I'm an asshole. If you work form me, work come first, as is the most important thing to me, after (and outside the office) your life, lifestyle and everything that is important for you.
Assholes: A Probing Examination
151–160 of 197 posts
Re: Assholes: A Probing Examination
#152Earlier quoted context omitted.
Disclaimer: I am an independent contractor mostly because I fled what I consider structural defects of the corporate world, so a bit biased. Isn't it a matter of management though? Assholes can be productive to a company if you have a good manager doing damage control and sinking time into firewalling the asshole. Given the prevalence of this disease and the abundance of managers, it seems like a good way to increase…
Why do you believe that the optimal point for a business is maintaining the employees on the edge of quitting? What are the pros and cons of doing this?
Pro: employee is more productive.
Con: none for the company
Re: Assholes: A Probing Examination
#153I've dealt with my share through the years... the most problematic asshole I encountered was definitely in the 'unintentional' mold: friendly, outgoing, always willing to help others... So what made this person an asshole?
They WOULD NOT LET GO their solution to a problem. If the team agreed on another approach, every planning meeting or conversation for the next month got derailed to rehash why this persons' idea was the best, and why we should change our decision. If we held to the original decision, this person would call team meetings with PO and PM 'to help resolve the issue'.
This person didn't badger juniors. On the contrary, this person would have side conversations with the most junior devs to get them 'onside', then come to the senior devs with "the rest of us have been talking and we think the way forward is X".
Caused a lot of divisiveness on our team before getting fired.
Re: Assholes: A Probing Examination
#154I do think there is another side to this though. I think equally bad for the organization are people who are entirely supportive of huge mistakes:
- Encouraging people to try any technology they want in an important, tight-deadline project
- Telling people there's "No wrong way" to do things
- Spending tons of time mentoring people who show little/no-motivation and low rate-of-learning
- Refusing to perform a root-cause-analysis because it might seem to indirectly indicate blame
- Inviting unknowledgeable people who talk to much to meetings above their station for "inclusion"
- Not correcting the spread of misinformation
Re: Assholes: A Probing Examination
#155Is assholish-ness a sign of a good founder? Do incubators use this as a secret criterion for admission? Ultimately can we write a word2vec implementation that produces an ‘asshole score’ based on a personal essay or job description as?
Re: Assholes: A Probing Examination
#156I've dealt with my share through the years... the most problematic asshole I encountered was definitely in the 'unintentional' mold: friendly, outgoing, always willing to help others... So what made this person an asshole? They WOULD NOT LET GO their solution to a problem. If the team agreed on another approach, every planning meeting or conversation for the next month got derailed to rehash why this persons' idea wa…
Yes, this is a better point than the one the OP was making: while everyone can agree assholes are bad it's not always easy to spot them.
Similar to your experience: I had a colleague who was extremely negative. Everything was horrible, every manager was stupid. Nothing was done right, ever. We never worked on the right project and if we did we never did it the right way, according to him.
I think he just valued his role as a contrarian: if everyone else was wrong all the time it meant he was always right, that he knew better and more than the rest of us.
I used to tell him if he hated things that he should suggest better ways of doing things to management or, if all else fails, find a new role or new company that would make him happier.
But he never did, he just liked complaining and/or making others miserable. But he didn't walk around with a sign that said "asshole" -- he could be polite and friendly and well-adjusted during the normal course of a work day.
Then what do you do? Do you engage the person and argue with them? Ignore them and hope the problem goes away? We all know toxic coworkers exist, the question is how to change their behavior or deal with them effectively.
Re: Assholes: A Probing Examination
#157> Asshole behavior begets additional asshole behavior from others. Non-assholes are hardened into assholes over time to survive, and a spiral of incivility reigns. I've been infected by this before. Never again. (I prefer to slap up so I ended up getting shown the door.) Before we go through a hiring round with my team nowadays, I like us to review what I've seen approvingly referred to over on Metafilter as The Babo…
> I prefer to slap up so I ended up getting shown the door. What does "slap up" mean?
From the article:
> Slapping down people of lower status in the company hierarchy.
This would be the other direction.
Re: Assholes: A Probing Examination
#158Not sure exactly how but I’ve mostly avoided places where being an asshole is acceptable. This could be to do with actively avoiding bro-fest type places, looking for high-impact rather than high-pay kind of work, but I can’t really take credit.
Separately, I’m quite shocked reading this HN thread seeing people defending the behaviour the article describes. I suddenly feel like I don’t really know the tech industry at all!
Re: Assholes: A Probing Examination
#159My problem with this is that it assumes there's only a single isolated asshole in the company and he exists in a social vacuum. It's much more common for multiple assholes of varying degrees to exist somewhere, and being assholes there's a very good chance they are not working together and instead are engaged with each other in GoT-tier power struggles. If a firable asshole is suppressing a worse unfirable asshole, do you still try to get rid of the former?
Re: Assholes: A Probing Examination
#160> It may seem “unfair” to toy with the idea of losing the assholes, particularly the unintentional assholes. Since they “don’t know better” it seems almost cruel to let them go simply because they’re making everyone around them miserable, and it somehow feels like a smaller request to have 50 people tolerate one asshole’s behavior than to demand one asshole figure out how to not alienate everyone with whom they inter…
It's very nice that the "correct" answer also happens to be the most convenient and easiest one for the author.