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Ask HN: How to deal with incompetent people

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Re: Ask HN: How to deal with incompetent people

#31

Post by JacKTrocinskI »

Aeolun wrote: post #26
zldkz5 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

There is a difference of course though and it's important to market to non-technical people that readable, maintainable, and tested code really does lead to lower costs for the company in the future.

Re: Ask HN: How to deal with incompetent people

#32

Post by beat »

minionslave wrote: post #27

I 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,…

I recommend reading So Good They Can't Ignore You, by Cal Newport.

And more broadly, learn how politics are played.

Re: Ask HN: How to deal with incompetent people

#33

Post by clavalle »

zldkz5 wrote: post #10
clavalle wrote: post #8

I 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…

>I thought that the value that I create will talk more than the nonsense of some people.

Nope. Silence is always less noticeable than noise.

Evil prevails when good men do nothing. Also, nonsense fluff prevails when good work isn't spoken of.

You have a professional duty to make sure nonsense is crowded out by important information. No one is going to do that for you.

Follow the rule of three...tell people what you are going to do and why it is important. Tell people what you are doing. Tell people what you've done. And not just anybody; decision makers.

It is no one else's job to tell people who influence your life of your good works.

No one has time to dig through everything you might have done to hold up the shining examples of your work. And now you have someone above you that might actually be interested in seeing it kept buried so it is even more critical that you do that interpersonal information transfer yourself.

You are a business, and like a business there is no worth in a product that the people who are in a position to buy don't know about. You're going to have to market and sell your value to the people that are buying. All of the time. Make it a habit. Your co-workers are competitors...don't expect them to sell your product for you. (though, keep in mind, part of your value-add is cooperating in your value-add chain so don't take this analogy too far).

Honestly, this is stuff that took me way too long to learn. They should teach it in engineering school. Hell, they should teach it in secondary school, for that matter, since there is really no one who is not running a business even if it is a business of one.

Re: Ask HN: How to deal with incompetent people

#34

Post by coleifer »

If you are able to discern his motivations, you can probably have faith that others will, too.

The extent to which your ego is bound up in taking credit, having a certain reputation among your colleagues, etc, is the exact extent to which your coworkers behavior can "get to you".

Always the best advice is: do your job to the best of your ability and don't worry what anyone else is doing. Others will notice. And if they don't, then perhaps its not the kind of place you would want to work, anyways?

Re: Ask HN: How to deal with incompetent people

#35

Post by JacKTrocinskI »

beat wrote: post #23

Bluntly? 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 pe…

How can you work together or respect someone that takes credit for you work? This guy is a snake, it's not about being introverted.

Re: Ask HN: How to deal with incompetent people

#37

Post by zldkz5 »

Aeolun wrote: post #26
zldkz5 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

> there’s no difference between ridiculously shitty code that works, and beautiful, well-organized code that works.

Unfortunately that's not true. If "shitty code that works" requires three days to be understood in order to make a small change that became a delivery issue and three days in a problem that can be solved in one hour are $$ that somebody is paying. In addition "shitty code that works" most of the time has scalability and performance issues sooner or later you need to address if you don't want it to implode.

> where would you like to go from there?

I can also keep staying in this position, I just don't like to have a manager that I'm not even proud of. And, by the way, I'd like to be in a position where decision making is more stronger also in a business perspective. There are a lot of ridiculous choices that some people makes that are not very effective in some ways let alone make data driven choices. As the organisations today claims to be "agile", most of the time they're not at all. They just use a new word but act as old school (long feedback-loop just to give you an example)

Re: Ask HN: How to deal with incompetent people

#38

Post by astockwell »

I toiled like you seem to be for a long time, cleaning up technical debt, and writing well-architected (but very time-consuming) code. I learned a few things (things I have to remind myself of often, when I too feel the anger rising at people who don't place the same priority on those things):

The business is almost never paying to you clean up technical debt. They are paying you to generate revenue (or save costs). Period. It could be the best architected system in the world, but if it takes 4x as long to build, and the "quick and dirty" version can ship and generate revenue earlier, then that is the way the business will want to go (even with an elevated error/loss rate). My takeaway: If you do not intimately understand exactly how what you do each day makes the business more money, or saves the business more money, then you need to pause and figure that out.

Nobody gets credit for building a system that never goes down. It does not speak for itself (much as I would like it to). As others have pointed out, it's critical to communicate the value (see point above) of what you are doing, and communicate it to the people who matter.

Dealing with Humans (incompetent and otherwise) is actually what most of us get paid for (or at least it's a big share of why we get paid). Dealing with bureaucracy, red tape, incompetence, things taking too long, etc... Sometimes I wonder why I have to wait for others who are slow, don't they realize how much money is being wasted?! But it's true, the human component of our jobs is the main reason why we haven't already been replaced by others/computers. Relationships trump even adding business value (point 1 above): if you are difficult to work with, but add value, you will still be marginalized (or even let go). However on the flip side, if you are great to get along with but do little-to-nothing, you may not thrive, but you will survive.

Re: Ask HN: How to deal with incompetent people

#39

Post by rsa4046 »

zldkz5 wrote: post #11
cupofjoakim wrote: post #4

Have 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.

I think clavalle's point above is critical. Your good deeds, prowess, etc., have little chance of being noticed absent a willingness on your part to blow your own horn, loud. Now that he is your manager and you are subordinate, any attempt to coerce him to change will only evolve into a wasteful power struggle you can't win. If you are indeed so valuable to the outfit (and thus to him as well), then leverage this value to promote yourself, not necessarily at his expense, but to benefit of all. But -- life lesson: you won't get noticed by dint of talent alone (such notice requires unusually observant managerial staff, often lacking). He is not the solution to your problem: you are.

Re: Ask HN: How to deal with incompetent people

#40

Post by beat »

JacKTrocinskI wrote: post #35
beat wrote: post #23

Bluntly? 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 pe…

How can you work together or respect someone that takes credit for you work? This guy is a snake, it's not about being introverted.

Are you sure we're getting a complete story here? The OP is what writers call an "unreliable narrator". We're seeing this through his very emotional lens.

It's quite possible the other person did a lot of the "people" work that enabled the code to be written and distributed. In that case, it's a "we", not an "I", and focusing entirely on "I wrote the code", ignoring how it fit into the organization, is dismissing someone else's well-deserved credit.

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