11 ms·

Managing difficult software engineers

175 points by redbell 3y ago

physicsguy 3y ago
I've seen all of these at one point or another and a lot of the time they're circumstance dependent because of nuts decisions the company has made that put people under stress. In particular, I've seen people (and been that person myself) who gets really negative because impossible deadlines get set by non-technical people with no bearing for the reality of the situation on the ground. I've also seen a lot of people give up on arguing with those non-technical people about scope and time, say "OK", roll their eyes, and know they'll miss the deadline before it even starts.
- pestatije 3y ago
  thats exactly what i do...theyll ask for a time estimate and then whether it can be cut by half because issues...i then say yes of course it can and proceed to delivery way past the deadline
- uoaei 3y ago
  And quite often the person who causes these circumstantial stresses can be the same person for whom this guide is intended, but I'm not able to find a lot of acknowledgement of that fact in the guide. I had a manager who pretended they could manage our product-consultancy team the same way they managed their previous research-code-monkey team. They had trouble because of their inability to do much besides say "replicate this paper". To them I probably looked like all of these archetypal "difficult engineers" at various times. From my perspective I wasn't getting the pay nor the time and respect from higher-ups to go through the hard slog of managing up, but I was getting paid enough to stick around, so I just ended up burning out super hard. I guess my point is, sometimes managing others starts with managing yourself. This insight extends far beyond the context of a day job.
- csydas 3y ago
  I can relate to this, especially as someone from a technical management position that has to fight such decisions frequently to try to protect my team from such pointless exercises in stress. > I've also seen a lot of people give up on arguing with those non-technical people about scope and time, say "OK" I understand why this happens, and it is extremely frustrating; consequently, this is why I really dislike the trend of complaining on social media about issues because at least with my company, this is an almost guaranteed way to ensure that a C-Level will "step in to correct this", which in fact just means that now the company needs to do what the C-Level said so the C-Level doesn't look stupid in public, even if the thing to do is absolutely disastrous. The best advice I can give if you're in a technical leadership position and you know this kind of thing happens in your org is: 1. Figure out who these non-technical persons with the ability to make said bad calls actually are in your company; do a process review on the last few events that triggered poor decision processes and find out from whom those decisions actually came from 2. Understand how that person processes information, how they're getting alerted, and most importantly, just get to understand them and what makes them "tick." (e.g., one of our lead PMs, usually a very good PM, unfortunately has a huge ego. Arguing with them in any public fashion causes them to get very defensive out of fear of looking "stupid"; a quick chat with them in private usually is enough to convince them of their mistake, and then we get more reasonable reactions) 3. Become professionally friendly with the common reporters of the issues that usually prompt bad decisions; if a particular sales team is finding actual issues but representing them in a way that results in rushed/poor decisions, teach them another place to report the issues so that more necessary stakeholders are able to view the issue before it gets to the decision process 4. Develop strong and strict change management processes that will protect from the issues; don't attach these processes to specific incidents, but instead present it neutrally as a best practice in change management, and then use the process to protect against such rash changes. The first few times upholding the process might be rough, but just remind people why the process exists, that the goal isn't to stop all decisions, but instead to ensure you are properly vetting decisions on core elements Implementing this is difficult, especially in orgs with poor discipline and process control already, but from experience with such orgs, most persons will pay lip-service to the initial neutral presentation, and won't realize that the bad behaviors they have which the process is meant to stop will be impacted. The goal here isn't to be dishonest with people, but instead to introduce a process-based prevention in a palatable way which makes future discussions easier as they'll carry a common point of agreement. At least with the C-Levels I've had to deal with, it was effective because they didn't want to look stupid in front of other C-Levels and higher management who were telling the C-Level "this breaks our internal processes, we need to review this first as last time we rushed decisions without the stakeholder input, we ended up with huge costs". It doesn't stop every C-Level, but it has greatly reduced the number of meetings I've had to have where I have to give "Explain it like I'm 5" presentations to non-technical decision makers to prevent disastrous decisions/changes. Edit/Addendum: I am well aware that the "real" solution is that decision makers just stop making drastic and ridiculous decisions/promises, but I don't think it's reasonable to expect to change personalities/poor thinking skills in a person, much less to force changes of management. Instead, I'd rather just use process to enforce this and deal with the occasional raised voices. Also Edit: fixed numbered list formatting.
  - physicsguy 3y ago
    Thanks for the thoughtful reply. Lots for me to mull over in that.
danwee 3y ago
3.4. The Procrastinator 3.5. The Lone Wolf 3.6. The Negative Nancy 3.7. The Over-Promiser 3.8. The Know-It-All 3.9. The Silent Type 3.10. The Perfectionist 3.11. The Unreliable One 3.12. The Conflict Instigator 3.13. The Burned-Out Employee I have experienced myself being one of each type of "difficult" software engineer during my career. Not every day, not every month, but from time to time. Sometimes because of the environment (e.g., type of company I worked for), sometimes because of internal issues (e.g., family issues), and sometimes because I really felt like that (e.g., when I was in my mid 20s). I haven't met any engineer who's never shown any traits of the thirteen "personas" listed in the post. If you're looking for an engineer that has zero traits like the ones listed above, you are perhaps looking for a robot.
- glimshe 3y ago
  Expand your last paragraph to apply to almost all human beings in any industry. There are burned-out doctors, know-it all priests, negative nancy teachers, perfectionist lawyers and silent type librarians. Perhaps what's special for Software Engineers is that it's a profession with a skew towards younger workers, so you might see larger groups of people who are still emotionally immature, and thus displaying these traits, than in other industries.
- flir 3y ago
  > e.g., when I was in my mid 20s Lone Wolf?
  - LeoNatan25 3y ago
    I’ve become more of a lone wolf in my 30s, actually. A combination of gained knowledge and experience, teams not familiar with my tech stack, remote hours (both because of timezone difference and also my crazy work hours) and also, yes, less trust in other people’s opinions. This also happens. It’s not just teenagers that feel sometimes they have the most experienced opinion. After listening to bad discussion for long enough, one becomes burned out and cynical of the “team discussions” and just looks inward to find solutions for the most difficult problems.
sublinear 3y ago
The people who should be put on PIP are the dead weight (non-technical management). Fire them and most of this "difficult behavior" magically disappears. They're the biggest source of miscommunication, worthless meetings, wasted time, bad estimates, imprecise language, and flat out lies. If the software engineers were left to actually do engineering instead of also having to spend half their day silently picking up the slack for these figureheads, maybe shit would actually get done.
- sgarland 3y ago
  My company started a sales org shortly after I arrived, which was disappointing as it was extremely engineering-heavy initially. My fears were correct, as it has been steadily going downhill from an engineering perspective. But hey, line goes up and to the right so it must be a great idea.
- javajosh 3y ago
  I think management often believes it's existence is justified by "protecting" the engineers. Of course, they are protecting them from other managers. So it's an arms race - or more technically, going from the good Nash equilibrium to the bad one.
taurath 3y ago
One thing that strikes me as missing is the suggestion of people having trouble in general with their lives, whether mental health, personal relationship problems, or financial struggles. This is especially the case when going over the “unreliable” worker. > they lack commitment, discipline, or time management skills They could also need time or space or latitude to resolve something that’s going on. When you have someone who is a high performer one year and a poor one the next, often something is going on that isn’t any of the offered reasons. Offering leave, a lessened workload, or something a little more human centric is a way to invest that person in working with you - browbeating and adding pressure doesn’t always work.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- throwaway60707 3y ago
  > financial struggles Talking about the general population, sure. But we're talking about software engineers, the most highly paid while at the same time the most accessible profession of all time. There are high school dropouts making 5 times the national average wage in SWE, and that's not unusual at all - you have the ones making 10 times for the "unusual" category. A person that knows nothing can get a job that pays the national average wage in this industry. I personally helped 7 people get from 0 to a job within a year. All of them are now (after 1-3 years of experience) making at least 5 times more than they did before they switched careers.
  - lordkirchner 3y ago
    There's lots of people out there who are at higher than national average in places that have a cost of living 3x+ the national average, who have exceptional expenses like caring for a special needs child or a sick relative, and/or have childcare costs that folks in lower COLA places often have covered by parents or by a stay-at-home parent. Collectively we can stop acting like every SSE in America is sipping champagne and eating caviar every day, because they really aren't.
    - 3y ago
5350-uiop-1130 3y ago
i aspire to be "The Unreliable One" > "They will need to spend time thinking about ways to work around them rather than work with them." managing expectations and simply not caring about most things are very under rated skills imo.
- XorNot 3y ago
  Not caring is critical, IMO. It's a job, not your life, and everything you think matters can be taken away by the whims of management who have the authority to do so. If they care about something, then you are no longer allowed to.
  - LeoNatan25 3y ago
    I really pity kids these days that wrap their whole life’s identity in their work, take every minor criticism as a personal insult, every dislike of their product as a personal attack on their self-worth. It’s understandable why it happens, especially with cynical and conniving companies trying their best to be in every facet of people’s lives, from dog walking to kid day care to social activities “after work”. People should really resist these conveniences and separate their work from their lives.
    - neon_electro 3y ago
      Unfortunately, with takes like this, most of us will be learning this lesson after we've already overinvested into such an identity. How can we as a society be more proactive?
      - LeoNatan25 3y ago
        I’m not sure. I am a cynical person, so I am naturally repelled by these tactics. And by now, I’ve learned to get too attached emotionally to my tech or products. I’m not sure where and how these lessons can be taught to young employees to be.
mkl95 3y ago
I haven't had a single employer that didn't blatantly lie to me during the hiring process. Infuriating stuff such as saying it's company policy to pay for training, and then refusing to do it. So my rule of thumb is that if it isn't in the contract, it's bullshit. But it aggravates me nonetheless.
riazrizvi 3y ago
This article is depressing, because it evokes a simplistic and dismissive management-style that I have found to be quite common. Rather I find that people develop workplace behaviors that are rational responses to what they can see from their vantage point, and most of the time they have the organization's interests at heart, as well as their own, just as managers do. For example, sometimes, engineers procrastinate on releases and deliverables because they intuit negative consequences that will impact them more than others, once the release happens. When workers are entrenched in workplace behaviors that are not aligned with the needs of the org as a whole, I believe it is important to start from a position that they have a good reason for behaving as they do. Then we walk them on the path from how they behave now, to how we agree they need to perform, by establishing a current routine that over time, shifts into a routine that is mutually aligned. It's a two way street of learning, where also bottom-up issues are addressed along the way, and incorporated into how the team functions as a whole. Low-competence managers like to oversimplify the work of getting stuff done, because they want to feel like they have the answers, but in a serious endeavor that has domain experts in the team, insight-discovery does not happen primarily top-down.
- twistedcheeslet 3y ago
  In case you missed it in the article, the author seems to address this in the section titled 'Effectively Managing the Norm'.
  - riazrizvi 3y ago
    Personally I use a show-don't-tell approach, and what I saw in the article was a few words at the beginning telling how we should trust people, followed by a giant section of showing how we actually don't.
  - pxue 3y ago
    The author went from "trust them to do the right thing" to "Set clear deadlines and regularly check in on their progress. Make them accountable for those deadlines" real fast
devjab 3y ago
I’ve never met any of these types in two decades of software engineering. Well, maybe the “negative Nancy” and the lone wolf, but even then not really. I’ve met a lot of the qualities/challenges that make up a lot of these types. Maybe especially the “unreliable” type, but never in a way that is laid out here and I certainly wouldn’t call them uncommitted or unreliable. I view them much more as rebellious, to which they are afforded leeway that very few professions. But to me, the inability to meet deadlines, often tells more more about the deadlines than the employees. Maybe that is because I’m from a technical background myself and the management I’ve done has been more Helle Hein and Scandinavian inspired than what is common in the US, but programmers are hard to fit into your organisation because they don’t have any fucks to give about your red tape. Now, programmers and other techies are quite famous for this, but the way I see it, this is what organisations should expect from younger employees in general going into the 2020ies. Young people are not going to respect the authorities of the past. To prove my point, just look at all the rave about silent quitters, which is essentially employees who aren’t going to go above and beyond for you because they just don’t respect that the way older generations did. The way I see it is that old famous trove about how some programmers wear shorts and sandals to a suit only dress code office. And they get away with it because ultimately the work they do matters more than them respecting some draconian corporate rules. It’s the mind set that you’re going to have to pay attention to. Because those programmers aren’t necessarily douche bags, they may be some of the nicest most committed employees you have, they just don’t care about your corporate red tape. Which is the way I see a lot of these “stereotypes” in this article. But how the author paints them… like they are broken or annoying, well… good luck getting any useful management tips from someone who views employees like that. One example I’ll dig into is the deadline bit. I’ve never once seen someone miss a deadline without it being the deadlines fault. Ok, I have, but then it was because they got sick or something similar got in the way. If you have employees who continuously miss deadlines it’s very likely that your estimation is simply wrong. Yes, you can try to limit distractions, but once you start putting the responsibility on the employees with silly things like “agreements of responsibility and expectations” you’re also either increasing their stress or sending them directly into the job section on LinkedIn. Depending on what sort of person they are. There is no magical way that you can possibly make someone who continually misses deadlines suddenly start making them without giving them less things to do or more time to do it. It’s just not possible. Hell, if you have someone who misses a lot of deadlines, you don’t have a difficult employee you have a super stressed employee who needs help.
diarrhea 3y ago
Can perfectionism be "cured"? Of the list, it's the most relevant to me. Would a "shock therapy" work, where I force myself to treat all solutions superficially, only making things work without trying to understand and polish it all? If such a project is then successful, maybe that leaves a lasting, "healing" mental impression. On the other hand, I have started to embrace it. It's a tough one to flip into a plus though, as it's a highly two-sided sword (other traits like charisma are useful without downsides, for example). For self-employment, startup founders etc., I suspect it's one of the worst blockers. For an IT forensics researcher, probably the opposite. Any stories of how perfectionism turned out a winning trait?
- Fluorescence 3y ago
  > Any stories of how perfectionism turned out a winning trait? Many, especially artists. But I would not take any solace from these exceptions because it hides the number of lives ruined by it. > Can perfectionism be "cured"? From my own perspective, there is no cure but you can prevent it blighting your life. Backsliding is always around the corner given a change in environment. The simplest solution is to work in an environment where the most crippling behaviours (extended procrastination, punishing rumination) are just not possible e.g. the type of work with non-negotiable external deadlines where you don't control "good enough". A solo startup developer it's probably the very worst environment and the best might something like a producer of live TV coverage.
- pravus 3y ago
  > Can perfectionism be "cured"? I don't really consider it a "cure" but the way I manage my perfectionism (and holistic completionism) is to simply re-frame my goals to not meet perfect but to get as close to perfection as possible. As long as my actions get me closer to my goal, I am satisfied. It's a very brute-force and reduced version, but another way to say it is that if you want to go North, just never walk South and iterate in steps. Also, I've basically eliminated failure from my personal language. Any task that doesn't achieve the desired result is simply a delay and I re-adjust immediately to find a new tactic that will put me back on track. If the time-effort to proceed isn't worth it, I dump the effort and change strategies. I long ago got rid of the idea that anything I create is special or worth saving. Outcomes are what matter. It's a very pragmatic approach and eliminates the perfection tendencies because it gets things done.
wouldbecouldbe 3y ago
I miss The overcomplicator type.
darkwater 3y ago
If the author is here, a nitpick on the writing: if you use the "let call him XYZ" thing, then _use XYZ to address the persona_ later in the text! Mark, Sarah and Emily for instance appear exactly ONCE in the text, when you say "let's call them XYZ".
varjag 3y ago
Why introduce names (a la "let's call him Mark") but never refer to them?
- bryanrasmussen 3y ago
  because much writing is like code so you start with an intention as to what you will need later, get done and realize you didn't need everything you thought, and if you're a junior or really tired or on a very heavy deadline don't do an adequate cleanup.
  - bryanrasmussen 3y ago
    maybe this observation should be part of my next article - managing difficult article writers.
jacquesm 3y ago
I'd be much more interested in a reverse article: managing difficult bosses. That's more often than not the problem, the lower ranks usually know their stuff and bad apples are rare, the other way around seems to select for incompetence and obstruction. Good managers are just as rare as difficult software engineers.
- banzo 3y ago
  It is called "managing up"
  - threetonesun 3y ago
    Which is easy if you have a good manager, and a great way to get fired if you have a bad one, which I think was the original question posed here, how do you "manage up" a bad manager. The general answer is: quit. That's where the saying "people don't leave bad jobs, they leave bad managers" comes from, there aren't a lot of great solutions for dealing with that power dynamic.
    - banzo 3y ago
      I have this in my bookmarks that might be of help: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18988939 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18988939 "Design Patterns for Managing Up"
mawadev 3y ago
This post shows why working is so uncomfortable. It is never bad resource allocation, time management or toxic behavior in the workplace. The fault has to always be the individual. The person is an interchangable robot or resource, where you simply push some buttons to magically "reset" it. Then you are shocked when the problem arises again and in other people as well.
- zingababba 3y ago
  You are free to do what we tell you!
- nisegami 3y ago
  Yes, I agree. Reading "The Unreliable One" section in the context of someone who is being pulled in too many different directions by incompetent management really changes how it comes across.
fidotron 3y ago
The lengths that engineering leaders will go to in order to avoid learning basic lessons about team building astounds me. “The norm” here is not very productive, it just means they are not killing themselves and each other. People, like software, have different things they are compatible with, and if you try to shove incompatible things together then these problems arise. The managerial response is overwhelmingly “the problem is the incompatibility” and not “the problem is with our organization”. Team formation is a combinatorial exercise where the best person to have in a team is a function of the other team members. Accept this basic truth and all else follows. A difficult employee is a failing manager. Either there is something wrong in the organization or the employee does not belong there and you need to fix it.
FrustratedMonky 3y ago
Aren't a lot of people an amalgamation of all of these characteristics? The only time I've seen someone that does NOT have these negative traits, seem to be typically very silent, or not outspoken. I've worked with some pretty good engineers that didn't have these negative traits. But they also didn't drive decisions. They could competently do something given to them. But it seems like to be pushing boundaries, or driving to a solution, someone necessarily has some of these negative traits.
deleted 3y ago
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treprinum 3y ago
I think an article about "Working around difficult managers" would be more beneficial than marking almost any talented sweng "difficult" from the management perspective.
000ooo000 3y ago
The Burned Out employee section is just embarrassing. >Managing a Burned-Out Employee involves addressing the issue with as much empathy and concern as you have. Suggest they take a vacation or sabbatical. Go all-in on work-life balance and provide resources for stress management. That's right - activate your empathy! Tell them to get lost for a while. Send them a link to a mindfulness video on YouTube. Whatever you do, don't actually engage any literature on burnout and certainly do NOT have a discussion with the burned out employee about their burnout. Remember, your team members are your most valuable asset and their wellbeing is critical to your making money! Seriously this is just a LinkedIn post taken too far. God help anyone working under this guy.
makach 3y ago
How you are being perceived is based on the assumptions and character of your manager. Early in my career I remember had a manager that brought it up to me in a 1-2-1 that I was "the negative nancy", which I found strange because I strive to be honest and try to do what is best for the projects I am working on, I never thought of myself as someone like that. I didn't change despite getting those comment, and it kept being brought up in my 1-2-1. I was producing beyond my expectations so nothing was formally written down. It was just the impression. After a while my manager moved on and a new manager stepped in. And from then on in my following 1-2-1 I was getting feedback contrary to my usual feedback. Now I got told that I was a very positive(!) and valuable member of the team making a positive impact. You yourself rarely change, but the first impression you give away combined with your managers capabilities and characteristics can very much color how other perceive you. Managers need to stop using words such as difficult and use their tools and skills to do their job and work with understanding and resolving challenges.
- agentultra 3y ago
  This, 100%. To use a malapropism: impressions are 9/10ths of the law. If you give your manager an impression that you are one of these stereotypes, you’ll never shake it. You’ll always be seen that way. And because people rarely change, or at least it takes a while, the only real way to escape such an impression is to find a different manager.
- coffeefirst 3y ago
  Yes. I hate this article. It presupposes "the norm" doesn't need anything special and everyone else is "difficult." But supporting people is the manager's job. You can't do that if you pathologize literally everything messy or nuanced. Some of these categories are people learning to estimate for the first time, or responding to pressure to say "yes" to impossible things by saying "yes" to impossible things. Also notably absent is any mention of air cover. There's usually a reason people get burned out or start sounding the alarm about a project. But rather than get to the bottom of that and help with the root causes, in every single of one of these cases he assumes the problem is basically their personalities.
makeitdouble 3y ago
> Procrastinators [...] may have poor time management skills, often underestimating the time required to complete tasks. > Make them accountable for those deadlines. I've seen this advice a lot, and it's a terrible approach. You've got a team member you already know has bad time management or bad prioritization skills, and/or busted estimates. You've already stuck them in the bucket so it's not your first rodeo. You already know they're not just unmotivated, because you'd take a completely different approach otherwise. That's were comes the interesting part: you're either punishing them for something they're motivated to do but aren't good at, and you couldn't find a way to help them the first few times (they still got late despite all the micro management you did). Or you're punishing them for deadlines that you knew were busted but didn't adjust on your part, even as the whole project is affected by that decision. You should be the one accountable for that.
nprateem 3y ago
Very simplistic. Any article like this needs to be far more nuanced. I feel for "Unreliable Anna". Her mother is actually in hospital so she's stressed but trying to put a brave face on things. Her dickhead manager hasn't bothered to ask about her situation and is instead putting her through for a formal warning. Meanwhile the whole team find Lone Wolf Lisa toxic as she undoes other people's work and should be shown the door since she's clearly not a good fit and this isn't the first time. Her team can't understand why she's kept around so get demotivated. I could go on...
nly 3y ago
My thesis: Sometimes some of the developers who "get shit done" and ship on time are the most destructive of all. Creating huge inefficiency savings for relatively modest savings in the short term. Spending an extra day thinking about the system you're writing when you know it's going to take weeks, before you write it, costs you a small %. The inevitable rewrite could take weeks. 90% of my time as a developer is unfucking previous kludges and weak designs
- hobofan 3y ago
  I don't think that there is any correlation between time spent "thinking about the system" and likelihood that it needs "unfucking". If there is any at all, it's probably the inverse. When I think back on all the projects that needed fixing, they were usually systems that were over-engineered the hell out of and that someone spent a lot of time "thinking about", where a much simpler solution would have sufficed. I think part of the problem here is that (some) engineers (sometimes) spend the time "thinking about" the problem, and then think that their solution has to match time spent thinking in terms of complexity. And that time is often spent aimlessly "thinking about" the problem rather than understanding and breaking down the problem and doing structured engineering.
  - arcbyte 3y ago
    We want more thinking about business complexity and much much less thinking about accidental technical complexity. I agree that I've seen people build monstrous things full of pointless technical abstractions to do the simplest business requirement possible. I've also seen people build the stupidest collection of logic into a maze of rules in one simple but massively long class to accomplish what is actually a trivial business problem that could have been clearly solved in 5 lines. I would rather they spend a bit more time thinking about how the business problem and whether they are solving it appropriately.
PedroBatista 3y ago
So basically how to "manage" pretty much every person regardless of what they are doing professionally.. Also find it funny how a person who doesn't act and do stuff exactly how you want is considered "difficult". We definitely need more "difficult" persons.. That is not a virtue by itself but ironically is the only thing that will save us from this depressing "corporate" bullshit.
tannhaeuser 3y ago
There's one type of "difficult" personality missing I'm seeing a lot recently, and that's the resume padder.
bawolff 3y ago
> Procrastinators tend to delay tasks, often focusing on less important tasks while ignoring the critical ones. They may have poor time management skills, often underestimating the time required to complete tasks My understanding is that most research on procrastination suggests that it is not caused by poor time management but emotional management, and that the appearence of poor time management is more a symptom than a cause.
alphazard 3y ago
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Draiken 3y ago
This article is patronizing and tries to simplify the complexities of managing people by putting them into buckets and listing recipes. For me, this type of view only causes more harm than good. Instead of actually sitting down with the "difficult engineer" and figuring out what is happening, managers will label them as "X" and poison their view of them moving forward. Sometimes even publicly. Good managers know you're dealing with people and you actually get to the bottom of what is happening on each situation. As others pointed out, there may be a reason you're the "lone wolf", "procrastinator" or any other of these simplistic labels at any given moment. But the average manager just wants labels and recipes to follow, which this type of article provides. Then when reality hits and nobody perfectly fits those buckets and the recipes don't really work as expected, all we can hope is they realize how bad of a manager they've turned into. To any managers reading: do your actual job and remember you're dealing with real people. Don't label everyone and follow magical recipes. That's how you become a bad manager.
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itsautomatisch 3y ago
I'd like to see the inverse for dealing with difficult managers, including boxing them into similar reductive stereotypes like the "spineless doormat" and the "non-technical MBA."
commandlinefan 3y ago
I'm absolutely positive that I've been described as "difficult" many times throughout my 30-year career as a computer programmer. I've picked up on a lot of frustration from other people around me - but that's almost always when I tell them I don't know the answer to the question that they just asked me for an answer to. I can figure it out, I'm qualified to figure it out, but I don't know the answer _right this ver instant_. So I'm "difficult".
shadowtree 3y ago
Careful with advice from someone who never managed large teams, successfully. Look at the author's LI bio. Content marketing is adding so much noise, muddying up the waters.
lkrubner 3y ago
If this subject interests anyone, I have written a great deal on the topic: "Why are you lying to me? What the hell is wrong with you?" https://respectfulleadership.substack.com/p/a-true-story-software-bugs-dishonesty https://respectfulleadership.substack.com/p/a-true-story-sof... "How to deal with weird passive-aggressive text communication from your co-workers or subordinates" https://respectfulleadership.substack.com/p/how-to-deal-with-weird-passive-aggressive https://respectfulleadership.substack.com/p/how-to-deal-with... "Is Anger Ever Strategic?" https://respectfulleadership.substack.com/p/is-anger-ever-strategic https://respectfulleadership.substack.com/p/is-anger-ever-st...
- CipherThrowaway 3y ago
  I read the dishonest employee story and, candidly, I did not find it to be an example of good leadership. You are recounting an argument that you are proud to have won, and where you are proud to have put a subordinate in his place. In your eyes, this is an example of good leadership because you did it in a way that was merely firm rather than, say, abusive. You achieved behavioral compliance, which is definitely better than nothing, but genuinely good leadership in that situation would have involved more two-way communication, empathy and active listening to build a mutual understanding. By the end of the article, I'm left with no understanding of what Jerry's motives were or why he behaved and communicated the way he did. You didn't seem to be interested in engaging him more deeply to find out. Instead, you seem exclusively focused on achieving your "I'm right, you're wrong" moment. At points, you offer uncharitable speculation: > Maybe he was feeling lazy or maybe he was trying to defend the code he'd written in the past. Which to me raise more questions. Why is he feeling lazy? Why is he feeling defensive? These are certainly not things that people regularly experience in workplaces where they feel respected. I did not feel your attitude in the situation, or recounting of it, was respectful to Jerry at all. At best, this interaction feels like a behavioral "quick fix" that falls short of identifying and fixing the underlying issues and risks long term resentment and disengagement.
  - lkrubner 3y ago
    Keep in mind these things: 1. Fully understood, respectful leadership means respect for everyone, not just the person I happen to be talking to right now. Aggressively pushing Jerry to be more honest in the future was, in part, how I demonstrated my respect for the Travel Deals Team and for Sonia. They were not in the room to defend themselves, but Jerry had disrespected them, so I needed to defend the importance of their work. 2. Some managers adopt a passive-aggressive style where they pretend there has been no conflict, even when there has been conflict. This passive-aggressive style does tremendous damage to an organization. Where there has been some kind of conflict, you need to address it directly. The commenter is suggesting that I should simply assume that Jerry was operating in good faith, even though I had some evidence that he was not. "Innocent until proven guilty" is a necessary legal standard to protect us from the overwhelming power of the government, but among private citizens if you assume someone is innocent and operating in good faith when you have evidence that they are not, then you are simply a sucker who is going to be easily manipulated by bad faith actors. Keep in mind, I spoke to Jerry in good faith during our first conversation, it was only in our final conversation that I assumed he had been operating in bad faith. 3. I encourage a democratic culture, but that means the people on my teams have to be honest with each other. No one doubted that Jerry was a talented engineer, but if he made changes secretly, or if he secretly ignored directions from the Travel Deals Team, then he was undermining our democratic process. 4. If you value a democratic process, then you must enforce compliance to that process. Failure to enforce compliance is not democratic or empowering or generous or liberal or kind or intelligent. A failure to defend your process is simply idiocy or cowardice. If you think your process is a bad one, then you have an obligation to change it, but once you’ve got a process that you think is a good one, then you need to enforce compliance to it, or you have no process, merely anarchy, and your company will not survive. 5. There is a time and a place for healthy debate regarding all of our decisions. Jerry was free to meet with people and make his opinions known. Of the people who report to me, no one has ever been punished for making a strong case for their ideas, even if their ideas disagree with what the majority of the team favors. But all such conversations have to be done in compliance with the overall process, and that process means that once a decision is made, we all stick with it. In other words, if you want to run a business in a democratic fashion, you need a strong dose of "democratic centralism." By contrast, anarchism is the enemy of group decisions. 6. Jerry's motivation was implied when he said “I don’t like the idea of showing deals for Bermuda when someone searches for Caribbean.” This suggests that his ego was so great that he was willing to defy the clear intent of the Travel Deals Team, while also ignoring the feedback he was getting from Sonia. He was using his control of the code to impose his will on the situation, in defiance of all of the other stakeholders at the company. This cannot be tolerated or ignored, it has to be confronted. And, again, this is not a court of law, a manager in this situation should not wait till they have overwhelming evidence, they should demand a confrontation as soon as their instincts tell them that something is a bit off or suspicious. I gave Jerry multiple chances to reassure me he respected the decisions being made by others, but he did not give me any such assurance till, at the very end, I forced it out of him.
SilverBirch 3y ago
I started reading this with high hopes. Unfortunately it quickly started to spiral. The procrastinator may well not be procrastinating, they may genuinely be struggling technically. "It's works locally but not on staging" is a technical, solvable problem. Sure, it might be a lie, it might be actually they're off doing other things, but in itself that doesn't sound like procrastination. The lone wolf? When you describe that scenario to me, it sounds like Lisa might not have appreciated the 5th time her entirely male team shouted her down in the last "high energy" discussion. I once got to sit in on a team who would do planning poker, it was arduous, and one of my colleagues completely ruined it when she pointed out it was pointless because they always just deferred to Rik. It was like an hour a week where Rik got to decide what everyone did. I'm not saying that for certain Lisa wasn't a lone wolf, all I'm saying is that diagnosing people into these categories may do more harm than good. And often the advice that's suggested is just absurd. Treat the people who work for you as people. Communicate with them, let them understand your expectations and when they aren't meeting them and work with them to fix problems where they exist. Most importantly, if you're part of a good team, let others lead, and learn from them and learn to work with them. Often the negative nancy is the person who will throw a thousand problems up the first time you talk to them, and the second time you talk to them they've got a neat solution on how to solve them all. That's fine - now you know, give them the space they need to work. Oh and also? A PIP isn't a way to fix a problem. It's an HR tool to build the documentation up to fire an employee with the minimum risk of legal problems. It's a way to fire people 99.9% of the time, and you need to know that going in, because even if miraculously it works and the employee improves, you have put that employee on the short list for any layoff and that may well be totally out of your hands.
redeyedtreefrog 3y ago
HN has huge numbers of articles on the technical side of software engineering but very few on the people side. Even if this is just one slightly idiosyncratic take, I still gained more from it than yet another article on LLMs, or the most efficient low level code possible in C++ or Rust, etc. Hopefully there are more similar submissions. Also, when people complain that it talks in idealised, simplified models rather than real world messy people: there's obviously no way the author could write up details of real people, so non-personal generalizations is the best that's possible.
deleted 3y ago
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bartimus 3y ago
Perhaps someone can write the inverse version of this post? "Managing difficult managers"
blurbleblurble 3y ago
The nerve to tack on nonviolent communication after issuing the most sweeping damnation of peoples' circumstances...
GoToRO 3y ago
If you find engineers difficult then you should not be a manager in a technical field. Real world is difficult and thats what engineers have to conquer. If you are not ready to hear hard truths, choose another field.
kazinator 3y ago
This is an okay read, but doesn't measure up to the genre classic: "Academic Programmers: A Spotter's Guide".

175 points by redbell 3y ago

I've seen all of these at one point or another and a lot of the time they're circumstance dependent because of nuts decisions the company has made that put people under stress. In particular, I've seen people (and been that person myself) who gets really negative because impossible deadlines get set by non-technical people with no bearing for the reality of the situation on the ground. I've also seen a lot of people give up on arguing with those non-technical people about scope and time, say "OK", roll their eyes, and know they'll miss the deadline before it even starts.

pestatije 3y ago
thats exactly what i do...theyll ask for a time estimate and then whether it can be cut by half because issues...i then say yes of course it can and proceed to delivery way past the deadline
uoaei 3y ago
And quite often the person who causes these circumstantial stresses can be the same person for whom this guide is intended, but I'm not able to find a lot of acknowledgement of that fact in the guide. I had a manager who pretended they could manage our product-consultancy team the same way they managed their previous research-code-monkey team. They had trouble because of their inability to do much besides say "replicate this paper". To them I probably looked like all of these archetypal "difficult engineers" at various times. From my perspective I wasn't getting the pay nor the time and respect from higher-ups to go through the hard slog of managing up, but I was getting paid enough to stick around, so I just ended up burning out super hard. I guess my point is, sometimes managing others starts with managing yourself. This insight extends far beyond the context of a day job.
csydas 3y ago
I can relate to this, especially as someone from a technical management position that has to fight such decisions frequently to try to protect my team from such pointless exercises in stress. > I've also seen a lot of people give up on arguing with those non-technical people about scope and time, say "OK" I understand why this happens, and it is extremely frustrating; consequently, this is why I really dislike the trend of complaining on social media about issues because at least with my company, this is an almost guaranteed way to ensure that a C-Level will "step in to correct this", which in fact just means that now the company needs to do what the C-Level said so the C-Level doesn't look stupid in public, even if the thing to do is absolutely disastrous. The best advice I can give if you're in a technical leadership position and you know this kind of thing happens in your org is: 1. Figure out who these non-technical persons with the ability to make said bad calls actually are in your company; do a process review on the last few events that triggered poor decision processes and find out from whom those decisions actually came from 2. Understand how that person processes information, how they're getting alerted, and most importantly, just get to understand them and what makes them "tick." (e.g., one of our lead PMs, usually a very good PM, unfortunately has a huge ego. Arguing with them in any public fashion causes them to get very defensive out of fear of looking "stupid"; a quick chat with them in private usually is enough to convince them of their mistake, and then we get more reasonable reactions) 3. Become professionally friendly with the common reporters of the issues that usually prompt bad decisions; if a particular sales team is finding actual issues but representing them in a way that results in rushed/poor decisions, teach them another place to report the issues so that more necessary stakeholders are able to view the issue before it gets to the decision process 4. Develop strong and strict change management processes that will protect from the issues; don't attach these processes to specific incidents, but instead present it neutrally as a best practice in change management, and then use the process to protect against such rash changes. The first few times upholding the process might be rough, but just remind people why the process exists, that the goal isn't to stop all decisions, but instead to ensure you are properly vetting decisions on core elements Implementing this is difficult, especially in orgs with poor discipline and process control already, but from experience with such orgs, most persons will pay lip-service to the initial neutral presentation, and won't realize that the bad behaviors they have which the process is meant to stop will be impacted. The goal here isn't to be dishonest with people, but instead to introduce a process-based prevention in a palatable way which makes future discussions easier as they'll carry a common point of agreement. At least with the C-Levels I've had to deal with, it was effective because they didn't want to look stupid in front of other C-Levels and higher management who were telling the C-Level "this breaks our internal processes, we need to review this first as last time we rushed decisions without the stakeholder input, we ended up with huge costs". It doesn't stop every C-Level, but it has greatly reduced the number of meetings I've had to have where I have to give "Explain it like I'm 5" presentations to non-technical decision makers to prevent disastrous decisions/changes. Edit/Addendum: I am well aware that the "real" solution is that decision makers just stop making drastic and ridiculous decisions/promises, but I don't think it's reasonable to expect to change personalities/poor thinking skills in a person, much less to force changes of management. Instead, I'd rather just use process to enforce this and deal with the occasional raised voices. Also Edit: fixed numbered list formatting.
- physicsguy 3y ago
  Thanks for the thoughtful reply. Lots for me to mull over in that.

danwee 3y ago

3.4. The Procrastinator 3.5. The Lone Wolf 3.6. The Negative Nancy 3.7. The Over-Promiser 3.8. The Know-It-All 3.9. The Silent Type 3.10. The Perfectionist 3.11. The Unreliable One 3.12. The Conflict Instigator 3.13. The Burned-Out Employee I have experienced myself being one of each type of "difficult" software engineer during my career. Not every day, not every month, but from time to time. Sometimes because of the environment (e.g., type of company I worked for), sometimes because of internal issues (e.g., family issues), and sometimes because I really felt like that (e.g., when I was in my mid 20s). I haven't met any engineer who's never shown any traits of the thirteen "personas" listed in the post. If you're looking for an engineer that has zero traits like the ones listed above, you are perhaps looking for a robot.

glimshe 3y ago
Expand your last paragraph to apply to almost all human beings in any industry. There are burned-out doctors, know-it all priests, negative nancy teachers, perfectionist lawyers and silent type librarians. Perhaps what's special for Software Engineers is that it's a profession with a skew towards younger workers, so you might see larger groups of people who are still emotionally immature, and thus displaying these traits, than in other industries.
flir 3y ago
> e.g., when I was in my mid 20s Lone Wolf?
- LeoNatan25 3y ago
  I’ve become more of a lone wolf in my 30s, actually. A combination of gained knowledge and experience, teams not familiar with my tech stack, remote hours (both because of timezone difference and also my crazy work hours) and also, yes, less trust in other people’s opinions. This also happens. It’s not just teenagers that feel sometimes they have the most experienced opinion. After listening to bad discussion for long enough, one becomes burned out and cynical of the “team discussions” and just looks inward to find solutions for the most difficult problems.

sublinear 3y ago

The people who should be put on PIP are the dead weight (non-technical management). Fire them and most of this "difficult behavior" magically disappears. They're the biggest source of miscommunication, worthless meetings, wasted time, bad estimates, imprecise language, and flat out lies. If the software engineers were left to actually do engineering instead of also having to spend half their day silently picking up the slack for these figureheads, maybe shit would actually get done.

sgarland 3y ago
My company started a sales org shortly after I arrived, which was disappointing as it was extremely engineering-heavy initially. My fears were correct, as it has been steadily going downhill from an engineering perspective. But hey, line goes up and to the right so it must be a great idea.
javajosh 3y ago
I think management often believes it's existence is justified by "protecting" the engineers. Of course, they are protecting them from other managers. So it's an arms race - or more technically, going from the good Nash equilibrium to the bad one.

taurath 3y ago

One thing that strikes me as missing is the suggestion of people having trouble in general with their lives, whether mental health, personal relationship problems, or financial struggles. This is especially the case when going over the “unreliable” worker. > they lack commitment, discipline, or time management skills They could also need time or space or latitude to resolve something that’s going on. When you have someone who is a high performer one year and a poor one the next, often something is going on that isn’t any of the offered reasons. Offering leave, a lessened workload, or something a little more human centric is a way to invest that person in working with you - browbeating and adding pressure doesn’t always work.

deleted 3y ago
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throwaway60707 3y ago
> financial struggles Talking about the general population, sure. But we're talking about software engineers, the most highly paid while at the same time the most accessible profession of all time. There are high school dropouts making 5 times the national average wage in SWE, and that's not unusual at all - you have the ones making 10 times for the "unusual" category. A person that knows nothing can get a job that pays the national average wage in this industry. I personally helped 7 people get from 0 to a job within a year. All of them are now (after 1-3 years of experience) making at least 5 times more than they did before they switched careers.
- lordkirchner 3y ago
  There's lots of people out there who are at higher than national average in places that have a cost of living 3x+ the national average, who have exceptional expenses like caring for a special needs child or a sick relative, and/or have childcare costs that folks in lower COLA places often have covered by parents or by a stay-at-home parent. Collectively we can stop acting like every SSE in America is sipping champagne and eating caviar every day, because they really aren't.
  - 3y ago

5350-uiop-1130 3y ago

i aspire to be "The Unreliable One" > "They will need to spend time thinking about ways to work around them rather than work with them." managing expectations and simply not caring about most things are very under rated skills imo.

XorNot 3y ago
Not caring is critical, IMO. It's a job, not your life, and everything you think matters can be taken away by the whims of management who have the authority to do so. If they care about something, then you are no longer allowed to.
- LeoNatan25 3y ago
  I really pity kids these days that wrap their whole life’s identity in their work, take every minor criticism as a personal insult, every dislike of their product as a personal attack on their self-worth. It’s understandable why it happens, especially with cynical and conniving companies trying their best to be in every facet of people’s lives, from dog walking to kid day care to social activities “after work”. People should really resist these conveniences and separate their work from their lives.
  - neon_electro 3y ago
    Unfortunately, with takes like this, most of us will be learning this lesson after we've already overinvested into such an identity. How can we as a society be more proactive?
    - LeoNatan25 3y ago
      I’m not sure. I am a cynical person, so I am naturally repelled by these tactics. And by now, I’ve learned to get too attached emotionally to my tech or products. I’m not sure where and how these lessons can be taught to young employees to be.

mkl95 3y ago

I haven't had a single employer that didn't blatantly lie to me during the hiring process. Infuriating stuff such as saying it's company policy to pay for training, and then refusing to do it. So my rule of thumb is that if it isn't in the contract, it's bullshit. But it aggravates me nonetheless.

riazrizvi 3y ago

This article is depressing, because it evokes a simplistic and dismissive management-style that I have found to be quite common. Rather I find that people develop workplace behaviors that are rational responses to what they can see from their vantage point, and most of the time they have the organization's interests at heart, as well as their own, just as managers do. For example, sometimes, engineers procrastinate on releases and deliverables because they intuit negative consequences that will impact them more than others, once the release happens. When workers are entrenched in workplace behaviors that are not aligned with the needs of the org as a whole, I believe it is important to start from a position that they have a good reason for behaving as they do. Then we walk them on the path from how they behave now, to how we agree they need to perform, by establishing a current routine that over time, shifts into a routine that is mutually aligned. It's a two way street of learning, where also bottom-up issues are addressed along the way, and incorporated into how the team functions as a whole. Low-competence managers like to oversimplify the work of getting stuff done, because they want to feel like they have the answers, but in a serious endeavor that has domain experts in the team, insight-discovery does not happen primarily top-down.

twistedcheeslet 3y ago
In case you missed it in the article, the author seems to address this in the section titled 'Effectively Managing the Norm'.
- riazrizvi 3y ago
  Personally I use a show-don't-tell approach, and what I saw in the article was a few words at the beginning telling how we should trust people, followed by a giant section of showing how we actually don't.
- pxue 3y ago
  The author went from "trust them to do the right thing" to "Set clear deadlines and regularly check in on their progress. Make them accountable for those deadlines" real fast

devjab 3y ago

I’ve never met any of these types in two decades of software engineering. Well, maybe the “negative Nancy” and the lone wolf, but even then not really. I’ve met a lot of the qualities/challenges that make up a lot of these types. Maybe especially the “unreliable” type, but never in a way that is laid out here and I certainly wouldn’t call them uncommitted or unreliable. I view them much more as rebellious, to which they are afforded leeway that very few professions. But to me, the inability to meet deadlines, often tells more more about the deadlines than the employees. Maybe that is because I’m from a technical background myself and the management I’ve done has been more Helle Hein and Scandinavian inspired than what is common in the US, but programmers are hard to fit into your organisation because they don’t have any fucks to give about your red tape. Now, programmers and other techies are quite famous for this, but the way I see it, this is what organisations should expect from younger employees in general going into the 2020ies. Young people are not going to respect the authorities of the past. To prove my point, just look at all the rave about silent quitters, which is essentially employees who aren’t going to go above and beyond for you because they just don’t respect that the way older generations did. The way I see it is that old famous trove about how some programmers wear shorts and sandals to a suit only dress code office. And they get away with it because ultimately the work they do matters more than them respecting some draconian corporate rules. It’s the mind set that you’re going to have to pay attention to. Because those programmers aren’t necessarily douche bags, they may be some of the nicest most committed employees you have, they just don’t care about your corporate red tape. Which is the way I see a lot of these “stereotypes” in this article. But how the author paints them… like they are broken or annoying, well… good luck getting any useful management tips from someone who views employees like that. One example I’ll dig into is the deadline bit. I’ve never once seen someone miss a deadline without it being the deadlines fault. Ok, I have, but then it was because they got sick or something similar got in the way. If you have employees who continuously miss deadlines it’s very likely that your estimation is simply wrong. Yes, you can try to limit distractions, but once you start putting the responsibility on the employees with silly things like “agreements of responsibility and expectations” you’re also either increasing their stress or sending them directly into the job section on LinkedIn. Depending on what sort of person they are. There is no magical way that you can possibly make someone who continually misses deadlines suddenly start making them without giving them less things to do or more time to do it. It’s just not possible. Hell, if you have someone who misses a lot of deadlines, you don’t have a difficult employee you have a super stressed employee who needs help.

diarrhea 3y ago

Can perfectionism be "cured"? Of the list, it's the most relevant to me. Would a "shock therapy" work, where I force myself to treat all solutions superficially, only making things work without trying to understand and polish it all? If such a project is then successful, maybe that leaves a lasting, "healing" mental impression. On the other hand, I have started to embrace it. It's a tough one to flip into a plus though, as it's a highly two-sided sword (other traits like charisma are useful without downsides, for example). For self-employment, startup founders etc., I suspect it's one of the worst blockers. For an IT forensics researcher, probably the opposite. Any stories of how perfectionism turned out a winning trait?

Fluorescence 3y ago
> Any stories of how perfectionism turned out a winning trait? Many, especially artists. But I would not take any solace from these exceptions because it hides the number of lives ruined by it. > Can perfectionism be "cured"? From my own perspective, there is no cure but you can prevent it blighting your life. Backsliding is always around the corner given a change in environment. The simplest solution is to work in an environment where the most crippling behaviours (extended procrastination, punishing rumination) are just not possible e.g. the type of work with non-negotiable external deadlines where you don't control "good enough". A solo startup developer it's probably the very worst environment and the best might something like a producer of live TV coverage.
pravus 3y ago
> Can perfectionism be "cured"? I don't really consider it a "cure" but the way I manage my perfectionism (and holistic completionism) is to simply re-frame my goals to not meet perfect but to get as close to perfection as possible. As long as my actions get me closer to my goal, I am satisfied. It's a very brute-force and reduced version, but another way to say it is that if you want to go North, just never walk South and iterate in steps. Also, I've basically eliminated failure from my personal language. Any task that doesn't achieve the desired result is simply a delay and I re-adjust immediately to find a new tactic that will put me back on track. If the time-effort to proceed isn't worth it, I dump the effort and change strategies. I long ago got rid of the idea that anything I create is special or worth saving. Outcomes are what matter. It's a very pragmatic approach and eliminates the perfection tendencies because it gets things done.

wouldbecouldbe 3y ago

I miss The overcomplicator type.

darkwater 3y ago

If the author is here, a nitpick on the writing: if you use the "let call him XYZ" thing, then _use XYZ to address the persona_ later in the text! Mark, Sarah and Emily for instance appear exactly ONCE in the text, when you say "let's call them XYZ".

varjag 3y ago

Why introduce names (a la "let's call him Mark") but never refer to them?

bryanrasmussen 3y ago
because much writing is like code so you start with an intention as to what you will need later, get done and realize you didn't need everything you thought, and if you're a junior or really tired or on a very heavy deadline don't do an adequate cleanup.
- bryanrasmussen 3y ago
  maybe this observation should be part of my next article - managing difficult article writers.

jacquesm 3y ago

I'd be much more interested in a reverse article: managing difficult bosses. That's more often than not the problem, the lower ranks usually know their stuff and bad apples are rare, the other way around seems to select for incompetence and obstruction. Good managers are just as rare as difficult software engineers.

banzo 3y ago
It is called "managing up"
- threetonesun 3y ago
  Which is easy if you have a good manager, and a great way to get fired if you have a bad one, which I think was the original question posed here, how do you "manage up" a bad manager. The general answer is: quit. That's where the saying "people don't leave bad jobs, they leave bad managers" comes from, there aren't a lot of great solutions for dealing with that power dynamic.
  - banzo 3y ago
    I have this in my bookmarks that might be of help: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18988939 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18988939 "Design Patterns for Managing Up"

mawadev 3y ago

This post shows why working is so uncomfortable. It is never bad resource allocation, time management or toxic behavior in the workplace. The fault has to always be the individual. The person is an interchangable robot or resource, where you simply push some buttons to magically "reset" it. Then you are shocked when the problem arises again and in other people as well.

zingababba 3y ago
You are free to do what we tell you!
nisegami 3y ago
Yes, I agree. Reading "The Unreliable One" section in the context of someone who is being pulled in too many different directions by incompetent management really changes how it comes across.

fidotron 3y ago

The lengths that engineering leaders will go to in order to avoid learning basic lessons about team building astounds me. “The norm” here is not very productive, it just means they are not killing themselves and each other. People, like software, have different things they are compatible with, and if you try to shove incompatible things together then these problems arise. The managerial response is overwhelmingly “the problem is the incompatibility” and not “the problem is with our organization”. Team formation is a combinatorial exercise where the best person to have in a team is a function of the other team members. Accept this basic truth and all else follows. A difficult employee is a failing manager. Either there is something wrong in the organization or the employee does not belong there and you need to fix it.

FrustratedMonky 3y ago

Aren't a lot of people an amalgamation of all of these characteristics? The only time I've seen someone that does NOT have these negative traits, seem to be typically very silent, or not outspoken. I've worked with some pretty good engineers that didn't have these negative traits. But they also didn't drive decisions. They could competently do something given to them. But it seems like to be pushing boundaries, or driving to a solution, someone necessarily has some of these negative traits.

deleted 3y ago

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treprinum 3y ago

I think an article about "Working around difficult managers" would be more beneficial than marking almost any talented sweng "difficult" from the management perspective.

000ooo000 3y ago

The Burned Out employee section is just embarrassing. >Managing a Burned-Out Employee involves addressing the issue with as much empathy and concern as you have. Suggest they take a vacation or sabbatical. Go all-in on work-life balance and provide resources for stress management. That's right - activate your empathy! Tell them to get lost for a while. Send them a link to a mindfulness video on YouTube. Whatever you do, don't actually engage any literature on burnout and certainly do NOT have a discussion with the burned out employee about their burnout. Remember, your team members are your most valuable asset and their wellbeing is critical to your making money! Seriously this is just a LinkedIn post taken too far. God help anyone working under this guy.

makach 3y ago

How you are being perceived is based on the assumptions and character of your manager. Early in my career I remember had a manager that brought it up to me in a 1-2-1 that I was "the negative nancy", which I found strange because I strive to be honest and try to do what is best for the projects I am working on, I never thought of myself as someone like that. I didn't change despite getting those comment, and it kept being brought up in my 1-2-1. I was producing beyond my expectations so nothing was formally written down. It was just the impression. After a while my manager moved on and a new manager stepped in. And from then on in my following 1-2-1 I was getting feedback contrary to my usual feedback. Now I got told that I was a very positive(!) and valuable member of the team making a positive impact. You yourself rarely change, but the first impression you give away combined with your managers capabilities and characteristics can very much color how other perceive you. Managers need to stop using words such as difficult and use their tools and skills to do their job and work with understanding and resolving challenges.

agentultra 3y ago
This, 100%. To use a malapropism: impressions are 9/10ths of the law. If you give your manager an impression that you are one of these stereotypes, you’ll never shake it. You’ll always be seen that way. And because people rarely change, or at least it takes a while, the only real way to escape such an impression is to find a different manager.
coffeefirst 3y ago
Yes. I hate this article. It presupposes "the norm" doesn't need anything special and everyone else is "difficult." But supporting people is the manager's job. You can't do that if you pathologize literally everything messy or nuanced. Some of these categories are people learning to estimate for the first time, or responding to pressure to say "yes" to impossible things by saying "yes" to impossible things. Also notably absent is any mention of air cover. There's usually a reason people get burned out or start sounding the alarm about a project. But rather than get to the bottom of that and help with the root causes, in every single of one of these cases he assumes the problem is basically their personalities.

makeitdouble 3y ago

> Procrastinators [...] may have poor time management skills, often underestimating the time required to complete tasks. > Make them accountable for those deadlines. I've seen this advice a lot, and it's a terrible approach. You've got a team member you already know has bad time management or bad prioritization skills, and/or busted estimates. You've already stuck them in the bucket so it's not your first rodeo. You already know they're not just unmotivated, because you'd take a completely different approach otherwise. That's were comes the interesting part: you're either punishing them for something they're motivated to do but aren't good at, and you couldn't find a way to help them the first few times (they still got late despite all the micro management you did). Or you're punishing them for deadlines that you knew were busted but didn't adjust on your part, even as the whole project is affected by that decision. You should be the one accountable for that.

nprateem 3y ago

Very simplistic. Any article like this needs to be far more nuanced. I feel for "Unreliable Anna". Her mother is actually in hospital so she's stressed but trying to put a brave face on things. Her dickhead manager hasn't bothered to ask about her situation and is instead putting her through for a formal warning. Meanwhile the whole team find Lone Wolf Lisa toxic as she undoes other people's work and should be shown the door since she's clearly not a good fit and this isn't the first time. Her team can't understand why she's kept around so get demotivated. I could go on...

nly 3y ago

My thesis: Sometimes some of the developers who "get shit done" and ship on time are the most destructive of all. Creating huge inefficiency savings for relatively modest savings in the short term. Spending an extra day thinking about the system you're writing when you know it's going to take weeks, before you write it, costs you a small %. The inevitable rewrite could take weeks. 90% of my time as a developer is unfucking previous kludges and weak designs

hobofan 3y ago
I don't think that there is any correlation between time spent "thinking about the system" and likelihood that it needs "unfucking". If there is any at all, it's probably the inverse. When I think back on all the projects that needed fixing, they were usually systems that were over-engineered the hell out of and that someone spent a lot of time "thinking about", where a much simpler solution would have sufficed. I think part of the problem here is that (some) engineers (sometimes) spend the time "thinking about" the problem, and then think that their solution has to match time spent thinking in terms of complexity. And that time is often spent aimlessly "thinking about" the problem rather than understanding and breaking down the problem and doing structured engineering.
- arcbyte 3y ago
  We want more thinking about business complexity and much much less thinking about accidental technical complexity. I agree that I've seen people build monstrous things full of pointless technical abstractions to do the simplest business requirement possible. I've also seen people build the stupidest collection of logic into a maze of rules in one simple but massively long class to accomplish what is actually a trivial business problem that could have been clearly solved in 5 lines. I would rather they spend a bit more time thinking about how the business problem and whether they are solving it appropriately.

PedroBatista 3y ago

So basically how to "manage" pretty much every person regardless of what they are doing professionally.. Also find it funny how a person who doesn't act and do stuff exactly how you want is considered "difficult". We definitely need more "difficult" persons.. That is not a virtue by itself but ironically is the only thing that will save us from this depressing "corporate" bullshit.

tannhaeuser 3y ago

There's one type of "difficult" personality missing I'm seeing a lot recently, and that's the resume padder.

bawolff 3y ago

> Procrastinators tend to delay tasks, often focusing on less important tasks while ignoring the critical ones. They may have poor time management skills, often underestimating the time required to complete tasks My understanding is that most research on procrastination suggests that it is not caused by poor time management but emotional management, and that the appearence of poor time management is more a symptom than a cause.

alphazard 3y ago

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Draiken 3y ago

This article is patronizing and tries to simplify the complexities of managing people by putting them into buckets and listing recipes. For me, this type of view only causes more harm than good. Instead of actually sitting down with the "difficult engineer" and figuring out what is happening, managers will label them as "X" and poison their view of them moving forward. Sometimes even publicly. Good managers know you're dealing with people and you actually get to the bottom of what is happening on each situation. As others pointed out, there may be a reason you're the "lone wolf", "procrastinator" or any other of these simplistic labels at any given moment. But the average manager just wants labels and recipes to follow, which this type of article provides. Then when reality hits and nobody perfectly fits those buckets and the recipes don't really work as expected, all we can hope is they realize how bad of a manager they've turned into. To any managers reading: do your actual job and remember you're dealing with real people. Don't label everyone and follow magical recipes. That's how you become a bad manager.

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itsautomatisch 3y ago

I'd like to see the inverse for dealing with difficult managers, including boxing them into similar reductive stereotypes like the "spineless doormat" and the "non-technical MBA."

commandlinefan 3y ago

I'm absolutely positive that I've been described as "difficult" many times throughout my 30-year career as a computer programmer. I've picked up on a lot of frustration from other people around me - but that's almost always when I tell them I don't know the answer to the question that they just asked me for an answer to. I can figure it out, I'm qualified to figure it out, but I don't know the answer _right this ver instant_. So I'm "difficult".

shadowtree 3y ago

Careful with advice from someone who never managed large teams, successfully. Look at the author's LI bio. Content marketing is adding so much noise, muddying up the waters.

lkrubner 3y ago

If this subject interests anyone, I have written a great deal on the topic: "Why are you lying to me? What the hell is wrong with you?" https://respectfulleadership.substack.com/p/a-true-story-software-bugs-dishonesty https://respectfulleadership.substack.com/p/a-true-story-sof... "How to deal with weird passive-aggressive text communication from your co-workers or subordinates" https://respectfulleadership.substack.com/p/how-to-deal-with-weird-passive-aggressive https://respectfulleadership.substack.com/p/how-to-deal-with... "Is Anger Ever Strategic?" https://respectfulleadership.substack.com/p/is-anger-ever-strategic https://respectfulleadership.substack.com/p/is-anger-ever-st...

CipherThrowaway 3y ago
I read the dishonest employee story and, candidly, I did not find it to be an example of good leadership. You are recounting an argument that you are proud to have won, and where you are proud to have put a subordinate in his place. In your eyes, this is an example of good leadership because you did it in a way that was merely firm rather than, say, abusive. You achieved behavioral compliance, which is definitely better than nothing, but genuinely good leadership in that situation would have involved more two-way communication, empathy and active listening to build a mutual understanding. By the end of the article, I'm left with no understanding of what Jerry's motives were or why he behaved and communicated the way he did. You didn't seem to be interested in engaging him more deeply to find out. Instead, you seem exclusively focused on achieving your "I'm right, you're wrong" moment. At points, you offer uncharitable speculation: > Maybe he was feeling lazy or maybe he was trying to defend the code he'd written in the past. Which to me raise more questions. Why is he feeling lazy? Why is he feeling defensive? These are certainly not things that people regularly experience in workplaces where they feel respected. I did not feel your attitude in the situation, or recounting of it, was respectful to Jerry at all. At best, this interaction feels like a behavioral "quick fix" that falls short of identifying and fixing the underlying issues and risks long term resentment and disengagement.
- lkrubner 3y ago
  Keep in mind these things: 1. Fully understood, respectful leadership means respect for everyone, not just the person I happen to be talking to right now. Aggressively pushing Jerry to be more honest in the future was, in part, how I demonstrated my respect for the Travel Deals Team and for Sonia. They were not in the room to defend themselves, but Jerry had disrespected them, so I needed to defend the importance of their work. 2. Some managers adopt a passive-aggressive style where they pretend there has been no conflict, even when there has been conflict. This passive-aggressive style does tremendous damage to an organization. Where there has been some kind of conflict, you need to address it directly. The commenter is suggesting that I should simply assume that Jerry was operating in good faith, even though I had some evidence that he was not. "Innocent until proven guilty" is a necessary legal standard to protect us from the overwhelming power of the government, but among private citizens if you assume someone is innocent and operating in good faith when you have evidence that they are not, then you are simply a sucker who is going to be easily manipulated by bad faith actors. Keep in mind, I spoke to Jerry in good faith during our first conversation, it was only in our final conversation that I assumed he had been operating in bad faith. 3. I encourage a democratic culture, but that means the people on my teams have to be honest with each other. No one doubted that Jerry was a talented engineer, but if he made changes secretly, or if he secretly ignored directions from the Travel Deals Team, then he was undermining our democratic process. 4. If you value a democratic process, then you must enforce compliance to that process. Failure to enforce compliance is not democratic or empowering or generous or liberal or kind or intelligent. A failure to defend your process is simply idiocy or cowardice. If you think your process is a bad one, then you have an obligation to change it, but once you’ve got a process that you think is a good one, then you need to enforce compliance to it, or you have no process, merely anarchy, and your company will not survive. 5. There is a time and a place for healthy debate regarding all of our decisions. Jerry was free to meet with people and make his opinions known. Of the people who report to me, no one has ever been punished for making a strong case for their ideas, even if their ideas disagree with what the majority of the team favors. But all such conversations have to be done in compliance with the overall process, and that process means that once a decision is made, we all stick with it. In other words, if you want to run a business in a democratic fashion, you need a strong dose of "democratic centralism." By contrast, anarchism is the enemy of group decisions. 6. Jerry's motivation was implied when he said “I don’t like the idea of showing deals for Bermuda when someone searches for Caribbean.” This suggests that his ego was so great that he was willing to defy the clear intent of the Travel Deals Team, while also ignoring the feedback he was getting from Sonia. He was using his control of the code to impose his will on the situation, in defiance of all of the other stakeholders at the company. This cannot be tolerated or ignored, it has to be confronted. And, again, this is not a court of law, a manager in this situation should not wait till they have overwhelming evidence, they should demand a confrontation as soon as their instincts tell them that something is a bit off or suspicious. I gave Jerry multiple chances to reassure me he respected the decisions being made by others, but he did not give me any such assurance till, at the very end, I forced it out of him.

SilverBirch 3y ago

I started reading this with high hopes. Unfortunately it quickly started to spiral. The procrastinator may well not be procrastinating, they may genuinely be struggling technically. "It's works locally but not on staging" is a technical, solvable problem. Sure, it might be a lie, it might be actually they're off doing other things, but in itself that doesn't sound like procrastination. The lone wolf? When you describe that scenario to me, it sounds like Lisa might not have appreciated the 5th time her entirely male team shouted her down in the last "high energy" discussion. I once got to sit in on a team who would do planning poker, it was arduous, and one of my colleagues completely ruined it when she pointed out it was pointless because they always just deferred to Rik. It was like an hour a week where Rik got to decide what everyone did. I'm not saying that for certain Lisa wasn't a lone wolf, all I'm saying is that diagnosing people into these categories may do more harm than good. And often the advice that's suggested is just absurd. Treat the people who work for you as people. Communicate with them, let them understand your expectations and when they aren't meeting them and work with them to fix problems where they exist. Most importantly, if you're part of a good team, let others lead, and learn from them and learn to work with them. Often the negative nancy is the person who will throw a thousand problems up the first time you talk to them, and the second time you talk to them they've got a neat solution on how to solve them all. That's fine - now you know, give them the space they need to work. Oh and also? A PIP isn't a way to fix a problem. It's an HR tool to build the documentation up to fire an employee with the minimum risk of legal problems. It's a way to fire people 99.9% of the time, and you need to know that going in, because even if miraculously it works and the employee improves, you have put that employee on the short list for any layoff and that may well be totally out of your hands.

redeyedtreefrog 3y ago

HN has huge numbers of articles on the technical side of software engineering but very few on the people side. Even if this is just one slightly idiosyncratic take, I still gained more from it than yet another article on LLMs, or the most efficient low level code possible in C++ or Rust, etc. Hopefully there are more similar submissions. Also, when people complain that it talks in idealised, simplified models rather than real world messy people: there's obviously no way the author could write up details of real people, so non-personal generalizations is the best that's possible.

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bartimus 3y ago

Perhaps someone can write the inverse version of this post? "Managing difficult managers"

blurbleblurble 3y ago

The nerve to tack on nonviolent communication after issuing the most sweeping damnation of peoples' circumstances...

GoToRO 3y ago

If you find engineers difficult then you should not be a manager in a technical field. Real world is difficult and thats what engineers have to conquer. If you are not ready to hear hard truths, choose another field.

kazinator 3y ago

This is an okay read, but doesn't measure up to the genre classic: "Academic Programmers: A Spotter's Guide".