6 ms·

I very much disagree with the premise that most of the time difficult engineers have the organization's best interests at heart. Most people (across any discipl

I very much disagree with the premise that most of the time difficult engineers have the organization's best interests at heart. Most people (across any discipline) have very little regard for the "interests" of the organization that they're working for. Not because of incompetence or malice or organizational dysfunction but because most people just want to show up, do their time and get out to live their life with what little time they have left of their day. Maybe, at best, they care about the interests of some of their co-workers that they like. Difficult engineers are difficult because they're difficult just like a difficult sales executive is difficult because they're difficult. I've worked in great companies and terrible companies with great people and difficult people. The reason difficult people don't survive as long at good companies is because the organization has the breathing room to get rid of them, whereas in a chaotic mismanaged organization there's still a framing in which a difficult engineer is valuable -- because mismanaged organizations aren't considering the long term implications of difficult employees, they're focused on answering "can this person help put out our current fire?". Difficult engineers are given far too much room to be difficult because we're seen as geniuses who just need tending to. We should show employees kindness and support them in doing their best work and growing to benefit the organization, but we should not try to fix difficult people. If you're a manager dealing with a difficult engineer, you can be sure every one of their co-workers hates them and is making their life worse. Terminate your difficult employees, don't change the number of points allocated to a sprint.

nerdchum 3y ago
Ive found way more difficult managers than difficult employees in my career. Difficult managers need to be terminated as well.
- arpa 3y ago
  what do you mean it's an interactive system of shitiness?
- datadrivenangel 3y ago
  At a certain point the rot starts from the head. Amazing how a few bad senior managers can allow for so much bad behavior.
  - thelastparadise 3y ago
    They're harder to fire. Sometimes the org going belly-up is the consequence.
- nine_zeros 3y ago
  > Ive found way more difficult managers than difficult employees in my career. Yep. They set the tone. And if the manager's tone is not one of honesty, the ICs will intuitively not continue to be honest. Because they intuitively know that honesty will get penalized.
- izacus 3y ago
  Well... were you ever a manager to actually know that?
bawolff 3y ago
> but because most people just want to show up, do their time and get out to live their life with what little time they have left of their day. I feel like this is overstated. Yes, ultimstely the job is just a job and most people have other things in their life. However its hard to devote 40-ish hours a week to some cause without starting to identify with the cause. In my experience most people do start to care about org goals, or they go crazy and get burned out spending so much time on goals they dont care about.
- dgb23 3y ago
  Generally people have a work ethic and want to do good work that gets recognized as such. So it's somewhere _between_ "just to get paid" and "align with company goals". It absolutely sucks if you want to do good work and that doesn't align with company goals or doesn't get you paid (since most people need money). Those three things are not always reconcilable and I have seen how people can break if this creates an area of tension.
  - sdiupIGPWEfh 3y ago
    > It absolutely sucks if you want to do good work and that doesn't align with company goals. It's particularly bad if you otherwise love your coworkers, your immediate manager, and what the company does enough to stick around indefinitely, but come find you're never actually allowed the opportunity to "do the right thing", because there's instead just always something else more pressing pushed on you. You'll never get the chance to fix the big problems that you see solutions to. You realize that for everything else you appreciate about your position, you're still just a cog in the machine. Then you feel depressed and slip into some negative developer stereotype.
Draiken 3y ago
> Most people (across any discipline) have very little regard for the "interests" of the organization that they're working for. Not because of incompetence or malice or organizational dysfunction but because most people just want to show up, do their time and get out to live their life with what little time they have left of their day. Maybe, at best, they care about the interests of some of their co-workers that they like. Why does fulfilling your contracted role not align with the "interests" of the organization? If by "interests" you mean giving more than what you were contracted to do, then that does qualify as a dysfunctional organization in my book.
- NBJack 3y ago
  Short sighted decision making that doesn't account for the larger ecosystem. Sloppy code that barely meets the requirements. Zero coordination on a release that clearly left another team scrambling because it placed significant load on their service/ introduced a disruptive user story/ broke or delayed another team's clearly announced pending release. The list goes on, but the bottom line is that many folks will be happy to optimize for their personal "local minima" but literally harm the organization in the process.
  - sam0x17 3y ago
    "local minima" is entirely a function of what processes and requirements are in place for code to be accepted. In a well designed engineering org, the "local minima" and "optimal" are indistinguishable from each other, because you only let through fully tested code that passes the hopefully many CI steps you have and has also been subjected to extensive code review, QA, etc. If the reviewers and QA folks are doing their job, nothing like what you're describing should get through, and true "problem" engineers are simply those who are never able to get something through. When this falls apart it is invariably leadership's fault for writing bad tickets or not implementing proper CI, quality control, or testing practices, or not allocating sufficient time and resources to the code review process. And this stuff is only becoming more important as we integrate LLMs into our workflows...
    - 3y ago

nerdchum 3y ago

Ive found way more difficult managers than difficult employees in my career. Difficult managers need to be terminated as well.

arpa 3y ago
what do you mean it's an interactive system of shitiness?
datadrivenangel 3y ago
At a certain point the rot starts from the head. Amazing how a few bad senior managers can allow for so much bad behavior.
- thelastparadise 3y ago
  They're harder to fire. Sometimes the org going belly-up is the consequence.
nine_zeros 3y ago
> Ive found way more difficult managers than difficult employees in my career. Yep. They set the tone. And if the manager's tone is not one of honesty, the ICs will intuitively not continue to be honest. Because they intuitively know that honesty will get penalized.
izacus 3y ago
Well... were you ever a manager to actually know that?

bawolff 3y ago

> but because most people just want to show up, do their time and get out to live their life with what little time they have left of their day. I feel like this is overstated. Yes, ultimstely the job is just a job and most people have other things in their life. However its hard to devote 40-ish hours a week to some cause without starting to identify with the cause. In my experience most people do start to care about org goals, or they go crazy and get burned out spending so much time on goals they dont care about.

dgb23 3y ago
Generally people have a work ethic and want to do good work that gets recognized as such. So it's somewhere _between_ "just to get paid" and "align with company goals". It absolutely sucks if you want to do good work and that doesn't align with company goals or doesn't get you paid (since most people need money). Those three things are not always reconcilable and I have seen how people can break if this creates an area of tension.
- sdiupIGPWEfh 3y ago
  > It absolutely sucks if you want to do good work and that doesn't align with company goals. It's particularly bad if you otherwise love your coworkers, your immediate manager, and what the company does enough to stick around indefinitely, but come find you're never actually allowed the opportunity to "do the right thing", because there's instead just always something else more pressing pushed on you. You'll never get the chance to fix the big problems that you see solutions to. You realize that for everything else you appreciate about your position, you're still just a cog in the machine. Then you feel depressed and slip into some negative developer stereotype.

Draiken 3y ago

> Most people (across any discipline) have very little regard for the "interests" of the organization that they're working for. Not because of incompetence or malice or organizational dysfunction but because most people just want to show up, do their time and get out to live their life with what little time they have left of their day. Maybe, at best, they care about the interests of some of their co-workers that they like. Why does fulfilling your contracted role not align with the "interests" of the organization? If by "interests" you mean giving more than what you were contracted to do, then that does qualify as a dysfunctional organization in my book.

NBJack 3y ago
Short sighted decision making that doesn't account for the larger ecosystem. Sloppy code that barely meets the requirements. Zero coordination on a release that clearly left another team scrambling because it placed significant load on their service/ introduced a disruptive user story/ broke or delayed another team's clearly announced pending release. The list goes on, but the bottom line is that many folks will be happy to optimize for their personal "local minima" but literally harm the organization in the process.
- sam0x17 3y ago
  "local minima" is entirely a function of what processes and requirements are in place for code to be accepted. In a well designed engineering org, the "local minima" and "optimal" are indistinguishable from each other, because you only let through fully tested code that passes the hopefully many CI steps you have and has also been subjected to extensive code review, QA, etc. If the reviewers and QA folks are doing their job, nothing like what you're describing should get through, and true "problem" engineers are simply those who are never able to get something through. When this falls apart it is invariably leadership's fault for writing bad tickets or not implementing proper CI, quality control, or testing practices, or not allocating sufficient time and resources to the code review process. And this stuff is only becoming more important as we integrate LLMs into our workflows...
  - 3y ago