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This is a fantastic example because your manager did essentially the opposite of what this author would have wanted. The author wants managers to have no tolera

This is a fantastic example because your manager did essentially the opposite of what this author would have wanted. The author wants managers to have no tolerance for people who perform poorly, moving to do something to get the poor performers off the teams of the high performers. Yet that's short-sighted. Teams and expertise are built over time. It may not be ideal for people like the author of this article who believe themselves to be high performers who shouldn't have to ever put up with low performers. However, the real high performers are the ones who can accept that no team is perfect and nobody starts out as a superstar. They make the effort to work with people, mentor, and lead by example.

nunez 5y ago
It is much easier to think "we should fire that person" instead of "how can we improve this person."
- convolvatron 5y ago
  you have to do both. seriously do your best to help them improve. but if they are causing problems for other people, you have to give up after some time and get them out of the way
  - vanillax 5y ago
    this.
  - PragmaticPulp 5y ago
    > but if they are causing problems for other people, This is the crux of the issue: The definition of "causing problems for other people" isn't as well defined as it may seem. Someone who is constantly driving the team further apart than together, struggling to work with other members of the team, and being openly dismissive of others would fit the definition of "causing problems for other people". From another perspective, it would also fit the definition of the "hard to work with" person in this article. That's the point: Even when someone is falling behind, as an employee you must find a way to at least try to work with them and lead by example.
    - smackeyacky 5y ago
      I've seen a lot of examples of this, having been parachuted into a few failing teams. The most effective means I found of getting "hard to work with" people who genuinely wanted to be better, is to give them some freedom. One pattern that I saw quite a bit was one team member being a bit more technical (rather than business focused), so they tended to cop a lot of the internal questions that caused them to context switch a lot. It increases their frustration levels and drops their performance. One effective way to solve that is to acknowledge what is happening, and put in some boundaries so the other team members know that (for example) Tuesdays-Thursdays you need to really be stuck before you bug XXX about your problem. It makes XXX feel better about the situation because not only has it been acknowledged they are a key team member, it also makes sure they get some quiet time to really get stuff done at their own pace without having to switch jobs all the time. The other team members, knowing there are a few boundaries now, tend to become more self sufficient so you end up with a better performing team overall, and one that isn't so dependent on a single person. Obviously there are other patterns that end up creating "hard to work with" people, but the example came up so often I think it's worth writing about.
    - msrenee 5y ago
      That's a good point. You can have a person who is amazing at their task, but doesn't communicate and doesn't get documents and info to others that need it. Even if you're the best in the world at writing code, that's not worth a damn if you're withholding the materials and knowledge about a project that other people need to do their work. If you're too busy thinking what an amazing worker you are and everyone else is dragging you down, there's a good chance you feel vindicated in behaving in a way that makes your coworkers' jobs harder. Why should you help them out? They're not even trying to do things right and they're making you look bad.
  - rodgerd 5y ago
    Change the people, or change the people.
- andrewflnr 5y ago
  I'm not sure this is true in practice. Thinking about firing people is already kind of hard, so a lot of people think about and do other stuff they hope will improve the person. What's actually hard is doing something effective to improve the person's performance.
- EnKopVand 5y ago
  In what world is it easier to fire someone than to fix them? Because in any sort or management I’ve been involved with here in Denmark it’s always the exact opposite. When you fire someone. You tax HR and yourself with the process both of letting someone go and finding their replacement. You have to pay their salary 3-6 months going forward as well as all the paid vacation they may have saved up. Most importantly you tax your team with the added resource drain of covering the tasks as well as integrating the replacement. You also risk damaging morale, and worse, you risk increasing employee anxiety as even the best employee can have inferiority issues. That being said, the basic mantra in management should always be that you can get rid of anyone, it’s just a matter of cost. So if you need to fire someone, then you need to fire someone. Personally I prefer building people to the point where they will leave you themselves, but, that’s a style or management that isn’t present in a lot of companies because it takes a corporate culture that is very hard to maintain in large organisations and require quite a lot of management talent in small organisations. It’s also something that is incredibly hard to do as a single manager if the culture is against you.
  - bryanrasmussen 5y ago
    >In what world is it easier to fire someone than to fix them? In the U.S - where you generally don't have to pay as long a severance pay if at all. on edit: as in most things 'in the U.S' this varies on state by state basis.
    - conanbatt 5y ago
      Not really true, it is actually a constant lesson that you need to fire more because the bias is always to do nothing.
  - ChuckNorris89 5y ago
    >In what world is it easier to fire someone than to fix them? You clearly haven't met Austrian management. It's nearly at will employment (in theory it's not, but in some domains many companies know and do skirt around the law to get rid of employees quickly without getting sued). Once the management decides they don't like you anymore, you're given your standard one to three months notice, then you're gone. I asked a lawyer, and they said the employer can fire your without any reason as long as they give you your contractual notice period. My favorite example is them using Jira velocity charts to fire the one with the slowest curve. You get a warning (p.i.p.) telling you your velocity needs to catch up, then after two sprints you get your notice handed to you. OTOH, there are other EU countries where firing people is really difficult. Here it's just a rubber stamp thanks to decades of pro-business politicians elected in power who eroded workers' rghts.
- mprovost 5y ago
  Unless you're a sociopath, as a manager it's never easy to think of firing a person (where the alternative is improving them - sometimes people do things that make it easy). It's usually sleepless nights, stress, alcohol, sometimes counselling or therapy.
vvanders 5y ago
Maybe I read it differently but I think the bar that one can hold and the performance against that bar("high"/"low") can be two separate things. Sometimes they correlate but not always. My read on the article was more on a mis-alignment of values and what is considered success. High bar / low "performance"(which is a subjective thing and can vary based on external factors) are those who want to learn because they know they aren't at that bar now but they want to be. "Low bar" / high or low performance means that you have different goals and different measures of "success". If you don't resolve those first then that leads to the friction and the pattern the author outlines. This can be in a bunch of different areas(security, performance, maintainability) and sometimes if you have two people who hold velocity and architecture separately as their highest bar it can appear that they don't value each other's bar since they are in direct conflict. It's been my experience that if you can ground it in why people hold certain bars and that the goals are actually aligned then the sum of the team that hold a high bar in different areas is greater than the parts.
icelancer 5y ago
> This is a fantastic example because your manager did essentially the opposite of what this author would have wanted. The author wants managers to have no tolerance for people who perform poorly, moving to do something to get the poor performers off the teams of the high performers. This is not how I read it. You have to do your best as a manager to train your employees and live up to what Andy Grove said in High Output Management. You must set a high standard and it is your job to get your reports to that standard the best you possibly can. But when your reports cannot or will not get to that standard despite a huge investment in training and clear direction, you have to move on.
- nerdponx 5y ago
  > As you look at enough of these scenarios, you can back out a common pattern. The main character is trying to do their job effectively, but can’t due to the low performance of a peer. They escalate to the appropriate manager to address the issue, but that manager transforms the performance issue into a relationship issue: it’s not that the peer isn’t performing, it’s just that the two of you don’t like each other. Instead of being the manager’s responsibility to resolve the performance issue, it’s now the main character’s responsibility. By attempting to drive accountability in their peer, the main character has blocked their own progress (“they’re just hard to work with”) without accomplishing anything. Emphasis mine.
  - civilized 5y ago
    The problem he's focused on is not the tolerance for the peer performing badly. It's the blowback for the main character who points it out.
    - nerdponx 5y ago
      Precisely, that's the point I was trying to demonstrate.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
29athrowaway 5y ago
The problem with software engineering management nowadays is the ubiquituous 18th century sweatshop mentality. In those sweatshops, the worker that completed more pairs of shoes is the highest performing one. But when you try to apply that mentality to more abstract endeavours like software engineering, it doesn't work. Let's imagine there is a problem that requires to need to implement 100 classes to deal with 100 different types. A 18th century person would say: I have 100 classes, 5 workers, I am going to give 20 classes for each worker to implement. A person that actually knows what's going on would simply write template <typename T> class FuckYou, done. In the wrong hands, software is misery.
- 29athrowaway 5y ago
  And the generation Z version in case you are wondering is function FuckYou(T) { return class { // something with T }; } Because you can return classes from a function.
  - pas 5y ago
    in C++? or JS or ...? :o
    - pgruenbacher 5y ago
      zig
    - 29athrowaway 5y ago
      My self reply was JS
theptip 5y ago
I don’t think OP is advocating for having no tolerance for low performance. He’s just saying that it’s the manager's job to do something about it when it occurs and can’t be resolved otherwise, else it negatively impacts the rest of the team. “Do something” could be training, coaching, shifting scope of responsibilities, whatever. Doesn’t necessarily mean firing people. Mentoring and leading by example are great things to do, but they do nothing to solve the actual scenarios that Will gave as examples in the OP. There are some situations that you can’t resolve by being a good colleague, and the manager needs to step in.
- sangnoir 5y ago
  > He’s just saying that it’s the manager's job to do something about it when it occurs and can’t be resolved otherwise, else it negatively impacts the rest of the team. Managing peers is not their job - the author tried to spin the lack of action by manager as poor management, but what if the manager has more context and good reasons for maintaining the status quo? IMO, this is management equivalent of tech debt, and hr is demanding that it gets addressed immediately without caring about other consequences outside their own narrow window into the org.
kayamon 5y ago
> The author wants [...] Here we have an excellent example of the straw man, nice to see still practiced these days.
jzb 5y ago
I didn’t get that from this at all. His complaint seemed to be when the organization wouldn’t address a problem, period. In his shoes, I’d be thrilled if the response was “you’re right, we’re going to coach this other person to improve, because they’re valuable in a lot of ways, but need improvement there so we can succeed.”
PaulHoule 5y ago
In @koof's story, @koof recognized he was performing poorly. In the other situations an employee is performing poorly, not recognizing it, and neither is the organization.
tomaskafka 5y ago
I believe OP is talking about keeping poor performers in high positions for sake of fake harmony.

nunez 5y ago

It is much easier to think "we should fire that person" instead of "how can we improve this person."

convolvatron 5y ago
you have to do both. seriously do your best to help them improve. but if they are causing problems for other people, you have to give up after some time and get them out of the way
- vanillax 5y ago
  this.
- PragmaticPulp 5y ago
  > but if they are causing problems for other people, This is the crux of the issue: The definition of "causing problems for other people" isn't as well defined as it may seem. Someone who is constantly driving the team further apart than together, struggling to work with other members of the team, and being openly dismissive of others would fit the definition of "causing problems for other people". From another perspective, it would also fit the definition of the "hard to work with" person in this article. That's the point: Even when someone is falling behind, as an employee you must find a way to at least try to work with them and lead by example.
  - smackeyacky 5y ago
    I've seen a lot of examples of this, having been parachuted into a few failing teams. The most effective means I found of getting "hard to work with" people who genuinely wanted to be better, is to give them some freedom. One pattern that I saw quite a bit was one team member being a bit more technical (rather than business focused), so they tended to cop a lot of the internal questions that caused them to context switch a lot. It increases their frustration levels and drops their performance. One effective way to solve that is to acknowledge what is happening, and put in some boundaries so the other team members know that (for example) Tuesdays-Thursdays you need to really be stuck before you bug XXX about your problem. It makes XXX feel better about the situation because not only has it been acknowledged they are a key team member, it also makes sure they get some quiet time to really get stuff done at their own pace without having to switch jobs all the time. The other team members, knowing there are a few boundaries now, tend to become more self sufficient so you end up with a better performing team overall, and one that isn't so dependent on a single person. Obviously there are other patterns that end up creating "hard to work with" people, but the example came up so often I think it's worth writing about.
  - msrenee 5y ago
    That's a good point. You can have a person who is amazing at their task, but doesn't communicate and doesn't get documents and info to others that need it. Even if you're the best in the world at writing code, that's not worth a damn if you're withholding the materials and knowledge about a project that other people need to do their work. If you're too busy thinking what an amazing worker you are and everyone else is dragging you down, there's a good chance you feel vindicated in behaving in a way that makes your coworkers' jobs harder. Why should you help them out? They're not even trying to do things right and they're making you look bad.
- rodgerd 5y ago
  Change the people, or change the people.
andrewflnr 5y ago
I'm not sure this is true in practice. Thinking about firing people is already kind of hard, so a lot of people think about and do other stuff they hope will improve the person. What's actually hard is doing something effective to improve the person's performance.
EnKopVand 5y ago
In what world is it easier to fire someone than to fix them? Because in any sort or management I’ve been involved with here in Denmark it’s always the exact opposite. When you fire someone. You tax HR and yourself with the process both of letting someone go and finding their replacement. You have to pay their salary 3-6 months going forward as well as all the paid vacation they may have saved up. Most importantly you tax your team with the added resource drain of covering the tasks as well as integrating the replacement. You also risk damaging morale, and worse, you risk increasing employee anxiety as even the best employee can have inferiority issues. That being said, the basic mantra in management should always be that you can get rid of anyone, it’s just a matter of cost. So if you need to fire someone, then you need to fire someone. Personally I prefer building people to the point where they will leave you themselves, but, that’s a style or management that isn’t present in a lot of companies because it takes a corporate culture that is very hard to maintain in large organisations and require quite a lot of management talent in small organisations. It’s also something that is incredibly hard to do as a single manager if the culture is against you.
- bryanrasmussen 5y ago
  >In what world is it easier to fire someone than to fix them? In the U.S - where you generally don't have to pay as long a severance pay if at all. on edit: as in most things 'in the U.S' this varies on state by state basis.
  - conanbatt 5y ago
    Not really true, it is actually a constant lesson that you need to fire more because the bias is always to do nothing.
- ChuckNorris89 5y ago
  >In what world is it easier to fire someone than to fix them? You clearly haven't met Austrian management. It's nearly at will employment (in theory it's not, but in some domains many companies know and do skirt around the law to get rid of employees quickly without getting sued). Once the management decides they don't like you anymore, you're given your standard one to three months notice, then you're gone. I asked a lawyer, and they said the employer can fire your without any reason as long as they give you your contractual notice period. My favorite example is them using Jira velocity charts to fire the one with the slowest curve. You get a warning (p.i.p.) telling you your velocity needs to catch up, then after two sprints you get your notice handed to you. OTOH, there are other EU countries where firing people is really difficult. Here it's just a rubber stamp thanks to decades of pro-business politicians elected in power who eroded workers' rghts.
mprovost 5y ago
Unless you're a sociopath, as a manager it's never easy to think of firing a person (where the alternative is improving them - sometimes people do things that make it easy). It's usually sleepless nights, stress, alcohol, sometimes counselling or therapy.

vvanders 5y ago

Maybe I read it differently but I think the bar that one can hold and the performance against that bar("high"/"low") can be two separate things. Sometimes they correlate but not always. My read on the article was more on a mis-alignment of values and what is considered success. High bar / low "performance"(which is a subjective thing and can vary based on external factors) are those who want to learn because they know they aren't at that bar now but they want to be. "Low bar" / high or low performance means that you have different goals and different measures of "success". If you don't resolve those first then that leads to the friction and the pattern the author outlines. This can be in a bunch of different areas(security, performance, maintainability) and sometimes if you have two people who hold velocity and architecture separately as their highest bar it can appear that they don't value each other's bar since they are in direct conflict. It's been my experience that if you can ground it in why people hold certain bars and that the goals are actually aligned then the sum of the team that hold a high bar in different areas is greater than the parts.

icelancer 5y ago

> This is a fantastic example because your manager did essentially the opposite of what this author would have wanted. The author wants managers to have no tolerance for people who perform poorly, moving to do something to get the poor performers off the teams of the high performers. This is not how I read it. You have to do your best as a manager to train your employees and live up to what Andy Grove said in High Output Management. You must set a high standard and it is your job to get your reports to that standard the best you possibly can. But when your reports cannot or will not get to that standard despite a huge investment in training and clear direction, you have to move on.

nerdponx 5y ago
> As you look at enough of these scenarios, you can back out a common pattern. The main character is trying to do their job effectively, but can’t due to the low performance of a peer. They escalate to the appropriate manager to address the issue, but that manager transforms the performance issue into a relationship issue: it’s not that the peer isn’t performing, it’s just that the two of you don’t like each other. Instead of being the manager’s responsibility to resolve the performance issue, it’s now the main character’s responsibility. By attempting to drive accountability in their peer, the main character has blocked their own progress (“they’re just hard to work with”) without accomplishing anything. Emphasis mine.
- civilized 5y ago
  The problem he's focused on is not the tolerance for the peer performing badly. It's the blowback for the main character who points it out.
  - nerdponx 5y ago
    Precisely, that's the point I was trying to demonstrate.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

29athrowaway 5y ago

The problem with software engineering management nowadays is the ubiquituous 18th century sweatshop mentality. In those sweatshops, the worker that completed more pairs of shoes is the highest performing one. But when you try to apply that mentality to more abstract endeavours like software engineering, it doesn't work. Let's imagine there is a problem that requires to need to implement 100 classes to deal with 100 different types. A 18th century person would say: I have 100 classes, 5 workers, I am going to give 20 classes for each worker to implement. A person that actually knows what's going on would simply write template <typename T> class FuckYou, done. In the wrong hands, software is misery.

29athrowaway 5y ago
And the generation Z version in case you are wondering is function FuckYou(T) { return class { // something with T }; } Because you can return classes from a function.
- pas 5y ago
  in C++? or JS or ...? :o
  - pgruenbacher 5y ago
    zig
  - 29athrowaway 5y ago
    My self reply was JS

theptip 5y ago

I don’t think OP is advocating for having no tolerance for low performance. He’s just saying that it’s the manager's job to do something about it when it occurs and can’t be resolved otherwise, else it negatively impacts the rest of the team. “Do something” could be training, coaching, shifting scope of responsibilities, whatever. Doesn’t necessarily mean firing people. Mentoring and leading by example are great things to do, but they do nothing to solve the actual scenarios that Will gave as examples in the OP. There are some situations that you can’t resolve by being a good colleague, and the manager needs to step in.

sangnoir 5y ago
> He’s just saying that it’s the manager's job to do something about it when it occurs and can’t be resolved otherwise, else it negatively impacts the rest of the team. Managing peers is not their job - the author tried to spin the lack of action by manager as poor management, but what if the manager has more context and good reasons for maintaining the status quo? IMO, this is management equivalent of tech debt, and hr is demanding that it gets addressed immediately without caring about other consequences outside their own narrow window into the org.

kayamon 5y ago

> The author wants [...] Here we have an excellent example of the straw man, nice to see still practiced these days.

jzb 5y ago

I didn’t get that from this at all. His complaint seemed to be when the organization wouldn’t address a problem, period. In his shoes, I’d be thrilled if the response was “you’re right, we’re going to coach this other person to improve, because they’re valuable in a lot of ways, but need improvement there so we can succeed.”

PaulHoule 5y ago

In @koof's story, @koof recognized he was performing poorly. In the other situations an employee is performing poorly, not recognizing it, and neither is the organization.

tomaskafka 5y ago

I believe OP is talking about keeping poor performers in high positions for sake of fake harmony.