it’s really that important to you, take the time to communicate it to me clearly and simply. Otherwise, it’s like you’re passive aggressively asking me to do your work for you without giving me a good reason why I should stop what I’m doing and help you.
Again, this situation is when you ARE doing all of those things, treating the interaction with care, etc.
"Personally it seems kind of rude to me to ask someone to review something that’s disjointed or missing info and expect them to search for the missing pieces. Most people I know are fairly busy at their jobs and you’re adding one more thing on their plate and you’re not even their boss."
I feel like you're missing the point, this was just an example of someone who has taken a look and has a real question vs someone who hasn't looked at all. Of course, none of us are perfect and we will always miss things which means there will always be questions. This doesn't mean something is disjointed or missing info on purpose or maliciously. I would turn the table and say it's rude to come in, see a small mistake and assume the person didn't put effort into what they showed you.
Not saying that this doesn't happen, just saying the article was about a situation where the person DID put effort in and did their best and is having to say, essentially, "Here is the link to the documentation that is in the exact place that it is supposed to be that you chose to ignore"
"You: If I put it in the wiki you would have said to put it in the group, and if I put it in the group you would have said I should have put it in the wiki."
I learned this the hard way in a corporate setting. If someone's going to damn me for doing (A) and doing (not A) then they're really just attacking me.
OP's point is, tersely, a good faith coworker needs to do a bare minimum of work to show genuine interest outside of hostility. That's definitely a thing, too - few situations get to be one sided. Further, the example she gave sounds like a coworker who only makes demands or criticisms. When it's 100% demands or criticisms then it's actively destructive. This I learned from family who claim to "just be contrarians".
As an engineer I meet one of these people with the the just-feed-me mindset once in a while (luckily not too often). They are never very good at their job, because they lack perhaps the single most important ability for an engineer, to research on their own. An example is when an engineer could find the API doc with a 5 min search but choose to bother their co-workers for it repeatedly. They will also often complain about the lack of documentation but when they actually do projects the documentation are not more accessible either.
I also find people with this mindset hard to coach, just because it's a very passive attitude, and simple words of advice couldn't do much to change the passivity.
There is always a limit to guidance or documentation. Code changes every day in any decent software project and docs become stale quickly. Even if the docs are there, it's always a good idea to take a look at the code, do some research on your own and see if you find any discrepancies.
Posts and comments like this scare me.Not being a social person, while talking to others, my worst nightmare is when I ask someone a question, and they already have some presumptions about why I am asking that, and I would occasionally end up being scolded and not even know why.
In this case, because I asked about not being able to find the docs, I am already a hater because of the line of conversation others have had already.
1) Talk therapy can also just be "social interaction tutoring". 10/10 would recommend
2) "There aren't any docs" is accusatory and aggressive because it's about them / their work. "I couldn't find the docs" isn't, because it's about yourself. (Edit) "“Where can I find documentation for [this thing you’re doing]?” (thanks @
rattlesnakedave!) then goes the next step by actively inviting assistance.
2a) Tone definitely matters / helps, but that's a lot harder to coach / communicate over text.
I appreciate that on point 2 you add the question "Can you help?" I find it upsetting when people make a statement and you have to infer that it's a request for help.
I had a boss who would often send Slack messages stating something like "[Coworker] is on vacation today" or "The release is out" or "Our sales are down today". It was always some statement with no reason for me to think that he wants me to do something. Of course, I assumed he wanted me to do something or else he wouldn't have contacted me. Then I had to dig out of him what he expected of me.
For everyone reading this: If you want help, please make an explicit request and make it as specific as possible.
It may interest you to scroll through your chat logs with other people to see how much you or other people do what my old boss did (i.e. make a statement and expect someone to know what you want done). I just review the logs with my current boss and was pleased to see none of my previous boss's behavior from me or him. I did, however see that kind of behavior from one of my coworkers.
Following on in a similar vein, the usage of "soft" wording can result in the same kind of misunderstanding, and this is something I'm working on improving myself.
"Should", "Might", "Potentially". Just fucking say what you think instead of mincing words (my advice to myself).
Hey, thanks for the tips. I realize the different ways to communicate also plays a role. Somehow, I did not make that distinction as in my mind, there were very similar. Thank you for laying it out like that.
(and also thanks to the child comment, which makes it explicit about asking for help, so as to remove any confusion. That is something I will apply immediately)
Not at all! As I take it, the sentiment being expressed is against an individual who repeatedly, over the course of time, critiques and accuses without making an attempt to bridge the gap of understanding on their end.
For instance, in the article “There are no docs for [this thing you're doing]” would be significantly better posed as a question. “Where can I find documentation for [this thing you’re doing]?”
You can tell the author’s frustrations aren’t one off, from: “ Basically, with them, something's always wrong, and if you refute their points, they will pivot to find something else. This will go on for a while” and I think this is the general sentiment.
Everyone takes an accusatory tone now and then, or has a bad day, or whatever, but if you’re doing it consistently and refuse to be pleased that’s when it becomes “hater behavior”
It's pretty easy to tell when someone is genuinely curious/unknowledgeable/whatever vs. when they're just hunting for something they can complain about (or something they can use to fire you, if that's the power dynamic). Another comment here brings up a waiting tables analogy which I think is really great. Asking for 3 things at once (parallel) is much different than asking for 3 things separately (serial).
And truthfully, any question that shows you've actually looked for whatever you need helps 99% of the time.
I did not read that same interpretation of the article. The first question was not the problem, but the sum of the incessant questions. Sure, the first question can be a good indicator for what is to follow, but I would politely suggest not letting this article stoke your confirmation bias.
The easiest way to not be that person is to tell people what you've done already followed by your problem. Instead of
> Coworker: There are no docs for [this thing you're doing].
Say
> "I looked at company.xyz/wiki/app/docs and don't see the docs for [this thing you're doing]. Can you help me find them?"
I'm way more understanding if someone has given an attempt to solve their problem but failed and are now coming to me. If you come out the gate with "facts" I know aren't true like [x doesn't exist] or [y isn't working] I'm more likely to be annoyed at you.
It's one thing to be trying to act in a constructive manner but lack some social graces. It's another thing to be a person who expresses hostility by being unreasonable and difficult.
I think this article is about the latter, not the former. Consider that a person with highly polished social skills can still be hostile and difficult. In fact, they can be worse because they can use those skills to create the illusion that they aren't doing anything wrong.
> “expresses hostility by being unreasonable and difficult”
Sadly I’ve seen well-intending ASD/Asperger’s folks be
written off as hostile. It’s a tricky balance to build culture of positivity without blocking neurodivergent folks from amplifying a team with their unique gifts.
I'm in a relatively new job in an organisation with lots of systems and a complex web of scenarios that involve each of these systems, and I'm under-fucking-water in terms of how well I understand things in comparison to where I need to be for doing my job properly / competently. I've been working on a few diagrams and documentation to try to make sense of it, including asking questions of related persons, and all that has gotten me is three separate people questioning why I'm working on something that isn't "one of my assigned Jira tickets".
So I'm currently in a negative spiral of being not-particularly-useful because I don't know enough about how their shit works, and also now being reticent to ask questions in order to help solve the first problem, because it seems to self-nominate me as "not on task".
Will be applying for other jobs this weekend. Can't handle this BS.
Do apply for other jobs. It’s likely you’re working in a disfunctional place. However, if you decide to stick around do what you need to do to understand what is going on and don’t hide the fact that you need to get a better picture. If they fire you for that it’s a good confirmation you needen’t bother working there, the place is disfunctional.
I'm half-way through a 12-month contract, so leaving isn't any kind of existential problem for me. I've raised with my immediate manager the learning curve problems I've experienced (which he was thankful for one day, and then telling me to 'stay on task' the very next day), and he's also aware that someone that started one week before me left at the end of last year for similar reasons - I get the feeling that's water off a ducks back though.
The place of work is un-balanced towards "institutionalisation", which I've not experienced before and is likely a large part of the problem, and my take-away is to avoid such places for the rest of my (increasingly humble) career.
What's a good way to handle people like this? I generally put them on my "shit list", and actively minimize interactions, but this doesn't seem ideal. Does anyone have a more positive approach?
It could come off as a little snarkier than I would like to be, but as soon as someone says something should have been documented better I ask them where they think I should have put said document. Then I ask them if they looked there before asking me. 9 times out of 10 the answer is no, and it's then obvious to them that if I had already done exactly what they're asking of me, they still would have come and asked me.
Sometimes people have a point and something should be documented better. Especially if I've been asked twice, it's worth documenting better. And I would welcome their input on where and how that should be done. But those are the people are being constructive.
> It could come off as a little snarkier than I would like to be, but as soon as someone says something should have been documented better I ask them where they think I should have put said document.
I think the point of the article is that for these people, the answer will always be "whatever I can find that shows my opponent is wrong." So, if the doc was supposed to be in the shared drive, they will say "the shared drive." If it is in the shared drive already, they will say "It also should be linked in the Wiki." If it is linked in the Wiki, they will say "You should also have sent an E-mail to the team-announce@ list." If you did do that, they will say "It would be helpful if it were listed in this Team Resources doc." and on and on and on. And, when they finally find some thing that you didn't do, you say "OK, I will do [that thing] too." and they will come back with the passive aggressive "Well, don't do it because I told you to do it. I want you to understand why!" I worked with a manager like this and it was infuriating. Every conversation's goal was to conclude that I was wrong in some way, no matter how much prep I did.
I will often ask them to do/assist in, the thing they think is missing or needs to be done. Sometimes this actually works and you can work positively together, often not though.
Typically, asking them to do any additional work gets met with silence and a few days/weeks of being left along by this person. i.e. minimizing future interactions.
There's a tangent behavior where people are difficult because it gives them power/control. You add just enough interpersonal friction and people will do it your way. It's similar to the described scenario - nothing is good enough and there's always a justification.
I've found it an incredibly hard behavior to manage with no good outcomes. People acting in good faith just need to align on the allowed variance and the issue's done.
> There's a tangent behavior where people are difficult because it gives them power/control.
Another common one, which I've hit a few times, is that people who are being difficult are doing it mainly to get out of doing what they've been asked to do, or at least one particular detail of it, because they see it as a chore or they are simply incapable. They hope that by badgering you for every tiny detail, you'll eventually get exasperated and do that step for them because it is quicker and easier than dealing with them as they do their best not to get it done.
Sometimes management is quite savvy to the problems this causes and when reported they deal with it. Though in one example they didn't take the matter seriously at all until I was actively interviewing for other positions, because one way or another I was going to stop having to deal with that person (and the overtime I was doing to get my own work finished having spent large chunks of time trying to stop him make the project fail). This was far from his only flaw as a colleague: having massively lied about both ability and experience on his CV (which I didn't know about at the time, I was not involved with the recruiting) being the big one that was cited officially when they got rid of him.
I emailed a vendor who sells my clients goods through their platform, and asked them questions about their payout report. They don’t read/answer my questions, send incomplete answers when they do, send links to their knowledge base with months old information. I’ve concluded they are either overworked, don’t care, and/or have a parasitic brain fungus which prevents them from using logic.
A few months back I cross posted a programming question to several online communities, and in each got one person answering the question they think you’re asking, rather than the one you actually did ask—literally in words and sentences. And then proceed to answer the easy question—which you provided as context—and ignore the difficult question you brought to the group.
It’s a virus. It’s people optimizing their own successful behaviors and failing to perform in new situations.
In the first case the company says they added features to the report for internationalization. What? 330m Americans is not a big enough group to have a custom payout report without confusing garbage in it? (Like VAT on a receipt for goods bought in US). They bought into their own BS and can’t see.
In the second case, months later I discussed the programming problem at a meetup group and an expert in the domain said what I want doesn’t exist. No wonder the forum peeps answered their own mis-interpretation, because to very high reputation users it’s just a game.
On the one hand the organizations we belong to have great influence on our rational behavior. If you don't toe the line, then you'll be gone in short order and replaced by someone who will. To succeed you must adopt the mindset of the organization. I call it company-centric thinking.
On the other hand, you expect corporations to put profit before politics, and develop training and protocols which are pro-marketplace, pro-capital, and blandly neutral socially/politically. Mostly rational and yet, as discussed here frequently, this seems to eventually lead to awful companies with too much influence on our lives.
This is the friction between corporations or narrowly focused organizations and our own communities. Not unlike the Industrial Revolution, technology moves at a pace faster than rational people can adapt. Makes you want to live the life of a Quaker, and adopt new things only when they won't disrupt the community.
I've noticed this as a general pattern, when someone doesn't like plan X or doesn't want to do X, but the reason they give is bogus. And when you point out why it's bogus, they offer a series of other bogus reasons. Sometimes they are ultimately persuaded, and sometimes they land on a real reason, and sometimes they just wind up saying they just don't like it.
But no matter what, the series of bogus reasons (bogus German: vielenscheingründe) is a waste of everyone's time, and I wonder why people do it. Are they just doing it to stall while they wait for the hamster wheel in their head to offer up their real objection?
I've seen this with people in my life. Generally, I think it's because people have an emotional reaction and cook up some reason to justify their feelings. They may have no idea why they feel the way they do. Even the people who pride themselves on being "logical" do it too.
Other than that, people can also do it because the real reason is objectionable and it would make them look or feel bad to reveal it.
I've come to the conclusion that there are lots of times you'll never get the real reason for someone's choices/behavior directly from them.
I offer my condolences. People shouldn't have to work in that kind of environment.
I've been in a place like that. I quit without having another job to go to. Such a course of action may not work out for everyone, but it worked great for me.
I mean, it's kinda always been that way. There's this skill cliff you get to between power user and operator where you know enough to solve easy problems but getting all the information you need to put it together into something useful requires non-trivial effort. And you go through that cliff every time you take on a new project.
If you want to put together a self-hosted Spotify alternative, for instance, one of the first and most attractive things I found was mpd. I put a whole bunch of time into working out how to containerify it so I could run it on my cluster in order to find out why nobody else put in the work, mpd isn't designed to and has no functionality to serve music over a network. It's there to run a local music player. It was written in an era before Spotify and had no idea that was going to be something people would want to do.
And you can find online thread after thread of people asking how to do this with mpd and getting answers that aren't satisfying. It leads them to get on a forum themselves and ask themselves, in order to get the same unsatisfying answer.
It takes time and experience before you can figure out such things at a glance just by seeing other conversations about it. Time before you learn you need to read the available docs carefully because the answer you're seeking is very very probably in there already.
Nobody's born with this kind of patience but working on tech stuff long enough will eventually beat it into you.
It's just that more and more people are starting out and so online is simply dominated by these people.
This hits home really hard. I’m currently in my 2 weeks notice period after 6-7ish months at a company where this was (is?) a regular occurrence. At some point you have to chalk things up to willful ignorance and move on.
I tend to think people like this are just looking for an excuse not to work. My approach is to either facilitate them or force them to do more work.
If I decide to facilitate their not doing work, I would say "Yeah, I think there are docs for this. I'm in the middle of something, but give me an hour or so and I'll email you the link." Then, I'll forget about it. If they really need to know they'll come back and ask again.
If I decide to disincentivize them by making it more work for them to ask me for work I'd go along the lines of - "That's great feedback. Why don't you take notes of all the issues you have with the wiki while you're working on your thing. When you're done, update the wiki so the next person to use it can benefit from what you find. Thanks."
non-violent communication [0] and sales culture [1] both teach us that when someone makes a request, we can either take it at face value, or try to understand the underlying need. In Rachel's case, the requests kept on being red herrings, because whatever this person's underlying need, it wasn't for the design doc to be in the wiki or whatever. A process of discovery might have been a better track than continually trying to hit a moving target.
Then again, when I've been on the other side of a moving target -- when a supervisor kept coming up with things I was doing wrong that never quite jelled together -- it was because a decision about my continued employment had already been made in principle, but no one was acknowledging it head-on for political/legal reasons. In that situation, I don't think there's any way to get off-script except just to quit, which is exactly what your supervisor and HR department are probably hoping for.
The "bad" example in the blog post makes me think that the persons need might just to be validated about unhappy or frustrated they are at work. Someone to listen to them for a just few minutes. When I've seen this kind of behaviour in others or myself, it's usually because of deadlines, multiple blockers, not being able to get forward momentum, along with some time pressure.
The difficulties with non-violent communication I've found are:
a) it's hard to do well.
b) you have to be pretty calm and grounded yourself.
c) it feels like a lot of extra work.
I think it's worth it for important interactions such as with partners, family, and good friends.
Reminds me of my current job, but with general communication rather than specific projects. This convo has come up several times between us:
Him: "You don't post updates and I don't know what you're doing about [Project A]"
Me: "I post updates every day in the daily update list where you told us to. I'm one of the only ones on the team who does it consistently"
Him: "Yeah, well you need to tell the project manager of [Project B] the state of the project"
Me: "I did in these places over a couple of days, pinging him directly each time."
Him: "Well you need to do it more. It's not his fault that he's too busy to look when you mention him. You need to keep doing it to keep him in the loop."
Wow this was timely for me. Literally in multiple versions of the described interactions this morning. Two thoughts:
1. I don't think it's helpful to categorize people. Humans will be varying degrees of reasonable/unreasonable for a variety reasons and constantly in motion on that spectrum. It's more productive, for both selfish and altruistic reasons, to try to understand the why of their behavior.
2. Getting that understanding is hard. Especially over mediums that leave out non-verbal communication. But it's really worth your time to discern if there is any area where you've communicated poorly, so you can improve, AND it's really worth your time to recognize when a person has already made up their mind and not waste anymore effort trying to change it.
3. Even when a person has made up their mind beforehand, it might be worth your time to try to understand where they're coming from, depending on whether you are in a position to simply ignore them or not. If you can't ignore them, digging deeper can open up your options to get buy-in, or lead to workarounds. Of course, very relationship, and situation dependent.
I would simply start with: "You have to be more specific" and go from there.
And as a warning to your approach: don't take on the job to make dysfunctional people function for free. Either communicate that you are taking on a burden, or escalate to those whose job it is.
In one instance (literally this morning) "You have to be more specific" was exactly my approach and immediately got to the core issue. In this case there was nothing to be done about it. Our differences are irreconcilable and he's not my responsibility.
In that case trying to understand his deeper motivation was still helpful. It allowed me to have empathy and us to part amicably instead of getting into a shouting match. I consider that the best possible outcome.
I used to answer forum posts quite a lot, and I eventually realized something similar:
If the person doesn't tell you what they've already done to try to resolve their issue, they probably didn't do anything. And it's a waste of my time to try to answer them.
That isn't always true. Sometimes they're just too lazy to type it all out, but that's another uphill battle. It's not my job as a random forum viewer to pull all that information out of them. It's their job to provide it if they want help.
I answer a lot fewer questions now, but I'm a lot more satisfied with the results.
I hate this kind of behaviour, where people prioritise themselves and their own egos or insecurities over the project or mission. In my experience it's fairly common in large companies, which have the resources to work around it, but it's devastating in startups.
On one occasion I've was blamed for not doing my job, a senior role in a startup, despite the fact that mine was the only job that was successfully completed (a product launch). That can be a real problem when the incomplete jobs include things like capital raising and sales.
I think you often get this behaviour from people who are working outside of their experience. The revert to processes, book-smarts and magic bullets, instead of using experience and seeking goals. When nothing from the book seems to work, they lash out at others. "If only you did what the book said this wouldn't have happened!"
Since every book you read will tell you something different, there is a ready source of material to support such a person's attitude, which seems to have the effect of reinforcing it.
This is excellent knowledge about human nature. The only thing I would add is that it's usually the same person in different circumstances.
There's a concept of someone "tilting" or "going tilted" (analogy to an old pinball machine; I wonder if we need to update it? Do people still play pinball?). Essentially, as a software engineer, your job is to make order out of chaos (where chaos is defined as "Everything that doesn't work the way you think it should"). Some of that involves changing your reality to match expectations. A lot of it involves changing your expectations to match reality; that's usually the fastest path (though you'll get paid for the first).
But changing yourself takes cognitive energy. When someone has had enough of that for a time, they're tilted. There isn't any reasoning with them because they're in a mindset where they are demanding reality conform to their expectations, and every deviation from that will just make them angrier. A person Rachel's describing in the first scenario has tilted and until they un-tilt, it's unlikely there'll be anything that can be done to help them solve the problem they were working on when they tilted.
Some corollaries / consequences of this model:
- some people have, in some contexts, nearly zero patience with surprise before they tilt. We often call many of those people "users." ;)
- a manager or project lead prone to tilting can be a real problem because they have the authority to try to solve the situation by putting other people on bending reality. Be sensitive, as a team member, to whether a manager is tasking you with a project because it's a good idea for the company's goals or because they're grumpy about something and taking advantage of their position to change it without actually fixing anything other than their mental model not matching current consensus reality.
There are a surprising number of people in high tech endeavours with a very particular form of illiteracy. They can not learn things very well by reading longer documents. They always seem to get lost along the way. So it is possible that the sort of behaviour described in the article is really a cry for help. They might need someone to hold them by the hand and lead them to understanding.
I instinctly want to agree. I remember quite a few examples of that.
On the other hand. This post can be weaponized as a argument towards: 'I did enough documentation. If you disagree you are unreasonable.'
Or from people that don't do documentation but spam. With that I mean people who do not think about what to put into the documentation, but throw in everything, mostly unsorted. Like: 'It is in there. On page 756, section C, subsection 1.3.3.4. Easy to find. Just look.'
In the end I think it all comes down to the question how reasonable people work together and with respect for each other.
> On the other hand. This post can be weaponized as a argument towards: 'I did enough documentation. If you disagree you are unreasonable.'
I don't think that's what she's advocating. Her point, as I am reading it (and her post aligns quite well with some of the worst experiences I have had), is that a reasonable person isn't going to come with "there's no docs" or even "there's not enough docs", they'll do a reasonable amount of searching find the docs, and instead approach with something concrete like, "Hey, I have $question about $system. I did see the docs here $link, but they don't seem to answer that." "Oh, yeah, not clearly enough. $answer" "Thanks! Do you mind if I send a PR to add that to the docs?" "Please, by all means!"
I feel like the whole 'docs' angle of this story is kind of a distraction. The bottom line (IMHO) is that reasonable coworkers, with a reasonable interest in coming to an amicable decision quickly, will not engage in this kind of behaviour.
The anti-social person can be the consumer of the docs, or the producer of the docs. In both cases they will find a way to pick a fight. The important thing is for the reasonable person to learn to recognize what is reasonable behaviour, and not fall into the trap of making protracted concessions in a futile attempt to be reasonable themself.
I think the point being made is that you will encounter unreasonable people at work over the course of your career, and this is an example of one particular type of unreasonable. The examples you mention are very real as well! At some point even if you act in good faith, there will be situations in which you absolutely cannot bridge the gap.
For anyone not familiar, a guideline in improv is to avoid saying `Yes, but...` and instead say `Yes, and...`.
While maybe not using those exact words, I find that when I disagree with someone at work I can either set myself up in opposition with them or I can work with them to get to the desired state.
"Is this the doc you are looking for?"
"Yes, but why isn't this in the wiki?" vs "Yes, and let's add a link to it in the wiki".
It's a very simple shift, but it really makes a difference in collaboration.
Whenever I don't understand what's happening, I try to step back and think of open ended (non judgmental) questions.
So depending on the whatifs, in this OC's case, I might ask:
How can I make this better?
Can you help me improve the docs, wiki, readme, whatever?
Additionally, it shifts the "initiative" (for lack of a better term) back onto the eeyore. Meaning, instead of me explaining and defending, by asking for help, I'm shifting the onus back onto them.
I mean, it's just so easy (and lazy) to criticize. Subtly, gently insist the critic put some skin into the game. Over time, they'll step up or bow out; both outcomes which suit me fine.
You're the new guy. You look for documentation, you find something outdated, untouched for 6 years with a note that the page was migrated from some other system and is "work in progress".
If that thing was untouched for 6 years, it is logical to conclude that it no longer contains correct information. You read a few lines, see dead links and wrong information, you conclude that it is no longer useful.
The person that wrote the original wiki, still works at the company, but they now work on a different system and have no responsibility for that legacy system.
See, the issue is always the same: transfer of knowledge deteriorates with every person that quits or gets promoted. The system is now maintained by someone else, who has their own "wiki" on their own machine. The original, now useless wiki, should have either been deleted or updated. This doesn't happen.
This creates such waste on a global scale, that it is beyond comprehension. Whoever solves this issue, will surely help the human kind.
In summary, when a transfer of ownership for a wiki occurs, there should be a mechanism to make sure that it gets either deleted or maintained. Having new hires hunt for information, benefits no one, especially not the organization. Get your documentation in order, and you will save a ton of hours and improve productivity!
A place i worked had a wiki, and i diligently updated the wiki with everything that i was doing, including screenshots and links to where i came about the correct solution to problems if necessary. Having to host a meeting every two weeks to basically put the wiki up on a projector and read from it, taught me within the first quarter to not bother with the wiki editing at all.
I had my own set of servers in a rack, and i synced home directories between my laptop, desktop, and the servers. When i left, one of my managers pulled up all edits from the wiki that i made (18 months prior!), and said "i thought you said you were good at documentation...?" I emailed him the tarball of my home directory. They obviously weren't paying me to write documentation.
There was also three ticketing systems, depending on what group whoever submitted a ticket either knew about or thought could handle it. There was a ton of notes in the ticketing system. I wasn't involved in stuff that people could complain about, so i only used the ticketing system when i would volunteer to help do NOC/sysadmin duties. There was no mindshare between the wiki and the ticketing systems.
There was also email. There was also several IRC channels, internally - each group would have a room for the devs and manager(s) for that group, and the managers and some devs were in the IT channels or the backoffice channels, it was a mess. I like IRC for emergencies and for basic communication, but stuff that isn't transitory or ephemeral ought be put in the wiki, not left to someone to figure out how to parse irc logs at some point in the future.
I still occasionally write detailed "how-to" guides, put up here and there on the internet - but i've still never found a decent software stack to self-host some sort of documentation repository, and oh how i've tried so many softwares...
This is a management failure. If you let hundreds of people run amok you're going to have nonsense documentation strategies. First: you can't have a group of people dedicated to putting out fires who also do other things. Don't have NOC do database backups, for instance. NOC should NOC, and their "guidebook" should be in the same place as everyone else's. As soon as you relieve the pressure on different sub-organizations or teams or groups, you can probably successfully mandate that X hours per week of the team's budget should go to pruning, editing, correcting, and adding to the documentation. Secondly, the manager or at least the senior team member should get an easily digestible digest of all edits/new entries posted to the documentation system, ideally daily. If the documentation starts to drop off or becomes lower quality, that should be addressed quickly. Third, a universal glossary would be excellent.
i wrote too much to agree with your premise, but other than the last paragraph being a non-solution, i didn't really add anything. Oh well.
I similarly do a lot of documentation, mainly because it helps me to understand the scenarios and contexts, but also because I'm aware that it can short-cut the (expensive) learning curve for new hires.
But it's pretty universally un(der)-appreciated because there's no direct line from good documentation to "improved bottom line". I've not come across documentation-related KPIs, especially now that Agile gets misinterpreted as "no documentation" - sure, the code can change regularly, but the fundamental concepts barely change and should have a couple of levels of documentation (detail and overview) as they're fundamental to the business itself, and user processes change slowly enough that updating existing diagrams is a progressive, not wholesale change.
Humans are political animals. That's why most technical criticisms are basically just reflections of personal problems rather than anything truly rational.
For example, someone who keeps coming up with reasons your tool won't work for a particular application, when the real reason is that it makes their previous tool less important or replaces it.
I have a client who has a 'trusted partner' (programmer) who does not have the skills or time for the scope of the current project. Yesterday he was telling the client my new tool doesn't work and that there was only three weeks left, so I needed to create a new hook to bypass the tool entirely and run a script on my server that he writes. The problem is that was nonsense, so I demonstrated the whole thing working last night. They require my API so they need to use my tool which configures the API (the API has always been a way to trigger the tool with certain inputs). We discussed this long before.
But basically the guy has done nothing but say that my tools or approaches won't work, because they are supplanting his own.
But everything comes down to political BS in this world. That's the main thing holding back technology. Idiotic primate manipulations.
I don't like this one bit! In many cases, finding the right docs in an org is like finding a needle in a haystack. When someone asks a question that's in the docs, I default to assuming they looked and they couldn't find it, not that they are lazy or trying to put down my work. FWIW with this approach I have not had people needling me like the author here, and I have a ways to go but I have been in this industry for 17 years now.
I think the people that could use more effort in communication will see this post as relatable, and will justify their behavior when interacting with other teams / team members. In my experience infra teams are particularly bad at this, which I attribute to lack of building up a "customer first" muscle that feature teams tend to build by necessity. Of course this is wreckless speculation. I do know that it's annoying when other teams are short with reasonable questions, and have this self righteous attitude that what they work on is obviously perfect and that I'm an idiot for asking these questions!
The difference is in intent. Sometimes, the docs actually suck. Sometimes, the docs are fine and the person complaining is just trying to find something to complain about. It depends on the situation, and isn't necessarily possible to distinguish from a single interaction.
The biggest difference between junior devs and senior devs is the ability to dig for answers and information and only ask when you are completely blocked. It seems like you've surrounded yourself with junior engineers and aren't interested in mentoring them into doing better. You should talk to your manager, or find a more technical place to work with fewer people to mentor.
I read this through a completely different lens. The people I've seen with this type of behaviour have been bitter or incompetent leads or managers. I too wished they would take a long hike of a short bridge, but chose to leave the company instead. Entitled and demanding people who offered very little value and had built their careers by trampling on others. No thanks for me.
There are certainly exceptions to every case, but I when I was first starting out my career, I was super guilty of doing this. Always asking my coworkers for help or information, even though I had all the access to information that I needed, or could just ask Google. It wasn't until the lead engineer kindly sat me down and told me that I need to be more responsible for my interruptions and only ask when you're completely stumped. Some of the best career advice I have gotten in this industry.
My last two positions have followed the exact opposite philosophy, and I prefer their take.
The general consensus at these places was that getting to the information faster is preferable. We have a team chat channel for a reason, ask their. Don't stop your search, and don't ask first thing, but after a cursory glance, ask. Then continue to search on your own. If someone knows the answer and sees the question, they should respond. If you find the answer first, update the thread and answer your own question in case it helps anyone else.
That said, I agree if the answer was easily found in a google search. That's the kind of basic info an engineer/developer should be able to answer on their own with research and self-exploration.
It's key to be able to tell quickly whether the answer/info you're looking for is likely to be a common/general piece of info or a company/industry specific piece of knowledge that might not be found widely.
That is good advice! I got the same from my first manager: Research and try to find the answer first before reaching out for help. I had in fact already done that in the particular situation in which he commented, but he was right in principle anyway, so no harm done.
I have a very different feeling about the OPs situation though. This is not about junior people asking too many questions or being lazy or incompetent, it is about a personality of people who are just entitled and demanding and just generally bitter assholes. Not typically seen in juniors!
I didn't see this as a hostile student, I saw it as a hostile co-worker who is trying to accuse you of something you didn't do.
A junior dev may ask a lot of questions but that would be like, "Where is that documented? How do I read that? I don't understand what it's saying." A senior person might have already grokked a lot of it but didn't realize there was hidden context somewhere else, so when they say they couldn't find the documentation you show them and they go back to read it. A hostile student (someone who wants to be force-fed info instead of reading themselves) would pepper you with questions showing they didn't in good faith read any of the docs, but they wouldn't lie and say the docs weren't there. This is someone who thought that you were slacking off or wasting time and want to show that, and they'll keep at it until they can find something to stick. And if they can't, they'll make you have two mutually exclusive things to be true in order to satisfy them.
Hard disagree, but obviously our mileage has varied. I find that junior devs are the most hungry and will comb through endless poorly organized docs and source code before asking a question that makes them look like they "don't belong".
Yeah I agree. "Only asking when you are completely blocked" definitely isn't a sign of seniority: it might mean losing a lot of time for little benefit. Maybe the person with the knowledge would be very happy spending 10min with you rather than you spending hours figuring things out by yourself.
Instead of pointing them to check a specific email or providing specific wiki link, would not it make more sense for letting them do "some work" in trying to find the resources on their own? Like one could say, "ohh I think you have it in your email or you can search it on internal wiki and let me know once you read everything if you still have any questions?"
In german, this is sometimes referred to as 'bessermachen', i.e. this must/should have 'better made', in some arbitrary way. It is all about 'which monkey is in charge here'.
Recognizing these types of interaction early is a useful skill. It does seem pretty obvious most of the time, I can tell based on the first question whether the person I'm talking to is interested in a good faith discussion or not.
Conversely, I try hard to exhaust all available documentation before I finally go to someone and ask for their assistance. I want them to know I'm serious, so they don't just blow me off. And when I do ask for help, I try to make it clear I'm just trying to clear a blocker to my understanding, not wasting their time.
I have been the unreasonable coworker at certain times throughout my life.
There's a huge difference between taking the time to learn the internals of something widespread and useful, and being expected to spend hours or days performing (literally) exhaustive searches of random internal repos in order to find the documentation for some bullshit internal tool that only one person knows anything about.
We have products to ship. If my options are:
- Work weekends
- Delay a product
- Annoy the one guy in the company who knows anything about Ultrabuild
This is a good reason to establish clear written communication and to use that as documentation to cover yourself when someone is being insidious.
"Let me confirm, you would like X, and that I should post in Y for X purpose. Can do!" then when they try to say you should have done Z, you just show them what they said and say, I did what we agreed to, happy to make adjustments in the future but let's make sure to establish a common ground/set expectations up front.
I usually try to avoid this by adding a question mark as early as possible to the conversation. It happens way too often that people are trying to answer a question without even knowing what the question is or solving a problem without knowing what the problem is. That leads to confusing conversations.
Regarding the example:
> There are no docs for <X>
Respond by: "What do you want to achieve?" or "How can I help?", and don't assume that you know what the other person wants to know.
It is infuriating on nearly a daily basis when I search for how to do something, find my question on stack overflow, and the responses are all arguing that it's an X/Y problem or insisting that they should do something different.
Whereupon the asker gives up, or it turns out they really did want the answer to "Y", but I want the answer to "X".
Some people try too hard to be nonconfrontational instead of speaking their mind and it can play out like Rachel describes; they don't really want to work on or engage with something but won't say so. "no" is always fine to say, and they should.
And I agree with her point that if people won't say "no" but broadcast it with their actions then it's wise to treat it as a "no". "Maybe" is often "no" as well.
An unwillingness to participate fully, or no active awareness or experience of actions and consequences can be frustrating and potentially dangerous.
In a previous life I employed a type of 3-strikes and you’re out strategy. A trivial example… Instead of relenting and responding to questions of, “What is the URL for xyz?” I reminded people that by asking me, they had probably not bookmarked the page and that they were now using me as their bookmarking service. As a bookmarking service, I offer 3 free URLs then I start charging.
Pedantic? Of course. Annoying? Probably, although no less annoying and unproductive as asking me.
The result? Some people understand the process, whilst others don’t. Until, of course, they are the target for these types of lazy question.
Life and situations are rarely as simple as this trivial example of course, although the introduction of some value payment, monetary or some other exchange, sometimes has a surprising elucidating effect.
Patience and understanding are clearly essential, irrespective of the situation. Perhaps I can gain some insight into their apparently unhelpful or destructive behaviour if I can see it from their perspective too.
A phenomenon I've never stopped seeing online is people asking a simple factual question ("what is X?") instead of just using a search engine which would get an answer instantly.
Or people who, when given documentation, insist on asking a series of questions which are all directly answered if you bother reading the clear, concise documentation at all.
Simple obvious questions can be natterings about the "known unknowns". 1) Where do I order a beer? 2) Do they serve food? 3) Which tram do I take to get there? Progressively these three questions tell us more about the querant's location or context. But this can be quite unconscious. What about asking for summation: You've asked about beer, food and tram info, can you sum up for me what would make you happy? (Really want uncle Owen's fish and chips. Want a companion to eat with...)
Simple obvious questions can also be testing for "true facts" as opposed to "documented facts", although I would expect that behavior to subside with increasing acquaintance.
The worst I’ve seen so far: people posting trackbacks, no comments or anything, (the sort of lack of effort that would get flagged even on stack overflow), in a massive slack channel asking for help.
Eh, I'm one of those people sometimes. If it's a word I don't know that I want a definition for, sure I'll look it up.
If it's a concept, an event, or something more broad then I'll just ask because I find I often get more context from individual conversations than from consulting the hive mind. It can often open up avenues for conversation and learning that would have not otherwise happened.
I do the same for in-person in conversation. If I don't know what something is, I'm not going to whip out my phone and look it up, I just ask "what does that word mean?" or "toilet paper...what's that?"
I used to think this myself. I even got in trouble from my university professor when I complained about other students using our internal forum to ask simple googleable questions.
Now I think of it as a different style of knowledge seeking. In life, some people get answers themselves via physical artifacts and other people get answers by talking to more knowledgeable people. One involves more socialization than the other.
I think both styles are valid and have different pros and cons. I find it less annoying when I think about those interactions like this.
This seems pretty common in our field. There will always be people who put down others to try and make themselves look good because that's how every corporate culture is incentivized to run. I have not seen any serious attempts to address core issues like this at any company. HR only reacts to protecting the business, and that means retaliation for speaking up usually, especially if the bad coworker is a boss favorite.
Also, managers will blame you even if you bring up an issue, but it's not slated into the sprint. Then when the issue blows up in production, they'll say you should have worked faster to address it previously when it was noted, or that you should have placed more emphasis on it during the sprint planning when really, the final decision wasn't in your control in the first place. I've seen this happen on my teams in the past.
Tech is just all around toxic, and these things happen quiet frequently at larger companies.
you see that a lot on hacker news. you make a comment and they attack you without taking a position of their own. This way they can pivot to anything that suits them and continue attacking you.
Sometimes people do this subconsciously. Like a manager who's been mostly made redundant by other managers, so they roam around doing random "managery" things like poking holes in people's work, redirecting work, refocusing work, planning pingpong championships, rearranging desks to improve the feng shui, etc.
The real issue here is how much information is shot at you when you’re working at a place like this. You’re likely in a number of groups where people are posting design questions, specs, announcements, new team joiners and leavers etc. Then there’s a wiki and a chat thread or two, and there’s probably even an old wiki page that’s still used for specific aspects that haven’t been migrated to the new one.
Bonus points if the group posts are just mixed in to a newsfeed with some kind of non-chronological algorithm.
Oh, and, you know, don’t forget to check email. And do your actual work.
‘I posted it to the group’ is as bad an excuse for not properly informing as ‘It wasn’t on the wiki’ is an excuse for not finding the info. The real culprit is just the disorganized firehose of information from all the teams and people you’re supposed to keep tabs on.
My current CEO and COO are exactly like this. Nothing that you say changes the predefined outcome that they've come up with.
Can someone point me to some book or material about how to deal with this kind of people? I don't wanna leave my CTO role, but it's extremely draining to work with them.
By definition, you can't deal with these kinds of people. You can't change the mind of someone whose mind is made up. At best, you can wait until they fail and are replaced. However, you'll likely waste a lot of time waiting for that day, and depending on how the organization is structured, it may never happen.
Usually it's the company's fault someone doesn't know about it because there's no one place to share information. It could be in Slack, email, wiki, Google Doc, checked into the github repo with the software, checked into some unrelated repo where some team decided to document code, I've even seen a team use an outsourced wiki host that only they had access to and they'd put documentation there. When you asked for the doc (assuming you knew that you had to ask for it), they'd print a page as PDF and send it to you.
If they want to be hands-off and let teams put documentation where it works the best for that team, they should have a good search engine that will search across all those spaces.
This follows a pretty simple pattern for me: "people don't want to be wrong"
They have a certain vision for themselves, they know what's important, they spent time to do it the right way. If something is wrong, its clearly because something else failed, in this case, you. It breaks their idea for themselves.
I think it is less about rationality as I've seen just about everyone do this at various points, and more being humble and willing to own up to when was had an oversight, letting go of the ego to be able to say,
"huh, I completely missed that you wrote this. I understand that you said you have brought this up before, even if I don't remember it, I believe you. I will dig into this and listen better here on out."
So, sure--there are people who will drill you down into an abyss of perceived inadequacy because of something totally unrelated. It may be that they don't like you. It could also be that they're just having difficulty communicating their values. I find it productive in these situations to take a step back and ask a question along the lines of, "What are we trying to solve here?" I.e. let's cut through the minutiae and call out what the actual problem is. Once we've done that, let's work on solving that.
Being on the unreasonable side is usually due to stress, which could be because of the topic at hand or, unfortunately, something completely unrelated and you're taking it out on the topic at hand.
I guess the best advice I have if you're on the receiving end is to weather the storm, and hope for better dialogue (maybe even an apology!) later down the line. It's been my experience that you can shorten the storm by expressing empathy for the unreasonable person's situation.
This is just somebody blowing you off who probably isn't allowed to just ignore you, and they're buying time by sending you on errands.
edit: the solution is probably to make clear to others that they're blowing you off, maybe by publicly requiring that they follow up on the next errand they're sending you on with some sort of deliverable on their end.
edit2: and if nobody else cares that they're blowing you off, look for another job.
What? A coworker did these things? Saying that information is not clear, whatever you try? How 'bout if your project manager behaves like this. Because of a combination of being incompetent and trying to cover that up by shifting blame. Well that's the situation I'm currently in right now and it is very stressful, it feels there's nowhere out, apart from updating your LinkedIn profile...
I was in this exact situation together with many colleagues. Just leave. It sucks that you have to leave what you've invested, but it's a fallacy to think that it will get better. The project manager needs to be punished and you need to find a better job.
Take it slowly and rationally though. Do not give them any hint that you are leaving at all and start a slow powerful search for your next adventure. My number one tip? Make sure you get a good manager which is both good to you as well as in control of their immediate environment meaning so that they make sure you can keep your sanity as well.
Indeed you are right! A month ago or so I had a one on one talk with him and explained that i felt targeted by him. I also gave him some examples of why I felt like that. He acted as if he had no idea, and said I was mistaken and gave some explanation that did not fully convince me. But it helped for a while though... he was more friendly up until a few weeks ago when things got rough. People's true nature doesn't change. I'm now convinced he is not to be trusted and does not have the courage to stand up for his people towards higher management, who seem to be using him as a puppet. I have to thank you for your tips! Thing is, you might start out with a good boss but positions can change quickly within a company. Luckily the job market is on our side. At least all the hard work resulted in new knowledge and skills.
Thanks! I will be dusting off my resume this evening and pimp it to the latest status. It is so sad, since I get along with most coworkers really well, and enjoy working with them. They even vouched for me but management seems not to understand the situation.
All that is great TILL you actually do your diligence, find something on the wiki, use that as a source of truth and it backfires because there was something somewhere in some group that you posted.
The point being just like it is the responsibility of the searcher to put in the effort to look before asking, it is the responsibility of the person writing documents to make sure they stay up to date.
If the procedure seems to work, but instead of creating a server, deletes all data, then yes, the page's author should have fixed it. One should not leave dangerous advice around. (But in general, relying on documentation to avoid dangerous steps is a bad idea in general. If script is deprecated, instead of editing wiki, change the script itself to "print("deprecated, see ..."); exit(1);")
If the procedure cannot be executed because the script was renamed, or because backend was taken down, or because it fails loudly in the first step, then it's OK to keep wiki out of date. Sure, it was not useful, but at least it gives some info.
And of course in case of doubt, you can always ask the original author: "Hey, I am trying to do X, is procedure on wiki page Y up to date?" -- those kinds of questions are much, much nicer than generic "Where is the docs" question.
I once worked for a manager like this for some fraction of a year. He was the deputy director of systems engineering, but it seemed to me that part of his brain was missing. During that time, the attrition in our group was over 50%/year. I got the worst performance review of my career from him and I was happy to move on to a better position elsewhere in the company.
Not having knowledge disseminated through your organization well is a huge issue at larger organizations. I left my last company because no one was on the same page. There was rapid turnover, new people come in and have no clue how things are supposed to be done. It got so bad that the company had all 400 members of the engineering department redo the new hire orientation for a week.
<shameless pitch>I created https://gainknowhow.com/software-companies.html to solve these issues by structuring documentation/skills as a tree. Currently, all documentation is stored in a flat data structure, which does not have knowledge of documentation dependencies. When documentation is structured as a tree, you know who to notify when their relevant skills change. I'm trying to solve this exact issue. I'd love your feedback on the idea</shameless pitch>
Knowledge management is not a technical problem, it's a nobody-wants-to-do-it problem. People will see poor management of knowledge, and assume that if they just used this one weird trick, the problem would go away. See also, maintenance work vs greenfield work.
This wiki knows when you've passed a skill and notifies you of the exact changes made since you've passed it. It also lets you know of new documentation upstream in your documentation tree.
I mean, ok. Sure. But I had a really bad vibe reading the article too. Maybe the tone of voice, maybe the "jump off the pier" valediction ... My gut feeling is I wouldn't want to work with either of the two.
> You: If I put it in the wiki you would have said to put it in the group, and if I put it in the group you would have said I should have put it in the wiki.
Ehhh. Servant != Supplicant. It's a workable tactic, sure, but I would not expect it to actually resolve anything (only alleviate symptoms, temporarily).
I see it differently. At work, we have several bothersome but sorely needed issues that needs doing, but no one is volunteering to do them, because they mostly consist of loads of thankless work, that may drag on, and will distract you from tasks that earn easier praise. Eventually, one or more of us get sufficiently annoyed to clean up whatever the issue was, but that no one volunteered to work on it, does not mean they are not grateful someone eventually did. I have botb been the volunteer and the feetdragger at times, and have seen colleagues i appreciate in both roles too
> Coworker: There are no docs for [this thing you're doing].
> You: Yes there are.
> Coworker: You could make a wiki page.
> You: There IS a wiki page. [finds page, sends link]
Maybe this is just an exaggerated exchange for humour.
But if not, then this would be a very unprofessional way of responding to a coworker, even one who is being annoying/ignorant. You have to hold yourself to a higher standard. An exchange like this only increases toxicity - and, in fact, I think that “You” is the more toxic person in the exchange.
>An exchange like this only increases toxicity - and, in fact, I think that “You” is the more toxic person in the exchange
The person acting like a helpless baby is clearly the more toxic person. This is someone if, they aren't spoonfed everything, will slow down the entire engineering team. Secondly, why is "coworker's" assumption that "you" isn't acting responsibly? You should start from there, if someone is going to treat me like a teenager, why am I the more toxic person for spoonfeeding them?
the first line doesn't end with a question mark. If there's no question then why respond? Someone saying "there's no docs for this" wouldn't get much of a response from me, i would probably think they were talking to themself. Someone saying "where's the docs for this?" is much more helpful to know what response to give.
No, if the opener is “there are no docs for this” as opposed to “where are the docs” or “am I just missing something”, we’re already in unprofessional territory. So to ascribe a lack of professionalism solely to the author is not correct.
some people are stop-oriented and some are go-oriented.
i realized that there were a lot of the first at a company i worked at when i had a ready-to-go release shut down by legal, pr, and some other group all in the same week. if we were successful, they get nothing, but if we messed up, they would have to stay late.
Ya totally soul sucking people like that exist in a lot of companies. And it's mostly due to these two reasons they do it
1) To get a ego boost when you acknowledge your mistake. Till they get their boost they keep finding loopholes. These are the kind of people who didn't get enough hugs as children.
2) To showcase themselves as all knowing and superior to management or leadership. They don't care about you or your work. You are just a peg in corporate ladder for them. These are the kind of people who would have been certified as sociopaths if there was a universal mental screening.
Unfortunately, I don't have any advice on dealing with either of those two. Both weigh heavily on the general happiness in the workplace and make it a hellhole fast.
i work in consulting and you run across a lot of your number twos. I knew a woman in leadership who was very professional and i would dare say kind. However, when crossed by one of these people she would very quickly and purposely cut off their balls, put them on a cross, and force all the other #2s to look and watch. It was a very effective way to manage sociopaths. It's like managing a pack of fighting dogs, they only know death either giving or receiving. To treat them otherwise is almost unfair as they're not equipped mentally to handle it.
I read these posts on rachelbythebay.com so that indicates that I think the content is OK. But every time I do, my most visceral reaction is "Please serve your website over TLS."
So the comments that were disagreed with enough to be downvoted to obscurity or sometimes even moderated out of sight entirely represent the entire community?
This happens a lot with comments like "HN is toxic" or in a more mainstream sense "gamers are toxic", and it just makes me sad.
Please don’t misrepresent what she said. She said “At the time, I was mostly referring to the open sewers that are certain web forums on certain days of the week and certain hours of those days. For some reason, when the regular people are out doing whatever they do, the haters have nothing better to do than run unchecked on the web. With no sensible people there to set them straight, they feed off each other, and pretty soon you have some straight-up nuclear waste in those forums.”
I think that is saying HN is usually a good forum, but at some limited times it is not.
This sounds a lot like the difference between communicating with a subordinate and with a superior (and those “on your level” often behave as superiors).
I would do the exact same thing if I were her co-worker.
She clearly states that this is a project she came up with that no one else on the team wants. If no one wants it, or is engaging with it, why would you expecting your colleagues to get excited to work on this?
There is nothing more annoying in corporate that co-workers who start trying to give you projects and tasks you didn’t want, didn’t ask for and micro-managing you horizontally.
Some of my worst job experiences came from people like this. They come up with a dumb project, then “clear it with management” then come and try to make me do it for them.
Your co-workers are not your friends, especially not if you try to start assigning them work. Because who gets the credit?
You do, not them. Suddenly they have another layer of management.
I would both avoid and add friction to anyone doing what she is trying to do in this situation. I’m not paid to help my co-workers get promoted into management or do their pet projects for them.
Nowhere in the post does it mention the author asking anybody to do any work. Their coworker showed up asking questions about something they're working on.
It sounds like the coworkers don't care about this project, though:
> You've mentioned it multiple times in different venues with very little uptake from the rest of the team. It's pretty clear they are more concerned with other things.
That's ok, and happens frequently. "I don't have time to fully comprehend everything that's happening over there, but COWORKER is handling it and I don't see any obvious problems with their approach. :+1: and moving on".
Maybe some teams don't work this way, and require more direct participation and signing-off from members, which is fine too.
No, the article is not demanding that co-workers are excited about the project at all. Nor is the author giving tasks to anyone.
It literally starts with coworker complaining about lack of documentation, being given documentation, complaining about lack of wiki, being given like, complaining about missing info on wiki and then being shown it is there.
Author is asking people to ask for docs before complaining about lack of docs and to read existing wiki before complaining about missing info on wiki.
I guess you're really notdoingthework. Someone needs to be assigning you work, and she never presented it as if she just came up with a project and threw it at another co-worker. If it wasn't her project, where did the documentation come from, and group discussion?
This attitude sounds at least as toxic as the person who is unable to help themselves before reaching out for help to others.
If you were on my team you actually do. I'm a senior+ engineer and other engineers work on the projects I lead. They get to pick their day to day work, but most projects are driven or approved of by me. We also have a manager which has a totally different set of responsibilities.
There is the management career track and the individual contributor career track. Advancing along either of them should depend on growing scope of influence. That means ICs need to drive projects across larger and larger groups of people.
Of course the people who show they can do that get promoted. Try it!
That's not really how it's done in practice though, fwiw. Large tech firms mostly try to quantify "impact" and that can mean a lot of things. You could have very large name recognition by doing a lot of outreach, like talks. Being a bit reductive, that's like promoting someone for their sense of celebrity. Then there's folks who save quantifiable dollars or improve some process by some nominal percentage of $success_metric for their impact. Wrangling a large project usually is pretty arbitrary and not on a single engineer - in fact, most of them are committee based.
You're being managed and hustled, that's what managing is in flat organizations.
The mistake in the example is that when Coworker (the antagonist) came to You (the protagonist) and presented a problem by saying, "there's no docs for this," the protagonist answered the question in the context of the problem and not the context of the person and the relationship.
The Coworker in this case invents problems not because he wants solutions, but because he wants You to solve them, and to report the result back to Them, and as soon as you tacitly accept that relationship by giving them an answer, you have accepted that you are obligated to satisfy them, and then they can take that to your colleagues and boss and say you aren't satisfying them. This is what people mean when they use the term "leverage."
If you are technical, you solve problems, so if you have an answer, you give it, and you've solved the problem. What a natural manager does is find problems and uses them as leverage to extract value and power from them. They aren't problem solvers, they are managers, it's a totally different kind of mind. Important, but also often predatory and bullying, so take care.
When someone comes to you and says, "can I get a status on this?" If you give it to them, you have set the precedent that you work for them, and they now have leverage and power over you, even though the org chart doesn't say they do. It's a pure tactic. Since you are generally an agreeable person, it doesn't occur to you to treat their question as an act of aggression, and that's what they're counting on, because their entire toolkit is based on exploiting peoples agreeableness for leverage.
The ability to have the sense to respond to "can I get a status on this?" with, "I'm updating my boss with it, and we can loop you in after," is a skill to be practised. Sometimes the person will just escalate their aggression, and repeat the request, and that's when you know you're dealing with an asshole hustler. The best way to deal with them is to talk to your boss and say you're glad to work on the team, but given the reporting structure, you don't make ad hoc commitments across teams because it breaks up team alignment and if you are a team lead, it rewards other people for interrupting your team members and starting fires.
Short version is, "when I work for you, I will work for you, but until then, that request is out of line." The art is in how you finesse that sentiment and while making it clear. Antagonist Coworker will probably make a scene, try to find people who don't like you and complain about how you are "hard to work with," and encircle you to push you out, and really, navigating that bullshit is 80% of most senior roles that deal with cross functional team competition in any mid size org. It's what I don't like about "flat" organizations, where it really means that this kind of politically aggressive type gets an option on everyones time and attention and then gets rewarded for starting fires. When we moralize weak leadership skills, we reward bullies, and then wonder why our orgs have toxic culture problems.
As a consultant who has worked in dozens of organizations, there's always one of these people, and you have to deal with them as the new kid in school dealing with the insecure bully who creates chaos that always seems to put themselves in the center of it. Sometimes it's the only tool they have, so they don't realize they're doing it and it's just their "personality." It's not. It's a tactic they've practised, and to survive in an organization, you need to actively respond to it, imo.
"Talk therapy" (in one of the other comments): yeah, I think so, maybe. But I don't know if "have you discussed the underlying issue with a trained therapist?" is in order in a professional relationship. I /do/ believe that if the person is otherwise reasonable there likely is an underlying issue, and that they're unwilling/unable to articulate it. It's dangerous to try talk therapy yourself and goes off the rails in entirely unexpected ways. Plus, I'm not being paid for this, and as an employee I am at least arguably putting my employer at risk (not that that would dissuade me if I thought it would work, because results); as noted it encourages people to share things at work that I do not want to know about; you will get projection and your role as therapist will confound your professional relationship.
I'm sorry, does this sound like I lack empathy? Because I do not. That's exactly what I'm afraid of.
A long time ago when I was management, my manager sent me to a Fred Pryor seminar about building and motivating teams. I dunno what your experience with Fred Pryor seminars is, they're usually pretty pedestrian but the facilitators often have amazing experience and know it too. I can't remember much of it, but the instructor went on a 15 minute tear about what he called "don't wanna" which I will never forget. This is exactly it. The upshot is that when for whatever entirely "rational" reasons a team member has decided to oppose something, they will use your resources to do it. Have you considered asking management "person X seems to be spending a lot of effort opposing Plan 0.9, do you think we should review or move forward?"
(Something obvious about spotting internally consistent psychopaths was pointed out to me while working in construction, but I won't repeat it here because I don't want to piss them off.)
It's insane that we think that technology choices are rational, or that "rational" is the same for different team members, especially when for example "management doesn't think we should focus on security" always comes up as a post facto rationalization: I've never seen it stated as a nonfunctional requirement when I took the job, in fact almost invariably people blow smoke about it during the courting process.
I recommended talk therapy to the person who was worried that their (perceived) lack of social skills would make them appear combative / argumentative, as a way to get tutored/coached in those social skills, in a safe setting. I do not recommend telling a combative coworker "have you tried therapy?".
Some people will run you ragged, asking for more napkins, then when you return with them, more ketchup, then when you return with that, there’s an issue with the food, then so on and so on.
If you don’t check yourself, you will actually leave your other tables without any of their basics, or their food will get cold waiting in the window, because you’ve developed tunnel vision to please this one needy table.
Sometimes things really do stack up, but there are strategies to avoid or deal with that. These strategies will fail with the Truly Needy table. And then they won’t tip well, or at all.
I learned it’s better to deprioritize that table and pay the normal amount of attention to everyone else. Better for those all to tip at a standard rate and give them a good experience than to let one group drag down the whole floor.
That super needy table didn’t need half the things they asked for anyways. Those napkins are sitting there unused when they leave. The glass of water they asked you to fill at halfway is still almost full. Life goes on.