41–50 of 67 posts
Wow! Once again I'm grateful to live in a country with sane labour laws - and glad to have the backing of a trade union. So because the managers couldn't do a decent job of managing their employee, he loses his job and all associated benefits?
Guess there's room for all types of sanity in a world this big.
Question: What a person that IS the exceptionally skilled person but that drags down the team, should do to not drag down the team?
Don't be imperious or brusque. Learn to story-tell. Know how to present on the subject - if they're having race conditions, be able to explain race conditions well, for example. Don't pursue argument beyond it being productive, especially not for its own sake. Make sure you're not proposing your personal One True Way. Be trustworthy. At some point, people have to experience failure for themselves. You did, probably.…
I've had jobs where I was performing much better or much worse than other jobs simply due to fitting better or worse professionally with the personalities of other people I worked with (this is to a significant extent not dependent on me liking these people or getting along with them on a personal level).
A manager I know had a term for obnoxious over-achievers: "brilliant assholes". But there are other kinds of high achievers who should not leave because, after all, talent is talent. You don't say, "Bob wrote 70% of our product, and he's head and shoulders above the rest of the team, so he's got to go!" You should say, "How are we best utilizing our in-house talent? Does Bob engender resentment from the lesser progra…
> How are we best utilizing our in-house talent? This question definitely captures more of the nuance that I felt was naggingly lacking in the original post. It's easy to justify firing someone in very black and white terms, but it's a lot harder to take such an employee and turn them into a valuable member of the team again, even though that might be the best outcome. Not saying it can always be done -- I've seen ma…
Wow! Once again I'm grateful to live in a country with sane labour laws - and glad to have the backing of a trade union. So because the managers couldn't do a decent job of managing their employee, he loses his job and all associated benefits?
hey you've just made me happy I live in a sane country that lets my workplace get rid of people who ruin the work experience. I'm also glad I'm not forced to support a union. Guess there's room for all types of sanity in a world this big.
I'm the kind of developer the article mentions (at least some of my previous colleagues like to think so). But here is the deal. It is hard to work with me if you don't want to put enough energy into your own work. Because at my previous job there were people who told me that it is impossible (for them) to work with me, and all I could see that they didn't add ANY value to the project, but made me do stupid things li…
I bounced out of a big company for that and other reasons. I just could not deal with the culture. I work at a smaller company now, and am much happier, though it's still not a perfect fit.
The reality is that it's almost never a perfect fit. In these cases you have to realize that it's you that has to adapt to the company and not the other way around. I have an idiom that I use for these situations. "It's the job". It's the part of the job that they're paying you to do, that you don't like to do, but you do it anyway because that's the job. Make a rational decision to either get along with others or leave the company.
You can't have it both ways, they are paying you and not the other way around.
Now, I'm not saying you should give in to every idiot who wants you to change how you do things. You should definitely fight back against stupidity. But you have to learn to pick your battles and recognize when it's you that's being dumb and not them. And also realize that the apology is the cheapest and most effective career tool you have at your disposal. Nothing smooths over bad feelings like a well-worded apology. Try to do it even when it's not your fault.
This sounds similar to what I've experienced at various startups. The problem is that the people who have been around the longest tend to have more knowledge of the tools and techniques which relate to a specific project - Sometimes it even seems like their overall understanding of technology is superior too - But that is an illusion. I've changed companies a lot as a software engineer and I noticed that whenever I j…
Yes, I've seen this too. I think I've even been that person. (But that's a different story.) The first company I worked for claimed that most new employees took 6 months to ramp up to the internal tools & processes, which sounded absurd to me until I actually started ramping up myself. Holy cow. And the people who were entrenched in this company's particular way of doing things seemed like absolute geniuses until I r…
The thing is - if you zoom out, "experience" is nothing more than overspecialization in the particular environment you found yourself. That applies at the industry, society, evolutionary, and planetary levels as well. Organisms adapt to the particular circumstances that they live in. Usually these adaptations are beneficial, because otherwise they get pruned out and people adopt different ways of doing things. But sometimes the environment changes in a way that makes all that accumulated knowledge irrelevant, and you end up like the dinosaurs. Extinct.
I've found that most of the time, people's knowledge is the product of hard-won experience, and if you tear it down, you will encounter the same problems that led to them coming to those conclusions in the first place. But occasionally, something changes in the environment, and you need to tear things down to adapt. If you want to build off existing knowledge, become an employee, and join a company that's busy figuring out all the corollaries of the premise that founded it. If you want to challenge existing premises, become a founder, and look for areas where the environment has changed in a way that invalidates existing knowledge.
If you try to build something totally new and different by learning all the existing ways people have built stuff, you will probably fail (believe me, I've tried several times). Similarly, if you join an organization hoping to tear down all the wisdom they've accumulated and replace it with an outsider's perspective, you will probably meet significant resistance. Sometimes organisms have to die to learn.
Question: What a person that IS the exceptionally skilled person but that drags down the team, should do to not drag down the team?
One possible answer is that the most talented guy on the team shouldn't take on too large a share of the work. Sure, he can do any task better and faster than anyone else, but in doing so he's robbing the less talented team members of tasks that they could worked on. The overall team productivity might be higher if he sits back and pays close attention to what his teammates are getting stuck on and only spends his ti…
It's too easy to have the best members of a team do everything that's even remotely complex or 'difficult', and end up causing the others to stagnate as a result. The reasoning often becomes 'why learn something new when the smart guy will take care of it much faster?''
So you end up with one or two great programmers/designers/employees/whatever doing the 'tricky' stuff, and a large group of others basically doing the same grunt work day in, day out.
Then all you need is the top 'talent' to leave, and well, the company is in deep trouble. The other team members end up struggling to continue work that they never needed to learn how to do, or never got the chance to learn how to do.
I'm the kind of developer the article mentions (at least some of my previous colleagues like to think so). But here is the deal. It is hard to work with me if you don't want to put enough energy into your own work. Because at my previous job there were people who told me that it is impossible (for them) to work with me, and all I could see that they didn't add ANY value to the project, but made me do stupid things li…
The thing you need to realize is that the company is bigger than you are. If you can't work out a way to get along with others in your company, then you are the problem and not the people you perceive to be doing things wrong. You should go find a place that better fits your way of doing things. I bounced out of a big company for that and other reasons. I just could not deal with the culture. I work at a smaller comp…
Every story has two sides. But I really appreciate your comment.
Some financial firms have forced paid time off (atleast 5 consecutive days) to make sure they are never fully dependent on any one employee, and to fix it if they ever find themselves in that situation. (They also do it to make sure no one is covering up fraud by always working.)