11 ms·

A Response to Jacob Kaplan-Moss’s “Incompetent but Nice”

175 points by genericlemon24 4y ago

t344344 4y ago
Stuff like this is why I refuse to return back to office. There is some sort of relationship play between "nice guys" and managers. Both of them are refusing to do their work, "nice guy" to complete his work and manager to manage. And somehow I am part of this, and have to work extra weekends!
- mkl95 4y ago
  > somehow I am part of this, and have to work extra weekends Most engineers are not expected to work weekends unless they are on call. You don't have to put up with it.
  - t344344 4y ago
    In theory maybe. My point is why should I even make that fight? I have my own issues, my own life, my own people that depend on me.
    - bawolff 4y ago
      I don't think i've ever been asked to work weekends in any job i've had. Its not normal in the industry for employers to require this (except if you are oncall)
milar 4y ago
I don’t understand how this is an issue that needs anxiety. Fire them. I’ve been this person early in my life, and deserved to be fired. Incompetent but nice is still, literally, incompetent. Incompetent people get dismissed.
- manfre 4y ago
  > I don’t understand how this is an issue that needs anxiety. Empathy. Some people have more of it than others.
  - milar 4y ago
    Sure. But how does worry help you or the person who is going to get fired? The manager goes through months of stress avoiding the thing they need to do (bad for their health), while the bad fit engineer gets strung along.
    - js8 4y ago
      Empathy is not worry. It's actually the other way around - you seem to worry that underperforming person is going to bring down the business, empathic people do not care.
    - krisoft 4y ago
      > how does worry help you or the person who is going to get fired? That is the point. By the point you know you need to fire them it is easy. Getting to that point is the hard bit. Maybe they just need a different style of assignments? Maybe there are interpersonal issues in the team you as the manager should address. Maybe they have a health issue they can address with time. Maybe they are burnt out and you should reconsider how you are running your team, or even worse how the whole company. Depending on the situation you have many more things you can do to address an underperforming employee than just firing or not firing them. Whether or not it will be successful depends on multiple factors some in the control of the manager, some not so. A sane manager should not stress or worry over the ones they can't control, but easy to imagine them stressing over the ones they can.
  - flappyeagle 4y ago
    Often it’s extremely misguided. It’s better for people to work at a job they don’t struggle with. Fire them and move on so they can too
    - 4y ago
clarkevans 4y ago
I like the nice vs kind distinction. By being nice to someone who is underperforming (by keeping them onboard), you're being unkind to those that are performing but have to pick up the slack or watch the team's progress fall behind.
alfor 4y ago
ADHD is probably the problem under this behaviour. Can’t complete tasks and underperform but want to help other, be part of the team. People with ADHD have developed coping behaviour to fit in but have very low control on their executive functions, they can’t keep working on something that doesn’t catch their attention. It’s very hard to understand for someone who don’t have the problem "why can’t they just do it!" When the job is new, the team is new it’s all very interesting but as routine and boredom set in the get unable to stay on the task. They hate themselves for not doing what they should do and want to do the right thing but are unable. It’s very stressful and often lead to burnout. Medication help, so is meditation, omega-3, better/more sleep, exercice and jobs that have movement and a lot of change and creativity.
- donatj 4y ago
  This sounds a lot like me. I do get a TON done, am always working hard, but I can’t single thread to save my soul. I have a tendency to work on 6+ tickets at the same time which has in the past clashed with what management has wanted - clean single threaded work that looks nice on a kanban board. For instance I have a project right now that in linear time has taken about a week but has taken well over a month in actuality because I am constantly jumping around. I literally don’t even mean to, I try to stay on task but will get an idea for a difference project and switch branches without even thinking about it. I don’t know that I would want to medicate it, I don’t have a problem with it and my net output is very good even if individual tasks take longer than “they should”. I see it as just an alternate way of thinking/working. I just wish we’d stop trying to jam people into workflows. You’re missing out on potential.
  - darkerside 4y ago
    The danger is that multitasking like that can make you FEEL like you're getting a ton of things done while you're really just spinning wheels in place. I'm not saying that's what is happening to you. You may have data to back up what you're saying. But there could be a parallel in some cases to moneyball, which exposed how intuition and bias had led to suboptimal decisions through false perceptions.
  - 4y ago
xivzgrev 4y ago
This article is good but imho misses a big potential issue: the manager’s perception of performance. Managers, especially newer ones can have lots of biases. Someone you think is underperforming may actually be doing ok, they’re just not approaching the work in the way or at the exact same performance you or superstar Sam does. Not everyone is a rockstar, and if you insist on that you are going to have trouble scaling. So my first question is “how is this manager evaluating performance?” Follow ups -have those expectations actually been communicated to employee? -what specifically has been done to help the employee? Is it lip service or actual help? Has HR and managers manager been looped in and do they all agree employee is underperforming? Only then do I think you should move to reassigning / firing
- ResearchCode 4y ago
  Mostly agree but HR would have no clue about that.
  - watwut 4y ago
    I agree. And I am not even trying to bash HR, it is just that individual developer, artist, writer or whatever is something they are not equipped to evaluate.
- flappyeagle 4y ago
  High performance work is a partnership between manager and contributor. Employees are not helpless. You don’t have to wait for the manager to do the right thing. You can tell them what to expect from you. You are leaving power on the table by taking a passive stance
  - consp 4y ago
    > You are leaving power on the table by taking a passive stance No everyone is able to be assertive.
    - flappyeagle 4y ago
awill88 4y ago
Sometimes people just don’t want to work with you because you’ve become a moniker, too. There’s no reason, seriously. It’s called being shit out of luck imho
JPLeRouzic 4y ago
> "Possibility: Undiagnosed health issues" Thanks to Glyph to raise this issue. Once I had an employee who was nice but who had often to leave due to health issues. I learned a few years later that this person had deceased because of cancer.
mkl95 4y ago
Company culture can be incredibly complex and fluid. You may be a good fit for some teams and suck for others depending on their current projects, the people involved, etc. Different teams can perceive you as a completely different person. Not to mention most low level managers were trained to be ICs and lack basic project management skills.
blitz_skull 4y ago
I nodded in agreement all the way up to the section on having a hard conversation on performance. I had assumed that was a given until he explicitly called it out after several other things including actually firing the person. As a leader, that should have been step number one. Just because this person is nice doesn’t give you a freebie to avoid the painful-but-necessary responsibility to have this conversation. If you haven’t had that hard conversation to highlight and plan on fixing performance, and you fire someone, then you’ve taken the easy way out. If you’re a leader taking the easy way out, you’re unfit to lead.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
probably_wrong 4y ago
In his "Make good art" speech [1] Neil Gaiman mentions a third axis in the good-bad/nice-jerk graph, namely, "delivers the work on time". I'm not sure how good it would work for software development, but the comic book world has plenty of successful artists like that - their art is okay at best, but they have plenty of work because they reliably hit their deadlines. Assuming your worker is not entirely terrible, I always thought this made for a reasonable tie breaker. [1] https://jamesclear.com/great-speeches/make-good-art-by-neil-gaiman https://jamesclear.com/great-speeches/make-good-art-by-neil-...
- CuriouslyC 4y ago
  That works better in comic books than software. As an example, I have a coworker who is pretty good in terms of domain knowledge, and can push out work pretty fast, but he does things like write migrations that insert rows of data one at a time in a loop, or adds three layers of almost do-nothing wrapper functions around business logic that doesn't need to be abstracted. He's made a lot of useful contributions but the stuff he's been heavily involved in is borderline indecipherable so the tech debt tradeoff has been pretty brutal.
  - mjr00 4y ago
    This reflects more poorly on your engineering leadership than your coworker imo. Where are the guardrails? Why aren't his migrations going through a pull request where you can review and say "this should be a batch insert?" If PRs are in place but nobody speaks up, why is the culture afraid of pointing these things out?
    - CuriouslyC 4y ago
      Oh, I totally agree, had I been the technical lead for that team I would have flagged a lot of that stuff. As it stands the lead for that team is also on the nice but incompetent spectrum to some degree, and since the code base they're working on is an inherited dumpster fire I get the sense people on that team have mostly given up on code quality.
    - 4y ago
danielvaughn 4y ago
I'm now in my second role where this applies to me. The first one, I was fired from, but I chalked it up to inexperience. This time around I have a lot of experience under my belt, and for that reason it's weighing on me quite a lot. I'm finding myself digging into Kubernetes for the first time and no matter how hard I try, I just can't seem to crack it. None of it makes any sense to me - I get what K8s is at a high level, but man...once you get into the details, it just feels impossible. I don't know if I've ever experienced this much stress in a job before.
- danpalmer 4y ago
  That sucks. Can you focus on strengths instead? I happen to find infra quite easy, but CSS/design systems, I just always seem to suck at, and I'm thankful to work with people who are good at these things. I'm all for working on weaknesses! But at some point I think it's better to focus on where we can add value and play to our strengths.
  - danielvaughn 4y ago
    I'm exactly the opposite - always been mostly FE. I can find my way around a backend, but you wouldn't want to trust me with a complex/critical system. I was hired at this company as an FE dev, but after doing a bit of BE work for them, they asked if I wanted to join the platform team. After years of being shielded from devops/infra stuff, I felt like I was stagnating if I stayed in the FE lane, so I went ahead and took the dive. My mood shifts from one day to the next. Some days I'm okay, but others are really, really hard. Like I'm barely able to understand k8s, and we're also using terraform, helm, etc etc. It might be the largest single learning curve I've ever faced.
    - evntdrvn 4y ago
      Don’t be too hard on yourself, the learning curve as a new infra/platform engineer is VERTICAL. Try not to hide that you’d benefit from some bootstrap assistance in a misguided effort to “not look clueless”, that’s a fast ride to a bad perf review or worse. One strategy that is incredibly effective in this situation is to ask if you can shadow an experienced/skilled team member for a sprint or two, and then switch to pairing with the same type of person for the following month or two. Your rate of learning will skyrocket using this approach, compared to trying to “go it alone” Good luck and enjoy the ride!
gwbas1c 4y ago
TLDR: First try and see if there a non-obvious cause, like a disability, a situation with someone else on the team, ect. Then either fire them or re-assign them to a different role. --- I think it's important to set clear expectations early and explain common sense. Sometimes things that you think are obvious aren't. I also think it's important to be a lot more introspective about your current situation and management style. I've seen "nice but incompetent" happen because a manager didn't set clear expectations at the beginning, and just assumed subordinates would "figure it out."
davidthewatson 4y ago
Quadrants are useful to visualize the problem along a couple binary spectrums, but the process shouldn't stop there. A more evolved process would avoid using such vague words to define problems that are complex, dynamic, interdependent, social, and psychological. Performance and expectations are wicked problems. Determinations of performance and expectations are often closed and siloed as opposed to being open and transparent. That's a cultural problem arising from "difficult conversations". Organizations often make the mistake of over-simplifying these conversations. I can think of few chasms between performance and expectations in twenty years that was reflective of reality. Organizations make sense of those situations slowly, poorly, and privately, if at all. Why? Because if their cultures were reflective, protean, or sensemaking at all, they were closed conversations, ill-defined, informal, and not repeated on a regular basis. A few examples I've sampled from my work: - Numerous individuals suffered from self-medication while receiving little care or concern. - Founders copy emotional traits of Jobs, Gates, Musk, and Torvalds not the intellectual ones. - Trauma: ill-defined roles, changing expectations, and stack ranking. Personally, I'll take competent but rough-around-the-edges because my experience has been that my most talented coworkers all fit that description no matter their education and experience while realizing that the edges are where the most important insights occur.
AndyNemmity 4y ago
I feel like this at times can fit me. I am great at a lot of tasks. I am bad at some of my tasks, which makes me disinterested in doing them. I am clearly an expert level at some % of my tasks, but show very little growth in the other ones as the pain of failing repeatedly with no hope doesn't seem worth it when I can focus on what I am great at, and accomplish a lot of things. Obviously I need to either improve at the tasks I'm bad at, change roles, or find other people to do the tasks I'm bad at. I keep trying every few months to really attack what I'm bad at, but there's always so much work it's easy to get handed a task I'm great at, and just do that. I'm told by my manager I am doing a great job, because it's easy to focus on the tasks I'm great at. I feel like I'm doing a very bad job, because it's easy to focus on the tasks I'm bad at.
NickC25 4y ago
I think what gets lost in this discussion but should be worth noting is team dynamics. As I'm not an engineer, things are probably different for me and in the teams I've been in. Sometimes the nice person can take the heat off the jerk, or can better interact with other teams or employees so that the jerk can do what they are good at, and not be bothered by others. Part of what I did as a PM was to bring my talented IC teammates coffee, and make sure the rest of the company didn't bother them during crunch time. All requests came to me. The ICs were generally nice too, but unable to communicate politely when push came to shove. That's where I came in. Am I a good engineer? Hell no, I'll never be one, and I'm fine with that. I can, however, get others to like me, and respect what I have to say - which brings its own benefits when it comes to team-to-team interaction dynamics. Nobody likes the asshole, but I'm happy to cover for the asshole because that's part of what needs to get done to make sure everyone is on the same page. Sometimes, nice people just need to be in better roles. Engineering is probably not one of them. Nice people might suck at certain important things, but everyone plays different roles in large and small teams, and sometimes contributes in a less direct or noticeable way, but still important. Put them in the roles they can thrive in, damnit! All that said, there's a difference between a brilliant jerk and someone who lacks social tact and is a genuinely unpleasant, disrespectful person to be around. I have no problems with the straight-shooting brilliant jerk. The my-way-or-the-highway-and-oh-by-the-way-go-fuck-yourself person who might be good but is completely lacking in social norms and can't get along with anyone no matter how good, screw them.
manv1 4y ago
Finishing things is surprisingly hard. You have to practice to get good at it. I'd suggest learning how to paint. Why? Because a painting is literally never done. Just like software, there's always more you can do to a painting. But at some point you need to finish and hang it up. Even pollock-style splatter painting will work for this exercise. I've been shipping software and finishing projects for a long time, and it does get easier. There's this weird feeling of anxiety when you're near completion...it's a lot like stage fright. And getting that last 1% done is really, really hard. It takes a ton of effort...more effort that it takes to start. At some point you have to decide "it's as good as it's going to get" and be done with it. That's not to say I don't have plenty of projects that I haven't finished; I do. But I also have a lot of stuff that I finished off and am relatively happy about. Again, read books about art, not about programming. Finishing stuff is hard. It's one of those things they don't really talk about in CS class...or in engineering. It's the reason Jobs used to say "artists ship." They do, or at least commercially successful ones do.

Stuff like this is why I refuse to return back to office. There is some sort of relationship play between "nice guys" and managers. Both of them are refusing to do their work, "nice guy" to complete his work and manager to manage. And somehow I am part of this, and have to work extra weekends!

mkl95 4y ago
> somehow I am part of this, and have to work extra weekends Most engineers are not expected to work weekends unless they are on call. You don't have to put up with it.
- t344344 4y ago
  In theory maybe. My point is why should I even make that fight? I have my own issues, my own life, my own people that depend on me.
  - bawolff 4y ago
    I don't think i've ever been asked to work weekends in any job i've had. Its not normal in the industry for employers to require this (except if you are oncall)

milar 4y ago

I don’t understand how this is an issue that needs anxiety. Fire them. I’ve been this person early in my life, and deserved to be fired. Incompetent but nice is still, literally, incompetent. Incompetent people get dismissed.

manfre 4y ago
> I don’t understand how this is an issue that needs anxiety. Empathy. Some people have more of it than others.
- milar 4y ago
  Sure. But how does worry help you or the person who is going to get fired? The manager goes through months of stress avoiding the thing they need to do (bad for their health), while the bad fit engineer gets strung along.
  - js8 4y ago
    Empathy is not worry. It's actually the other way around - you seem to worry that underperforming person is going to bring down the business, empathic people do not care.
  - krisoft 4y ago
    > how does worry help you or the person who is going to get fired? That is the point. By the point you know you need to fire them it is easy. Getting to that point is the hard bit. Maybe they just need a different style of assignments? Maybe there are interpersonal issues in the team you as the manager should address. Maybe they have a health issue they can address with time. Maybe they are burnt out and you should reconsider how you are running your team, or even worse how the whole company. Depending on the situation you have many more things you can do to address an underperforming employee than just firing or not firing them. Whether or not it will be successful depends on multiple factors some in the control of the manager, some not so. A sane manager should not stress or worry over the ones they can't control, but easy to imagine them stressing over the ones they can.
- flappyeagle 4y ago
  Often it’s extremely misguided. It’s better for people to work at a job they don’t struggle with. Fire them and move on so they can too
  - 4y ago

clarkevans 4y ago

I like the nice vs kind distinction. By being nice to someone who is underperforming (by keeping them onboard), you're being unkind to those that are performing but have to pick up the slack or watch the team's progress fall behind.

alfor 4y ago

ADHD is probably the problem under this behaviour. Can’t complete tasks and underperform but want to help other, be part of the team. People with ADHD have developed coping behaviour to fit in but have very low control on their executive functions, they can’t keep working on something that doesn’t catch their attention. It’s very hard to understand for someone who don’t have the problem "why can’t they just do it!" When the job is new, the team is new it’s all very interesting but as routine and boredom set in the get unable to stay on the task. They hate themselves for not doing what they should do and want to do the right thing but are unable. It’s very stressful and often lead to burnout. Medication help, so is meditation, omega-3, better/more sleep, exercice and jobs that have movement and a lot of change and creativity.

donatj 4y ago
This sounds a lot like me. I do get a TON done, am always working hard, but I can’t single thread to save my soul. I have a tendency to work on 6+ tickets at the same time which has in the past clashed with what management has wanted - clean single threaded work that looks nice on a kanban board. For instance I have a project right now that in linear time has taken about a week but has taken well over a month in actuality because I am constantly jumping around. I literally don’t even mean to, I try to stay on task but will get an idea for a difference project and switch branches without even thinking about it. I don’t know that I would want to medicate it, I don’t have a problem with it and my net output is very good even if individual tasks take longer than “they should”. I see it as just an alternate way of thinking/working. I just wish we’d stop trying to jam people into workflows. You’re missing out on potential.
- darkerside 4y ago
  The danger is that multitasking like that can make you FEEL like you're getting a ton of things done while you're really just spinning wheels in place. I'm not saying that's what is happening to you. You may have data to back up what you're saying. But there could be a parallel in some cases to moneyball, which exposed how intuition and bias had led to suboptimal decisions through false perceptions.
- 4y ago

xivzgrev 4y ago

This article is good but imho misses a big potential issue: the manager’s perception of performance. Managers, especially newer ones can have lots of biases. Someone you think is underperforming may actually be doing ok, they’re just not approaching the work in the way or at the exact same performance you or superstar Sam does. Not everyone is a rockstar, and if you insist on that you are going to have trouble scaling. So my first question is “how is this manager evaluating performance?” Follow ups -have those expectations actually been communicated to employee? -what specifically has been done to help the employee? Is it lip service or actual help? Has HR and managers manager been looped in and do they all agree employee is underperforming? Only then do I think you should move to reassigning / firing

ResearchCode 4y ago
Mostly agree but HR would have no clue about that.
- watwut 4y ago
  I agree. And I am not even trying to bash HR, it is just that individual developer, artist, writer or whatever is something they are not equipped to evaluate.
flappyeagle 4y ago
High performance work is a partnership between manager and contributor. Employees are not helpless. You don’t have to wait for the manager to do the right thing. You can tell them what to expect from you. You are leaving power on the table by taking a passive stance
- consp 4y ago
  > You are leaving power on the table by taking a passive stance No everyone is able to be assertive.
  - flappyeagle 4y ago

awill88 4y ago

Sometimes people just don’t want to work with you because you’ve become a moniker, too. There’s no reason, seriously. It’s called being shit out of luck imho

JPLeRouzic 4y ago

> "Possibility: Undiagnosed health issues" Thanks to Glyph to raise this issue. Once I had an employee who was nice but who had often to leave due to health issues. I learned a few years later that this person had deceased because of cancer.

mkl95 4y ago

Company culture can be incredibly complex and fluid. You may be a good fit for some teams and suck for others depending on their current projects, the people involved, etc. Different teams can perceive you as a completely different person. Not to mention most low level managers were trained to be ICs and lack basic project management skills.

blitz_skull 4y ago

I nodded in agreement all the way up to the section on having a hard conversation on performance. I had assumed that was a given until he explicitly called it out after several other things including actually firing the person. As a leader, that should have been step number one. Just because this person is nice doesn’t give you a freebie to avoid the painful-but-necessary responsibility to have this conversation. If you haven’t had that hard conversation to highlight and plan on fixing performance, and you fire someone, then you’ve taken the easy way out. If you’re a leader taking the easy way out, you’re unfit to lead.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

probably_wrong 4y ago

In his "Make good art" speech [1] Neil Gaiman mentions a third axis in the good-bad/nice-jerk graph, namely, "delivers the work on time". I'm not sure how good it would work for software development, but the comic book world has plenty of successful artists like that - their art is okay at best, but they have plenty of work because they reliably hit their deadlines. Assuming your worker is not entirely terrible, I always thought this made for a reasonable tie breaker. [1] https://jamesclear.com/great-speeches/make-good-art-by-neil-gaiman https://jamesclear.com/great-speeches/make-good-art-by-neil-...

CuriouslyC 4y ago
That works better in comic books than software. As an example, I have a coworker who is pretty good in terms of domain knowledge, and can push out work pretty fast, but he does things like write migrations that insert rows of data one at a time in a loop, or adds three layers of almost do-nothing wrapper functions around business logic that doesn't need to be abstracted. He's made a lot of useful contributions but the stuff he's been heavily involved in is borderline indecipherable so the tech debt tradeoff has been pretty brutal.
- mjr00 4y ago
  This reflects more poorly on your engineering leadership than your coworker imo. Where are the guardrails? Why aren't his migrations going through a pull request where you can review and say "this should be a batch insert?" If PRs are in place but nobody speaks up, why is the culture afraid of pointing these things out?
  - CuriouslyC 4y ago
    Oh, I totally agree, had I been the technical lead for that team I would have flagged a lot of that stuff. As it stands the lead for that team is also on the nice but incompetent spectrum to some degree, and since the code base they're working on is an inherited dumpster fire I get the sense people on that team have mostly given up on code quality.
  - 4y ago

danielvaughn 4y ago

I'm now in my second role where this applies to me. The first one, I was fired from, but I chalked it up to inexperience. This time around I have a lot of experience under my belt, and for that reason it's weighing on me quite a lot. I'm finding myself digging into Kubernetes for the first time and no matter how hard I try, I just can't seem to crack it. None of it makes any sense to me - I get what K8s is at a high level, but man...once you get into the details, it just feels impossible. I don't know if I've ever experienced this much stress in a job before.

danpalmer 4y ago
That sucks. Can you focus on strengths instead? I happen to find infra quite easy, but CSS/design systems, I just always seem to suck at, and I'm thankful to work with people who are good at these things. I'm all for working on weaknesses! But at some point I think it's better to focus on where we can add value and play to our strengths.
- danielvaughn 4y ago
  I'm exactly the opposite - always been mostly FE. I can find my way around a backend, but you wouldn't want to trust me with a complex/critical system. I was hired at this company as an FE dev, but after doing a bit of BE work for them, they asked if I wanted to join the platform team. After years of being shielded from devops/infra stuff, I felt like I was stagnating if I stayed in the FE lane, so I went ahead and took the dive. My mood shifts from one day to the next. Some days I'm okay, but others are really, really hard. Like I'm barely able to understand k8s, and we're also using terraform, helm, etc etc. It might be the largest single learning curve I've ever faced.
  - evntdrvn 4y ago
    Don’t be too hard on yourself, the learning curve as a new infra/platform engineer is VERTICAL. Try not to hide that you’d benefit from some bootstrap assistance in a misguided effort to “not look clueless”, that’s a fast ride to a bad perf review or worse. One strategy that is incredibly effective in this situation is to ask if you can shadow an experienced/skilled team member for a sprint or two, and then switch to pairing with the same type of person for the following month or two. Your rate of learning will skyrocket using this approach, compared to trying to “go it alone” Good luck and enjoy the ride!

gwbas1c 4y ago

TLDR: First try and see if there a non-obvious cause, like a disability, a situation with someone else on the team, ect. Then either fire them or re-assign them to a different role. --- I think it's important to set clear expectations early and explain common sense. Sometimes things that you think are obvious aren't. I also think it's important to be a lot more introspective about your current situation and management style. I've seen "nice but incompetent" happen because a manager didn't set clear expectations at the beginning, and just assumed subordinates would "figure it out."

davidthewatson 4y ago

Quadrants are useful to visualize the problem along a couple binary spectrums, but the process shouldn't stop there. A more evolved process would avoid using such vague words to define problems that are complex, dynamic, interdependent, social, and psychological. Performance and expectations are wicked problems. Determinations of performance and expectations are often closed and siloed as opposed to being open and transparent. That's a cultural problem arising from "difficult conversations". Organizations often make the mistake of over-simplifying these conversations. I can think of few chasms between performance and expectations in twenty years that was reflective of reality. Organizations make sense of those situations slowly, poorly, and privately, if at all. Why? Because if their cultures were reflective, protean, or sensemaking at all, they were closed conversations, ill-defined, informal, and not repeated on a regular basis. A few examples I've sampled from my work: - Numerous individuals suffered from self-medication while receiving little care or concern. - Founders copy emotional traits of Jobs, Gates, Musk, and Torvalds not the intellectual ones. - Trauma: ill-defined roles, changing expectations, and stack ranking. Personally, I'll take competent but rough-around-the-edges because my experience has been that my most talented coworkers all fit that description no matter their education and experience while realizing that the edges are where the most important insights occur.

AndyNemmity 4y ago

I feel like this at times can fit me. I am great at a lot of tasks. I am bad at some of my tasks, which makes me disinterested in doing them. I am clearly an expert level at some % of my tasks, but show very little growth in the other ones as the pain of failing repeatedly with no hope doesn't seem worth it when I can focus on what I am great at, and accomplish a lot of things. Obviously I need to either improve at the tasks I'm bad at, change roles, or find other people to do the tasks I'm bad at. I keep trying every few months to really attack what I'm bad at, but there's always so much work it's easy to get handed a task I'm great at, and just do that. I'm told by my manager I am doing a great job, because it's easy to focus on the tasks I'm great at. I feel like I'm doing a very bad job, because it's easy to focus on the tasks I'm bad at.

NickC25 4y ago

I think what gets lost in this discussion but should be worth noting is team dynamics. As I'm not an engineer, things are probably different for me and in the teams I've been in. Sometimes the nice person can take the heat off the jerk, or can better interact with other teams or employees so that the jerk can do what they are good at, and not be bothered by others. Part of what I did as a PM was to bring my talented IC teammates coffee, and make sure the rest of the company didn't bother them during crunch time. All requests came to me. The ICs were generally nice too, but unable to communicate politely when push came to shove. That's where I came in. Am I a good engineer? Hell no, I'll never be one, and I'm fine with that. I can, however, get others to like me, and respect what I have to say - which brings its own benefits when it comes to team-to-team interaction dynamics. Nobody likes the asshole, but I'm happy to cover for the asshole because that's part of what needs to get done to make sure everyone is on the same page. Sometimes, nice people just need to be in better roles. Engineering is probably not one of them. Nice people might suck at certain important things, but everyone plays different roles in large and small teams, and sometimes contributes in a less direct or noticeable way, but still important. Put them in the roles they can thrive in, damnit! All that said, there's a difference between a brilliant jerk and someone who lacks social tact and is a genuinely unpleasant, disrespectful person to be around. I have no problems with the straight-shooting brilliant jerk. The my-way-or-the-highway-and-oh-by-the-way-go-fuck-yourself person who might be good but is completely lacking in social norms and can't get along with anyone no matter how good, screw them.

manv1 4y ago

Finishing things is surprisingly hard. You have to practice to get good at it. I'd suggest learning how to paint. Why? Because a painting is literally never done. Just like software, there's always more you can do to a painting. But at some point you need to finish and hang it up. Even pollock-style splatter painting will work for this exercise. I've been shipping software and finishing projects for a long time, and it does get easier. There's this weird feeling of anxiety when you're near completion...it's a lot like stage fright. And getting that last 1% done is really, really hard. It takes a ton of effort...more effort that it takes to start. At some point you have to decide "it's as good as it's going to get" and be done with it. That's not to say I don't have plenty of projects that I haven't finished; I do. But I also have a lot of stuff that I finished off and am relatively happy about. Again, read books about art, not about programming. Finishing stuff is hard. It's one of those things they don't really talk about in CS class...or in engineering. It's the reason Jobs used to say "artists ship." They do, or at least commercially successful ones do.