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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

#211

Post by tamrix »

move-on-by wrote: post #39
gwbas1c wrote: post #16

I liked the article, but I find the definition of a toxic worker difficult. It's more like the article defines a toxic worker by the result, not the symptom. In reality, what are the symptoms of a toxic worker? What are the causes? What are the situations where someone might be labeled "toxic" but the real problem is something else?

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…

You're not toxic, your manager is.

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

#212

Post by hnick »

commandlinefan wrote: post #185
happytotoss wrote: post #58

I have recently been labeled a “brilliant jerk” at a FAANG company and threatened with termination. In actuality I now know that I have acted like this (not always but sometimes) and I take ownership of it. In trying to come to terms with it, I’ve been doing a lot of research and I think the research is overly simplistic particularly when it comes to motivation. I am not a psychopath and I am not purely self interest…

> I have recently been labeled a “brilliant jerk” Nobody's ever come right out and labelled me that way, but I suspect there are at least a few people in my past who probably would describe me that way (they'd probably backtrack and say, "well, he wasn't all that brilliant - he just knew a lot of stuff is all. But boy was he a jerk!"). Not all, not even most, but at least some. Like I said, this could all be in my he…

Oh I know that too well. Having to explain that when the system says file not found, it means your program is trying to use a file that is not there. Or pasting error messages into google and summarising the first result for them.

At one point it was so bad I felt like I was just tech support, and was in a reactive not a proactive mode because the next question is surely coming soon so I'd better not start any deep work.

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

#213

Post by killjoywashere »

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…

> charismatic unproductive people

Not to drag politics into this, but, seriously, I think Trump has this category covered quite nicely. The costs are staggering.

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

#214

Post by nieve »

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.

This mindset can spread to higher levels if it's allowed to. At one point during the dot-com bubble the company I worked for was acquired by one where ad sales and biz dev were granted credit for all income and everything else in the company was considered a loss. This was a _financial media_ company and without fresh content the entire thing would have keeled over immediately, but via appearing to hold the purse things had slid to the point that ads and business development had power over almost all decisions. They bought us because they were trying to move into premium subscription products like we did, but we didn't know how bad it was until we found out that every dollar we brought in was attributed to the business development group and on paper our entire subsidiary was a money hole.

From individual employees up to the C-level divisions they judged everything solely on what was easiest to put into a spreadsheet and it destroyed them in less than a year. Sad to say my hope they were unique was wildly optimistic.

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

#215

Post by ramblerman »

HenryBemis wrote: post #157
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.

> but wait... our entire economical system is based on this. This is a difference between those who believe in Scarcity from those who believe in Abundance (at least in theory). The Takers and Makers.

can you elaborate, I don't understand what point you are making in relation to the OP.

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

#216

Post by imtringued »

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…

I don't understand this argument. Just look at the hen breeding comment. The entire point is that "losing" can be more beneficial than "winning" but the highly efficient winners end up pushing out the sustainable losers. The end result is a local maximum (in relative terms, please spare me the fixed pie bullshit).

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

#217

Post by FearNotDaniel »

rjf72 wrote: post #209
TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Probably" applied to catastrophic outcomes isn't particularly reassuring. It also requires a certain wilful denial of the mounting evidence that catastrophic outcomes - including starvation, oppression, and worse - have already happened for many people , and are likely to happen for many more people in the near/medium future. Having said, it's true that this is the Number One problem that humanity has to fix now - h…

The reason you have to say probably is because nothing is 100% certain in situations like this. Imagine some virulent agricultural disease spread among large areas of production driving a sharp decline in production. It doesn't matter what economic system you have there - even if everybody is a 'real' millionaire, people are going to starve simply because there isn't food to feed everybody. The Irish Potato Famine [1…

I don't think the Irish Famine is a good example here at all. There was easily enough food for everybody in the British Isles, and certainly in the British Empire as a whole. But Victorian-era capitalism decreed that these people deserved to be left to starve to death.

Pure capitalism and pure socialism are both destructive ideologies that inevitably lead to cruelty. Hasn't humanity moved on from this false dichotomy yet? Successful societies manage the balance between the two.

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

#218

Post by JoeAltmaier »

diminoten wrote: post #78
JoeAltmaier wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lifetime of experience. If you have other observations, feel free to make them.

One person's experience is basically useless, statistically speaking.

How about one person, experiencing the same thing dozens of times?

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

#219

Post by sleepysysadmin »

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…

I've worked in a couple toxic MSPs.

There was 1 guy who had been working there for 10 years. He was a 'senior' guy who was more intermediate and took days to work on fixes that would take a couple hours for most others.

Early in my time there I was given a client of his. I was working hand in hand with him. All decisions were bounced off him and agreed upon. The customer complained and when I explained to the boss that I had been working with him all along, he denied it and let me take the fall.

Then another day, couple other techs were given a ticket to work on. They determined a new NAS needed to be deployed because the backups arent working. I was sent onsite to deploy a new nas; that's what I did.

I email everyone involved including him, he was on vacation. He replies all but excludes me; and I'm told he took me down a notch and bad mouthed me badly. Mind you I just did what I was told. He then publicly in front of me told everyone that I was screwing over his client. So I replied instantly, "For the record, I was told to deploy a NAS. I did as I'm told. I did got above and beyond and see if I could get that vmhost back alive; I couldn't and so I agree with the techs who recommended a NAS.

He did this kind of shit often to people; but he was the only person who could work on the internal network. The owners of the MSP loved him. He then got promoted to be the IT manager. This pretty much started the process of literally everyone quitting.

Of note, right after he got promoted. There was another coworker who was beyond angry that he got promoted. He was flipping his lid and tells me that he is going to kill the new IT manager. I report this death threat and I got fired the next day. I was apparently the toxic one.

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

#220

Post by crimsonalucard »

chatmasta wrote: post #181
crimsonalucard wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not just our economy. It's the duality of human nature. We function better as a group yet we are competitive at the same time. As a result in practice a hybrid system of capitalism and communism tends to work the best aka socialism. See Scandinavia.

Work best according to whom? Just because something works in a tiny and homogenous country, under the shadow of a few hegemonic superpowers, does not mean that same thing will work in a super power like the US, which is larger, more heterogenous, and already contributes expenses to world society that benefit Scandinavia. Take the military for example. In any real world war, Scandanavia would depend on the help of NAT…

Works best according to the best available data we have.

I dont have data on whether or not the system will function well as a big country or not because the data doesnt exist. The nonexistence of said data unsubstantiates any claim I can make or you can make and pushes it into the realm of speculation.

But speculate we shall. Military seems like an arbitrary choice. Socialist countries can choose to either spend on military or education and they have chosen the latter probably because there has never been a century where human society is more at peace than ever before according to all available data we have.

Why has the current century broken all records for peace on earth? Perhaps it's because, unlike previous centuries, war no longer offers spoils as it once did. A country that goes to war in the past had a net gain in wealth while a country that does the same in modern times will have a massive net loss. Information and technology have replaced territory and gold as our treasure and such a treasure can only be destroyed during war. Either way, data shows that conflict as a percentage of human population is currently massively smaller than all previous eras.

Still america chooses to build a huge army. Probably because of something called the military industrial complex. Powerful capitalist entities infiltrate a deliberately weak government and proceed to manipulate it into building an impressive yet uneeded military. Maybe? Just speculation.

Would such capitalist powers be able to influence a socialist government? What industrial complex tells Scandinavia to redirect those tax dollars towards free education instead of war?

All speculation.

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