Ask HN: Not treated respectfully by colleague – advice?

I think there are four pieces of evidence:

- One person on the team does not respect him. That is pretty unambiguous.

- His manager puts his own (in all likelihood, based on quite limited information) opinion about the one guy over the opinion of the team lead. The team lead definitely knows the guy better, yet his manager disregards that. Why would he do that if he believed that the team lead was doing good leadership? Questioning the behavior of your subordinates is something you do when you don't trust in their abilities.

- The post mortem. If you are the team lead and you want a post mortem, then you will do a post mortem. "Because I say so", should be enough of a reason. Yet somehow his own manager needed to get involved, to force through the decision of the team lead? This also relates to the point before this.

- The Team. And I think this is the biggest tell. Imagine you are a team lead and you tell 10 people "we are doing X", one guy disagrees. There are still 9 other people, if they trusted the team lead as a leader, they would take his side, especially if X is something as obvious as doing a post mortem. This whole situation can only develop if the 9 people "who like to work with him" refuse to stand up for him at all. If you as a leader have 90% of the people behind you everything you say will be done.

The real question is why the rest of the team is doing nothing. Either it is because they are more afraid to go against the one guy (unlikely) or because they do not think it is worth it to stand up for the team lead. The real thing OP should consider is why his team does not appear to care the tiniest bit about his leadership position. If they did, the one guy would not be a problem at all.

One question remains, why do they love working with him. I do not think they are flattering him, I think they mean it. Often working for a weak leader is easy, because you can set your own rules and you can push your leader around. They probably enjoy that the atmosphere in the team is more relaxed, they get to have more influence on decisions and they can deflect work they do not want to do.

This sounds similar to the guy I'm working with. He's great in certain ways and takes his job seriously but can be really grating to work with. (Frankly, I think it probably has something to do with taking stimulants, just based on similarities between him and another engineer I worked with who was open about being on a big dose of stimulants, and who resembles this guy but about 2x worse.)

Thank you for your advice.

> your manager isn’t doing his job

Yeah, I do believe this and agree. My manager's new, and hasn't gotten much guidance or mentorship. I feel like he depends on me for a lot, and since I don't have a clear answer for him in this situation since I'm actually involved in it, I think he doesn't know what to do. He's said in the past with respect to this engineer's conflict with a struggling engineer on the team -- publicly pointing out that engineer's mistakes and lack of progress -- that he was afraid to have this come up to our director's (his skip's) visibility to avoid making a bad impression.

I can see talking to my skip, and overall I think it'll have a decent chance of him being receptive, and that he has a good amount of trust for me. I think my manager will be understanding about what I've done and why, but it'll put friction and distance between me and him -- so far he's been an incredible advocate for me in everything. Everything except this, which is exactly what I really need him for, since it's affecting my well-being.

The hard part is pointing to specific behaviors that I'd like changed. It's really difficult since it can all be covered up as just doing work and participating in the team -- that's the nature of passive-aggressive behavior like this.

Why the heck would you resign before talking directly to the other employee about the issue?

I think from what I've written, it could be possible to interpret this as the case. At least part of it's true -- I'm not nearly as experienced in some of the technologies this team uses as the other engineer who's been working on the team for a lot longer. I think I'm self-aware about what I know and what I don't, and defer to him in those cases. I do think that plays into why he doesn't seem to have much respect for me.

But the cases where we have the most conflict aren't those in which I'm reviewed or questioned, but in which I'm reviewing or questioning something about the other engineer. As an example -- there was recently an incident that resulted in a global outage for three hours due to a bad code change. The root cause was related to his change, which enabled another change to break the code. Users had to report this to us -- we didn't have alerts. The impact would directly affect growth and revenue, but in ways we can't quantitatively determine.

I said we should do a post-mortem, add an integration test that would prevent recurrence, and add an alert -- the other engineer vehemently pushed back, claiming that it was another team's fault, since the code was shared with them, and pushed for another action item that wouldn't improve our operational stance. The other engineer has never worked in an operationally excellent team, whereas I have -- any other engineer who has would see a post-mortem as obvious. I think the opposite that you describe is the case; the other engineer still sees himself as effectively 'the lead', and wants to prove it, so is vulnerable and sensitive to loss of status or criticism.

Overall I don't think what you've described is actually the real story. Several engineers both on the team and off the team have had complaints about this engineer, and the same thing happened with the previous lead, who was much more experienced than either of us. One engineer was distressed enough that it really should've warranted going to HR, which I suggested to my manager, who didn't follow through out of fear of it reflecting poorly on him, which is really unfortunate. I was brought into the team exactly because my style of leadership isn't top-down, brusque, or imposing -- I made it clear from the start my intention wasn't to unseat the other engineer as 'lead', and deliberately tried to make a lot of space for him to have ownership and growth and put him back on the promotion track.

You don't have to take my word about this, but the intention of my post is to get advice. My main goal isn't to solidify my performance or status -- I'm already comfortably trusted and performing well. My goal is not to come into work with a high risk of conflict and stress each week, and needing to contort myself to avoid this. What would your advice be if I am representing the truth?