49 ms·

I had this exact situation come up with an engineer that I can only call brilliant, with the most conservative of overtones. He was more than that. Being a ma

• tikhonj 7y ago
  This is one of the often unspoken benefits of remote work—it obscures how (and when) you work and exposes only the results. This naturally pushes back on micromanagement not only from managers but also from everyone else on the team. It's not fool-proof by any means—you can still build up processes and expectations that lead to micromanagement if your managers or culture are so inclined—but it makes the default behavior of the team distinctly less oriented towards micromanagement. You'll waste a lot less time and energy worrying about optics if people being present at a particular place and time is not an obvious signal of dedication/hard work/whatever.
  • jes5199 7y ago
    in the age of slack, where managers about to instant message you any second, you don't really get control of your schedule
    • rriepe 7y ago
      Between this and the memory complaints, I have to ask: Has anyone tried closing Slack?
      • crustacean 7y ago
        At some companies you can get a negative performance review for not being on Slack during working hours. “Needs to be more responsive / better team player.” In other places you might be expected to be online beyond 9-5 too.
        • partyboat1586 7y ago
          It's difficult but I'd avoid places like that. If your team won't allow you to close slack for an hour you have serious communication and planning problems. Anywhere I've worked what I do is message anyone who might need vital information from me then just close slack for an hour, do my work and check back in. When I get pulled up on it I give my explanation about focus, communication etc. If they don't like it then I leave. I'm glad it's a seller's market.
      • bakuninsbart 7y ago
        Oh hey, I am relevant for once. I moved to another city for university a while ago, but kept the job I had before as a half-time remote position. At first I felt extremely pressured through slack. People didnt know my exact schedule and would also write me on days off, and I felt like I should answer asap, because otherwise people would develop the idea that I slack off because I get to work remote. Well, after a panic attack I changed my approach and asked my colleagues to write me mails instead or ask me on teams where I would only be online on certain days. Everybody just said sure, and work is finally fun again. I think I wasn't the only one either, more and more people started avoiding slack and only look into it maybe once a week.
      • Viliam1234 7y ago
        Once I was told by my manager to close Slack and focus on my work, and only check what's new about twice a day. A week later, the same manager got angry at me for not responding to client's urgent issue which was announced by Slack an hour ago. So... yeah, closing Slack improves things, until it suddenly makes them worse.
• helpPeople 7y ago
  After my wife had someone lie about 15+ hrs of working at home, I stopped believing in the "work at home" trend. I understand it works for some, but since it doesn't work for everyone, I can see how people would be offended by an "unfair" policy. Sure, if there is a clear start and end, these things could work. But on creative work that could go on forever, it's easy to cut corners.
  • marcinzm 7y ago
    If they're getting the necessary amount of output who cares if they spend those 15 hours with their kids instead of browsing reddit behind the boss's back? The inability to track actual output levels doesn't go away when everyone is in the office. Instead you promote the person who is best at looking busy instead of the one actually outputting the most work.
    • dx87 7y ago
      It matters if they're getting paid by the hour. I used to work with someone who was good at handwaving away why his work was falling behind, and the management believed him. In reality, he was missing deadlines because he wasn't working a full 40 hour week. He'd record his commute as working hours because "he's an engineer, and thinking about his work is just as important as doing work", so he ended up working ~10 hours less per week than everyone else because he claimed that thinking about work on his commute counted as billable time.
      • marcinzm 7y ago
        >I used to work with someone who was good at handwaving away why his work was falling behind, and the management believed him. So you had a management issue rather than a worker issue.
      • sweeneyrod 7y ago
        But how would the situation have been different if he'd been underperforming despite working the correct hours? I don't think that would change things, except that it might make it harder to fire him.
• nradov 7y ago
  I think it was Mark Cuban who made the point that a mature, professional team can handle having one "Dennis Rodman". But it can only be one, and management has to be clear that they're making an explicit exception which isn't open to others. The rest of the team might find this a bit unfair, but usually they'll tolerate it as long as results are good and they're treated well in other ways.
  • burnte 7y ago
    This, exactly. we try too hard to make one rule to fit everyone but not everyone fits every rule. It's ok to use judgment and say "this person gets this other treatment for these valid reason."
    • nefitty 7y ago
      I had always assumed that these sorts of exceptions can become HR liabilities, especially when the person getting special treatment shares the same title as other peers.
      • jdc 7y ago
        Could you be more specific? Why not give the high-performing prima donna a small promotion?
        • rzzzt 7y ago
          It's a question of finding a great sounding, but ultimately meaningless title to add to the company ladder.
          • Aeolun 7y ago
            Junior Architect Senior Architect Legendary Architect
  • deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
• bilbo0s 7y ago
  Just a question to check on something that I'm pretty sure I already know from your story: Just want to verify my assumption that you were too small to have a "Research" or "Tech Strategy" department to move that guy into?
  • marcinzm 7y ago
    Some people like making production product or like having the higher development standards of production systems.
  • heyflyguy 7y ago
    I was the business owner and we had 9 employees. Even with him moving into another department, it would be like printing new business cards and that's it.
• castlecrasher2 7y ago
  I had a conversation with a CPU designer by chance at a fast food restaurant. He described exactly this, except that everyone he hired was brilliant but didn't fit in with education or other jobs because they thought in more dimensions than just "pass this class", and that's exactly what he needed for silicon design. I can only assume it's a team consistency issue in that if not everyone is on the same page then it's possible the outlier will move on.
  • partyboat1586 7y ago
    What do you mean by thought in more dimensions? Like abstract creative / divergent thinking that defies a canonical answer? Or being constantly distracted by meta problems?
    • thecupisblue 7y ago
      Pretty much. Thinking from different planes of knowledge and connecting them, recognising, applying and folding over abstractions and patterns. Imagine if your knowledge of software development was a tree, and imagine if your knowledge of design was another tree and you had one for hardware, biology, music, math, physics. And a lot of times contain the same patterns and abstractions, so you can recognise them and apply them where you see fit instead of just using them from one tree only, so that gives you a lot of mental models on how things work. That turns out well in abstract stuff and thinking in complex systems, especially when you need optimisation thinking like a CPU designer would need.
      • partyboat1586 7y ago
        Interesting. So how does this make them bad at school?
        • thecupisblue 7y ago
          Lack of focus on the class, boredom, lack of will to obey rules and instructions, punishment instead of rewards (for example, bad grade on a math test because they did it in their head instead of writing down the whole process) for different behaviour and many more
• PragmaticPulp 7y ago
  I had a similar brilliant engineer with odd working hours at one point. I also had the same problem with other engineers requesting the same odd hours, with equally negative results. In my case, I eventually learned that the odd hours weren't the key to his perceived success. Instead, he used the odd hours to force us to give him only work that could be accomplished alone. We were lulled into letting him make key architecture decisions in isolation, because no one else was awake or online at the same time to discuss them. Eventually he became the architect by virtue of operating in isolation, where we couldn't discuss his decisions. Everyone else was forced to work around his code. If he refactored the codebase in the middle of the night to make his job easier, the other team members were all forced to work around his refactor and waste time updating their PRs to match his work. Worse yet, having someone like that on the team drives away other great employees. Eventually everyone else will get sick of accommodating the architects isolated schedule. If they have other opportunities, they'll leave. > I often think about how I could have better allowed his brilliance while not alienating the rest of his team, but in the end I failed. It's not on you. Brilliance and individual productivity aren't everything in a team setting. If your project must scale past a single person, you need everyone operating on the same page. It's painful in the short term to lose the quirky rockstars, but it makes for a healthier team in the long run.
  • fizx 7y ago
    You're both right :) You want the "quirky rockstars" as your prototypers, not your architects. Then everyone can thrive.
    • rch 7y ago
      It seems like all these comments assume everyone is working on roughly the same class of problem. That's probably a mistake.
    • heyflyguy 7y ago
      This is a super strong, on point message.
    • oh-4-fucks-sake 7y ago
• codesushi42 7y ago
  I am sorry, but you sound like a terrible manager for allowing that kind of work schedule without seeing the consequences down the road. I would wager your most prized teammate left at least partly due to burnout, whether he told you that or not. That kind of work regimen is not sustainable, and you paid the price by encouraging it.
  • heyflyguy 7y ago
    thanks
  • _vertigo 7y ago
    Clearly it is the manager's job to determine what work schedule works best for each of their subordinates. They might have preferences but let's be honest, people can't be trusted to set their own schedules otherwise they'll work too hard!
    • codesushi42 7y ago
      It is a good manager's responsibility to maintain the health and longevity of his team. Obviously, that wasn't the case here, and the burnout superstar even left. Not surprising.
      • _vertigo 7y ago
        I think you're projecting your own personal biases and grievances into this scenario. I don't think it's a given that this was burnout related at all. You have no proof that it was, and yet you persist in treating it like a foregone conclusion. I also think that you're wrong in making it the manager's job to police to work habits of their subordinates. I think a good manager should recognize signs of burnout in their subordinates and bring it up to try and address it, but you're arguing that the manager should impose their own idea of a healthy schedule on their subordinates rather than trusting them to know what works best for them. That strikes me as paternalistic.
        • codesushi42 7y ago
• screye 7y ago
  I am one of the people who work better in spurts of productivity. I love that my company has a loose work from home policy. To me that means, I can go in the zone without being interrupted, but also that I can work on those not-so rare nights of productivity boosts from like 11pm-3am. I'm no rockstar tho. Just a regular employee with wierd productivity graphs.
  • JimboOmega 7y ago
    I've found the more senior I get, the less spurts of productivity are tolerated. People will rattle on about consistency and expectations. Especially so if this is more on the scale of weeks than within a day.
    • screye 7y ago
      I can easily be productive when I am working with people on business problems. But, for coding, I need time to get in the zone. In contrast to your case, the managers in our team do not do any coding at all. I imagine you are talking particularly about senior ICs.
      • JimboOmega 7y ago
        Yes. If you're a senior IC and tend to do several days work on your good days but get little done on your bad days, depending on the boss you have this can cause a lot of friction (even if overall you're producing a lot). There's a strong tendency to "watermark" your productivity, and ignore circumstances around it. Today is a perfect example, I got to look at code only for the first hour before I got a pinged about an issue somebody thought was related to code pushed out last week. It turned out the issue had nothing to do with it, but I had to investigate that. Then I got pulled into a conversation about why a certain number was up and how we might ameliorate that; came up with a pretty simple solution someone else is implementing... but then I got asked if I still was working on some low priority ticket so I had to figure out what that was, and then my boss wanted more details in our weekly status update so I had to search up some docs and tickets and stick them in there. Right now I have 15 minutes between lunch and a meeting with HR, and no, I'm not using it productively - because how far can I really get in such a small time window? I budget for this reality in my estimates, but often get pushback. "Is this really going to take a week?" Well, no, it's not. If all this crap was pushed out of the way it could get done in a couple days, like project X did. But the reality is I'm halfway through my workday and had at best an hour to code uninterrupted - much of which I spent checking my email and doing code reviews because I often get tagged for not doing those things often enough There are quiet days when I can just code, and there are days like this. And even in the former category, not everything is perfect; sometimes I didn't sleep well or have other personal stuff. But the days everything went well sets the expectations, while the reality is much less predictable.
• jdsully 7y ago
  When a team is close in abilities with a single outlier it can be difficult to have special cases. Because there isn’t a wide variation between people policies are expected to be “fair”. The alternative is strict hierarchies where its made clear that some people have better abilities. That comes with extra privileges (money, flexibility, etc). The one thing you can’t get away with is pretending everyone is equal but some are more equal than others.
• wayoutthere 7y ago
  This is textbook bipolar behavior -- periods of intense productivity offset by periods where you basically stay in bed for a few days. I suspect he works the way he does because it's how he has had to set up his life to be able to keep a job. Work is a healthy outlet for manic energy, but it burns you out fast and you have to hibernate for a bit when your mood turns. I know I personally am toxic as hell if I have to be at work when I'm in a depressive state, so it's better for everyone. I say this because bipolar disorder is a protected condition under the ADA, which allows for work modification. We tend to end up in positions where deadlines are soft and there's a lot of individual work that can be done asynchronously, so there are a lot of us in software. This may not have been the case with him, but I do think there's a lack of awareness of mental health issues in the workplace. People who struggle with mental health can still be great employees in the right circumstances. If there were better awareness that people struggle with issues like these, I think there would be fewer issues with co-workers.
  • wizzard 7y ago
    Someone works long hours sometimes and therefore they're probably bipolar? What?
    • wayoutthere 7y ago
      I don't know if that was the case with this guy, just that the schedule OP described is the kind of schedule that a bipolar person might end up with. But the main point is that building a work culture that can handle this kind of schedule from people who really need it (for whatever reason) is a good thing, and there are good reasons beyond mere convenience that a person would work a schedule like this.
      • heyflyguy 7y ago
        Oddly enough he did confide in me that he was bipolar.
    • ebiester 7y ago
      Considering that I had the same thought, no. However, most people cannot regularly work 48 hour shifts except under duress. (IE, their life, job, or crisis depends on it.) Many can do it once, but need a significant break afterwards. If someone is regularly cycling like that, it very well could be a coping mechanism for bipolar.
• vinceguidry 7y ago
  I would have floated the suggestion of a contracting arrangement for the high-performer.
• deleted 7y ago
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• newnewpdro 7y ago
  I've been that guy before, at my first serious early-stage, well-funded startup. The founders and executive team completely fucked it up. They kept hiring crappy/unmotivated people, prioritizing growing the team in quantity over quality, and with every added mediocre head it only amplified the morale drag when I'd be delivering huge progress after multi-day sleepless sprints while everyone else was barely getting anything done in the 9-5 office productivity theatre of standups and meetings. I started absolutely dreading coming to the office after completing one of my kamikaze sprints. The VP of Eng had established this twisted pattern of holding a standup the moment I leisurely walked in the door at whatever hour I happened to make it in after not being seen for days, which for over a year was the weekly norm. Everyone in engineering would have little to nothing to say about their progress, and I'd drop another mother lode. It just made everyone else feel inferior, and I started to increasingly abhor their lack of progress and feel like I was the only person actually taking the opportunity seriously enough to make an effort. It culminated in my abrupt departure three years in. And for years afterwards they failed to deliver any major new features successfully. Burned through many more millions of dollars, before eventually going bankrupt. My mistake was not leaving earlier. That experience left such an awful taste in my mouth I've basically never made that level of sacrifice of my own life/time at another company since. Edit: To clarify, the hard lesson I learned at this job was that no amount of individual contribution can save a sinking ship. This particular experience was 15 years ago, and I've worked at numerous startups since, some with successful exits. I haven't seen any correlation between the amount of my contribution and the likelihood of a successful exit, absolutely none. Surely this is different for founders, but I haven't gone down that road yet. What I have seen however is some companies are far more dysfunctional than others, and the best thing you can do is learn to identify them quickly and RUN, the opportunity cost is too great.
  • edmundsauto 7y ago
    I intend this as a nudge for you to introspect, not as a criticism. I've shared your perspective before, and have found much more satisfaction in looking at my own behavior to understand what of my experiences were true facts, and what were stories that I told myself. For me, the reality was that my ego needed the boost from my perceived superiority. I had little else in my life that I Was proud of. Looking back, I understand how my behavior was an expression of a great deal of talent plus insecurity. I've spent a lot of time working on myself, and my career and life satisfaction are significantly higher because of it.
• bitwize 7y ago
  This. "Manager time" and a set workday are there for reasons. There is no one so brilliant that they don't need to collaborate and in order to collaborate everybody needs to be following the same book of rules. > I often think about how I could have better allowed his brilliance while not alienating the rest of his team, but in the end I failed. Expect your brilliant engineer to be in the office during core business hours, and if he can't brook that schedule, fire him.
  • zentiggr 7y ago
    I've just started a new position in the last couple of months, and my junior status and need to learn a large codebase and set of tooling has me studying almost all day every day. I'm pretty sure I'm absorbing this massive application and all the external transactions it does pretty fast, all things considered. If I was constantly interrupting my train of thought and research to 'sync up' or 'collaborate' or whatever other personal fear of missing out that you're strapping your team into massaging, I'd dare say I won't be a solid contributor anywhere near as fast. Assume everyone thinks the way you do and you throw away the chance for them to excel under even a slightly different structure.
  • deleted 7y ago
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• fit2rule 7y ago
  On the one hand, you had a desired result: more of your heroes. On the other hand, you had the result: failed attempts by compatriots to emulate the hero. Maybe the problem wasn't that you had a hero, or too many non-heroes. Maybe the problem was you. The idea that everyone can perform the same way when given the same opportunity is local to you, the manager. Perhaps what you needed to do was recognise that some members of your team couldn't be the same kind of hero - but maybe there was another quest for them. Maybe the heroes you thought your were enabling by letting them follow the same schedule rules, really actually just needed you to let them be a different kind of hero: the kind that gets things done on a normal, 9-5, business-like schedule. There is room for this experiment to be repeated.
• tajd 7y ago
  Knowing what you know now, how would you manage this situation again?
• gowld 7y ago
  How about letting people try their preferred schedules, and then circling back and showing (some) people that it's in their interest to follow a "9-5" schedule because you actually saw them performing better? And then leave it to them to decide if they want to underperform and face consequences, or do what works well? At my job I get paid how good my boss thinks my work is, not how good he thinkgs it could be if I worked differently.
  • deleted 7y ago
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• itronitron 7y ago
  An advantage of having software devs that can't communicate with one another (for whatever reason) is that it encourages de-coupling of parts of the system/application which ultimately makes the whole thing easier to grow and maintain.
  • jodrellblank 7y ago
    Inverse Conway's Law; organizations are encouraged to create isolated, disconnected teams in order to benefit from modular maintainable code with clear and distinct interfaces.
• inopinatus 7y ago
  Sounds like a false equivalence. This person had clearly different strengths and they’re best handling different kinds of work such as prototyping, speculative stuff.
• KorematsuFred 7y ago
  Building software is social thing rather than lone wolf thing. I have come to realize that it is much better to hire people who have good communication skills and not be a problem for other team mate no matter how brilliant they are. If they are really brilliant and you want to keep them with special treatment, promote them with a very visible title that clearly tells other why they can not get the special treatment which he gets. But in my opinion if you look deeply these people are more of liability than asset for a general average SWE scenario.
• oarabbus_ 7y ago
  I don't doubt the brilliance of this guy, but sounds like he was (ab)using amphetamines, honestly.
  • partyboat1586 7y ago
    Absolutely. It's pretty much the only way to work 48hrs straight.
    • jlokier 7y ago
      I must disagree. I've done a small number of 48 hour stints in circumstances where the need arose, and I've never in my life touched amphetamines or anything else like them.
      • partyboat1586 7y ago
        Perhaps it's easier for some. What was the need?
      • oarabbus_ 7y ago
        Eh, you said it yourself "small number". Sure you can do it one time here or there, likely with heroic doses of coffee for the second 24 hour period. But consistently doing this as described in the thread isn't "mania" phases of bipolar. It means one is on stimulants.
• eplanit 7y ago
  I worked with one client that had a true genius like that, and their solution seemed to work well -- they took him off the "team". He became like a little R&D department, reporting to top management. This allowed him to work away at his pace and in his fashion. He was available to projects as a consultant, which helped reset expectations as to how he would engage with teams day-to-day. They would assign bright people to work with him sometimes (akin to a research assistant), which helped drive an incentive in others to achieve that kind of excellence in the hope that they can attain the same autonomy. It seemed to work out well from what I observed.
  • Xelbair 7y ago
    That is really good to way to handle such people - it is a win-win situation for everyone. 10x gets flexible work hours and, more importantly, interesting and varied projects. Team doesn't get annoyed by one odd guy, but they are still available to support them, and other teams. And there is mentoring in there too - this system basically makes them share their knowledge and thought process with potential others like them. EDIT: There is also a benefit of not having them be a cornerstone of any project(ie - if they leave it fails).
• option 7y ago
  Perhaps, the answer to the question you have at the end is to allow and encourage work from home
• zer00eyz 7y ago
  Honestly any "rockstar" who can do this I give one piece of advice. Your hard work, your massive productivity will NEVER be rewarded appropriately in relationship to your peers. Show up, work less than everyone else and still outproduce them. Use the rest of the free time you have to other things. "Work from home". Show up to the office and grow a new skill (further compounding the value delta between you and everyone else) or make quality of life improvements to your working environment (that thing we wanna automate but never get to). Much of work is theater, and the only time you should put on a show, should stretch your legs is when there is an emergency in production (its down and your not making money) every other "emergency" is bluster and poor planing.
  • RonanTheGrey 7y ago
    Nobody wants to recognize it but this is the real answer. No company (that is not your own) deserves that level of dedication. People ask “what am I supposed to do, slow down to their pace?” That’s exactly what you’re supposed to do. Put that manic energy into things that will pay off for you later (like passive income), not make your manager’s bonus.
• arandr0x 7y ago
  Tell the other employees that they aren't privy to their coworker's personal situation and that you are at liberty to allow any employee to not show up a few days a week, if you believe doing so is essential to their physical or mental health, if it's not hurting the bottom line, and if it's not a quid-pro-quo situation. If the other employees want more time off, the correct solution is not to ask them to pull all nighters but just ask why. Usually extra time off can be accomodated with occasional work from home or allowing shifted start times. Or, possibly, your employees didn't even want the two days off a week -- maybe they were just feeling left behind and unappreciated that you just loved that coworker so much, and they came to perceive his odd working hours as a status symbol and reward.
• proc0 7y ago
  I worked in one team where they declared "scrum hours", which were 4-6 hours during the day everyone agreed to be in office. This gave enough flexibility to creative people and enough face to face with people who wanted questions quickly answered. Not sure what the best balance is, but that seemed ok.
• DoreenMichele 7y ago
  I gladly encouraged him to work when he wanted, sometimes that meant he'd work 48 hours straight and sleep for two days and show up Friday. It's extremely common for brilliant people to be twice exceptional. Problems like ADHD, ASD, OCD, etc. are fairly strongly associated with very high IQs. This means if they pull an all-nighter, it's not because they pushed themselves to be productive. It's because their brain was on fire with an idea and they needed to get it all out right now and literally were incapable of sleeping until they could get it done. That can't be replicated from the other direction. You can't say "I know! I will stay up and work all night and it will be brilliant!" That's not how that works. Not by a long shot.
• dwoozle 7y ago
  I work in an FAANG where the director in charge takes people like this and just forces them to work from home. WFH is normally not allowed so you have to be in the exceptional tier to be offered it, and that gives you the flexibility to manage your own schedule. It limits the ability of those people to influence the culture.
• pjmorris 7y ago
  "One other lesson needs to be drawn explicitly. A project is not a house of cards which collapses when a single "key" person is removed. At least, it should not be; but often, when management thinks it is, the prophecy becomes self-fulfilling. That was one of the lessons in Mark's case, for if a little less reliance had been placed upon Mark, his manager might have populated his team with other than trainees. After all, even if the "key" man is as contented as a cow with his work, people are sometimes inconsiderate enough of their managers to get sick, to get drafted, or to die. No, if a manager wants to run a stable project, he would do well to follow this simple maxim: If a programmer is indispensable, get rid of him as quickly as possible." "The Psychology of Computer Programming", Gerald M. Weinberg
• stjohnswarts 7y ago
  Could you have worked out a consultant "pay by the hour" arrangement. As long as he pulled his hours for the week it would still seem like a great investment.
• joe25 7y ago
  I've been such an engineer: hard to manage, but, I'd dare to say, brilliant. First 5 years of my career were painful: I didn't understand why people were often upset about me, why they wrote poor peer feedback and why I wasn't given the formal role to drive projects. Then I bothered to learn some people skills and corporate politics. These days I don't bother to work more than 2-3 hours a day: most of the time I hang around, talk to people and make connections. Those 2-3 hours are more than enough to deliver piles of work and get outstanding perf reviews. Because I talk a lot to others, everybody generally likes me and I get good feedback. The unused energy and competence goes into side projects. I even started a side company. Now when my manager talks about the importance of showing more leadership, I calmly admit how right he is, and at the end of the day head to a dinner with 2 VPs and one CEO to discuss things related to my company.
  • RonanTheGrey 7y ago
    Beautiful... a living example of a mini thread I had with another commenter above!
• charlieflowers 7y ago
  So what would you and others in this thread do if, through some stroke of luck, you had hired the next John Carmack? Are you saying that would be a guaranteed liability? If so, how good is too good? You need to be sure to let your engineers know to stop progressing before they get there.