Ask HN: How to deal with incompetent people • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: How to deal with incompetent people

#131

Post by zldkz5 » Wed, Nov 21, 2018, 1:13 PM UTC

paraditedc wrote: post #65

Let me start by pointing out that, based on your description, your colleague is not incompetent and your colleague technically did not do anything wrong. Is it wrong to say "we did" for tasks given to your team as whole? No, because after all everything is team's effort. At the same time, it is also not wrong to say "I did" when it is indeed only your effort alone. It's just playing with words for one's own gains. Wh…

> technically did not do anything wrong.

I didn't share everything that happened in two years time but just some vague summary. Is hard for someone that does nothing to do something wrong. In all the meetings we had his first thought was "let's find an open source alternative that does that for us" even in some highly customisable and domain specific solution that won't be available in GitHub for you to use. Or not any "how to do ...." search in Google can solve.

Yet, after more than two years, is still have lacks on how our infrastructure and the application works. And he still propose useless open source or SaaS solutions that don't fit at all our usecase because he doesn't even know what the applications do.

Re: Ask HN: How to deal with incompetent people

#132

Post by zldkz5 » Wed, Nov 21, 2018, 1:22 PM UTC

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…

> I never heard anything about incompetence in your description.

I was rushing trying to explain two years in a few words. You might not know what happened is such long span. To give you some ideas of why I said incompetence:

- my colleague doesn't know yet how our infra works

- he has no clue of the application architecture has he still make unforgettable mistakes after two years

- in any architectural meeting where we have to discuss about something he got missed, and, when he's there, he will suggest an open source tool to do so even when it doesn't fit our needs

- in any meeting when somebody ask something to him, the first answer would be "just go in google and search for a library to do x, z, y" even when the question is very architectural specific and domain specific

- even after we implement something he still want to find an open source or SaaS to use for no reason, not understanding that we have a lot of integration cost that he doesn't even understand

- he only had front-end (only in small-sized companies) experience and less than 6 years of total experience when he was hired (he joined right after me, I was not the interviewer) and he never lead a team before.

I worker in multiple context during my career; mainly enterprise and consultancy and I had team leading experience before the role.

Re: Ask HN: How to deal with incompetent people

#133

Post by zldkz5 » Wed, Nov 21, 2018, 1:26 PM UTC

Rooster61 wrote: post #58

zldkz5 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Has I said in another comment it was made out of request by the manager and director. They asked us to clean the code since we were experiencing issues due the volume. Without the changes that we were asked for today the company could not even be able to sell their product online.

Re: Ask HN: How to deal with incompetent people

#134

Post by zldkz5 » Wed, Nov 21, 2018, 1:35 PM UTC

navinsylvester wrote: post #53

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 underst…

It was required by our ex-manager and director to do so. As we were re-inventing the wheel in any application. If you're a fully hands-on manager you should understand the value of having strong common components that can be plugged in an out.

If you don't think so, just use a plain language without any framework, module, library or third party component and let's see who target the release date first.

We are paid not to build beautiful or robust software, but, first, to deliver faster and without headache. Decoupling stuff and avoid redundancy is a huge benefit and we experienced it dropping down the delivery time by at least 20%.

Re: Ask HN: How to deal with incompetent people

#135

Post by zldkz5 » Wed, Nov 21, 2018, 1:36 PM UTC

_pmf_ wrote: post #13

> I've been doing a lot of work to clean up the debt that was accumulated and, meanwhile, I improved the reliability and the efficiency of the infrastructure. I wrote common components and library to avoid duplication and shared it with wiki pages on how to implement certain things correctly. What's the business case for this?

Required by our ex manager and director to cleanup the debt and increase delivery time. And, it was urgent since we were having performance issue.

Pretty much I don't like to do stuff for the sake of doing it

Re: Ask HN: How to deal with incompetent people

#136

Post by zldkz5 » Wed, Nov 21, 2018, 2:02 PM UTC

itomato wrote: post #84

Who are you to judge another's competence? By what standard? Your expectations are yours alone, unless you are tasked by the business to analyze and optimize.

Indeed that was my scope. I was tasked by the business to analyze and optimize the technical assets of the company. And yes, I do also recruit and judge other's competence

Re: Ask HN: How to deal with incompetent people

#137

Post by fpalmans » Wed, Nov 21, 2018, 5:17 PM UTC

I am a little late to the conversation, though want to share some quick thoughts here.

On the one hand, I understand why you this situation makes you unhappy. On the other hand, I want to offer a different perspective. Based on your description, it sounds as if the two of you could form an excellent team! You have the technical know-how and drive, he has the relationship building and political skills. Perhaps you should team up with him and make him your advocate for career advancement - he at least appears to be good at it. Never forget that advancing one's career in a company is NOT a zero-sum game!

Also - when a manager, whether or not he has the title, says that he did something, or that he will do something, in stead of taking credit, can also signal acceptance of accountability. In other words, if a deadline is missed, or a system breaks, etc, he will take the flack. Perhaps this is something you need to clear out with him directly.

Assuming that you enjoy/prefer the technical work, aligning yourself with him might be a match made in heaven. You continue to make him look good and he makes sure he gets you regular raises, progresses your career, gives you time off, sends you to conferences or training courses in which are interested, gets you bonuses, etc., etc.

Re: Ask HN: How to deal with incompetent people

#138

Post by LocalMan » Wed, Nov 21, 2018, 10:13 PM UTC

The one thing you probably haven't been doing is having friendly work-oriented talks with your boss. A couple of times a week you should have been raising some easy issue just as a "heads-up" so the boss is up to date.

The idea is to break down the social barrier between you two and make sure he knows you, feels relaxed around you, and knows you're competent. A related important goal is to make sure the boss knows that you two can work together as near-equals as part of a team. That's what being promoted really means, from the boss's point of view.

You've run into a colleague more of a predator than an engineer. I've also been pushed out this way and was foolishly resting on my technical laurels.

Re: Ask HN: How to deal with incompetent people

#139

Post by navinsylvester » Wed, Nov 28, 2018, 4:31 AM UTC

zldkz5 wrote: post #134

navinsylvester wrote: post #53

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 underst…

It was required by our ex-manager and director to do so. As we were re-inventing the wheel in any application. If you're a fully hands-on manager you should understand the value of having strong common components that can be plugged in an out. If you don't think so, just use a plain language without any framework, module, library or third party component and let's see who target the release date first. We are paid no…

You are missing the point here. No one is doubting the usefulness of reusable code or common components.

Its about developers spending time on what they think needs to be refactored due to the engineering itch on an already functional and maintainable code. Most times by doing it they can be introducing instability to the whole system. In a larger code base with handful of engineers and teams it becomes a bottleneck to make quick changes since it can break others stuff so too much interaction and policy around it and so forth.