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Thanks. I'm willing to check if it's my character though, that's why I asked. > people not behaving the way youd want someone to behave given your estimation

Thanks. I'm willing to check if it's my character though, that's why I asked. > people not behaving the way youd want someone to behave given your estimation of their talent and/or experience. Yeah. This could be related. I observed it more lately, thanks. Perhaps I used some wrong terms with "showing authority". What bothered me then was that he started to give wrong dev advice on multiple occasions to other new people onboarding. If it was correct, I wouldn't have "cared". Note : I'm speaking about only 2 occurrences in the last 6 years. But it's a very frustrating experience. I thought the situation was more coined like the "expert beginner" though ( https://daedtech.com/how-developers-stop-learning-rise-of-the-expert-beginner/ https://daedtech.com/how-developers-stop-learning-rise-of-th... ) Have you mentored?

refulgentis 3y ago
Yes, to an extent, first had my startup where that was extremely easy (people love to suck up to you when you're in charge). Then Google. Google was a nightmare for sociological reasons not dissimilar to what you describe. Quick anecdote attempting to: - colleague is a server-side engineer, highly sociable and communicative. They transfer to client side work on our team, get about a year experience - new manager comes in but is quiet and absentee due to parental leave, about 6 months of a 9 month launch cycle - manager assumes and communicates I'm de facto lead and should be getting people on the project - colleague sees it more as a competition (residual from new manager coming in and me being de facto lead in between managers). new manager never spelled it out to everyone, so 6 months of hell ensue - got to the point he went to manager's manager to complain regularly, eventually gets cut off and told to stop giving me a hard time because he's describing me helping him - 2 weeks past ship deadline, with 2 weeks of work left, he repeatedly insists in a meeting that our work is in Binary A, but it's in Binary B, I let partner team deal with explaining it to him, I tried to avoid anything approaching conflict - He consistently was a helpful contributor when he sat down and coded, but caused an infernal amount of racket between severe absenteeism and a sense of extreme alarmism when he was present and learning what was going on, because of the gaps like you explain (not knowing what you don't know) - The bitter lesson I took away from all this was more or less that I did the right thing, I got them involved and was polite.and helpful with them, and there was nothing I could do to keep the abusive side of that from happening without causing a situation where it looked like I was uncharitable and failing at my duty to mentor. - Didn't matter or help with my performance review. He kicked up enough noise to indicate smoke, so there must be fire, even if managers manager had enough at that one point. - after launch, i spent the next 6 months carefully building a relationship with the other key team member via everyday things, lunch, cat pictures. That way, my relative formality was obviated, and they began being a good influence (i.e. being blunt with the trouble colleague when they were on another planet, rather than re-enforcing their alarmism)
- NicoJuicy 3y ago
  Thanks! Many great points. There is a reason behind my original question, since it's related to reflecting over the mentor role in the current situation. And I'm trying to find out if if there, with the current situation, are similarities with past annoyances because of my character. So the following hit right to home, because that's what I'm reflecting about: > What struck me each time is how the things you observe are universally centered around people not behaving the way youd want someone to behave given your estimation of their talent and/or experience. I'd appreciate your thoughts about the mentor role on the following situation. The person I'm mentoring now is a senior with past roles in Amazon, IBM, ... We are working together for 2 months now, but December is traditionally a low activity month because of holidays and a week off by the company. I've had a feature that I was originally going to do solo ( my priority was the deadline and now I'm mentally switching to onboarding the senior the right way). This also means that the user stories were less documented. We have a 7 hour difference in time zone ( he in Canada and I'm from Belgium). I've almost daily asked if there were any issues/unclarities. He also started early sometimes, probably to have more overlap and more help from me. He also worked a Saturday ( for a relatively simple problem that he couldn't fix in 3 days, we did pair programming and I had 2 solutions in 30 minutes). He couldn't solo implement a feature flag, where the "enabled" route took the new endpoint ( swagger generated) and the old route took the old one. I literally had to take the screen over and did it in 5 minutes. Personally, this looked like an easy task. Any advise from the mentor viewpoint? My urge was that this ( and other things) looked like a red flag. I requested feedback internally and it was mentioned to take character/culture differences into account. I'm now trying to compare past experiences to reflect on that feedback. But I have a hard time getting over it that someone with 18 years of experience couldn't do that solo. I was always worried that he would be without work. It's possible that this was viewed as "pushing", while I just tuned in to see if everything was clear and if he had questions. My current guess is that perhaps because of my handling, he tried to adjust his coding to my way of doing/development and it impaired him ? ( that's the only possible explanation I can find). This guess is related to what was mentioned after feedback internally. My actual guess is more in the lines of "beginner expert". And my worry is that our team in theory has an additional senior, while that's not the case. Note: I requested for an additional senior ( full stack) for a while since we can use it. But it seems that the position that was open is not similar to what was fulfilled ( I would say there's even such a big difference that's it's red flag. And i believe it's also my job to signal that). Any advice / reflections would be greatly appreciated.

refulgentis 3y ago

Yes, to an extent, first had my startup where that was extremely easy (people love to suck up to you when you're in charge). Then Google. Google was a nightmare for sociological reasons not dissimilar to what you describe. Quick anecdote attempting to: - colleague is a server-side engineer, highly sociable and communicative. They transfer to client side work on our team, get about a year experience - new manager comes in but is quiet and absentee due to parental leave, about 6 months of a 9 month launch cycle - manager assumes and communicates I'm de facto lead and should be getting people on the project - colleague sees it more as a competition (residual from new manager coming in and me being de facto lead in between managers). new manager never spelled it out to everyone, so 6 months of hell ensue - got to the point he went to manager's manager to complain regularly, eventually gets cut off and told to stop giving me a hard time because he's describing me helping him - 2 weeks past ship deadline, with 2 weeks of work left, he repeatedly insists in a meeting that our work is in Binary A, but it's in Binary B, I let partner team deal with explaining it to him, I tried to avoid anything approaching conflict - He consistently was a helpful contributor when he sat down and coded, but caused an infernal amount of racket between severe absenteeism and a sense of extreme alarmism when he was present and learning what was going on, because of the gaps like you explain (not knowing what you don't know) - The bitter lesson I took away from all this was more or less that I did the right thing, I got them involved and was polite.and helpful with them, and there was nothing I could do to keep the abusive side of that from happening without causing a situation where it looked like I was uncharitable and failing at my duty to mentor. - Didn't matter or help with my performance review. He kicked up enough noise to indicate smoke, so there must be fire, even if managers manager had enough at that one point. - after launch, i spent the next 6 months carefully building a relationship with the other key team member via everyday things, lunch, cat pictures. That way, my relative formality was obviated, and they began being a good influence (i.e. being blunt with the trouble colleague when they were on another planet, rather than re-enforcing their alarmism)

NicoJuicy 3y ago
Thanks! Many great points. There is a reason behind my original question, since it's related to reflecting over the mentor role in the current situation. And I'm trying to find out if if there, with the current situation, are similarities with past annoyances because of my character. So the following hit right to home, because that's what I'm reflecting about: > What struck me each time is how the things you observe are universally centered around people not behaving the way youd want someone to behave given your estimation of their talent and/or experience. I'd appreciate your thoughts about the mentor role on the following situation. The person I'm mentoring now is a senior with past roles in Amazon, IBM, ... We are working together for 2 months now, but December is traditionally a low activity month because of holidays and a week off by the company. I've had a feature that I was originally going to do solo ( my priority was the deadline and now I'm mentally switching to onboarding the senior the right way). This also means that the user stories were less documented. We have a 7 hour difference in time zone ( he in Canada and I'm from Belgium). I've almost daily asked if there were any issues/unclarities. He also started early sometimes, probably to have more overlap and more help from me. He also worked a Saturday ( for a relatively simple problem that he couldn't fix in 3 days, we did pair programming and I had 2 solutions in 30 minutes). He couldn't solo implement a feature flag, where the "enabled" route took the new endpoint ( swagger generated) and the old route took the old one. I literally had to take the screen over and did it in 5 minutes. Personally, this looked like an easy task. Any advise from the mentor viewpoint? My urge was that this ( and other things) looked like a red flag. I requested feedback internally and it was mentioned to take character/culture differences into account. I'm now trying to compare past experiences to reflect on that feedback. But I have a hard time getting over it that someone with 18 years of experience couldn't do that solo. I was always worried that he would be without work. It's possible that this was viewed as "pushing", while I just tuned in to see if everything was clear and if he had questions. My current guess is that perhaps because of my handling, he tried to adjust his coding to my way of doing/development and it impaired him ? ( that's the only possible explanation I can find). This guess is related to what was mentioned after feedback internally. My actual guess is more in the lines of "beginner expert". And my worry is that our team in theory has an additional senior, while that's not the case. Note: I requested for an additional senior ( full stack) for a while since we can use it. But it seems that the position that was open is not similar to what was fulfilled ( I would say there's even such a big difference that's it's red flag. And i believe it's also my job to signal that). Any advice / reflections would be greatly appreciated.