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How to deal with difficult people on software projects

howtodeal.dev

21–30 of 130 posts

Re: How to deal with difficult people on software projects

#21

This is a horrible website and you will likely experience diminished tenure if you follow it's advice. First, there is a complete lack of empathy for the person being labelled. What are the motivations and constraints that led to this person acting this way? A key question and the foundation for building healthy productive relationships. Second, the 'solutions' are horrible. "Go around the person" is terrible advice…

Can't agree more. Everything from the framing of the problems, to the solutions, to the model of how things work (and how they ought to be fixed) go directly against anything that has ever worked in my experience.

Re: How to deal with difficult people on software projects

#22

This is a horrible website and you will likely experience diminished tenure if you follow it's advice. First, there is a complete lack of empathy for the person being labelled. What are the motivations and constraints that led to this person acting this way? A key question and the foundation for building healthy productive relationships. Second, the 'solutions' are horrible. "Go around the person" is terrible advice…

Fully agreed.

Amusingly, every single archetype in the "manager" section of this site contains advice which runs exactly counter to the advice from the also highly-upvoted "Common Mistakes of New Engineering Managers" article currently on the HN home page.

This just goes to show the extent to which our industry is still very "unsolved" and contains a multitude of often completely-opposed opinions - which means that reducing these opinions and the people who hold them to labels and suggesting they be "solved" is patently ridiculous.

Re: How to deal with difficult people on software projects

#23
post #12

I got stuck on the first one "Product Manager". Do the newer companies have this role? I mean, for the companies that are consumer facing and not enterprise oriented. IMO, this is a spillover role from the enterprise heavy 90s/2000s into today. Am I wrong?

Any company that has more than one product or more than one flavor of a product have product managers.

Re: How to deal with difficult people on software projects

#24
post #20

This is a horrible website and you will likely experience diminished tenure if you follow it's advice. First, there is a complete lack of empathy for the person being labelled. What are the motivations and constraints that led to this person acting this way? A key question and the foundation for building healthy productive relationships. Second, the 'solutions' are horrible. "Go around the person" is terrible advice…

Seriously - the "Patent Author" PM may well have come to be that ways because if he doesn't, the engineering team just makes assumptions (that are wrong) and build the wrong thing, instead of checking with the PM. When I've worked with dev teams in India (with me in CA), I have written extremely detailed and specific product specs, because I'm asleep while they're working, so if something is unclear it can waste a wh…

[deleted]

Re: How to deal with difficult people on software projects

#25
post #12

I got stuck on the first one "Product Manager". Do the newer companies have this role? I mean, for the companies that are consumer facing and not enterprise oriented. IMO, this is a spillover role from the enterprise heavy 90s/2000s into today. Am I wrong?

The bulk of software that is actually making money and not just trying to convince investors to get in early enough to get rich off of other investors before enough people figure out they're never going to monetize are still selling to enterprise customers. For every 30 people figuring out how to profit off a user-facing web app, there are 3000 chugging away at basic J2EE or maybe Spring Boot now for some proprietary backend business system for a Fortune 500 or the government that no member of the public will ever see. This sort of work seems to have become invisible to web-based developer communities like Hacker News, but they're still there. The need and the demand has only grown.

Granted, I don't know that it means there needs to be dedicated Product Manager roles. Granted, I as an engineer don't particularly want to deal with expectation management, scheduling, and capacity planning, and am perfectly happy to let someone else do it, but most of my work has been for the military and intelligence community and I think we have a much bigger problem there that org structure at the actual product development level can't solve. Our "customer" is an acquisition office, not the actual users of our products, and we're not legally allowed by the structure of contract law to have any direct contact with the actual users. So we cargo cult the hell out of basic agile principles that promise a more responsive and user-oriented process, but we can't legally implement that process the way it is actually supposed to be implemented. Instead of being directly accountable to our users, we're instead accountable to career bureaucrats who are more concerned about adding bullet points to their resumes while taking minimal risk than the actual needs and use cases of analysts and warfighters.

Re: How to deal with difficult people on software projects

#26

This is a horrible website and you will likely experience diminished tenure if you follow it's advice. First, there is a complete lack of empathy for the person being labelled. What are the motivations and constraints that led to this person acting this way? A key question and the foundation for building healthy productive relationships. Second, the 'solutions' are horrible. "Go around the person" is terrible advice…

Go around is a valid strategy, eventually your entire team will go around the difficult person and the difficult person will no longer be part of the solution chain essentially relegated to obscurity. Works in big teams with sufficient overlap not in small ones

Re: How to deal with difficult people on software projects

#29
post #12

I got stuck on the first one "Product Manager". Do the newer companies have this role? I mean, for the companies that are consumer facing and not enterprise oriented. IMO, this is a spillover role from the enterprise heavy 90s/2000s into today. Am I wrong?

How did you come to such a conclusion?

Re: How to deal with difficult people on software projects

#30

THIS IS SOOO GOOODDDD!!! I'm thinking how to make this a team activity to kindly label each other and understand how to address them as a group. Though i guess this requires a maturity that is rare...

Michael Scott, is that you?
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