The stress comes from people who are bad at what they do and are trying to make it someone else's problem. They don't have vision for how they will accomplish what is asked of them. In their imagination, there is not a clear set of steps that can be burned down over the coming days and weeks to arrive at something of value. In their minds it is all chaos and uncertainty and they are desperate for the assurance of someone who knows what's going on.
The relationships that one develops with each category of person are fundamentally opposite. One is about enticing repeated interactions: You really get it, how do we work together in the future? And the other is about keeping a polite distance to prevent repeated interactions. How do I avoid meetings, projects, shared responsibilities, and future employment opportunities that involve this person?
Lots of assumptions here, obviously the reality is much more nuanced than this.
I want to work with smart and accommodating individuals who are team players.
None of these qualities are what we expect of rock stars. When I hear “rock star” - I fear a cult of one.
The stress is just not that apparent in environments where projects tend to fail anyway, or environments that provide lots of job stability.
You basically get paid for being present instead of actually produce something useful.
I don’t understand why one would want to work in such an environment, except when you’re soft-retiring / soft-quitting
In my last full time job I worked for a tech consulting company that rented us out to teams at financial instutions that managed insane amounts of money. This was in 2021 before AI was common. I worked remotely, and the first month didn’t do anything — just waited for the corporate laptop to arrive etc. Then I worked 2 hours a day.
But I had to put 8 hours in the timesheets, and select what projects I was working on. And I always had a feeling of guilt about that, like I was helping my consulting company charge hours that I wasn’t really working. I just kept finishing the tasks I was assigned in the sprints, and then there was nothing more to do. I didn’t aggressively ask for more work, just took on what others did. This went on for a while, and I felt guilty. Working on my startups in the meantime, like those people who work multiple jobs. I didn’t realize this happens a lot.
On one of my calls with my immediate manager I mentioned I had some downtime — and he was like “oh you have downtime? That’s not good.” And then it became his problem. And I didnt get more work but from then on I felt this tension with him, and probably others downstream of it. Nothing concrete, but just the feeling slightly changed, for a few weeks. So I nicely resigned after 6 months, saying to HR that investors funded my startups but they want me to work on them fulltime. So I left on good terms.
I regret it, though, in retrospect. Because of my ethics I missed out on income that could have helped my family and people around me. That was a great salary for remote work 2 hours a day, and I would have invested over half of it in crypto and probably 3xed it all by now. I only left because my ethics bothered me, but I learned later how often “full time” jobs really aren’t. Like, at all!
This is much easier when the relationships within the work environment are "good".
I work with a bunch of different personality types and geniunely like almost all of them. It just takes time to work out each individuals quirks and work with / around them.
There's some irony in the way you try to pin the blame on a third-party, and while trying to denigrate it too. I think it warrants some soul searching. I mean, would you feel stressed if you had to endure a team member who threw blanket accusations at your competence and in the process blamed you for causing grief to other team members?
> They don't have vision for how they will accomplish what is asked of them. In their imagination, there is not a clear set of steps that can be burned down over the coming days and weeks to arrive at something of value.
There's a lot to unpack there. Only a highly disfuncional team would throw a team member to the wolves and leave them out to fend for themselves on a task that is relatively complex. No wonder people would feel stressed in that environment.
having been the guy fixing the third party's bugs at almost every position, i side with the parent.
Or they don't have the vision to know how others will accomplish what they are asking for.
This is a big struggle for me; people who want to play product owner, and make requests that are very ignorant of work required. Or think they know just what work is required and spell out development approaches despite not having any background or experience in software development.
They key really is getting to know what it is they really want to do and then deliver a solution. Which can be its own exercise in frustration.
I'm not saying don't socialize and just work ; you just need to balance the two.
or, the other is about providing them the vision and the clear set of steps. Then checking their progress along those steps. (including revising the steps when the original plan diverges from the evolving reality).
Training and mentoring the people so they can become rock stars.
Some incompetence is a known quantity, and when it is known it will not produce stress. The junior dev on the team might not know how to do something. The team leadership should already have priced that in, and have a plan to help them if need be. If the junior dev's incompetence is creating stress, the root cause is leadership incompetence.
The kind of incompetence that produces stress is incompetence that is too impolite to mention. It can't be addressed through "mentorship" or "working together" because that would call the legitimacy of the role and the person filling it into question. Engineering managers who don't understand engineering, product managers who don't understand the product, etc. The list is long, and examples are common. The organization is built around the assumption that these people can do things that they are unable to do. That mismatch is the origin of stress.
Investing time in the 1st kind of incompetence is a good investment because you will get a good return on your time invested. The junior dev with potential becomes the rock star. The 2nd kind of incompetence is often "Throwing good money after bad". These situations are not worth your time. There is unlikely to be an improvement, and you risk it backfiring especially if the problem is above you in the org chart.
One is people / process stress; related to the steps needed to get work done, including approvals and negotiations to decide what to do.
Another is operational stress; related to keeping a service running; some of that can be people or process stress, but if your service is growing rapidly it might just be organic operational stress.
There's also the stress of getting the work done in a reasonable time.
Some people are better at managing the different kinds of stress.
Anyway, I think the moral of the post is when you rage quit, say "fuck this shit, I quit" rather than "fuck you all, I quit" ... keep the rage pointed at the system rather than the people :P Unless it's just like one person who is really intent on making your job hell. You might be able to get away with singling out one person, rather than doing the Oprah thing and "everybody look under your chair, you get a fuck you" :P
There is also people with just toxic personalities that everybody tries to avoid. In Europe unfortunately, is not easy to get rid of such characters and they often victimize teams and jeopardize entire projects.
Septic avoidance and minimizing interactions, sticking to process and keeping the distance are absolutely necessary for mental health.
Software is for people (end users/customers) to use, and is made to work for people.
Learning the people side of building, and delivering, and helping people with it is key.
Of course, some people in any office environment will play work in pursuit of achieving a daycare or high school for adults.
I had this mindset when much, much more junior but these times... not so much. Maybe in purely startup small shop env, but thats not where most of us get work done.
You can't ignore people who bad at what they do and are trying to make it someone else's problem, but you can find allies who are good at what they do and want to take some pride and ownership in the same things you do.
If someone doesn't have a vision for how they will accomplish what is asked of them, that's an opportunity for mentorship. They might not take it from you, but you can offer it.
I actually think the really dangerous people are the ones you encourage people to seek out: those who think everything is easy. That to me is a sign of Dunning-Kruger. I'd rather sit down with somebody who says "I don't know yet how to solve this, but we'll work it out", than somebody who says "it's easy we don't need to think too hard about this" or "it's hard and so I won't even try".
Also, meetings, shared responsibilities - they're part of getting stuff done as part of a team. Instead of trying to avoid them, try to improve them. Learn the people skills needed to help a person change their habits towards being the productive ally that adds to a team rather than takes away from it.
It's not easy, it's hard, but you will figure it out. If I was working with you, I'd say "we", not "you" but alas...
I agree with your overall sentiment, but there’s another dynamic which doesn’t always lend itself well to a mentorship role: when the leader has no vision other than some vague concept. Sometimes we can politely corral them, but it’s extremely frustrating when that “vision” is predicated on some magic, black box operation that they think happens and they won’t listen to any technical advice on why their vision may not be feasible.
To the OPs point, we have limited resources in time, labor, patience, etc. It’s worth consciously deciding where those are best spent.
Work is certainly not my top priority, but I spend a ton of my time on my job, and I would like to feel fulfilled and happy doing it. Have capable colleagues that you can trust to pull their weight is a big part of that.
In general, I’ve found that the clock-in, clock-out types seem to take their mediocrity as almost a badge of honor, with this feeling that by not working hard or accomplishing a lot, they ensure the business is not getting overmuch value out of them.
This is so sad, IMO. If at all possible, work should be fun. As programmers, we have more opportunity for that than most, and should take advantage. Is that perspective “Live to Work”?
The type of person in question can be understood as somebody who equates technical skill with "not needing help." It's implicit in your post. Your mythical rock stars are extremely talented individuals, while what sets the incompetent apart is apparently their need for assurance from others.
Professional competence is literally the set of the things you can do without needing help. That doesn't mean you never ask for help. It just means there is an expectation that you can accomplish some things on your own. If you need help with everything forever, then you are fundamentally not useful and not coachable (which is worse). When needing help is anticipated and transient, that's a non-event. When your job is mostly things that you are expected to do yourself, but you need help with all of them, that creates stress for your peers and subordinates.
I'm happy to provide leadership to help those who are less capable, but willing to learn, and are actually nice people.
People who are currently bad what they do have their own work struggle, go home to their issue, have their hobbies and ambitions.
I think the article strikes a very good point when it says you don't want to be remembered as that guy but I would go even further in that it's not only about your reputation. When you are that guy, you are actually making everybody life slightly worse including your own.
I think there is more value in acting and being remembered as someone who can lift up rather than as someone who is distant and self-interested. It's not that you should always be mindlessly helpful but you can be assertive, give honest feedback, help people realise when they should take responsibility and define directions without being a pushover or exploited. In my experience, that's how you make people actually want to work with you. These are obviously hard skills to develop (at least they were and still are to me) but they are how so valuable.
To go back to your conclusion, for me it's more about "How do I convince the people I want to work with to work with me?" than about cutting people. After all, you will probably be the sole constant in all the work environments you will be a part of in your life so you are the biggest factor into making them work for you.
Why are you looking for a new job? Because I have a dickhead manager and looking for a higher salary. But my answer will be I'm looking for new challenges, for opportunity to grow.
Both sides are telling lies during the interview.
In the US context, you should refrain from blaming specific people and if you possibly can you should explicitly leave open the possibility that everyone involved was trying to do their best (even if you really don't think this is true). Project an assumption of good faith even if it's not deserved.
But that said, you are looking for a new job and no one is going to be surprised to hear that there were things you don't like. More importantly, it's valuable to surface those things because you want to know if the things you didn't like are commonplace in the place you're interviewing.
The insistence on hearing only pleasurable falsehoods is not healthy.
The harder case is when your performance is lagging and there is a reduction in force.
On the other hand, managers are usually hiring because they failed to do their job competently with the last person in this role.
Brand-new positions are exceedingly rare these days. The market is worse than it's ever been for SWE. There was likely someone they laid off who could have filled it if management wasn't completely incompetent.
This isn't a growth market at the moment. It's a zero-sum game. Everyone's trying to screw each other over as much as possible, and they're lying through their teeth and pretending like it's not. Nobody on either side is sifting through this torrent of AI slop by choice.
Most jobs are pretty shitty, the idea that you need to demonstrate toxic positivity about how shitty it was is just so inauthentic.
If everywhere smells like shit, it’s time to check under your own shoe. I’ve had shitty jobs, snd while nowhere is perfect it’s definitely a stretch to say most jobs are shitty.
> the idea that you need to demonstrate toxic positivity
Nobody is asking you to do that. When I’m interviewing a candidate I’m assuming that this is a situation that they’re trying to impress/show themselves and if you’re shit talking your previous jobs then what are you going to be like if we disagree, or when you are interviewing for your next job? All I’m asking for is don’t shit talk your previous jobs and managers. If you can’t do that for 45 minutes I’m not going to hire you.
I agree and resent that work is just a place where I go to get lied to and lie right back. We've found that lying is a highly successful workplace strategy. But the point of the lying game is to never admit we're lying.
The pretzels people will twist themselves in to avoid the cognitive dissonance of lying all the time and not wanting to be a lair is maddening. I find facing it head on is a refreshing frame.
A bit of clarity taken from "The Complex Problem Of Lying For Jobs"
> But over the years, I have broadened my definition of a lie, and I have realized that most of my interlocutors (including my younger self) had actually narrowed our definition of lie into uselessness in an attempt to feel better about our behavior in the job market.
> If we set aside pedantic obsession over the technicalities of whether the exact words you said were a lie, as if we're all capricious djinn [...] If you have a good idea of what impression you are leaving your interlocutor with, and you are crafting statements such that the image in their head does not map to reality, then you are lying.
https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/the-complex-problem-of-lying...
A lot of people can’t, and a lot of companies try to avoid those people.
Someone who is going through the pain of looking for a new job is not going to like their current job.
If when asked, their answer is satisfaction with your current job, when most jobs are miserable, then i m thinking you're being dishonest with me.
I've put candidates at ease by mentioning well known struggles at their current employer. Generates a laugh.
Relationships can also help you mitigate the dysfunctional environment while you're there, with huge benefits to your health.
(Don't underestimate when people say stress kills you: it's not a video game health meter that recovers quickly and fully at the end of of an encounter; that bad stress is damage from which you never fully recover.)
But also be aware that supportive relationship oases in a dysfunctional environment can also slow leaving a place where you really-really should.
Some people need to be told to be more loyal than they are, but some people need to be told when loyalty is killing us and not doing any good. (Seriously, your supportive colleagues are probably bittersweet glad to see you escape, and you leaving might even give attention/leverage of management to help fix org problems, or encourage colleagues to expedite their own escape.)
Identify problems and act early, for the sake of your mental and eventually physical health.
It's dehumanizing, and it undervalues your inherent worth and skill set.
Obviously don't be a jerk. Beyond that you will really damage your mental well-being if you're constantly trying to put on a certain face or worry how things will "play" with recruiters.
The best advice is to try to stay generally optimistic and collaborative, and to take pride in your craft and lead by example. But also not to discount the fact that you might in fact be more capable of following your passions and starting your own thing than you realize.
If you just want to hunker down and do your own thing you might survive, but the best thing to do is probably move on from such places (or work with your team when it gets bad to get out of it ya rite lol it goes on forever)
We're doing contracting without the upside/autonomy, let's not delude ourselves
https://rework.withgoogle.com/en/guides/understanding-team-e... https://archive.is/fFEgI
considering "effective at Google" == projects destined for the Graveyard, I feel like they could've been asking themselves better questions
And the reason is, I'm a lowly engineer and that's all. I have zero clout, HR and hiring managers couldn't give a shit of whom I recommend. So if you "prioritize relationships" with an ulterior purpose (get hired eventually by some "relation"), then make sure you relate to the right people :)
To give a personal counter-example, I'm an engineer. Based on my recommendation, my current employer hired a person who was fired (not laid off, but actually fired!) from my previous workplace. And my recommendation was itself based on a recommendation of my friend who is a former colleague at the aforementioned previous workplace, and whose opinion I trust and value highly. Of course the hiree still had to pass the interviews etc, and that isn't easy in and of itself; but my personal recommendation was what got their foot in the door.
I see life as emotional combat, that I'm always dealing with so many conflicting conflicts at the same time that I'm trying my best to manage everything and so is everyone else. It has been helping me SO much just to frame life this way.
[0]: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/williams-fighting-battle-q...
I as well take things personally, aka, I feel attacked and pull away, shrinking into my experience and actively not wanting to imagine what someone else is going through.
When I focus on emotional combat, I can start to see how I'm not just experiencing this one specific conflict but am getting hit from multiple angles: financial, physical, social, familial, etc.
And then it almost makes me see that the other person is going through this combat as well, whether I want to see it or not.
So in short it can help me broaden my perspective on the conflicts I'm experiencing, which then can almost trick me into broadening it for the other person, and I can feel myself expand.
Over time, I realized that excessive stress and anxiety weren’t solving anything. In fact, they were making relationships with my colleagues tense. So, I started trying to slow down, giving myself and others some space, and holding onto those connections that I might need in the future.
Because no matter how important work is, relationships will always be the most valuable asset.
- Want a promotion? I hope your manager likes you
- Need collaboration from colleagues? Better not be a dick to them
- Want to look for new opportunities? Better have a network
We are social beasts at the end of the day.
So, many of us are doing just good by being really really minimal social beasts. I think the key is to not being a dick, but that doesn't require being a social person in my experience.
Indeed I think the importance of a work network is overrated. My LinkedIn is hopelessly outdated and to switch jobs, all I seem to have/need is my CV and professional years. In my experience interviewing is very much like dating.
Humans are inherently social beings (there's also a positive correlation of intelligence in animal species with the level of socializing (eg: birds, dolphins, dogs, etc.)).
It's also good to see the term "Social Health" starting to being used these days.
I reckon (tried on myself) that to be able to still prioritize one's personal and work growth, that one could remove self-indulgences like watching TV, browsing public reels (any social media outside of your family and friends), listening to music alone, etc. and instead spend some of that extra time with others. To an extent, these relationships help with personal and work growth as well, for example getting better at a sport or traveling and learning about other industries respectively.
i'm 'that guy' prety much everywhere, and one reason is that I really just like what I do and am usually committed to the mission over the org. defying pournelle's iron law plays out predictably though.
another reason is Pfeffer's triad, where power in any situation is a local weighting of Performance, Credentials, and Relationships. I trade on performance and cred, where my relationships are often polarized because of the imbalance being heavy in those other weightings.
a friend once described it as the relative skills of an indoors cat vs. an outdoors cat, where an outdoors cat catches all the mice and keeps off some larger animals but will probably scratch the furniture and cause a stink once in a while, whereas an indoors cat keeps the house mostly mouse-free, uses a litter box, but doesn't survive long outside, and if you don't empty the litter box often enough you get toxoplasmosis gondii and become a zombie.
managing indoors and outdoors cats together is an art.
The job felt disposable, but that small human moment stayed with me.
Yet, about 30% of the source of TFA is a stylesheet. I guess they mean no external stylesheet?
Relationships are a thing I support outside work. Inside work, I might build rapport and expand my professional network; that is NOT THE SAME as meeting people for the sake of pursuing relationships, and as much as possible one should be kept away from the other.
And it’s true about the “fuck yous”. It instantly reminded me of an old coworker that was let go and was trying to joke about it, but the F U sticks aside from anything else he accomplished while there.
1. Be nice.
2. Don't be an asshole.
3. Don't be a push-over. (Arguably the hardest as many people read that as "be an asshole". It is not.)
The same applies in remote environments.
Yes: do not snap, blow your top, yell, throw temper tantrums, act like a child.
However, no: in many places and industries, you do not have to rely on the good recommendation of your former boss or coworkers to get your next job. In fact, it may even be illegal for employers to disclose more than your dates of employment and job title. So, check the norms and laws in your region before staying in a toxic job, if you're there only hoping things will get better enough for a decent recommendation.
I think I've been nice to my coworkers for over a decade. If I had felt the need to tell them "fuck you", I absolutely would have. Choose who you work with, and perhaps you won't have to say "fuck you".
Even though they are probably your manipulative narcissistic manager or coworker?
sent from my iPhone
