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Trustworthiness, sure. But not friendliness (unless it's asshole-level unfriendliness) over competence. There's little worse than a friendly but incompetent tea

• doteka 5y ago
  I don’t think that’s an opinion held by someone who actually worked with/had to manage the combination of “slightly unfriendly + extreme confidence” before. That is how you get Prima Donnas, temper tantrums during technical discussions and other fun stuff.
  • delecti 5y ago
    Someone extremely confident and prone to tantrums is not friendly. Competence is not necessarily linked with a lack of humility.
  • mypastself 5y ago
    Extreme competence, not confidence.
  • pydry 5y ago
    I've yet to work for somebody exhibiting extreme confidence in a work situation who wasnt covering for something - usually a lack of competence. I've heard stories of "brilliant assholes" but once I've peeled back the layers of these stories I always develop a strong impression that the brilliance is a facade.
    • watwut 5y ago
      My experience with brilliant assholes is that it is combination of self sufficient prophecy and bullying effects. Some people think that being asshole is component of being brilliant and thus they assume you to be brilliant if you act like ass. And the other component is that assholes often times end up dominating rooms and looking brilliant, because they effectively bully others into being silent. For most people, being silent is better then risking the asshole will target you.
• zitterbewegung 5y ago
  Anecdotal evidence doesn’t trump actual research…
  • xxs 5y ago
    The people in the research are students and we know nothing about their experience in any real work environment, or if they have been in a position where the progress on their tasks/teams depends on the competence level of their co-workers.
  • mortehu 5y ago
    Keep in mind this is just a survey of students in class projects.
  • deepstack 5y ago
    Really depending on the people. Sometime I prefer prefer friendliness over competence. However if the competency involves me doing work to cover for the other colleague, then I take unfriendliness and competent anytime.
  • serverholic 5y ago
    Be careful of extrapolating this too far.
  • boredumb 5y ago
    The actual research is a collection of anecdotes from students doing class projects.
    • bjourne 5y ago
      But that actually makes the result even more significant. Class projects are heavily dependent on every student in the group pulling their part. Someone who is nice but incompetent may cost a student several grade levels, while a competent asshole may allow for them to coast along and still receive a top grade.
      • deleted 5y ago
• crate_barre 5y ago
  I’ll take anyone that doesn’t create extra work for me, you can be an asshole no problem. The easier you make doing my job (eg, I can get my work done without you adding bullshit code that I need to make my way around), the more I’m willing to forgive almost anything. Just be invisible to my work plans for the day, and we’re all good.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• vladvasiliu 5y ago
  > There's little worse than a friendly but incompetent teammate, who will often get too many passes and second chances (because they're well liked) before being terminated. This reminds of people who try to defend someone accused of incompetence: "but s/he's so nice!"
  • JumpCrisscross 5y ago
    Most teams don't have a pressing need for competence. As long as they tread water, they're fine. If they outperform, there is no meaningful reward. In those environments, friendliness trumps competence.
• glipglop4lyfe 5y ago
  > There's little worse than a friendly but incompetent teammate What about a very competent but toxic personality who ends up preventing contributions from other team members, because when they contribute they get belittled or bullied?
  • gherkinnn 5y ago
    I'd take a nice incompetent over a highly capable arsehole any day. At worst, the former is a neutral in his overall contributions, whereas the latter will be a net negative.
    • Jensson 5y ago
      > At worst, the former is a neutral in his overall contributions No, with an extra teammate the expectations on your team increases, so you have to work hard enough to pay for that guys salary as well. Lets extend this a bit, would you prefer to work in a team with 5 incompetent but nice persons who don't contribute anything, so your work has to be enough to pay all their salaries, or would you want to work with 5 assholes who work hard enough that you can slack all day because they pick it up? I'm sure a majority would prefer the second scenario, the first scenario would lead to burnout really quickly and soon they will call you the toxic asshole genius.
    • blibble 5y ago
      how incompetent? I've worked with people that refuse to do anything in git other than commit, which means: - new copy of the repo every time origin changes - spending a week manually rebasing a dozen commits (obviously with many unique mistakes each time) after being sent multiple simple videos explaining simple things about git, and shown how to do merge/rebase multiple times by the lead using screen sharing and refuses to upgrade their monitor from 1366x766 even after being given the money to do it, because "it's not necessary"
  • t-3 5y ago
    Someone who prevents work from being completed is not competent. The one-dimensional view of competence as being purely technical knowledge is not useful for measuring ability to complete projects and advance the goals of the business.
• watwut 5y ago
  > There's little worse than a friendly but incompetent teammate Did you met unfriendly and incompetent? Cause those really sux. The worst is "jerk, average competent, but people who don't work directly with him assume he is genius because he is jerk".
  • deleted 5y ago
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• almeria 5y ago
  There's little worse than a friendly but incompetent teammate, who will often get too many passes and second chances (because they're well liked) before being terminated. Except of course for the perfectly (if narrowly) competent but decidedly jerkface and/or outright asshole teammate. Who is even more likely to get a pass for being such a "rainmaker". Or because "it's crunchtime and we need all the firepower we can get our hands on". Which was basically the article's point.
• Aunche 5y ago
  I mean you aren't really contradicting anything. Friendly people get too many passes and second chances because people like them.
• dgb23 5y ago
  I personally have no problem with "hard-shell" type of people who are maybe _rough_ and direct, but have emotional depth and are ultimately self-reflective. They can come off as assholes to some people, but most of the time (not always...) they are just uncomfortable, which can have very positive effects as well. So I'm personally not like that though in most situations. I think it's counterproductive with most people and often rude. I think the above is a bad strategy in more than 60% of cases (scientific number; totally not pulling that out of my ass), because most people take direct criticism personally or become defensive. However in my closer professional circle I very often prefer uncomfortable no-bullshit type of style. It's simply more _effective_ and clear.
• tablespoon 5y ago
  > But not friendliness (unless it's asshole-level unfriendliness) over competence. If you could translate "friendliness" and "competence" into equivalent units, I think competence would be devalued compared to friendliness, at least once you get into negative values (e.g. for every extra point of unfriendliness, you need 5-10 competence points to make up for it).
• jayd16 5y ago
  I get what you're saying but if they're reliable its different. If they ask for help and won't just go missing for a week or something like that, then its not a big deal if they need some hand holding on a more complex task. Reliably mediocre is better than unreliable, any day.
• gfodor 5y ago
  Not to mention because you often genuinely like them, it is harder to give them negative feedback in many ways, which is a bad feedback loop.
• gregkerzhner 5y ago
  Someone who is friendly but incompetent is fun to shoot the shit with, but they will also make a commit that breaks prod and duck out for the weekend leaving you to fix the mess. Less competence ultimately means more burden and headache for those that are more competent, and at the end of the day, I value having coworkers who I can rely on more than having coworkers who are easy to talk to.
  • pydry 5y ago
    IME many less competent folks tend to avoid doing the work that puts everybody else in this position and will pick up donkey work instead.
  • watwut 5y ago
    This is more related to risk taking.
  • csee 5y ago
    For me, they're not even fun to shoot the shit with. There's nothing like 1 year of built-up resentment at having to pick up their slack again and again only to be paid roughly the same and sharing half the credit with them.
• gorbachev 5y ago
  > There's little worse than a friendly but incompetent teammate Except that you can teach them things. It's hard to teach an unfriendly person anything, and it's impossible to teach an arrogant asshole anything at all, because they think they're better than anyone else.
  • mym1990 5y ago
    Second this. It is weird that parent went from incompetence directly to being terminated. Competence is built over long periods of time, and if you're lucky you can positively influence an "incompetent" person rather than putting them back into the water.
  • bagacrap 5y ago
    I don't know about;"teaching", but I think people can change their nature and it's life experience that causes this to happen. It would be pretty surprising to me if someone acted the same way at 23 and 32. Arrogance in particular is something that often ebbs with age. OTOH, for software, the most important skill is resourcefulness, and that seems like more of an intrinsic property of someone's personality.
    • gorbachev 5y ago
      True, however, arrogant assholes remain arrogant assholes, in general, much longer than friendly incompetent people remain incompetent.
    • DoingIsLearning 5y ago
      > Arrogance in particular is something that often ebbs with age. I would argue that arrogance ebbs with experiencing or observing failure just enough times. Failures and their lessons usually correlate with age. However, it is not unusual to find people with enough age and nous yet lacking the graciousness you expect from experts/mentors.
  • Jensson 5y ago
    The best predictor of teachability is how much they learned in the past. If a person is incompetent today then most likely they will be hard to teach, and if a person is competent today they will soak up most things you say. There are exceptions of course, but friendly and unteachable and unfriendly but very teachable are both very common scenarios. Teaching the unfriendly person might not be fun but it still works.
• BeetleB 5y ago
  > There's little worse than a friendly but incompetent teammate, who will often get too many passes and second chances (because they're well liked) before being terminated. In my experience, a brilliant asshole is worse. He's less likely to be terminated, and causes problems for everyone. Incompetent people are self aware of their incompetence. Brilliant assholes rarely acknowledge their problem. The one time I dealt with a brilliant asshole - oh wow. He would be right 90% of the time, but for the remaining 10% there would be no way on Earth you could convince him he was wrong. You could bring evidence, mathematical proof, anything: He just wouldn't listen. It got to me being very careful that he not be around when I'd ask for help - because he often misunderstood my problem and would then insist I implement his solution, and there was no way I could convince him that he misunderstood the problem statement. If I ignored him and implemented a different solution, he would throw a loud tantrum. And he had no stake in my work - we were working on different projects. I spent two years in that team and every time he acted up I started documenting it. I never complained (it was clear the manager didn't want to deal with people problems), and on the outside I didn't let my frustration show. I now hear that another member of that team is really complaining to the manager about him. I reached out to him and let him know that if he wants to escalate with HR, I have plenty of material to provide. The one nice thing with incompetent people is you at least look better when it comes to reviews. I know in one job I had I ended up slacking quite a bit, but I knew it wouldn't hurt me because they had quite a few people at my grade level who were just plain incompetent. Management isn't going to give the whole team a poor review.
• mountainriver 5y ago
  Amen I would go as far as to say this is rotting American corporations
• omegalulw 5y ago
  > But not friendliness (unless it's a***-level unfriendliness) over competence. This is the wrong way of looking at things. You shouldn't compromise on friendliness and you shouldn't compromise on competence. If you have to compromise, you compromise a little bit on both but not too much on either. An unfriendly teammate is very bad.