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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

#51

Post by Tactic »

zldkz5 wrote: post #42
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…

> It seems to me like people skills are a weak spot for you. That's not true as I always hangout with the people in different teams, and, we get along pretty well. I just don't do kiss-ass to my boss and I don't take advantage out of situations. > Find ways to work together We worked together for two years on daily basis. And I overcome a lot of bad behaviours but I can't stand to report to him

If you don't want to quit the team/job, then I would recommend trying to adopt the viewpoint that regardless of your manager's shortcomings (we all have them) at least they understand your value as a technical resource.

However, if this:

> I can't stand to report to him

remains true... the only solution in the end that will leave you with day-to-day satisfaction is to leave the situation. It sounds like you are aware of this.

Life is not always fair but in general it is consistent.

Re: Ask HN: How to deal with incompetent people

#52

Post by vthallam »

jhowell wrote: post #44
rc_hadoken wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He can control someone taking credit for his work...

Do you offer suggestions?

As the top comment says, information flow at the right time makes all the difference. When you do something nice, put something in your slack channel like "man I finally got this elastic search issues fixed. the search is faster now and it doesn't fail for certain terms` or something like that. a subtle self congratulating message and everyone know you did it.

Re: Ask HN: How to deal with incompetent people

#53

Post by navinsylvester »

You talk about not getting enough credit but want to be a manager. It's not a good trait to have as a manager and you will suffer even worse.

A new shared dependency is worse than duplication. Sometimes developers get carried away about doing it the right way and don't understand the trade-offs you need to do to make it tick. FYI - I am a fully hands-on manager.

If you truly aspire to be a manager you need to understand that tech side alone doesn't cut it.

Re: Ask HN: How to deal with incompetent people

#54

Post by oblio »

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,…

Divide et impera, I'd say. Get a backer, someone that sees your values: your manager, your manager's manager, one of the senior devs. If you have 3 people in a room at work, there's bound to be at least 2-3 (hidden) conflicts. Figure out where they are and benefit from them: get your backer to help you with your task and when you present it, present it as being team work. While you're the person actually presenting. Your backer will... back you and you'll be able to stay a bit in the spotlight and you could use the exposure.

Or just find a sane work environment, which one is easier.

Re: Ask HN: How to deal with incompetent people

#55

Post by gtycomb »

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 ...

I side with you on this because of something I see often: At the end of the day what the CIO (a purchasing manager or the budget signer) asks about is who killed the fire for the day. When you are the good fireman, no one wonders about the quality of hose you used ..

Re: Ask HN: How to deal with incompetent people

#56

Post by jcriddle4 »

Read the Dilbert Principle. If you are in too much of a hurry here is the Wikipedia summary of it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dilbert_principle The situation seems completely unfair but you need to move on, life has some sucky points sometimes and a magic fairy isn't going to come down and fix things and set them right. I suspect talking with the management will only make things much much worse. You look much better to an hiring company if you currently have a job. Put your resume out and when a good offer comes in jump. Do not let the fact that you did great work and an idiot got promoted suck the life out of you.

Re: Ask HN: How to deal with incompetent people

#57

Post by JustSomeNobody »

Reading your post, the only incompetence I see is your management. So, to deal with that I have some suggestions.

First off, again, your manager failed you. They should have known who was doing what and who wasn't. There is simply no excuse for that. That is their job.

Second, what you should take from this is make sure you have constant conversations with your manager(s). If they're not doing their job, do it for them by initiating these conversations. Tell them what YOU have done both individually and as a team member. Don't be negative. Even when teammates fail you, find a way to be positive. That may just mean that you leave out the team part and focus on your individual part. This cannot become a habit, however.

Re: Ask HN: How to deal with incompetent people

#58

Post by Rooster61 »

zldkz5 wrote: post #37
Aeolun wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ha…

> 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.

I think you might be missing their point. From the perspective of a programmer, yes, these things are true. Code SHOULD be Good and Right™, and that is very easy to see and grok from a programmer's standpoint. But to a manager? These things usually have to be stated explicitly, and that isn't entirely the manager's fault. It is easy and pervasive in the industry to write crappy code that works for a variety of reasons (time constraints, incompetence, poor decisions from on high, etc...). Even the best managers have some degree of "out of sight, out of mind" because they rightly delegate the responsibility of making sure the code works AND minimizes tech debt to the developer. It doesn't become apparent to them (and by proxy, the business) that the code was poorly written until the shit hits the fan.

Also, it is unfortunate that you have to leave that job. In my experience in the industry, being able to go back and fix tech debt like you are describing is very uncommon.

Re: Ask HN: How to deal with incompetent people

#59

Post by eriktate »

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…

Nothing big ever got built by a bunch of self-centered loud mouths either. And these are typically the types that find themselves in these roles.

I think you're making a big leap saying "let them deal with the frustrations of relationships". Nowhere in OP's post does he mention disliking people. In fact he seems proud of the fact that people come to him when they have questions. You need more than pure technical acumen for people to feel comfortable coming to you.

Situations like these are complicated, and I'm not sure there's enough information to make a judgement one way or the other. I do think taking the "high road" here is not always the best course of action. If you're more interested in the success of your team or your product, you will remain ripe for being used by those more interested in their personal success. It's a toxic circle that's hard to escape once you find yourself in it.

My advice would be to heed the red flag and look for work elsewhere. If you are being leaned on as heavily as you feel, then it will likely become apparent once you move on to greener pastures.

Re: Ask HN: How to deal with incompetent people

#60

Post by jhowell »

vthallam wrote: post #52
jhowell wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you offer suggestions?

As the top comment says, information flow at the right time makes all the difference. When you do something nice, put something in your slack channel like "man I finally got this elastic search issues fixed. the search is faster now and it doesn't fail for certain terms` or something like that. a subtle self congratulating message and everyone know you did it.

From my experience which is obviously different than yours, over time these pats on the back do more to divide than unite development teams. Others know who gets stuff done and who doesn't just like you likely know who gets stuff done and who doesn't. The slack pats on the back seem counter productive, almost as if looking for credit for doing your job. The higher up in the organization you go the less important it becomes that you refactored the code to batch load index data where the prototype might have inserted one record at a time. By the time the index is done, the people who use it don't really care how long or how efficiently it was built.
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