6. Tell the coworker to vent on Twitter. Works wonders for me. It is like shouting at /dev/null :)
Ask HN: Dealing with a Toxic Co-Worker
21–30 of 54 posts
Re: Ask HN: Dealing with a Toxic Co-Worker
#22well, this is what helped when I faced a similar siutation :
1. I took the guy who offended me to an informal cup of coffee and discussed about the situation.
2. Instead of confronting him, I explained my perspective and sought out his guidance to help me out.
It did help me in two ways : 1. The other person realized that I'm another human being just like him and not some "ideal code cranking robot" that he expected me to be ! He even apologized at some point for any offense he would have caused, explained his reasons and assured me that it was not personal. 2. I realized that he was under similar stress for meeting his own challenges / expectations laid out to him by his superiors. So, helped me feel better about myself , that the situation was caused mostly due to his inability to communicate rather than any fault from my end !
Re: Ask HN: Dealing with a Toxic Co-Worker
#23My advice, to take with appropriate salt: Leave. It's a seller's market for people with your skills right now. There's no guarantee that you'll find a new environment that doesn't have one of these cancer-in-the-locker-room culture killers, but they're not quite as common as you're fearing. It's not just this one employee that's the problem, it's that the bad apple, the manager, and the manager's manager are all knit…
> It's a seller's market for people with your skills right now. This gets repeated way too often - bordering on the obsessive. What are OP's skills? Where does he live? Unless I'm missing something obvious, we have no clue about it. I a vast majority of planet earth, it is not a seller market for developers. It isn't for basically any kind of skill, simply because there are no jobs. Even if we assume OP is from the U…
Average level of HN audience is pretty high, and for people with decent programming skill and good English remote is an option - with liveable wage, if you live anywhere outside SFBA/NY/London; and if you live in SFBA/NY/London, you have plenty of options as a developer.
Re: Ask HN: Dealing with a Toxic Co-Worker
#24I've had a similar experience with a fellow co-worker. In fact, my manager also saw this as an issue but the toxic co-worker was too important to the team. I suffered through it for a year and ultimately left in the end (although for different reasons). I guess what I'm trying to say is, having a toxic co-worker isn't the end of the world. Keep on learning and do your job. If at the point you find yourself not learning as much and not enjoying your job (and your co-worker is still toxic), it means it's time to move on. By that time you'll have learned how to deal with and thrive around a co-worker who is "toxic". Live, learn, adapt.
Re: Ask HN: Dealing with a Toxic Co-Worker
#25He needs to feel superior. He is confrontational to prove himself, he needs to "win" to feel he is better than everyone and validate himself. If you call hiss bullshit he'll probably go into denial (sooner or later). He can also become depressive, or even more aggressive. Those are defense mechanisms. They are triggered in confrontational situations, the "fight or flight" instinct. Men usually fight, women usually fl…
Helping people with problems is absolutely the best thing to do. When people offend us, we tend to write them off as an "asshole" or general bad person. But they're still a person with the same motivations as everyone else.
It's entirely possible that most other staff aren't showing him as much respect as they do each other. He may feel miffed when he does something great and nobody compliments him while others doing seemingly lesser things are publicly congratulated. People responding to "assholes" in this way only perpetuates the hostile feelings of everyone involved, and even makes their behavior seem more justifiable.
Something to look for in a company when you're applying is how they treat people with problems - either poor performance, not fitting in with coworkers, etc. Some companies try to help the people with problems while others try to get rid of whichever party to the disagreements is most powerless. I've even seen a case where many coworkers were rude to one individual and antagonized him into aggressiveness, then he was fired after taking a vote and finding he was unpopular!
Re: Ask HN: Dealing with a Toxic Co-Worker
#26To sum up the situation, you have a co-worker that you can't work well with because of their behaviour. Your manager is aware of the situation and tried, but failed to get the co-worker to change their behaviour.
To make life easy for you, I'll lay out your options:
- Go to your manager with a plan for improving the co-worker's behaviour. Any other conversation about it will be pointless because the manager has shown that they are unable to fix the problem without help.
- Go to your co-worker and find a way to convince them to change their behaviour. Remember that the manager has already tried and failed at this. You will have to try an approach other than saying "I would really like you to change your behaviour".
- Engineer the termination of employment of the co-worker by means fair or foul. (Note that going above your direct manager or to HR is essentially an attempt in this direction).
- Find a way to be happy in your work, despite your co-worker's behaviour.
- Engineer your own termination of employment.
I think only one of these approaches is easy and none are without risk. If you are willing and able to help your co-worker, this is likely to have the best possible outcome. The chances for success, though, are vanishingly small.
Improving the quality of the team by engineering other people's termination is something that is not so difficult if you know how to do it, but it rather paints a big arrow at your head with the caption "I am evil". Whether you want to go down this route is entirely up to you. It often makes your team happy at the expense of the person you are targeting.
Finding a way to be happy despite the poor behaviour of your colleagues is a very nice outcome for yourself, personally, but it doesn't do much to help others who share your situation. Still, if you wait long enough, the co-worker in questions may gather enough rope to hang themselves.
Finally, you can leave. Knowing when you have had enough is a wonderful wisdom to have. There are risks, as you have said and nobody can evaluate them for you.
It's not a good situation to be in. It's not entirely uncommon, though, given the short period of time people tend to stay in groups in this field, you are likely to encounter the situation again sometime in the future. Building your own skills so that you can help people who suffer from being assholes is something that can be quite valuable (and even marketable). Alas, I have never learned the knack myself.
Re: Ask HN: Dealing with a Toxic Co-Worker
#276. Tell the coworker to vent on Twitter. Works wonders for me. It is like shouting at /dev/null :)
Except when stuff on twitter gets people fired.
Re: Ask HN: Dealing with a Toxic Co-Worker
#28In my opinion, don't involve a tier. You can't report a problem that has no solution: it's nobody's job to change the toxic co-worker.
Go talk to him, tell him how he makes you feel (not "you do this, you do that", but "I feel like shit when you say X"). And ask him to be kind/patient to less experienced devs.
Make him feel important by requesting his mentorship instead of acid complaints.
Tell him he can help empower others instead of belittling them.
Talking to a manager will only make things worse.
Re: Ask HN: Dealing with a Toxic Co-Worker
#29Shouldn't you try to invite him for a beer and talk about it?
Also, be careful when stamping the "toxic" label. I'm not saying you're wrong in your judgement, but maybe you just don't know what's happening with his personal life. I have a fellow colleague which I always considered at least "cranky" since I joined my current company (half a year ago). Last week we traveled to work abroad and had some free time to talk over beers - he confided me that his mother was and still is very sick. Tough stuff, which reminded me clearly how frivolous we all can be when making judgements.
Re: Ask HN: Dealing with a Toxic Co-Worker
#30To sum up the situation, you have a co-worker that you can't work well with because of their behaviour. Your manager is aware of the situation and tried, but failed to get the co-worker to change their behaviour. To make life easy for you, I'll lay out your options: - Go to your manager with a plan for improving the co-worker's behaviour. Any other conversation about it will be pointless because the manager has shown…
Interesting, how do you engineer termination? (I imagine one must discover ways to raise all sorts of costs so it's eventually worth it for them to be gone.)