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Toxic Workers Are More Productive, But the Price Is High

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Re: Toxic Workers Are More Productive, But the Price Is High

#141

Post by unknowns »

wutbrodo wrote: post #120
unknowns wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hold up.. there are "gangs" of bad employees who team up together just rag on those carrying the team.. (you... right?) Man.. so glad Im insecure enough to rely on these gangs to fight my battles for me. Millions of bad employees but only 5 rockstar developers like yourself. I dont stand a chance.

> Man.. so glad Im insecure enough I know you're saying this sarcastically, but in the context of the rest of your comments, it sounds a lot more like self-pity. Take a second to read the comments you're responding and realize how much you're projecting your own complexes onto comments that are saying nothing close to what you seem to think they are.

"It sounds a lot more like self pity" is the very definition of you projecting onto my words. I dont need to read my words, I wrote them.

Re: Toxic Workers Are More Productive, But the Price Is High

#142

Post by Zimahl »

leroy_masochist wrote: post #40

Just read the study itself and am kind of scratching my head. I think the authors really just fail to consider the concept that the real problem with toxic employees is that they usually figure out to have their productivity measured very positively. The authors build their thesis around a dichotomy between "toxic employees" and "superstars" (not "rock stars" as claimed in the article summarizing the study). The auth…

In college I worked at an environmental testing company. I worked there for 3 summers. The first summer I worked there I worked closely with a woman named Shawn (name not changed because fuck her). I'm not saying she was bipolar, but she would wildly swing from having good days and having bad ones. Good days were fine sometimes really great, the entire department would be productive. Bad days were fucking terrible, she brought everyone down with her attitude, nit-pickyness, and comments (mind you she wasn't a manager).

Fast forward to the next summer, I was dreading working there because of her. But they gave me a raise to come back and I needed the money for college so I sucked it up. Day one - she's not there! She was pregnant, close to her due date, and was taking time off. That summer the office ran like clockwork. A few ups and downs here and there, but very even keeled. I spent another summer there and she never returned, I guess she decided to be a stay at home mom for a while.

Even years later it's hard to pinpoint just what exactly she did that was insanely toxic, it was just a number of things. But it was clear as day it was happening and made it easy to spot at other places where I've worked.

Re: Toxic Workers Are More Productive, But the Price Is High

#144

Post by commandlinefan »

Zimahl wrote: post #134
commandlinefan wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> tautological definition There's a picture that gets re-posted on LinkedIn periodically of Netflix's CTO Reed Hastings captioned with a quote attributed to him: "Do not tolerate brilliant jerks. The cost to teamwork is too high." Although this is the sort of feel-good positive fluff that is perfect LinkedIn-bait, I can't help but notice that the people who re-post it and re-share it tend to be people who I remember…

If more than one person has thought you are a jerk, especially more than one at a single job, and you don't know why, you're probably a jerk. The classic sign of a jerk is someone who can't pinpoint why someone would think they are a jerk in the first place. Or worse, you know why but you just don't care. As far as toxic workers go (jerks included), there are a lot of reasons they are toxic: * They are negative all t…

Maybe. (Actually, no, not, but for the sake of discussion). I have worked with people that would be considered "brilliant jerks" as in, they were amazing but they were so hard for most people to get along with that they actually were fired for being difficult to work with. It's never happened to me, but I've seen it happen maybe a half-dozen times to other people. What I couldn't help noticing about each of them was that: a) I never had any problem getting along with them. They just came down hard enough on the incompetent that they got a reputation for being unreasonable. b) there were people who were much, much more abusive, but not people that anybody would call "brilliant" (the opposite, in fact), who seemed to be applauded for their ability to anger people. The difference was that they people who got away with it always directed their arrogant attitude down, never up. It just seems to me that the more competent you're _perceived_ to be, the lower the threshold for bad behavior gets you labelled as a "jerk".

Re: Toxic Workers Are More Productive, But the Price Is High

#145

Post by [deleted] »

aaavl2821 wrote: post #137
goodpoint wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the most dominant hen, that pecked its way to the top of the pecking order at the expense of other hens. Individual selection doesn't necessarily work to the benefit of the group but wait... our entire economical system is based on this.

I don't think that's entirely true. I think the idea that the only way to "win" in business is by pushing others aside is incorrect. This thinking assumes that the economy is a zero sum game and there's plenty of reason to question that assumption. There are certainly elements in the economy that take value from others without creating any value in the process, but there are also people / companies that get wealthy b…

[deleted]

Re: Toxic Workers Are More Productive, But the Price Is High

#146

Post by jedberg »

commandlinefan wrote: post #27
blue1379 wrote: post #8

https://news.harvard.edu/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/16-057_d... It comes to a figure of 12k loss as the cost of replacing the toxic employee. Yes, replacing an employee is always a net loss in isolation. It seems to be using a tautological definition: defines a “toxic” employee as: “A worker that engages in behavior that is harmful to an organization, including either its property or people.” Yes, that causes a net l…

> tautological definition There's a picture that gets re-posted on LinkedIn periodically of Netflix's CTO Reed Hastings captioned with a quote attributed to him: "Do not tolerate brilliant jerks. The cost to teamwork is too high." Although this is the sort of feel-good positive fluff that is perfect LinkedIn-bait, I can't help but notice that the people who re-post it and re-share it tend to be people who I remember…

Having worked at Netflix, I can tell you the difference: An experienced person says "In my experience, this is the best way to go because of X, Y, and Z". A jerk says, "The best option is my way and if you do it any other way you're wrong and I don't have to justify myself to you because I'm that good."

In both cases what the person is suggesting is in fact the right way to go most of the time. The difference is whether or not you feel you're better than everyone else.

Re: Toxic Workers Are More Productive, But the Price Is High

#147

Post by FakeComments »

lordnacho wrote: post #41
FakeComments wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How so? Naively, it seems like capitalism is a means of “top group” selection, so long as there is relatively high chance for social mobility and opportunity. The method which worked better for chickens still involved selecting the best cohort (capitalism), and this improved over open breeding (socialism) or winner-take-all (monarchy).

How often do people get promoted on the basis that they will make the team better? Have you ever heard of that? How often do you hear "the IT guys kept things running well, enabling the sales people to bring the money in, so they get a piece of that?" Most of the time people who get stuff are the ones who have been attributed the most output individually.

My point was not that this happens as often as it should, but rather that the system we use now is built around the recognition that it’s important to do so, and consistently produces the most of that kind of result out of any of our systems. That is, if you look at market based systems against the others, in practice, they have the most people who end up wealthy due to merit — and why McDolands is one of the largest minters of “minority” millionaires ever.

This is important, because it implies the solution to our problems with the present is not to throw it out for a system that does worse asymptotically (eg, swap capitalism for socialism), but rather to further optimize and refine capitalism.

Re: Toxic Workers Are More Productive, But the Price Is High

#148

Post by thegayngler »

forgottenpass wrote: post #11

In the last few years, the metagame strategy of work politicking has evolved to include the act of labeling things "toxic." Article like this are just ammunition in that. I get that this article is about the trade-off between productivity and a less-easily-quantifiable loss to morale. But only a sliver of the people hearing about the study from this article will be carefully applying the lessons learned in towards th…

I am of the belief that in many cases if not most cases toxic workers are created and that most workers hired are not initially toxic for that work environment. So the question I have is what are the company's doing that turns people from good workers to toxic workers? How do you turn a toxic worker or situation into a positive one? That seems like it would be cheapest solution.

Re: Toxic Workers Are More Productive, But the Price Is High

#149

Post by arcticbull »

aunty_helen wrote: post #64
move-on-by wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a good question. I think I was labeled the toxic worker in my previous job. I was a team lead and kept bring up concerns to my manager: * 'this deadline is unrealistic' * 'we can't continue at this pace, we have to have time to address some serious technical debt' * 'I heard marketing saying that we can do X, but it isn't true and to add feature X would destroy our timeline' * 'Adding more contractors isn't g…

Ironically, not drinking the kool-aid makes you toxic. And managers are technically workers too. There's no reason to put them in an ivory tower and assume they can't hate their job, hate people they work with or want to exact revenge for some wrong done against them.

The truth is somewhat more nuanced IMO, and it’s mentioned somewhere here — behavior is contagious. Keeping upbeat and positive to your coworkers will make them upbeat and positive even if they’re not naturally. Positivity like negativity is contagious, but the latter is the steady state for many while the former requires continuous effort. The issue here is the won’t/can’t/stop/oh god in heaven. Showing up at your managers desk ready to listen and propose solutions and iterate is much more positively viewed. I’m confident the manager sees the issues for themselves, what they need are solutions.

Check out the difference a little wordsmithing makes:

* 'this deadline is unrealistic' — “id love to be able to get all this done for you, and with 8 weeks left, I’m only going to be able to get through half of this; let’s sit down and figure out what we can deprioritize without compromising the core of our next release”

* 'we can't continue at this pace, we have to have time to address some serious technical debt' — “I’ve noticed im having trouble moving quickly in the codebase with the level of testing we have right now, I’d love to lead an effort to improve testing and testability. Let’s resdefine ‘performance’ to include velocity, and with this new metric I’m sure we can find some time! Happy to do the leg work here.”

* 'I heard marketing saying that we can do X, but it isn't true and to add feature X would destroy our timeline' - same as 1: “I’d love to be able to get X out for you in the next release, and to do so requires we cut a few weeks scope elsewhere in the product — let’s sit down and see what we can deprioritize without compromising quality!”

* 'Adding more contractors isn't going to speed this up or improve the quality, we need time not warm bodies' — what will? “Let’s see if we can save the company some money by finding a way to work more efficiently! I’ve noticed x and y, and I’d love to take the lead on it. Let’s define some metrics to show this is as good as or better than bringing in some more contractors! The finance team is going to love our proposal.”

Re: Toxic Workers Are More Productive, But the Price Is High

#150

Post by Sharlin »

maxxxxx wrote: post #74
Sharlin wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't that the point of the study? The system is broken if individually productive but net counterproductive people are labeled "achievers" and promoted.

I guess I am looking at it from the employee perspective. If you want to advance it’s probably better to risk being called toxic instead of being a good team player who never gets anywhere.

There are many unethical things you might be prepared to do if your goal is "getting somewhere". Where do you draw the line? Or is it a case of not hating the player but hating the game?
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