Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: How to handle a workaholic colleague?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 83 posts

Re: Ask HN: How to handle a workaholic colleague?

#21

Post by jacques_chester »

brudgers wrote: post #12

To me: 1. If there is a direct correlation between hours worked and productivity for the team, then compensation is not relative. 2. To the degree that emails late at night is cast as toxic office politics, so are attempts to normalize the productive efforts of the coworker. 3. Pathologizing a coworker as 'workaholic' delegitmates the person and their values. It tends to provide an excuse for treating the individual…

Pathologising a preference for sustainable pace provides an excuse for treating everyone poorly "for the company's good" rather than accepting all the individuals as what they are: ordinary folk.

Good luck.

Re: Ask HN: How to handle a workaholic colleague?

#23

Post by johnwheeler »

You'd be surprised how little weight hard work carries relative to positive attitude coupled with an acceptable amount of work (former manager here).

Performance reviews aren't usually that objective. If you're getting dinged, it might be a problem with your attitude vs your performance. It's unfair, but you're working with humans, not vulcans.

Said another way: If management likes you personally, and you work hard enough, you're not going to get bad performance reviews.

If this coworker is a ball hog, that's a different story, and management will pick up on it over time. The best thing you can do in the meantime is worry about your own output and do good work with people who do want to work with you.

Re: Ask HN: How to handle a workaholic colleague?

#24

Post by Yoric »

In my experience, workers send emails late at night to explicitly demonstrate that they work more than others. I believe that it's unhealthy and it's pretty clear that it's not correlated to work quality.

This may be due to any number of reasons – from proving false a manager claiming that they don't work to impostor syndrome to office politics to actually compensating that they don't really work – but that's probably something you want to address directly with the mate. That's also a reason for which a number of places/teams I've worked at/with tend to normalize reports to once per day or once per week. That and the fact that managers just can't cope with twenty reports per night.

You also want to address the issue with the manager and make sure that you are not judged by number of emails but rather by actual impact. If that fails, you're probably working in the wrong place.

P.S.: When I write "in my experience", I've been the "worker who sends emails at all hours of night", in my case because of an abusive manager and an ongoing burnout.

Re: Ask HN: How to handle a workaholic colleague?

#25

Post by jacques_chester »

jacquesc wrote: post #7

From a fellow workaholic: Talk with him and see what really excites him. Suggest that you work together with him on an open source side project (possibly related to a something your team is building). A piece of the project he can get excited about and occupy his excess energy. Help him promote it so he can get him some recognition / feedback outside of just the internal company employees. And your team might still g…

I should note for future reference, we are not each other's alts.

Re: Ask HN: How to handle a workaholic colleague?

#27

Post by ChuckMcM »

In my experience managing people I find a much prefer predictable, low noise, task completion. Every time someone who reports to me sends something I have to read it because it might be a critical issue that needs to be immediately addressed. As a result I appreciate folks who limit their off hours communication to more urgent matters, and I would rather something be done, as committed too, in a couple of weeks to someone trying to get it all done in a week or less.

But I also try to establish that understanding with folks I supervise early on. I have known managers who use someone in their group who is really over working to "get everyone to be more productive" (usually by praising the level of output of the over working employee). It always blows up the team in my experience and they wonder why nobody wants to work for them.

Re: Ask HN: How to handle a workaholic colleague?

#29

Post by rsmsky1 »

Sometimes people just wake up in the middle of the night and have trouble falling asleep so they send emails or do other boring stuff, so they can fall asleep again. I've done that on occasion. If it were me, I would just concentrate more on my job and less on what my coworkers were doing.
Post reply on HN