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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, mor

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.

prpl 5y ago
as a curveball, however, I would imagine those who are most self-entitled are also more likely to be yelp elite or yelpers in general
- rossdavidh 5y ago
  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.
  - edude03 5y ago
    Yelp specifically I check very in frequently, Google maps however shows the reviews upfront and center, so I take those fairly seriously
    - aklemm 5y ago
      Seconding Google Maps for ratings.
    - Talanes 5y ago
      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.
  - 121789 5y ago
    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.
  - switchbak 5y ago
    Ever since Yelp started excluding my (2 or 3) useful reviews of fraudulent businesses, I no longer trust them. I asked them why they were filtering my reviews, and got the old "sorry, the algorithm has decided you're not to be trusted, nothing I can do" line. So much for trying to warn people, I suppose. Though I've seen similar behavior with Google too.
  - dreamcompiler 5y ago
    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.
- jack_riminton 5y ago
  The tyranny of the vocal minority. Surely one of the worst unintended consequences of everyone being on the internet
- Kluny 5y ago
  Nobody cares about Yelp.
  - exhilaration 5y ago
    Ehhhhh maybe not for local restaurants, but I think Yelp is a lot of people's go-to source for finding restaurants when visiting a new location.
  - xwdv 5y ago
    I care about Yelp. It is still the best place to find businesses and restaurants. It is an app I rarely think about, yet use it almost everyday. I just don’t give a fuck about Yelpers.
    - digisign 5y ago
      They won't let you see much without the app. I've never been back.
      - xwdv 5y ago
        I have the app because I’d rather be a first class citizen.
  - acdha 5y ago
    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.
  - fshbbdssbbgdd 5y ago
    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.
winternett 5y ago
> 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.
- micromacrofoot 5y ago
  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.
- malcolmgreaves 5y ago
  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! The customer is not always right.
  - ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
    > The customer is not always right. One of my favorite daily visits, is a site called "Not Always Right," and it has many stories like this: https://notalwaysright.com/newest/ https://notalwaysright.com/newest/
dspillett 5y ago
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.
- dexterdog 5y ago
  Which is why people who know people know that reviews are largely useless.
  - whimsicalism 5y ago
    I disagree - but negative reviews certainly almost always are.
    - rhacker 5y ago
      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.
      - whimsicalism 5y ago
        I'm talking about actually reading the reviews, not looking at the average.
      - jet_32951 5y ago
        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.
    - ivberrOg 5y ago
Kluny 5y ago
Plus, you're not getting a decent tip from them no matter how hard you try.
- dexterdog 5y ago
  Not necessarily true. I know people who are like this when they are out because they just like attention and they are willing to pay for it.
  - brewdad 5y ago
    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
unfocussed_mike 5y ago
> 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/~ -- James Taylor
nickff 5y ago
The cheapest customers are always the most expensive. I don't remember where I first heard it, but it's rung true for me.
tasha0663 5y ago
> 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.
- Shared404 5y ago
  I'm of the opinion that everyone should work a bottom level customer facing role at least once. In high school I worked at a pizza place and it would not be an exaggeration to say it opened my eyes to a lot of things. I'm very glad I worked there.
joshuamorton 5y ago
Amusingly you derived loadshedding from first principles. I think that's really neat!
- mst 5y ago
  My first thought was 'the utility monster problem' but your metaphor is better.
- sixstringtheory 5y ago
  Thank you for connecting those dots for me. I haven’t really done a lot of backend/infra but have heard the term before. Neat, indeed!
duxup 5y ago
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).
- derac 5y ago
  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.
  - wlmrtthrw16207 5y ago
    (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. I would have loved to be able to just say no.
trimbo 5y ago
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.
- throwawayboise 5y ago
  > 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.
  - mst 5y ago
    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.
    - twojacobtwo 5y ago
      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.
endymi0n 5y ago
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.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- bradknowles 5y ago
  Basically, he told you to triage. Spend the time saving those who can be saved with the resources you have, and don't waste time on those who can't. It's an easy thing to talk about (once you discover the concept). It's much harder to put into practice.
brightball 5y ago
Never grease the squeaky wheel. If you do, it’s only going to squeak louder and longer.

prpl 5y ago

as a curveball, however, I would imagine those who are most self-entitled are also more likely to be yelp elite or yelpers in general

rossdavidh 5y ago
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.
- edude03 5y ago
  Yelp specifically I check very in frequently, Google maps however shows the reviews upfront and center, so I take those fairly seriously
  - aklemm 5y ago
    Seconding Google Maps for ratings.
  - Talanes 5y ago
    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.
- 121789 5y ago
  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.
- switchbak 5y ago
  Ever since Yelp started excluding my (2 or 3) useful reviews of fraudulent businesses, I no longer trust them. I asked them why they were filtering my reviews, and got the old "sorry, the algorithm has decided you're not to be trusted, nothing I can do" line. So much for trying to warn people, I suppose. Though I've seen similar behavior with Google too.
- dreamcompiler 5y ago
  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.
jack_riminton 5y ago
The tyranny of the vocal minority. Surely one of the worst unintended consequences of everyone being on the internet
Kluny 5y ago
Nobody cares about Yelp.
- exhilaration 5y ago
  Ehhhhh maybe not for local restaurants, but I think Yelp is a lot of people's go-to source for finding restaurants when visiting a new location.
- xwdv 5y ago
  I care about Yelp. It is still the best place to find businesses and restaurants. It is an app I rarely think about, yet use it almost everyday. I just don’t give a fuck about Yelpers.
  - digisign 5y ago
    They won't let you see much without the app. I've never been back.
    - xwdv 5y ago
      I have the app because I’d rather be a first class citizen.
- acdha 5y ago
  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.
- fshbbdssbbgdd 5y ago
  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.

winternett 5y ago

> 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.

micromacrofoot 5y ago
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.
malcolmgreaves 5y ago
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! The customer is not always right.
- ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
  > The customer is not always right. One of my favorite daily visits, is a site called "Not Always Right," and it has many stories like this: https://notalwaysright.com/newest/ https://notalwaysright.com/newest/

dspillett 5y ago

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.

dexterdog 5y ago
Which is why people who know people know that reviews are largely useless.
- whimsicalism 5y ago
  I disagree - but negative reviews certainly almost always are.
  - rhacker 5y ago
    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.
    - whimsicalism 5y ago
      I'm talking about actually reading the reviews, not looking at the average.
    - jet_32951 5y ago
      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.
  - ivberrOg 5y ago

Kluny 5y ago

Plus, you're not getting a decent tip from them no matter how hard you try.

dexterdog 5y ago
Not necessarily true. I know people who are like this when they are out because they just like attention and they are willing to pay for it.
- brewdad 5y ago
  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

unfocussed_mike 5y ago

> 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/~ -- James Taylor

nickff 5y ago

The cheapest customers are always the most expensive. I don't remember where I first heard it, but it's rung true for me.

tasha0663 5y ago

> 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.

Shared404 5y ago
I'm of the opinion that everyone should work a bottom level customer facing role at least once. In high school I worked at a pizza place and it would not be an exaggeration to say it opened my eyes to a lot of things. I'm very glad I worked there.

joshuamorton 5y ago

Amusingly you derived loadshedding from first principles. I think that's really neat!

mst 5y ago
My first thought was 'the utility monster problem' but your metaphor is better.
sixstringtheory 5y ago
Thank you for connecting those dots for me. I haven’t really done a lot of backend/infra but have heard the term before. Neat, indeed!

duxup 5y ago

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).

derac 5y ago
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.
- wlmrtthrw16207 5y ago
  (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. I would have loved to be able to just say no.

trimbo 5y ago

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.

throwawayboise 5y ago
> 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.
- mst 5y ago
  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.
  - twojacobtwo 5y ago
    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.

endymi0n 5y ago

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.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
bradknowles 5y ago
Basically, he told you to triage. Spend the time saving those who can be saved with the resources you have, and don't waste time on those who can't. It's an easy thing to talk about (once you discover the concept). It's much harder to put into practice.

brightball 5y ago

Never grease the squeaky wheel. If you do, it’s only going to squeak louder and longer.