Antisocial Coding: My Year at GitHub

I've seen two people fired for being difficult to work with before.

One was very critical of other peoples' work, and would not take criticism well herself. She would make everything very personal. Despite being a junior engineer with limited experience or seniority, she would criticize more senior peoples' work in highly personal ways. Think "how could you be so stupid as to write this garbage" instead of "this is bad code". One day she received constructive criticism from her team lead (one of the nicest guys I've ever met) and instead of accepting it, she dug in and insulted him. He stood his ground and refused to +1 the PR without her change. He escalated it to his manager. She was given a formal warning. A week later she made another personal attack-as-criticism and was fired later that day.

The other was an obsessive perfectionist. He would withhold +1s from PRs until they were perfect. Given that these were PRs on existing systems, this meant in practice that if you modified code in a poorly-written existing file, he would refuse to +1 it until the entire file was rewritten, ground-up, to be high quality. One day, his dragging his heels turned a four hour ticket into a week-long tar pit. This caused an important deadline to slip. The next day he was let go.

----

In both cases they were cool people who I really liked. The first person was one of my closest friends in the office at the time. She was really cool, and while she was kind of abrasive, for the most part it was just like RMS-lite style assholitry. Nothing that out of the ordinary. The second guy, he may have been an obsessive perfectionist but his code was _perfect_. The stuff he wrote was by far the best anybody on our teams did.

But teams are more than the sum of their parts. These people might have been good individually, but their being hard to work with caused the whole team to suffer. So they got fired.

Maybe it's not super fair to them. Maybe they have their baggage or there's a culture shock (She was recent immigrant from China, he from Austria). But at the end of the day we are paid lots and lots of money to do important work, and if people are causing significant obstacles to us getting our jobs done, they're going to lose theirs. That's life

You're correct about this, so, let me be clearer: In my experience, they ghost; or they start ghosted.

Yes, there's a point at which you're completely justified in shutting down further dialogue because you do not find the communication constructive or productive. That point is after you have said that you do not find the communication constructive or productive.

(It sounds like your impression from the OP is that they didn't ghost too early; I didn't form an impression about that, but your take sounds reasonable.)

There's a flipside to your (correct) point about "that's not just how the world works"; basically, if you find yourself "having to accept my approach and just deal with it", are you sure you're not yourself requiring me to adopt to your communication modalities? Why are you sure you're not telling me to accept it and deal with you?

If I prefer directness and you prefer obliqueness, who is correct, and why?

(I find dealing with subtext and other "implies" to be the bad, evasive attitude - why would I have to accept it?).

Hence the qualifier "absolutely necessary." For example, harassment is bad, period. Github did the right thing in taking steps to address it by forming a team of developers to address harassment vectors.

That said, it might not have been the best idea to frame harassment in the context of the wider social justice movement. It may or may not fall into that group (depending on what you believe) and I'm not trying to argue whether it does or doesn't; what I am saying is that regardless, it might not actually be a good idea to inject politics into this situation. Nobody would say that preventing harassment is bad, but you will piss people off by injecting larger narratives into the issue.

If I could summarize, I guess I'm saying "go easy on the intersectionality."

I guess the other issue is why was the review happening 4 months after the period ended, especially if they had started working on improvements in the meantime. What was the point of all that work / those improvements, if they were just going to ignore it because it wasn't in the "correct period?"

Shouldn't the review have happened closer to the end of the period, so that all of that progress could be part of improvement?

Oh 'doh, I got my GP comments mixed up :P

Definitely a net-positive. We should have done more outreach and attempts to bring people into our way-less-drama bubble; but if the theories that the other groups were jealous of our successes was true, it might have accelerated our demise.

Ditto for being clearer with upper management why were liking the isolation.

I think there's an catch-22 problem tho: Anything we could have done would have just been political in some way, which would have been contributing to the drama.

Possibly the appropriate middle ground is to clearly and consistently seek feedback and share successes with the top of our management chain; avoid the politics of multi-person, but keep the awareness that we're doing well and will continue to do so with those that make the decisions about whether we'd get to keep going that way.

--

Original response:

It was definitely a net-positive; I got out (I was encouraged to get out by people I trust and respect) before it had a chance to properly explode, and there's a lot I'd have done differently.

Probably the most valuable skill is recognizing that you're in a tailspin; a good way to notice this is failing to achieve your own core values. In my case, people were feeling unheard; I pride myself on listening skills, so that should have been a pretty serious red flag. If you're sucking at stuff you really care about, something's pretty wrong.

I would have liked to have the presence of mind and skill to directly address the meta-problem; but that might have just backfired more, since I gathered that my directness was part of the issue.

So in that case, just bailing earlier. Make sure you don't stick around past the point where the bridges are burned; I'm a little past that, since I don't feel good when I think about going back, but I know I can.

The other option (which was one I was encouraged to take, that then turned into a full departure) was to take a sabbatical. I probably set down 70% of the baggage in the first month, which might have been enough to make a successful comeback - at least in attitude. (There's other complicating factors).