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0 pointsalphazard10mo ago0 comments

This comment and a sibling both brought up the issue of less experienced people and mentorship, which is important to clarify.

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.

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n4kana10mo ago

You nailed it. I worked in a high-expectation consultancy for 15 years, and the biggest stress didn’t come from junior people being green. It came from leadership avoiding hard decisions.

One team member had a TBI. My manager gave him a custom track so he could succeed. That sounds kind, but it meant the rest of us had to constantly check in, fix problems, and slow down for him.

Another person had lots of field experience but couldn’t handle problems without getting emotional. He built walls around every challenge and pulled people into his frustrations. He had the title of senior consultant, but he couldn’t do the work without a junior staffer helping him every step.

Then there was a junior person who had already underperformed in another team. Instead of addressing it, leadership moved her to my team, where she had even less experience. If I gave her 10 basic tasks, she would typically only complete 7. Not challenging tasks, just needed follow-through. My boss told me to keep setting clear expectations and checking in more. But she just kept pulling time and attention away from the actual work.

She was also split 50/50 between her old team and my team. I kept telling my boss and the other SVP that this made no sense. If someone is underperforming, the worst thing you can do is give them two sets of responsibilities. There’s no way to hold them accountable. Any time she didn’t deliver, we’d say, “Well, maybe it’s because of her other team.”

And here’s what really got me. My boss admitted he wanted these people off the team while enabling them. I ultimately pushed the field guy to deliver actual work until he quit. I kept pushing for the junior staffer to be placed on one team that could pin down her underperformance until the other team took her back. Leadership talked about fixing things, but they wouldn’t act. And it put me in a role that I wasn’t supposed to fill, applying pressure on my teammates rather than support.

This is an organizational deficiency with promoting engineers to manager roles as a matter of course. My boss was a fine engineer, but he was a horrible manager and no one held him accountable for his bullshit. I saw people go around him to complain to his superiors, but it wasn’t well received or productive.

Shame on the organization.

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