The time to speak was when the liar was claiming someone else's accomplishments - to contradict them clearly and immediately. After that it's much harder to recover.
Ask HN: How to deal with incompetent people
21–30 of 139 posts
Re: Ask HN: How to deal with incompetent people
#22Have you talked properly to the colleague in question? It seems like you've bottled up all this frustration for far too long, making this infected, which in turn makes it harder to talk about it. Even if it's hard, just tell him how you feel. Take it easy (don't start by listing all his faults) and stay objective - as in "When you do ... I feel ...". Be honest and say that you're not sure if you want to stay, and tha…
Terrible advice. Of all people you can talk to, the bad colleague now manager is the last choice! That's how you get backstabbed.
Totally agree, don't talk to the guy, I've tried that before and it doesn't work.
Re: Ask HN: How to deal with incompetent people
#23Bluntly? You're letting anger and resentment cloud your judgment. Your colleague is clearly not incompetent. He just has different goals from you. He probably wanted to shift from a technical role to a managerial role, and he succeeded. That's not incompetent! And that's probably because he recognized his talents are better with people than with technology. So be happy for his success, rather than resentful of his perceived incompetence.
It seems to me like people skills are a weak spot for you. That's not unusual in our industry. But leading and managing people, sorting out the relationships to make large project work, that work is just as essential as technical skills are. Nothing big ever got built by a bunch of grumpy, resentful introverts.
Rather than hating his "incompetence", try to recognize him (and others like him) as valuable allies. Find ways to work together, to let them deal with the frustrations of relationships, and let you focus on the technology. Create a mutually beneficial partnership. If you can't learn to do that, to trust the "people persons", you're going to find yourself in this situation over and over again.
Re: Ask HN: How to deal with incompetent people
#24Don't take it personally. Be happy for their accomplishments. Be happy for your accomplishments. Think about how important the "tough" times you are having now will be in 1 year, 3 year, 5 year, 10 years. Control what you can control.
He can control someone taking credit for his work...
Re: Ask HN: How to deal with incompetent people
#25Have you talked properly to the colleague in question? It seems like you've bottled up all this frustration for far too long, making this infected, which in turn makes it harder to talk about it. Even if it's hard, just tell him how you feel. Take it easy (don't start by listing all his faults) and stay objective - as in "When you do ... I feel ...". Be honest and say that you're not sure if you want to stay, and tha…
I never tried because we had to work together closely and I didn't want to break the balance. And now I don't know if it make sense since he became my manager.
leave the company.
if the company does not promote meritocracy (in a sense that it gives more competent people more responsibility and vice versa), you are destined to become more and more at disadvantage.
life is too short to spend it fighting a localized idiot. go build something interesting that will benefit mankind.
Re: Ask HN: How to deal with incompetent people
#26I never heard anything about incompetence in your description. Technical debt can build up for myriad reasons not related much to competence. What I would suggest is not to approach this situation as how you can wall off or otherwise attack this person but, instead as a life lesson on the importance of interpersonal relationships and politics. Politics are a fact of life. Humans are social creatures. All things being…
Yes I agree with you, the point is that being technical person doing a technical job I thought that the value that I create will talk more than the nonsense of some people. As I like to act first and share later, but there are people who talk but don't know how to act properly. I can build this skills as you said, true, but in my position now it would be impossible to get a promotion as the available spot has been ta…
Unless you can make the leadership recognize the greatness, there’s no difference between ridiculously shitty code that works, and beautiful, well-organized code that works.
Since you’re already in the position where you seem to lead the technical efforts of the team, where would you like to go from there?
Re: Ask HN: How to deal with incompetent people
#27I would like an answer to that too. I'm the youngest member of my team so the older more 'experienced' teammates are really good with politics.
We have a new project coming up and I basically was the one implementing the initial architecture, I showed them how to use the linux terminal, gitflow.
I am the dev with the fewest number of bugs reported, they are always on meeting about issues. They take the most visible, interesting features.
Yet during meetings, people talk to them more because they are older, so they basically take most of the credit.
What should I do in that case?
Re: Ask HN: How to deal with incompetent people
#28> he brag on stuff that I did > when he does something alone ... he would say "I did" > he got promoted as manager Act like the stereotypical manager, get promoted to manager.
I mean, he’s already functioning at the level he is aiming for, so might as well make it official.
Re: Ask HN: How to deal with incompetent people
#29How come people don't know what work you are doing at the company (thus allowing your colleague to take credit for it)? That's probably what you should try to address.
I'd start by writing emails detailing such or such feature you are working on, how it improves the system, etc. Maybe ask for feedback, or ask general questions to the business owner. Maybe suggest using some issue tracker where you could document over time what you are doing via comments, issues, etc. I'd expect your colleague might be the kind to distort truth, so such record is a good point of reference to set things straight.
Not only that would be good for you, since people will know that you are improving the system, but it will be good for the company since they'll know what's going on. They are lucky you're actually doing your job because another employee could have been slacking off and they wouldn't even know it.
Re: Ask HN: How to deal with incompetent people
#30I never heard anything about incompetence in your description. Technical debt can build up for myriad reasons not related much to competence. What I would suggest is not to approach this situation as how you can wall off or otherwise attack this person but, instead as a life lesson on the importance of interpersonal relationships and politics. Politics are a fact of life. Humans are social creatures. All things being…
This is an excellent break down of OP's situation, which seems very common in tech.
> make it known
This was the hardest "part" of working in a company for me to understand and execute on, especially when reporting to a non-technical supervisor. The thing is they simply don't know where to look or what to lookout for to give us accolades. It isn't as hard as we make it out to be, either. It can be as simple as "I made the common components for the WidgetMaker uniform through out the system, increasing reliability and improving maintainability. This will help us avoid an outage during peak WidgetMaking season so we can continue to make Widgets and operate smoothly", which isn't at all horn-tooty, but gives credit where due.