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> "Subtly bringing down others" is also an opinion (it's probably not how they see it or how the person they communicate with sees it). You're telling the OP y

> "Subtly bringing down others" is also an opinion (it's probably not how they see it or how the person they communicate with sees it). You're telling the OP you understand his situation better than he does and that everything is just his opinion. That's some blatant hypocrisy. To quote your original comment: > Because logically, these what you call "over confident" people get stuff done and get praise (or you wouldn't be jealous of them!) Yes, you are jealous of the success which you think is undeserved. There's nothing that supports that fact. How do you know they get stuff done? How do you know they get praise? And how in the world did you come to the conclusion that he's jealous of their success? You're simply masquerading false assumptions as psychological advice. At best you're attacking a straw man. You've build this fictive world in which the real, toxic, people are actually successful and worthy, but it's the OP who is too petty to acknowledge their true worth. But you're not talking about the reality. Worse, you're blaming the OP for not seeing the reality how your fiction is. At worst, you might be so absorbed in your fiction where everything wrong is just someone's opinion or useless emotion, that you might be toxic yourself. Just to be clear why I'm so aggressive with you, I have met toxic people, and I have felt being drained and put down by them. If you think these people do not exist, or don't mean harm, you're sorely mistaken. I can agree that they're being defensive, that they're actually afraid of being attacked so they attack first, but I can't agree with the fact that they don't exist or that it's my jealousness that hinders me from appreciating their worth.

teekert 9y ago
Thank you for your response, it is highly appreciated. Ok, perhaps I'm extrapolating from the situations I've been in too much. I admit I have never worked with truly toxic people before. I have worked with very confident, boastful people however. But such behavior I have always seen as "Ok this person takes my intelligence seriously and sees me as someone who can take on this attitude." I have often enjoyed resulting, hard, conversations but indeed heard more introverted colleagues label such persons as toxic or indeed draining. I am assuming (yes you are right) that these people get praise of some sort, otherwise why would you ever be annoyed? I mean if such people were ignored, demoted etc why would you be annoyed by that? The problem would solve itself. This is also where my assumption of success comes from. Why be annoyed by self-destructive people without success? Is this too much assumption? If they were truly unworthy of their own confidence, wouldn't they be exposed immediately? How do these people manage? How can they keep faking if results are required? It's not sustainable, there must be something there, they would be to easy to expose otherwise. On the other hand, if they'd fake it till they made it, they have a valid strategy and the confidence was not "over confidence", but justified. So, if you ask me how to speed up said exposure? Ask them questions in public, don't help them on subjects they claim mastery in, ask them for help on the subject they claim mastery in? Assign them difficult tasks in the area they claim mastery in, tell your pl that a task is better suited for person X, who is a master in Y. I wonder why this does not seem to happen. (Again, because if this did happen, the toxics would be exposed immediately.) What kind of environment is OP in? I find this environment very hard to imagine, unless OP is misinterpreting (which can be entirely on me and my lack of imagination of course).
- rootlocus 9y ago
  People don't need to be very skilled in order to talk BS and pick fights with others. And not all companies have a proper hierarchical structure where managers give a fk. Sometimes even "mediocre" knowledge of something is enough to keep the person employed because it's a niche technology or there aren't enough people applying. I've met a toxic person who never explained anything he did (always responding to "how did you fix it" with "dunno, just did some shit"), and I was too busy to check his commits. There was no code review. That same person used to answer people who asked him about X or Y with "dunno, don't care, it's not my problem". He bashed the people who used C++ smart pointers for being idiots who can't code without memory leaks. We were working on legacy code mostly fixing bugs. There were no tests and a team of ~100 QAs (it was a gamedev company). There was almost no way to tell if the bugs he fixed didn't introduce additional bugs that nobody knew about. And everyone was working overtime to get the damn game shipped. This was the sort of company where the number of fixed bugs was an evaluation metric. Didn't matter that someone solved 20 bugs by adding a missing texture, while someone else fixed a very hard AI bug or a race condition. Team leads were not involved in employee evaluations and managers only looked at the numbers. They fired people on a whim to "teach a lesson". They shut down an entire office with no prior notice and asked the employees to sign a letter saying they were leaving instead of being fired. Granted, the problem was mostly with the company, which is why the solution was to leave.

teekert 9y ago

Thank you for your response, it is highly appreciated. Ok, perhaps I'm extrapolating from the situations I've been in too much. I admit I have never worked with truly toxic people before. I have worked with very confident, boastful people however. But such behavior I have always seen as "Ok this person takes my intelligence seriously and sees me as someone who can take on this attitude." I have often enjoyed resulting, hard, conversations but indeed heard more introverted colleagues label such persons as toxic or indeed draining. I am assuming (yes you are right) that these people get praise of some sort, otherwise why would you ever be annoyed? I mean if such people were ignored, demoted etc why would you be annoyed by that? The problem would solve itself. This is also where my assumption of success comes from. Why be annoyed by self-destructive people without success? Is this too much assumption? If they were truly unworthy of their own confidence, wouldn't they be exposed immediately? How do these people manage? How can they keep faking if results are required? It's not sustainable, there must be something there, they would be to easy to expose otherwise. On the other hand, if they'd fake it till they made it, they have a valid strategy and the confidence was not "over confidence", but justified. So, if you ask me how to speed up said exposure? Ask them questions in public, don't help them on subjects they claim mastery in, ask them for help on the subject they claim mastery in? Assign them difficult tasks in the area they claim mastery in, tell your pl that a task is better suited for person X, who is a master in Y. I wonder why this does not seem to happen. (Again, because if this did happen, the toxics would be exposed immediately.) What kind of environment is OP in? I find this environment very hard to imagine, unless OP is misinterpreting (which can be entirely on me and my lack of imagination of course).

rootlocus 9y ago
People don't need to be very skilled in order to talk BS and pick fights with others. And not all companies have a proper hierarchical structure where managers give a fk. Sometimes even "mediocre" knowledge of something is enough to keep the person employed because it's a niche technology or there aren't enough people applying. I've met a toxic person who never explained anything he did (always responding to "how did you fix it" with "dunno, just did some shit"), and I was too busy to check his commits. There was no code review. That same person used to answer people who asked him about X or Y with "dunno, don't care, it's not my problem". He bashed the people who used C++ smart pointers for being idiots who can't code without memory leaks. We were working on legacy code mostly fixing bugs. There were no tests and a team of ~100 QAs (it was a gamedev company). There was almost no way to tell if the bugs he fixed didn't introduce additional bugs that nobody knew about. And everyone was working overtime to get the damn game shipped. This was the sort of company where the number of fixed bugs was an evaluation metric. Didn't matter that someone solved 20 bugs by adding a missing texture, while someone else fixed a very hard AI bug or a race condition. Team leads were not involved in employee evaluations and managers only looked at the numbers. They fired people on a whim to "teach a lesson". They shut down an entire office with no prior notice and asked the employees to sign a letter saying they were leaving instead of being fired. Granted, the problem was mostly with the company, which is why the solution was to leave.