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I used to work with an engineer who would have a loud negative emotional reaction the first time they were told about some new thing that would be happening at

I used to work with an engineer who would have a loud negative emotional reaction the first time they were told about some new thing that would be happening at our company, and after a little bit would be totally fine with it. After one or two instances of this pattern, the manager learned to talk to the engineer ahead of time, so the upset reaction wouldn’t happen in a big meeting. I suspect that more of us are like this than would like to admit to it. The manager’s new tactic seems to me both more effective and kinder, because it takes into account the engineer’s need to process a change outside of a public setting.

sgtnoodle 6y ago
Sounds like me at work last year when I had to take high dose steroids!
- __blockcipher__ 6y ago
  Presumably you’re referring to corticosteroids which are not anabolic steroids. Or just making a tired joke, I couldn’t tell which :P
  - sgtnoodle 6y ago
    Prednisone, and it definitely altered my personality significantly. I also ordered $400 worth of RC quadcopter parts, and spent 8 hours straight sanding off and re-polishing the top surface of my eyeglass lenses to get rid of the anti-reflective coating that was cracked and pitted. In the month leading up to that, interactions at work were also giving me anxiety bordering on panic attacks, like a visceral fight-or-flight response. That turned out to be my atrioventricular nerves progressively failing, such that my heart ventricles were beating slower and asynchronously from my natural pulse rate. I got down to 21 beats per minute at one point, and everyone at the hospital was amazed I was walking around and smiling rather than on the ground unconsciouss. I'm pretty much back to 100% now, and as an embedded software engineer, I am horrified to be able to say that I'm bluetooth enabled.
    - andrewem 6y ago
      I knew someone who was on prednisone for 3 days. They got 6 days worth of things done in those 3 days, then spent the next 3 days of withdrawal in bed unable to do anything. Also: this is wildly off topic, but did your 8 hours of sanding off cracked anti-reflective coating work? What equipment did you need? I had a similar issue and it never occurred to me that it might be fixable at home.
      - sgtnoodle 6y ago
        Yeah, it worked pretty well for my purpose. The only downside is that the edges got a bit rounded off, leading to more distortion than ideal in my peripheral vision. It was definitely an improvement overall, in that I was less steroid-aggro while wearing them afterward. My brain had no trouble filtering out the increased distortion, vs. the visual artifacts (starbursting) from the worn out coatings. I sanded the lenses by hand with 200 grit, then 400 grit, then 800 grit wet sand paper. There was the AR coating, but then under that there was some sort of underlying "toughness" coating that I had to completely sand through to get down to polycarbonate. That's what took the longest, since I didn't really know how far I needed to go with it, and it was fairly resistant to the abrasion. I tried soaking the lenses in isopropyl alcohol to soften the coatings, but I don't think it helped at all vs. just applying elbow grease. Once the surfaces were uniformly smooth but frosty looking, I polished them with Novus plastic polish #3, then #2, then #1. It wasn't perfect like a new lens, but the center was optically clear without any starburst reflections. With all the coatings gone, the polycarbonate quickly picks up little scratches just from cleaning, but it's quick to polish out again. It was worth it to keep me from going completely insane for the next month it took me to get an eye exam and order new glasses. Taking corticosteroids briefly then stopping cold turkey like that is pretty rough on your endocrine system. I had to be on the high dose for many weeks to get the desired effect, and my doctor had me slowly taper off over the course of a few months to keep from crashing like that.
    - cunac 6y ago
      wait for next software update to patch security :) , you made my day
    - 6y ago
grogenaut 6y ago
I personally will react negatively for about 5 to 15 minutes to any new large change idea so I just work to make sure I don't make judgments during that window. It does however let me get into real issues with the idea pretty quickly. I will often just tell people okay that's a big change give me time to go through the five stages of grieving and I think we'll be good
- xyzelement 6y ago
  That's awesome - sounds like you have an amazing degree of introspection: you understand what you are like and you know how to manage through that. Btw one reason companies ask interviewees about their weaknesses is not because the answer matters but because it shows whether a person thinks about what they are like, or not. Eg if someone ever said what you said "one of my weaknesses is that I freak out in the first 5 mins but I learned to work around that" - a real green flag that you are an excellent person to work with.
ZephyrBlu 6y ago
I obviously don't know why this engineer reacts the way they do, but I can see myself reacting that way not because of the change itself but because there was no advance warning or discussion.
- vishnugupta 6y ago
  > because there was no advance warning or discussion. As a manager I learned to keep my senior engineer pre-informed the hard way. Personally, when I was an IC, I was totally fine not being kept in the loop because I was impervious to such news or changes. So I just assumed that’s how it’s with everyone. Clearly I was wrong. That said, it is important to release that pre-information in an informal fashion lest they start acting on it before it’s formally announced. Especially ones that impact the immediate peer teams such as re-org.
  - ZephyrBlu 6y ago
    Are you really impervious to changes though? You're almost certainly going to be affected in some way. Also, I don't really see the point in hiring supposedly intelligent engineers and then cutting them out of the decision making process. Btw I'm not even a senior engineer, I'm a _junior_.
    - __blockcipher__ 6y ago
      I’ve always felt the same way, I absolutely detest the whole farce of a manager claiming they’re “shielding the team” when really they’re just making critical decisions without informing their own team / gathering [real] consenshs. To be explicit, there is absolutely a place to “shield the team”, but I’m talking about a pattern I’ve observed that many managers will use that as a pretext to avoid keeping people in the loop and essentially get to boost their own career by holding others back. Real shielding is when you politely tell team Y that their proposal is going to require your team to have to own and operate a net new production service, not when you make critical decisions without consulting some of the biggest stakeholders - your own team.
thu2111 6y ago
This seems like an instance of a common tactic (or problem, depending on your perspective) that is especially common at software firms where management learn to work around employees' problems instead of challenging them to improve. The engineer in this case had an emotional control issue: they reacted badly to anything new, even if they had no rational reason to do so (they were fine with it later). This could have been tackled by working with the employee to get them to understand that this type of loud public reaction is causing problems for everyone, including the perception of their own skills, and that they need to learn how to take a deep breath when a new change is announced - maybe wait a few minutes to write down what they wanted to say and then wait a few days before hitting the send button. Lots of approaches. Instead everyone else adjusted their behaviour to avoid tackling the underlying problem. The manager’s new tactic seems to me both more effective and kinder Maybe I'm just some asshole manager but I never saw it that way. You externalised one person's problem onto the whole team, who now all have to be aware of this special exception. Most obviously it makes it difficult to have brainstorming sessions, or if someone comes up with a new idea half way through a meeting unexpectedly, they can't raise it there and then, they have to wait for the meeting to end, pre-brief this one guy, let him/her get over it, then raise it with the rest of the team. So whilst it may have been kinder to that one specific person, I'm not sure it was kinder to everyone else, let alone more effective. Especially because once such a culture is embedded, sooner or later half the team has some weird quirk that everyone is expected to work around or ignore.
- scsilver 6y ago
  Is the cost of kid gloves out weight the cost of bringing in a new engineer that you don't know their failings at all. The devil you know is manageable, the devil you dont is a gamble. How much upside is in that gamble.
  - thu2111 6y ago
    It's definitely related to the cost of hiring and the cost of the employees. But it can work against the employees in the long run because they learn they can get away with bad behaviour and it gets normalised. Then it's hard to genuinely improve, so acts as an invisible barrier to their career growth (or worse, doesn't, and that demotivates the others).
yccs27 6y ago
I like the solution in this story. At first it sounds like the manager is just working around or “tricking“ the engineer, but the engineer simply gets what he likely wanted in the first place.

sgtnoodle 6y ago

Sounds like me at work last year when I had to take high dose steroids!

__blockcipher__ 6y ago
Presumably you’re referring to corticosteroids which are not anabolic steroids. Or just making a tired joke, I couldn’t tell which :P
- sgtnoodle 6y ago
  Prednisone, and it definitely altered my personality significantly. I also ordered $400 worth of RC quadcopter parts, and spent 8 hours straight sanding off and re-polishing the top surface of my eyeglass lenses to get rid of the anti-reflective coating that was cracked and pitted. In the month leading up to that, interactions at work were also giving me anxiety bordering on panic attacks, like a visceral fight-or-flight response. That turned out to be my atrioventricular nerves progressively failing, such that my heart ventricles were beating slower and asynchronously from my natural pulse rate. I got down to 21 beats per minute at one point, and everyone at the hospital was amazed I was walking around and smiling rather than on the ground unconsciouss. I'm pretty much back to 100% now, and as an embedded software engineer, I am horrified to be able to say that I'm bluetooth enabled.
  - andrewem 6y ago
    I knew someone who was on prednisone for 3 days. They got 6 days worth of things done in those 3 days, then spent the next 3 days of withdrawal in bed unable to do anything. Also: this is wildly off topic, but did your 8 hours of sanding off cracked anti-reflective coating work? What equipment did you need? I had a similar issue and it never occurred to me that it might be fixable at home.
    - sgtnoodle 6y ago
      Yeah, it worked pretty well for my purpose. The only downside is that the edges got a bit rounded off, leading to more distortion than ideal in my peripheral vision. It was definitely an improvement overall, in that I was less steroid-aggro while wearing them afterward. My brain had no trouble filtering out the increased distortion, vs. the visual artifacts (starbursting) from the worn out coatings. I sanded the lenses by hand with 200 grit, then 400 grit, then 800 grit wet sand paper. There was the AR coating, but then under that there was some sort of underlying "toughness" coating that I had to completely sand through to get down to polycarbonate. That's what took the longest, since I didn't really know how far I needed to go with it, and it was fairly resistant to the abrasion. I tried soaking the lenses in isopropyl alcohol to soften the coatings, but I don't think it helped at all vs. just applying elbow grease. Once the surfaces were uniformly smooth but frosty looking, I polished them with Novus plastic polish #3, then #2, then #1. It wasn't perfect like a new lens, but the center was optically clear without any starburst reflections. With all the coatings gone, the polycarbonate quickly picks up little scratches just from cleaning, but it's quick to polish out again. It was worth it to keep me from going completely insane for the next month it took me to get an eye exam and order new glasses. Taking corticosteroids briefly then stopping cold turkey like that is pretty rough on your endocrine system. I had to be on the high dose for many weeks to get the desired effect, and my doctor had me slowly taper off over the course of a few months to keep from crashing like that.
  - cunac 6y ago
    wait for next software update to patch security :) , you made my day
  - 6y ago

grogenaut 6y ago

I personally will react negatively for about 5 to 15 minutes to any new large change idea so I just work to make sure I don't make judgments during that window. It does however let me get into real issues with the idea pretty quickly. I will often just tell people okay that's a big change give me time to go through the five stages of grieving and I think we'll be good

xyzelement 6y ago
That's awesome - sounds like you have an amazing degree of introspection: you understand what you are like and you know how to manage through that. Btw one reason companies ask interviewees about their weaknesses is not because the answer matters but because it shows whether a person thinks about what they are like, or not. Eg if someone ever said what you said "one of my weaknesses is that I freak out in the first 5 mins but I learned to work around that" - a real green flag that you are an excellent person to work with.

ZephyrBlu 6y ago

I obviously don't know why this engineer reacts the way they do, but I can see myself reacting that way not because of the change itself but because there was no advance warning or discussion.

vishnugupta 6y ago
> because there was no advance warning or discussion. As a manager I learned to keep my senior engineer pre-informed the hard way. Personally, when I was an IC, I was totally fine not being kept in the loop because I was impervious to such news or changes. So I just assumed that’s how it’s with everyone. Clearly I was wrong. That said, it is important to release that pre-information in an informal fashion lest they start acting on it before it’s formally announced. Especially ones that impact the immediate peer teams such as re-org.
- ZephyrBlu 6y ago
  Are you really impervious to changes though? You're almost certainly going to be affected in some way. Also, I don't really see the point in hiring supposedly intelligent engineers and then cutting them out of the decision making process. Btw I'm not even a senior engineer, I'm a _junior_.
  - __blockcipher__ 6y ago
    I’ve always felt the same way, I absolutely detest the whole farce of a manager claiming they’re “shielding the team” when really they’re just making critical decisions without informing their own team / gathering [real] consenshs. To be explicit, there is absolutely a place to “shield the team”, but I’m talking about a pattern I’ve observed that many managers will use that as a pretext to avoid keeping people in the loop and essentially get to boost their own career by holding others back. Real shielding is when you politely tell team Y that their proposal is going to require your team to have to own and operate a net new production service, not when you make critical decisions without consulting some of the biggest stakeholders - your own team.

thu2111 6y ago

This seems like an instance of a common tactic (or problem, depending on your perspective) that is especially common at software firms where management learn to work around employees' problems instead of challenging them to improve. The engineer in this case had an emotional control issue: they reacted badly to anything new, even if they had no rational reason to do so (they were fine with it later). This could have been tackled by working with the employee to get them to understand that this type of loud public reaction is causing problems for everyone, including the perception of their own skills, and that they need to learn how to take a deep breath when a new change is announced - maybe wait a few minutes to write down what they wanted to say and then wait a few days before hitting the send button. Lots of approaches. Instead everyone else adjusted their behaviour to avoid tackling the underlying problem. The manager’s new tactic seems to me both more effective and kinder Maybe I'm just some asshole manager but I never saw it that way. You externalised one person's problem onto the whole team, who now all have to be aware of this special exception. Most obviously it makes it difficult to have brainstorming sessions, or if someone comes up with a new idea half way through a meeting unexpectedly, they can't raise it there and then, they have to wait for the meeting to end, pre-brief this one guy, let him/her get over it, then raise it with the rest of the team. So whilst it may have been kinder to that one specific person, I'm not sure it was kinder to everyone else, let alone more effective. Especially because once such a culture is embedded, sooner or later half the team has some weird quirk that everyone is expected to work around or ignore.

scsilver 6y ago
Is the cost of kid gloves out weight the cost of bringing in a new engineer that you don't know their failings at all. The devil you know is manageable, the devil you dont is a gamble. How much upside is in that gamble.
- thu2111 6y ago
  It's definitely related to the cost of hiring and the cost of the employees. But it can work against the employees in the long run because they learn they can get away with bad behaviour and it gets normalised. Then it's hard to genuinely improve, so acts as an invisible barrier to their career growth (or worse, doesn't, and that demotivates the others).

yccs27 6y ago

I like the solution in this story. At first it sounds like the manager is just working around or “tricking“ the engineer, but the engineer simply gets what he likely wanted in the first place.