In software, often the people are the source of stress. Building the software is easy to many in this industry, and the vast majority of the value produced came from someone who thought creating it was easy. Being surrounded by rock stars all doing something they find easy is sublime, and I encourage everyone to seek out those environments. They exist and are fleeting.
The stress comes from people who are bad at what they do and are trying to make it someone else's problem. They don't have vision for how they will accomplish what is asked of them. In their imagination, there is not a clear set of steps that can be burned down over the coming days and weeks to arrive at something of value. In their minds it is all chaos and uncertainty and they are desperate for the assurance of someone who knows what's going on.
The relationships that one develops with each category of person are fundamentally opposite. One is about enticing repeated interactions: You really get it, how do we work together in the future? And the other is about keeping a polite distance to prevent repeated interactions. How do I avoid meetings, projects, shared responsibilities, and future employment opportunities that involve this person?
> The stress comes from people who are bad at what they do and are trying to make it someone else's problem. They don't have vision for how they will accomplish what is asked of them. In their imagination, there is not a clear set of steps that can be burned down over the coming days and weeks to arrive at something of value. In their minds it is all chaos and uncertainty and they are desperate for the assurance of someone who knows what's going on.
Lots of assumptions here, obviously the reality is much more nuanced than this.
Well of course it's more complicated. But these 2 broad strokes do resonate with me as a meaningful bucketing. There are some people I see DMs from and go "ooh" and some people I see DMs from and go "well there goes my morning hand-holding them through something they should already both know and have internalized".
> some people I see DMs from and go "well there goes my morning hand-holding them through something they should already both know and have internalized".
Pre-emptively, I'm not saying anything below applies in your case :-).
A mismatch in the threshold of "they should already both know and have internalized" is where much of the friction in high-stress organisations comes from.
I see a lot of people expecting, as the parent post put it, "a clear set of steps that can be burned down [to get to a good result]", but entirely oblivious to the fact that the people they expect it from:
1. Don't have the organisational authority to organise it -- they can do "their part" but they can't tell people on whose work they depend what to do.
2. Don't have access to the same task-specific information as the person who expects it of them, and don't know who to ask because teams are heavily compartmentalised and/or hierarchical.
3. Don't have access to the same kind of organisational information as the person who expects it of them.
Much like responsibility, deflecting blame comes from above. In my experience, what the parent poster says is true: people who are bad at what they do and try to make it someone else's problem is probably the most common source of stress. But it is also my experience that the middle leadership layers of companies where this is a chronic problem is almost entirely populated by managers who try to make everything other people's problem, and whose teams end up having to deflect everything by proxy whether they want it or not.
I think this is part of the nuance that's lacking in the parent post. It's very hard for someone to work significantly above their organisation's level.
Agree - initiative is not innate, it is trained and built with experience (of rewards for taking initiative), just as waiting for direction is trained and built with experience (of micromanagement and threats to safety).
The worst of the worst in my experience is the person who ignores the existance of 1, 2, and 3, assumes their coworkers who have been conditioned to not stick their neck out are incompetent and are trying to "get one over" on everyone else, and uses that as moral justification to backstab people who would be happy to work with them. The sad part is that the result will only reinforce their belief system.
You will always be surrounded by people, and how you regard them will inform your experience of them. If you allow yourself to force a false dichotomy on others, it will eventually be forced back on you.
Very reasonable counterpoint. It's unfortunate you're addressing a bland dismissal that shouldn't carry weight on it's own. Everything is always more nuanced. Doesn't mean grantparent poster didn't have a good reductive shorthand. The dismissal didn't even bother trying to reframe.
But it's always an uphill climb because there is an internally-consistent manager-brain line of thinking for the workspace they've created, and it's really good at Uno-reversing any criticism of workplace norms as a problem with criticizer.
"Oh, you don't like working with people that are bad at their jobs? Sounds like someone's just not senior-ing hard enough."
>It is _also_ your job to make them less bad - this is good because your incentives are aligned.
This depends on the number of shits given. I can make anyone better who gives a shit, but there are a whole lot of people who don't and are irredeemable. If this seems to be the case, it's best to cut bait and find someone else quickly. In the 90s, it was "hire fast, fire fast," and somehow this was discarded. It was a tough but highly effective model for making really good teams.
To add to this, it seems people are either unwilling or unable to figure things out for themselves. There are some proprietary things that are really tough to figure out, but it seems a lot of devs these days spend about 5 minutes, then ask for help. "Back in the day," devs would spend a day or two banging their heads agains the before asking for help, and they were better for it.
This no shits given isn't limited to developers, but BAs, PMs, Biz and QA people. It seems a lot worse today than 10 years ago. I ended up spending a good chunk of my day doing people's jobs for them. The people that were hired to take stuff off my plate end up putting stuff on my plate.
Personally I'm with you on "many people no longer able to figure stuff out". However, we may differ on the time frames we're willing to "take" from them.
Back in the day, you figured stuff out on your own, because you had no other resources. I remember breaking my computer's ability to boot into a working DOS prompt (too long ago to remember what exactly went wrong and how I fixed it). I had a few hours until I would have to tell my dad that I "broke the computer" I had just gotten. That was motivation to try a lot of things and figure it out. My dad never knew in the end coz I fixed it. I also had no internet or other people around to ask for help even if I had wanted to.
But today, if I see someone struggling for a day or two on something that in the end I'll be able to solve for them in less than 5 minutes once they do ask, then I do think that's too long given they have the whole wide internet, AI tooling as well as coworkers to help them out available to them. The worst for me is when they struggle with the same type of stuff over and over or when they are unable to pick up the strategies I used when solving it for/with them. I try to solve things with them as much as I can but with some people it's just too frustrating. Like you want to just throw lots of things at the wall quickly and see if they stick but they're too slow / don't even seem to understand the concept or don't have enough ideas of what to try and throw at the wall.
> “well there goes my morning hand-holding them through something they should already both know and have internalized".
So where you work everyone works on the same things every day and the same patterns?
Sounds pretty circular if everyone just lives by the subset of understanding you prefer.
This is what smacks truest from my experience; companies stagnant because of workers like you focus on memorized maintenance routines. Internal evolution comes to a stand still as attention is put on memorization of existing process not evolution.
Again just anecdotally coworkers like you describe could be put to evolving process they seem to not connect well to. But patronizing seniors who just know codified routine, hold orgs backs.
This is almost delusionally disconnected from the types of dysfunction I've seen among juniors after years of working at the same company where they should have learned some basic shit like being able to e.g. properly read a stack trace, diagnose an issue by reading/searching logs, not storing secrets in git, etc.
I'm always willing to work with people on code/system design - in fact it's my favorite part of my job when someone says "how can I do this beter?" - but it is excruciating to have to handhold someone through a basic diagnosis routine for or provide the same basic feedback about logging or security the nth time.
You don’t have to. You chose the work, the employer.
In my experience your special literacy is everywhere these days. Lots of unemployed with your skills.
Excruciating dealing with colleagues like you that think we come hear to read your intrusive thoughts about others effort. Whole lot of contexts you fall short in.
More sad little man needing validation for his prior effort to get where he is. Eh, tough. Like I said your skills are everywhere; good job you’re a VHS copy of a VHS copy?
Great work following the social trend!
…Aside from configuration of machines others make, with software others make, what have you done that obliges us to bow and courtesy and earn your validation?
This website is a toxic mess. Am psyched the world has seen enough of software dev now to understand it’s real economic value, and the end of ZIRP pruning tech of empty economic effort.
I actually do a lot of mentoring and pairing. I actively move to get people that consistently fall short out of organizations. I'm sure there's plenty of work for people that consistently fuck up but can kind of stumble through making computers do stuff, I just don't want to work with them.
Being/staying motivated is like half the battle. Once more than half of the team has stopped caring the project is essentially dead. You should get away as soon as possible. In my experience as long as you care about the stuff are doing you are better than the bottom half of developers.
The coastline paradox, also known as "How long is the English coastline?", is the counterintuitive observation that the coastline of a landmass does not have a well-defined length. This results from the fractal curve-like properties of coastlines.
> The prevailing method of estimating the length of a border (or coastline) was to lay out n equal straight-line segments of length l with dividers on a map or aerial photograph.
> the sum of the segments monotonically increases when the common length of the segments decreases. In effect, the shorter the ruler, the longer the measured border
> The result most astounding to Richardson is that, under certain circumstances, as l approaches zero, the length of the coastline approaches infinity.
You are 100% correct, nobody wants to work with a "rock star" on a team. When I hear "rock star" I think diva. The best teams are made up of a group of competent people who get on with each other and do great work together - not a team where one or more people are god's gift and the others are subordinates. That kind of scenario doesn't last too long.
> They don't have vision for how they will accomplish what is asked of them.
Or they don't have the vision to know how others will accomplish what they are asking for.
This is a big struggle for me; people who want to play product owner, and make requests that are very ignorant of work required. Or think they know just what work is required and spell out development approaches despite not having any background or experience in software development.
They key really is getting to know what it is they really want to do and then deliver a solution. Which can be its own exercise in frustration.
Oh man I wish I knew I was being paid to be present and available
In my last full time job I worked for a tech consulting company that rented us out to teams at financial instutions that managed insane amounts of money. This was in 2021 before AI was common. I worked remotely, and the first month didn’t do anything — just waited for the corporate laptop to arrive etc. Then I worked 2 hours a day.
But I had to put 8 hours in the timesheets, and select what projects I was working on. And I always had a feeling of guilt about that, like I was helping my consulting company charge hours that I wasn’t really working. I just kept finishing the tasks I was assigned in the sprints, and then there was nothing more to do. I didn’t aggressively ask for more work, just took on what others did. This went on for a while, and I felt guilty. Working on my startups in the meantime, like those people who work multiple jobs. I didn’t realize this happens a lot.
On one of my calls with my immediate manager I mentioned I had some downtime — and he was like “oh you have downtime? That’s not good.” And then it became his problem. And I didnt get more work but from then on I felt this tension with him, and probably others downstream of it. Nothing concrete, but just the feeling slightly changed, for a few weeks. So I nicely resigned after 6 months, saying to HR that investors funded my startups but they want me to work on them fulltime. So I left on good terms.
I regret it, though, in retrospect. Because of my ethics I missed out on income that could have helped my family and people around me. That was a great salary for remote work 2 hours a day, and I would have invested over half of it in crypto and probably 3xed it all by now. I only left because my ethics bothered me, but I learned later how often “full time” jobs really aren’t. Like, at all!
Yep. I totally feel you. And then you see people just fill in 8hrs every day for the same stuff.
They don’t care about reality. They care about accountability. As long as the numbers are right, everybody’s happy. And if you’re out of budget. Hooray, one difficult meeting and everybody, the consulting agency, the champion inside, a few manager, get a nice increase in their budget and team size.
Unfortunately it’s not about the product, impact, quality, etc.. it’s just a game, and everybody’s just taking from the corporation/their customers (ultimately consumers).
> The stress comes from people who are bad at what they do and are trying to make it someone else's problem.
There's some irony in the way you try to pin the blame on a third-party, and while trying to denigrate it too. I think it warrants some soul searching. I mean, would you feel stressed if you had to endure a team member who threw blanket accusations at your competence and in the process blamed you for causing grief to other team members?
> They don't have vision for how they will accomplish what is asked of them. In their imagination, there is not a clear set of steps that can be burned down over the coming days and weeks to arrive at something of value.
There's a lot to unpack there. Only a highly disfuncional team would throw a team member to the wolves and leave them out to fend for themselves on a task that is relatively complex. No wonder people would feel stressed in that environment.
I know very well what working with non-10x engineers is.
I also know ver well that performance is a management and HR issue, not an engineering issue.
Your job as a competent engineer is to make your team work. Your responsibility is to help out fellow team members whenever they need to be unblocked, and create a healthy, accepting, tolerant work environment. Your job is to be trustable, not make others hate their job, and not be the toxic asshole who makes everyone miserable and drives others away from your team. Because otherwise it is you who create high-stress work environments, and burn out people.
Complaining about "DEI" is a cope mechanism of incompetent individuals, who prefer to fabricate conspiracies to justify why someone else was chosen over them. It's a rehash of the old argument of complaining about low-pay immigrants for stealing jobs that would otherwise be rightfully theirs.
This industry has basically no standards for what a software engineer should know and chronically underinvests in training people, then people will jump on hackernews and bitch about people not knowing what they're doing like they haven't been saying university is worthless for the past 7 years.
Sometimes "bad at what they do" is a manifestation of the environment in which they're doing the thing as opposed to incompetence. If the environment is healthy and is understanding of the asking of "stupid questions", that promotes a better exploration of both the problem and the potential solutions, which act to help form the vision of the path to the solution.
This is much easier when the relationships within the work environment are "good".
I work with a bunch of different personality types and geniunely like almost all of them. It just takes time to work out each individuals quirks and work with / around them.
I think it’s also possible to build relationships with people based on potential. Not every superstar was born that way. Most of them had help along the way.
Not being a rock star but showing potential is great. But there are some people who are allegedly always busy, in over their head, etc. And these are the type of people I agree that should be avoided. I've found that more often than not these people are always wasting time in meetings, chatting it up, only to complain about lack of time 1 hour later.
I'm not saying don't socialize and just work ; you just need to balance the two.
> And the other is about keeping a polite distance to prevent repeated interactions.
or, the other is about providing them the vision and the clear set of steps. Then checking their progress along those steps. (including revising the steps when the original plan diverges from the evolving reality).
Training and mentoring the people so they can become rock stars.
This comment and a sibling both brought up the issue of less experienced people and mentorship, which is important to clarify.
Some incompetence is a known quantity, and when it is known it will not produce stress. The junior dev on the team might not know how to do something. The team leadership should already have priced that in, and have a plan to help them if need be. If the junior dev's incompetence is creating stress, the root cause is leadership incompetence.
The kind of incompetence that produces stress is incompetence that is too impolite to mention. It can't be addressed through "mentorship" or "working together" because that would call the legitimacy of the role and the person filling it into question. Engineering managers who don't understand engineering, product managers who don't understand the product, etc. The list is long, and examples are common. The organization is built around the assumption that these people can do things that they are unable to do. That mismatch is the origin of stress.
Investing time in the 1st kind of incompetence is a good investment because you will get a good return on your time invested. The junior dev with potential becomes the rock star.
The 2nd kind of incompetence is often "Throwing good money after bad". These situations are not worth your time. There is unlikely to be an improvement, and you risk it backfiring especially if the problem is above you in the org chart.
You nailed it. I worked in a high-expectation consultancy for 15 years, and the biggest stress didn’t come from junior people being green. It came from leadership avoiding hard decisions.
One team member had a TBI. My manager gave him a custom track so he could succeed. That sounds kind, but it meant the rest of us had to constantly check in, fix problems, and slow down for him.
Another person had lots of field experience but couldn’t handle problems without getting emotional. He built walls around every challenge and pulled people into his frustrations. He had the title of senior consultant, but he couldn’t do the work without a junior staffer helping him every step.
Then there was a junior person who had already underperformed in another team. Instead of addressing it, leadership moved her to my team, where she had even less experience. If I gave her 10 basic tasks, she would typically only complete 7. Not challenging tasks, just needed follow-through. My boss told me to keep setting clear expectations and checking in more. But she just kept pulling time and attention away from the actual work.
She was also split 50/50 between her old team and my team. I kept telling my boss and the other SVP that this made no sense. If someone is underperforming, the worst thing you can do is give them two sets of responsibilities. There’s no way to hold them accountable. Any time she didn’t deliver, we’d say, “Well, maybe it’s because of her other team.”
And here’s what really got me. My boss admitted he wanted these people off the team while enabling them. I ultimately pushed the field guy to deliver actual work until he quit. I kept pushing for the junior staffer to be placed on one team that could pin down her underperformance until the other team took her back. Leadership talked about fixing things, but they wouldn’t act. And it put me in a role that I wasn’t supposed to fill, applying pressure on my teammates rather than support.
This is an organizational deficiency with promoting engineers to manager roles as a matter of course. My boss was a fine engineer, but he was a horrible manager and no one held him accountable for his bullshit. I saw people go around him to complain to his superiors, but it wasn’t well received or productive.
There is also people with just toxic personalities that everybody tries to avoid. In Europe unfortunately, is not easy to get rid of such characters and they often victimize teams and jeopardize entire projects.
Septic avoidance and minimizing interactions, sticking to process and keeping the distance are absolutely necessary for mental health.
Not all relationships are equal, so don't just prioritize relationships, but those that are valuable.
You can't ignore people who bad at what they do and are trying to make it someone else's problem, but you can find allies who are good at what they do and want to take some pride and ownership in the same things you do.
If someone doesn't have a vision for how they will accomplish what is asked of them, that's an opportunity for mentorship. They might not take it from you, but you can offer it.
I actually think the really dangerous people are the ones you encourage people to seek out: those who think everything is easy. That to me is a sign of Dunning-Kruger. I'd rather sit down with somebody who says "I don't know yet how to solve this, but we'll work it out", than somebody who says "it's easy we don't need to think too hard about this" or "it's hard and so I won't even try".
Also, meetings, shared responsibilities - they're part of getting stuff done as part of a team. Instead of trying to avoid them, try to improve them. Learn the people skills needed to help a person change their habits towards being the productive ally that adds to a team rather than takes away from it.
It's not easy, it's hard, but you will figure it out. If I was working with you, I'd say "we", not "you" but alas...
>If someone doesn't have a vision for how they will accomplish what is asked of them, that's an opportunity for mentorship.
I agree with your overall sentiment, but there’s another dynamic which doesn’t always lend itself well to a mentorship role: when the leader has no vision other than some vague concept. Sometimes we can politely corral them, but it’s extremely frustrating when that “vision” is predicated on some magic, black box operation that they think happens and they won’t listen to any technical advice on why their vision may not be feasible.
To the OPs point, we have limited resources in time, labor, patience, etc. It’s worth consciously deciding where those are best spent.
In my experience there's several types of work stress in software.
One is people / process stress; related to the steps needed to get work done, including approvals and negotiations to decide what to do.
Another is operational stress; related to keeping a service running; some of that can be people or process stress, but if your service is growing rapidly it might just be organic operational stress.
There's also the stress of getting the work done in a reasonable time.
Some people are better at managing the different kinds of stress.
Anyway, I think the moral of the post is when you rage quit, say "fuck this shit, I quit" rather than "fuck you all, I quit" ... keep the rage pointed at the system rather than the people :P Unless it's just like one person who is really intent on making your job hell. You might be able to get away with singling out one person, rather than doing the Oprah thing and "everybody look under your chair, you get a fuck you" :P
I think this characterization implies a dichotomy that bothers me.
Work is certainly not my top priority, but I spend a ton of my time on my job, and I would like to feel fulfilled and happy doing it. Have capable colleagues that you can trust to pull their weight is a big part of that.
In general, I’ve found that the clock-in, clock-out types seem to take their mediocrity as almost a badge of honor, with this feeling that by not working hard or accomplishing a lot, they ensure the business is not getting overmuch value out of them.
This is so sad, IMO. If at all possible, work should be fun. As programmers, we have more opportunity for that than most, and should take advantage. Is that perspective “Live to Work”?
I would say that you are in a unique place of privilege in that regard. I believe the common experience of many people is that any task, if it be work, cannot be pleasing. The requirement to continue to complete any task in exchange for the necessities of life induces a disparity of spirit that will dull even the most hedonic of activities. The snuffing out of the freedom to choose to do the task is what induces pain into the experience.
For my part, I choose to have a good attitude about work. I am grateful for the opportunity to work. I do the best I can so that I can be proud of how I have spent my life. But I would never expect any job or any work to provide me fulfillment or happiness.
The person I replied to claims their work based social interactions are totally utilitarian and transactional - very Patrick Bateman. Should work be fun? Of course, in fact every part of life should be good and fun for everyone all the time, yes? But realistically, I wouldn't have any fun working with this guy. If other peoples "mediocrity" is spoiling the "fun" for you, then you should consider building your own fun zone - no boring, mediocre people allowed.
The quotations feel unnecessarily petty. Do you enjoy working with people who are incompetent? Is there anywhere you’d draw the line with regards to competence, at which point you’d rather not have to deal with them?
I think your statements belie a sense of honor in both trying to find enjoyment and in developing master with what you do. But I also don't think the underlying dichotomy is the how the GP phrased their characterization of others as "bad" and "making it someone elses problem".
That implies not only a value judgement dichotomy but also an added heap of shame of the morality on those on the wrong side of that value judgement.
Those are not the same things as being okay doing the work you're paid for and not reaching higher - people who do that may have a much better sense of the business value they are providing, and may be trying to avoid an experience of being exploited, or prioritizing their health and well being for the long term rather than the short term needs of the organization that pays them. There's often not a good way to know who is who.
Most of the time when enticed with a reward, people will work harder. When they aren't enticed enough, they tend not to, and that level is different for everyone. Companies seek those who have internal reward structures so they don't have to offer very much to entice people.
I think there is a nuanced but discernible difference between people who are talented and time constrained, and those who are mediocre/lazy/disinterested.
I used to think the incentive structure was a dominant factor, but my opinion on that has shifted over the past ten years. I think companies need to incentivize capable employees to stay, because they will often have many other opportunities elsewhere. But in most cases I don’t think those incentives cause people to work harder or more effectively than they would otherwise.
Well, while certainly true, this is max few % of stressful reality. In fact, basically none of the workstress in my past 15 years was caused by this.
I had this mindset when much, much more junior but these times... not so much. Maybe in purely startup small shop env, but thats not where most of us get work done.
> The stress comes from people who are bad at what they do and are trying to make it someone else's problem.
People who are currently bad what they do have their own work struggle, go home to their issue, have their hobbies and ambitions.
I think the article strikes a very good point when it says you don't want to be remembered as that guy but I would go even further in that it's not only about your reputation. When you are that guy, you are actually making everybody life slightly worse including your own.
I think there is more value in acting and being remembered as someone who can lift up rather than as someone who is distant and self-interested. It's not that you should always be mindlessly helpful but you can be assertive, give honest feedback, help people realise when they should take responsibility and define directions without being a pushover or exploited. In my experience, that's how you make people actually want to work with you. These are obviously hard skills to develop (at least they were and still are to me) but they are how so valuable.
To go back to your conclusion, for me it's more about "How do I convince the people I want to work with to work with me?" than about cutting people. After all, you will probably be the sole constant in all the work environments you will be a part of in your life so you are the biggest factor into making them work for you.
I've worked with many people like you, and I can say from experience that they are never as competent as they think they are. Often they are quite competent, and yet somehow they still overestimate their own skills and make life harder for everybody.
The type of person in question can be understood as somebody who equates technical skill with "not needing help." It's implicit in your post. Your mythical rock stars are extremely talented individuals, while what sets the incompetent apart is apparently their need for assurance from others.
The most competent software engineers (which I referred to as rock stars) don't know how to do everything. It can appear that way to someone unfamiliar with software. The best have a keen self-awareness of their abilities. They understand how much time it would take them to figure something out, and their likely success rate. When they give good estimates and have accurate confidence in their abilities, they create predictability for others around them. That makes them a net sink for stress.
Professional competence is literally the set of the things you can do without needing help. That doesn't mean you never ask for help. It just means there is an expectation that you can accomplish some things on your own. If you need help with everything forever, then you are fundamentally not useful and not coachable (which is worse). When needing help is anticipated and transient, that's a non-event. When your job is mostly things that you are expected to do yourself, but you need help with all of them, that creates stress for your peers and subordinates.
Indeed. Completely absent from the calculus are those who are glaringly ignorant as to their lack of knowledge or skill yet nevertheless supremely confident, and unchecked, will happily blaze a trail of carnage as far as they can travel.
It's a fine line, between blind, numbing incompetence and blind, bulldozing skill, and it's probably best to make sure youre never too close to either.
Similarly, once you’re looking for a new job, assuming you’re looking for roles with the same job title you had before, do everything you can to paint your previous job in a positive light even if it was miserable. If you don’t, interviewers are left wondering how to interpret your dissatisfaction at your previous job.
I think there's a degree to which this is true, I wouldn't walk into an interview and immediately start slagging off my old employer, but if you're interviewing me and get all worked up when I say bad things about them in answer to the question "why are you leaving your current job" that's on you and I won't regret not getting the job.
That's your choice. It's not a bad idea to answer "why are you leaving your current job" with "i'm looking for greater opportunities to [the opposite of why you are leaving your job]" and people can read between the lines AND have less of the concerns they would if you went guns blazing on the bridges behind you
You can be honest about why your previous employer wasn’t the right fit without burning bridges. I really dislike all of this “reading between the lines” aren’t Americans supposed to be direct?
No, American big business talking heads are supposed to be direct. American workers are supposed to be demure, grateful to have health insurance, and slot perfectly into the cog slot they've been assigned. Someone who openly criticizes their former employer is showing they have opinions and will resist being mistreated. I mean, showing they're not a team player.
Companies would much rather miss out on growth than have employees who have any kind of leverage over them.
> I really dislike all of this “reading between the lines” aren’t Americans supposed to be direct?
You're talking about a culture in which the standard greeting is "How are you?", and the standard response to said greeting is, "I'm fine!" - even when you're obviously not fine.
So, no, it's very much not direct. If you want to see what a "direct" software engineering culture looks like, look at Eastern Europe. There, people will routinely say things like "this code is crap", and no-one (including the author of said code!) bats an eye at it because it's supposed to be taken at face value, not as an insult.
Similar to goblin mode in dating you should 100% be yourself but only if you already have money and don't particularly need a given job. This works best when you already have a job.
You want the shitty PHB megacorps to reject you so you don't win to lose by getting a job you are going to hate.
Goblin mode as a consultant is charging whatever high price will make you want to work on a project, not doing sales, only answering the phone when and for whom you want, and letting your work speak for itself.
It's a Tuesday. You crawl out of bed. You don't brush your teeth, you don't take a shower, you don't do your hair, you don't even really get dressed. You grab a piece of cake or a pretzel or something from the fridge, climb under a blanket in whatever room your TV is in, and binge Star Wars content for the next 5 hours. Your boyfriend watches a portion of this from the kitchen table, sipping his coffee. Goblin mode.
Well, it's family name, too. You're just forgiven somewhat if you're outside the community and don't know which family is supposed to be given deference. Unless you're talking to a family of cops or the family that owns everything in the area, in which case you immediately agree with whatever political opinion they share (loudly).
This is the part of the interview where they seeking to understand your maturity and discretion. The actual reason for leaving is not the right answer. An answer showing that you understand social norms and have great self restraint is the right answer.
That part of the interview is a bunch of bullshit questions and socially acceptable answers from both sides. It is simply to check is candidate agrees to play the game by the rules.
Why are you looking for a new job? Because I have a dickhead manager and looking for a higher salary. But my answer will be I'm looking for new challenges, for opportunity to grow.
I'm not sure this is always the best approach. You should not vent, clearly; and it takes two to tango. However, some concrete and professional differences in opinion do matter. This could be an opportunity to express how you deal with such a challenge. You might explain (without revealing proprietary information) a difference of how the company's (new?) direction diverged from your professional path, how you informed the organization with an open mind, evaluated options and collaboratively decided it was time to move on, with sufficient notice and transition assistance.
I think there's some truth to what you're saying here, but there is room for some nuance.
In the US context, you should refrain from blaming specific people and if you possibly can you should explicitly leave open the possibility that everyone involved was trying to do their best (even if you really don't think this is true). Project an assumption of good faith even if it's not deserved.
But that said, you are looking for a new job and no one is going to be surprised to hear that there were things you don't like. More importantly, it's valuable to surface those things because you want to know if the things you didn't like are commonplace in the place you're interviewing.
It frequently doesn't work, but even when it doesn't you may still win yourself some unexpected allies who feel the same way. Sometimes those allies are in high places.
trust me, as someone who is probably genetically incapable of refusing the temptation to "be real", it's exhausting and often doesn't lead to good outcomes. but i'm glad it's possible that i inspire otherwise-quiet people with my bad attitude.
Honestly, this is the most toxic thing about job interviews for me - "hey can we do the thing where you pretend you didn't have a string of shitty jobs for 5 years? because obviously you were at fault if they were shitty."
Most jobs are pretty shitty, the idea that you need to demonstrate toxic positivity about how shitty it was is just so inauthentic.
As an interviewer it's too hard to tell if a candidate was indeed a victim of circumstance, like an acquisition that turned into a shitty job, or if they are just a disgruntled malcontent who will also be disgruntled and malcontent at your company. The downside of hiring a malcontent is huge. An interviewer can assume that most quality candidates are also aware of this dynamic and will wisely choose to represent the positive aspects of their job history. Hire a shrink to vent about the toxic shitty job.
> if they are just a disgruntled malcontent who will also be disgruntled and malcontent at your company. The downside of hiring a malcontent is huge.
Honestly, I get much better along with malcontents than with these "annoyingly positive" people. So, tastes differ.
> An interviewer can assume that most quality candidates are also aware of this dynamic and will wisely choose to represent the positive aspects of their job history.
Many highly qualified candidates are bad actors and/or bad self-promoters.
I prefer positive people but can deal with complainers if they’re actively looking to make thinking better. The problem is when malcontents only bitch and rarely do anything about it. That creates a toxic environment.
Also very much depends on whether they're right or not. You can always compain about something, are they actually complaining about the things that matter?
So you are saying it is better if the candidate lies.
Otherwise you will be forced to reject him because there might be a possibility that the problem was him.
Seems like you are hiring the best liars. Or at least the best at playing an arbitrary game of saying and not saying the correct things that won't trigger a rejection.
At this point, are you even needed? Maybe we could replace the interview process with a lottery system. Same result, less expensive.
> So you are saying it is better if the candidate lies.
This is a toxic framing of an essential test. Constructing polite fictions is an essential skill for collaboration - no less essential than coding. Saying you're leaving in part because "your vision for the product has drfted from leadership's" tells me you probably think they were a pack of moronic baboons and that if you feel that way about some of your future team mates you can keep it under wraps.
Exactly. It sounds like this test is working as expected based on the comments here. "Honest" might mean telling your coworker that their code sucks and you could do it better if they would just get out of your way. Tactful and positive would be saying they're off to a good start but here's some feedback. If someone can't describe their current or previous job in somewhat positive terms, I don't expect they'll be able to tactfully navigate difficult social situations in their new job.
Imagine if any other field operated this way, holy shit, how does tech only get away with this toxic shit? Good try their Joe, you only nicked the artery a little bit! Umm nope thats not how we cut the lumber Bill, don't worry though the rafters are invisible under the roof!
Notably, in aviation, when things go wrong it is generally looked at in a non-blame way so that training cam be updated to prevent similar problems in the future.
It might not be what makes you happy, but ATC isn't in the business of making you happy. They're in the business of saving lives, which this method accomplishes better than what you're expecting.
This isn't a "tech" thing, it's a "professional managerial class" thing.
This same tests is applied in banking, finance, consulting, sales, or any number of other highly renumerative white collar professions. The farther up the ladder you go the more important it becomes.
Even if the complaints are about things which are individually valid, the pattern is toxic.
Imagine a sports team. After running around for 45 minutes you're all probably tired. Would you rather work with someone who says "I'm tired, it's hot in here" or someone who focuses on encouraging those around them and talking about the team's accomplishments?
Part of the interview is proving you can avoid griping and focus on positives for at least 30-60 minutes, which is an essential skill anywhere.
Yes, and toxic positivity obliterates morale - being unable to acknowledge the negative outcomes of decisions means that you are just working towards some idiot's dream until you go play the roulette wheel again to figure out what the next people are not telling you about this place.
This is what literally makes tech workers go dream about farming.
Somewhere between toxic negativity and toxic positivity lies a middle ground and I think some of the comments here are presenting a bit of a false dichotomy.
When interviewing people, it’s usually possible to identify both extremes.
I’d prefer to hire someone who is not toxic. That goes for both extremes.
So going back to the originally assertion about not saying anything negative about the company when asked for reasons why you didn't like it? Why is saying something negative in that situation toxic? Crazy making man!
Saying something negative isn't inherently toxic. But saying something negative in a job interview is walking a line. Everyone everywhere has experienced negative factors in a prior job, so it's not exactly a revelation if someone has some war stories.
But what a person chooses to focus on does say something about how that person thinks.
If I ask someone what they dislike about their previous job, and they say something like "there were times when management would change directions at the last minute and cause the whole team to scramble", that's relatable and not necessarily a red flag.
If someone starts venting about low quality coworkers and shitty management, that's probably a red flag.
If someone volunteers negativity unprompted, that's probably a red flag.
My point here is that discerning between toxicity and honesty is usually possible, and what a person chooses to be negative about is a signal that helps tell the difference.
What I don't want on my team is a culture of negativity. A negative/pessimistic default is a wet blanket that shuts things down before they have a chance to get started. It creates tension where it need not exist. And it requires significant effort to counteract once it exists on the team. And to reiterate, I'm not looking for toxic positivity either. That's a separate problem.
I have never had a work environment ruined by toxic positivity—the normal healthy human reaction to that kind of environment is gallows humor, which hits the sweet spot between acknowledging the problem and showing a willingness to be there with your team.
I'm sure there are people out there who do have a toxic positivity problem, but my own anecdotal experience leads me to prefer to err on the side of rejecting unnecessarily grumpy people, because they tend to more frequently be a problem.
Toxic positivity in startups means the people not looking at the real issues role play startup while everything crumbles around them.
Maybe it works out in big orgs but if it infects the team of a small org your work environment will be ruined when you are all laid off after months or years of overworking to make a blind optimist happy. Unemployment coincident with burnout is worse than some negative feedback during the process.
What you're describing as toxic positivity is refusing to criticize things as they're happening. That's very different from not badmouthing people and teams behind their backs when they're not around to respond.
I think that may be a very cultural thing. I love gallows humor (I understand, enjoy, and cultivate it myself), but some cultures don't even understand it.
Well you are insanely lucky, its the default in most startups and many companies that I have seen consulting, working directly with, or otherwise. Leadership has no strategy, the business is growing or shrinking regardless of their decisions, the rank and file are restless because its obvious they are led by folks who have no idea what's going on, and nobody is allowed to talk about it.
Precisely. Fuck "yes people", and the commitment to lying to ourselves / to each other about broken things, as an institutional strategy. If we always dismiss the negatives, then responsibility and accountability have no meaning. Every organization needs a few people who act as the org's mirror and conscience.
Nobody is asking you to lie. Your previous job and coworkers may suck enough to pull watermelons through a garden hose sideways but the job interview is not about your previous job or coworkers. It's about showcasing how awesome _you_ are and how well _you_ accomplished whatever you managed to accomplish despite the suck. Keep the gripes to yourself even if for no other reason that it takes time away from tooting your own horn in a time limited situation.
Maybe, but I think there's a piece where you can be genuinely demonstrating in the interview context that you know how to reflect positively on an experience which obviously wasn't that all great or why would you have left it.
As an interviewer I'm not looking for IT WAS THE BEST WOO but rather "these were the elements I most appreciated, these were where I had opportunities to grow and push myself and here's what I ultimately got out of it." Yes, the "what went wrong" will be discussed too, but that's a different question, and as interviewee I look to pitch the downsides less in terms of "I had the worst boss/colleagues/projects/clients/whatever" and more of a circumspect kind of "elements A and B that had been really good early on were less of a priority later in my tenure, and I felt that management and I had differing priorities which was increasingly leading to unhelpful compromises in how things were done; although I stuck it out for some time to ensure as smooth a transition as possible, ultimately I came to feel that my seat would be better filled by some more aligned to the company goals."
Of course, but many of the interviewers are looking for you to be a fresh faced young pup whose had nothing but love and kisses from every previous position, hell I had my new job ask if they could call my last boss and talk with them in an interview like format - its wild.
If everywhere smells like shit, it’s time to check under your own shoe. I’ve had shitty jobs, snd while nowhere is perfect it’s definitely a stretch to say most jobs are shitty.
> the idea that you need to demonstrate toxic positivity
Nobody is asking you to do that. When I’m interviewing a candidate I’m assuming that this is a situation that they’re trying to impress/show themselves and if you’re shit talking your previous jobs then what are you going to be like if we disagree, or when you are interviewing for your next job? All I’m asking for is don’t shit talk your previous jobs and managers. If you can’t do that for 45 minutes I’m not going to hire you.
Most humans don't feel that way most of the time. Barring extreme cases of trauma we tend to be moderately happy regardless of circumstances. If you find yourself unable to be consistently at least neutral in a first world country that tends to be a mental health issue worth addressing.
> Barring extreme cases of trauma we tend to be moderately happy regardless of circumstances
This has been scientifically proved wrong. Sonja Lyubomirsky writes that people come with innate levels of happiness, and apart from temporary swings (in either direction, in response to life events and activities), and apart from hugely intrusive, foundational trauma, "level of happiness" tends to remain constant for any given person's lifetime, and said level covers a huge spectrum, when viewed across people.
You can train your mind and habits to increase your happiness, but still, in her famous book, she assigns 50% weight to what level you are born with, and says that, however you fine-tune yourself only amounts to the other 50%. And, since her book was published, more recent research assigns an even higher weight to the innate level of happiness (i.e., higher than 50%). The sun does shine differently on different people, and it's not a mental health issue, it's just a given.
Think about it: if someone is born with 100% happiness, and never thinks consciously about their own happiness level, they will still be more happy (1 * 0.6 + 0 * 0.4 = 0.6), roughly speaking, than a person who is born with 0% happiness, but does everything in their power to improve (0 * 0.6 + 1 * 0.4 = 0.4).
> If you find yourself unable to be consistently at least /neutral/ in a first world country[,] that tends to be a mental health issue worth addressing.
I do agree about this; just know that the playing field is not level at all, and people who are less than moderately happy most of the time are not outliers; they are frequent.
I agree and resent that work is just a place where I go to get lied to and lie right back. We've found that lying is a highly successful workplace strategy. But the point of the lying game is to never admit we're lying.
The pretzels people will twist themselves in to avoid the cognitive dissonance of lying all the time and not wanting to be a lair is maddening. I find facing it head on is a refreshing frame.
A bit of clarity taken from "The Complex Problem Of Lying For Jobs"
> But over the years, I have broadened my definition of a lie, and I have realized that most of my interlocutors (including my younger self) had actually narrowed our definition of lie into uselessness in an attempt to feel better about our behavior in the job market.
> If we set aside pedantic obsession over the technicalities of whether the exact words you said were a lie, as if we're all capricious djinn [...] If you have a good idea of what impression you are leaving your interlocutor with, and you are crafting statements such that the image in their head does not map to reality, then you are lying.
I feel like this is broad enough to make most social interactions lying - if someone asks how you're doing and you say "good" and don't immediately vent about issues, you're trying to create a different impression, and so on?
in many polite circumstances people don't want to hear a truth, they want things to go smoothly and easily.
>I feel like this is broad enough to make most social interactions lying
They... kinda are tho. We even have a term specifically for that: "white lie."
Sometimes, like in your "how are you?" example, various patterns of white lie ossify into social protocol where both participants are saying things they don't literally mean, but both participants know the game.
You've probably heard of cases where anglosphere people go traveling, ask people how they are (or use any of our other non-literal pleasantries), and are surprised when a real answer is given.
White lies are a necessary wrong; we just shouldn't turn them into a "modus operandi" at a company. Indeed I cannot wrap my brain around how white lies managed to turn into a social protocol in the Anglosphere. Dishonesty encoded in the most basic forms of verbal interaction. In comparison, when I say "good day" in my own language, it's truly not far-fetched that I do wish you a good day, when I'm greeting you.
> if someone asks how you're doing and you say "good" and don't immediately vent about issues, you're trying to create a different impression, and so on?
This is exactly how many people outside of US feel when they observe the customary American greeting exchange of "How are you?" / "I'm fine, thanks." when it's patently obvious that the person asking doesn't actually expect any other response even though the person responding is obviously not fine.
Like, we get that this is a cultural thing and that it would be wrong to ascribe some profound meaning to such individual interactions. At the same time, it does make the overall culture look bad when that sort of thing is expected and even enforced.
This approach is simplistic. People can usually direct their anger and frustration, to some extent. Most of the time, there's little reason to be angry at a coworker. Even if they mess up, it's usually not a huge deal, it's relatively easy to mitigate or undo; if you need mediation, there's a manager "nearby" in the org chart to escalate to, and so on. In addition, you probably have some camaraderie from past projects and assignments etc, which provides a basis of resilience when they (or you) screw up. Staying relatively pleasant and positive is not a huge challenge.
Conversely, when upper management fucks up, and refuses to take responsibility (for example: admit to making the wrong decision, or even reverse the decision), that's when cynicism runs rampant among the rank and file. And gee, what a surprise, VPs and CEOs try to avoid underlings that speak up about the screw-ups of the brass.
So a lot of companies try to avoid a lot of people? How does that work out?
In my experience most companies work with a wide distribution of people. This "we avoid hiring people who have defects" reads as disconnected from reality. Nobody is perfect, and most companies are average and have average people.
Call it "inauthentic" if you want but the reality is that the people who are interviewing you know they are going to have to work with you, and 99% of people prefer working alongside those who might boost their morale by demonstrating positivity and optimism (even if somewhat manufactured) instead of dwelling insufferably on all the negatives.
You can demonstrate toxic positivity about the desired work place I guess? Like, focus on how amazing it is going to be and what opportunities you see here that will clearly overshadow your previous job.
And yet despite this, miserable people who drag their misery and sorrow to every occasion and conversation continue to wander about and often will drag you down towards misery too if you let them. Avoiding misery is but a matter of self defence. The pat-down before you enter a nightclub doesn't feel great either.
In the kind of "high-stress work environment" they're talking about (it's a dysfunctional, toxic kind), the only example they give for value of relationships is getting recommendations afterwards.
Relationships can also help you mitigate the dysfunctional environment while you're there, with huge benefits to your health.
(Don't underestimate when people say stress kills you: it's not a video game health meter that recovers quickly and fully at the end of of an encounter; that bad stress is damage from which you never fully recover.)
But also be aware that supportive relationship oases in a dysfunctional environment can also slow leaving a place where you really-really should.
Some people need to be told to be more loyal than they are, but some people need to be told when loyalty is killing us and not doing any good. (Seriously, your supportive colleagues are probably bittersweet glad to see you escape, and you leaving might even give attention/leverage of management to help fix org problems, or encourage colleagues to expedite their own escape.)
I left a place that I'd been for a long time that had slowly become toxic (to me at least), but it took me maybe a year longer than it should have for me to leave, and the after-effects of the stress stuck with me for at least 6 months, possibly up to a year. My wife basically pointed out that I was "different": less of what makes me me (I'm fundamentally happy and optimistic).
Identify problems and act early, for the sake of your mental and eventually physical health.
Nah, realizing I don't have to constantly be thinking about relationship was what made things a lot less stressful for me. It's still stressful. But at least I get to mind my own business. Not saying everyone is like me. Maybe no one is. But it was better for me to mind my own business and internally say fork you to all the superficial relationships.
I would not know what is there, beyond relationships? Money does not buy happiness. Doing a good job and never getting credit for it... would make me feel miserable. Maybe I'm in such a lucky situation that I can say this, being able to put relationships above all else. Or maybe it is just my attachment grounded personality.
You should prioritize your mental health, but what the article is saying is that you actually need to GET AWAY from that type of situation, and the most likely route is using a chain of other people's hands to pull you out of the situation.
If you just want to hunker down and do your own thing you might survive, but the best thing to do is probably move on from such places (or work with your team when it gets bad to get out of it ya rite lol it goes on forever)
This is fine, until it comes time for layoffs. Like it or not, software development is an intensly social enterprise. Of course there are lone geniuses out there doing their own thing, and if that's you great. But it isn't how enterprise teams work. Particularly as you reach L7, every single aspect of your job will become political in one way or another.
Except the layoffs come from someone's spreadsheet 3 levels up, so even if everyone likes you that may not be enough. It definitely helps, but not guaranteed.
The point isn’t about saving yourself from the layoff, it’s about having a network to help you find a new job, because yeah, the layoffs are disconnected, heartless, and clumsy. If you’re always building at least a couple relationships, some of those people inevitably quit on their own, branch out, and after years of this, you end up with a decently sized network to help you out (and you can help them too when the time comes)
This is true even outside of software development. Working at pretty much any company is an inherently social enterprise dictated by those same rules you correctly pointed out.
There is a difference between tolerating a few things here and there because it’s a high stress environment and being okay with psychopaths mistreating and abusing you with the excuse of “high stress environment”. You do not need to put up with the latter. Fork em and you do not need those relationships to find your next job. The article trivializes a high stress work environment by putting everyone at the same baseline of “everyone is good, it’s just that the situation sucks”. In reality a lot of people are not good and the workplace is only “high stress” because those people are part of the workplace.
Indeed, often the workplace is high stress because the direct manager is incompetent and passes down their stress instead of shielding you off and empowering you. Networking- wise not such an issue to say 'fork you' to such incompetent soul, though I always keep in mind everyone deserves some degree of respect.
You're not alone, though we are rare. I desperately want to go back to minding my own business. Except... everyone I work with now seems to believe I've either lied my way in or desperately need a friend.
We're doing contracting without the upside/autonomy, let's not delude ourselves
Many of you are more valuable than you realize and it pains me to read so many comments about how you need to frame things "just so" in an interview, or "be careful not to lose your patience ever".
It's dehumanizing, and it undervalues your inherent worth and skill set.
Obviously don't be a jerk. Beyond that you will really damage your mental well-being if you're constantly trying to put on a certain face or worry how things will "play" with recruiters.
The best advice is to try to stay generally optimistic and collaborative, and to take pride in your craft and lead by example. But also not to discount the fact that you might in fact be more capable of following your passions and starting your own thing than you realize.
That was really nice to read, thanks. There's a lot of black and white thinking out there that can really get one down sometimes if you're not careful.
This reminds me of a research study Google conducted on itself some years ago asking the question: “What makes a team effective at Google?”. They found the most important to be psychological safety.
I try to apply this advice to almost all relationships. It reminds me of the famous quote, "Be nice to everyone you meet because they are fighting a battle you know nothing about, and that I can say from experience." [0]
I see life as emotional combat, that I'm always dealing with so many conflicting conflicts at the same time that I'm trying my best to manage everything and so is everyone else. It has been helping me SO much just to frame life this way.
Could you elaborate what you get out of that quote? I consider myself reasonably kind to people in general, but if people treat me badly I tend to take it personal.
It's less out of the quote and more from just the phrase "emotional combat."
I as well take things personally, aka, I feel attacked and pull away, shrinking into my experience and actively not wanting to imagine what someone else is going through.
When I focus on emotional combat, I can start to see how I'm not just experiencing this one specific conflict but am getting hit from multiple angles: financial, physical, social, familial, etc.
And then it almost makes me see that the other person is going through this combat as well, whether I want to see it or not.
So in short it can help me broaden my perspective on the conflicts I'm experiencing, which then can almost trick me into broadening it for the other person, and I can feel myself expand.
Social relationships are an underrated thing in general. Reading a HN comment many years ago about how scientifically the strongest correlation with happiness is the level of social relationships, really helped changed my perspective (along with observational studies on socializing/loneliness levels).
Humans are inherently social beings (there's also a positive correlation of intelligence in animal species with the level of socializing (eg: birds, dolphins, dogs, etc.)).
It's also good to see the term "Social Health" starting to being used these days.
I reckon (tried on myself) that to be able to still prioritize one's personal and work growth, that one could remove self-indulgences like watching TV, browsing public reels (any social media outside of your family and friends), listening to music alone, etc. and instead spend some of that extra time with others. To an extent, these relationships help with personal and work growth as well, for example getting better at a sport or traveling and learning about other industries respectively.
Yup, my relationship failed, because I was grinding in a startup (that also failed). It wasn't the only reason, but it had a big effect. Don't be like me.
This reminds me of my time in a high-pressure work environment. Every day felt like walking on a ticking time bomb, just waiting for something to explode.
Over time, I realized that excessive stress and anxiety weren’t solving anything. In fact, they were making relationships with my colleagues tense. So, I started trying to slow down, giving myself and others some space, and holding onto those connections that I might need in the future.
Because no matter how important work is, relationships will always be the most valuable asset.
Unfortunately this also seems to pave the way for cronyism, and people climbing up the ladder without merit to back it up. What should be considered is a balance between soft and hard skills.
True, but this is already how most management works regardless. If you don't optimize for the existing system you probably won't get high enough to change it at all.
I guess it depends. I'm not really good at relationships, but I can be a very normal guy in almost every scenario. So, I'm not like asking my manager what did he do during the weekend (but if he talks about it, I listen and follow the discussion), nevertheless he's a professional and if I do my job the way they like it, I'll get a promotion (if I don't, then I need to switch to another company).
Similarly, I'm not friend of my work colleagues, but I'm definitely not a dick. It's easy to not be a dick; it's not easy to be "friendly".
I don't have a work network at all. The people I have worked with in the past are Linkedin connections now (I do have the phone number of a couple of people, though), but I have never relied on them to get a job (among other things, because they live in different cities, countries and continents).
So, many of us are doing just good by being really really minimal social beasts. I think the key is to not being a dick, but that doesn't require being a social person in my experience.
To me this feels like you are thriving on regularly getting promoted? My guess... maybe that is for you the required confirmation that you are doing well?
Indeed I think the importance of a work network is overrated. My LinkedIn is hopelessly outdated and to switch jobs, all I seem to have/need is my CV and professional years. In my experience interviewing is very much like dating.
I relate to this a lot. A few years ago I was stuck in a toxic team. Every day felt like survival. I almost walked out one day after a heated meeting, but I stayed quiet, and a teammate quietly checked in with me later. That connection ended up helping me find a much better job a year later.
The job felt disposable, but that small human moment stayed with me.
I don't mix relationships with work. Being kind to people for the purposes of recommendations is not the same as a relationship.
Relationships are a thing I support outside work. Inside work, I might build rapport and expand my professional network; that is NOT THE SAME as meeting people for the sake of pursuing relationships, and as much as possible one should be kept away from the other.
If a workplace is split into different functions, and your coworkers in your function are not great, it can be difficult or seem bothersome to try to bond with coworkers in a different function
In companies with highly compartmentalized roles, too much work to do, and annoying co-workers, it's easy to say, "that's not my problem, go away." (With a bit more diplomacy, I'd hope.) I have always prioritized trying to be the stereotypical helpful person who might not know the answer to your question, but usually knows who to ask. The more your name comes up in the context of "who knows how X works?", the better your job security and future prospects through networking.
A lot of times that stereotypical helpful person is so helpful that junior people never learn to get rid of their dependence on that person. I know that because I've been that stereotypical helpful person. I realized something was amiss when a junior person who had been on the team for two years still came to me every other day to ask me questions. They spent minimal amount of effort thinking on their own, and then simply decided to ask me. And when I explained the solutions, they only remembered it for a short time and then one week later proceeded to ask me almost the same question again. I suppose this is the kind of proto-vibe-coder before the age of AI.
I think this falls into the category of learning how to be a good mentor.
In my case, this happened a few times. My solution to that is: whenever I get the impression that I'm becoming a critical path for someone else's day-to-day work, I start to wean them off the direct advice and start pointing them to where else they can find the answer instead. If they ask how to do X, I'll say, "Sorry, I'm a little busy with something else but here is the documentation for it. You might start by looking at Y or Z first. I'll check in later if I get a chance, let me know if you have any questions at that point."
There is an amount of this that needs to happen when you onboard to a team, but as new hires become more aware of the stack and where things are documented it should happen only for genuinely complicated things and the occasional brain fart. I have a junior who frequently asks me where things live in the code when you could ctrl-f to find the answer and it's pretty annoying.
That's when you give feedback that they should spend, say, 30 mins trying to sort the problem out for themselves before asking for help. And that they should take notes or ask over Slack so they can refer back to the answer.
Going through this now in my job. This was a great reminder that I’m not alone in all of this. It’s funny how easy it can be to feel like I’m the only one that’s struggling.
And it’s true about the “fuck yous”. It instantly reminded me of an old coworker that was let go and was trying to joke about it, but the F U sticks aside from anything else he accomplished while there.
In a high stress work environment, don't be an idiot who eats poorly, sleeps too little, drinks too much alcohol, and then thinks that during the day they can function at a high level without issues
Yeah, I completely agree about the article. I left shitty jobs always with a bang, but reference checks are not a thing (yet) where I live and they even don’t want to see work certificates.
Unfortunately, in 20+ years and some 7 jobs in the meantime, I never ever got a job by means of an inside recommendation nor was I able to get someone I recommended to be hired.
And the reason is, I'm a lowly engineer and that's all. I have zero clout, HR and hiring managers couldn't give a shit of whom I recommend. So if you "prioritize relationships" with an ulterior purpose (get hired eventually by some "relation"), then make sure you relate to the right people :)
That’s exactly my experience. I got once a position from my network. It was a foot soldier’s position at classmate’s dad’s company. Decades later my network are same foot soldiers or leads of something like me. Nobody’s there, who could hire me immediately in the case of emergency.
To give a personal counter-example, I'm an engineer. Based on my recommendation, my current employer hired a person who was fired (not laid off, but actually fired!) from my previous workplace. And my recommendation was itself based on a recommendation of my friend who is a former colleague at the aforementioned previous workplace, and whose opinion I trust and value highly. Of course the hiree still had to pass the interviews etc, and that isn't easy in and of itself; but my personal recommendation was what got their foot in the door.
+1, every time I've been asked "do you know anyone to hire" it's been anything but upfront. Just another way to see how desperate you are [through your network]... and by proxy, how hard to push.
I think I've been nice to my coworkers for over a decade. If I had felt the need to tell them "fuck you", I absolutely would have. Choose who you work with, and perhaps you won't have to say "fuck you".
funny how orgs reward people who hold grudges but not people who let them go or who just set normal adult boundaries.
i'm 'that guy' prety much everywhere, and one reason is that I really just like what I do and am usually committed to the mission over the org. defying pournelle's iron law plays out predictably though.
another reason is Pfeffer's triad, where power in any situation is a local weighting of Performance, Credentials, and Relationships. I trade on performance and cred, where my relationships are often polarized because of the imbalance being heavy in those other weightings.
a friend once described it as the relative skills of an indoors cat vs. an outdoors cat, where an outdoors cat catches all the mice and keeps off some larger animals but will probably scratch the furniture and cause a stink once in a while, whereas an indoors cat keeps the house mostly mouse-free, uses a litter box, but doesn't survive long outside, and if you don't empty the litter box often enough you get toxoplasmosis gondii and become a zombie.
managing indoors and outdoors cats together is an art.
Yes: do remember that your coworkers are enduring similar stresses as you.
Yes: do not snap, blow your top, yell, throw temper tantrums, act like a child.
However, no: in many places and industries, you do not have to rely on the good recommendation of your former boss or coworkers to get your next job. In fact, it may even be illegal for employers to disclose more than your dates of employment and job title. So, check the norms and laws in your region before staying in a toxic job, if you're there only hoping things will get better enough for a decent recommendation.
In software, often the people are the source of stress. Building the software is easy to many in this industry, and the vast majority of the value produced came from someone who thought creating it was easy. Being surrounded by rock stars all doing something they find easy is sublime, and I encourage everyone to seek out those environments. They exist and are fleeting.
The stress comes from people who are bad at what they do and are trying to make it someone else's problem. They don't have vision for how they will accomplish what is asked of them. In their imagination, there is not a clear set of steps that can be burned down over the coming days and weeks to arrive at something of value. In their minds it is all chaos and uncertainty and they are desperate for the assurance of someone who knows what's going on.
The relationships that one develops with each category of person are fundamentally opposite. One is about enticing repeated interactions: You really get it, how do we work together in the future? And the other is about keeping a polite distance to prevent repeated interactions. How do I avoid meetings, projects, shared responsibilities, and future employment opportunities that involve this person?
> The stress comes from people who are bad at what they do and are trying to make it someone else's problem. They don't have vision for how they will accomplish what is asked of them. In their imagination, there is not a clear set of steps that can be burned down over the coming days and weeks to arrive at something of value. In their minds it is all chaos and uncertainty and they are desperate for the assurance of someone who knows what's going on.
Lots of assumptions here, obviously the reality is much more nuanced than this.
Well of course it's more complicated. But these 2 broad strokes do resonate with me as a meaningful bucketing. There are some people I see DMs from and go "ooh" and some people I see DMs from and go "well there goes my morning hand-holding them through something they should already both know and have internalized".
> some people I see DMs from and go "well there goes my morning hand-holding them through something they should already both know and have internalized".
Pre-emptively, I'm not saying anything below applies in your case :-).
A mismatch in the threshold of "they should already both know and have internalized" is where much of the friction in high-stress organisations comes from.
I see a lot of people expecting, as the parent post put it, "a clear set of steps that can be burned down [to get to a good result]", but entirely oblivious to the fact that the people they expect it from:
1. Don't have the organisational authority to organise it -- they can do "their part" but they can't tell people on whose work they depend what to do.
2. Don't have access to the same task-specific information as the person who expects it of them, and don't know who to ask because teams are heavily compartmentalised and/or hierarchical.
3. Don't have access to the same kind of organisational information as the person who expects it of them.
Much like responsibility, deflecting blame comes from above. In my experience, what the parent poster says is true: people who are bad at what they do and try to make it someone else's problem is probably the most common source of stress. But it is also my experience that the middle leadership layers of companies where this is a chronic problem is almost entirely populated by managers who try to make everything other people's problem, and whose teams end up having to deflect everything by proxy whether they want it or not.
I think this is part of the nuance that's lacking in the parent post. It's very hard for someone to work significantly above their organisation's level.
Agree - initiative is not innate, it is trained and built with experience (of rewards for taking initiative), just as waiting for direction is trained and built with experience (of micromanagement and threats to safety).
The worst of the worst in my experience is the person who ignores the existance of 1, 2, and 3, assumes their coworkers who have been conditioned to not stick their neck out are incompetent and are trying to "get one over" on everyone else, and uses that as moral justification to backstab people who would be happy to work with them. The sad part is that the result will only reinforce their belief system.
You will always be surrounded by people, and how you regard them will inform your experience of them. If you allow yourself to force a false dichotomy on others, it will eventually be forced back on you.
Very reasonable counterpoint. It's unfortunate you're addressing a bland dismissal that shouldn't carry weight on it's own. Everything is always more nuanced. Doesn't mean grantparent poster didn't have a good reductive shorthand. The dismissal didn't even bother trying to reframe.
But it's always an uphill climb because there is an internally-consistent manager-brain line of thinking for the workspace they've created, and it's really good at Uno-reversing any criticism of workplace norms as a problem with criticizer.
"Oh, you don't like working with people that are bad at their jobs? Sounds like someone's just not senior-ing hard enough."
The issue with your last statement is that it _is_ part of your job and an increasingly important one at that.
It is _also_ your job to make them less bad - this is good because your incentives are aligned.
If they both can't be of use and can't be made better, then you need management to step in.
>It is _also_ your job to make them less bad - this is good because your incentives are aligned.
This depends on the number of shits given. I can make anyone better who gives a shit, but there are a whole lot of people who don't and are irredeemable. If this seems to be the case, it's best to cut bait and find someone else quickly. In the 90s, it was "hire fast, fire fast," and somehow this was discarded. It was a tough but highly effective model for making really good teams.
To add to this, it seems people are either unwilling or unable to figure things out for themselves. There are some proprietary things that are really tough to figure out, but it seems a lot of devs these days spend about 5 minutes, then ask for help. "Back in the day," devs would spend a day or two banging their heads agains the before asking for help, and they were better for it.
This no shits given isn't limited to developers, but BAs, PMs, Biz and QA people. It seems a lot worse today than 10 years ago. I ended up spending a good chunk of my day doing people's jobs for them. The people that were hired to take stuff off my plate end up putting stuff on my plate.
Maybe I'm just old and salty. Get off my lawn!
Personally I'm with you on "many people no longer able to figure stuff out". However, we may differ on the time frames we're willing to "take" from them.
Back in the day, you figured stuff out on your own, because you had no other resources. I remember breaking my computer's ability to boot into a working DOS prompt (too long ago to remember what exactly went wrong and how I fixed it). I had a few hours until I would have to tell my dad that I "broke the computer" I had just gotten. That was motivation to try a lot of things and figure it out. My dad never knew in the end coz I fixed it. I also had no internet or other people around to ask for help even if I had wanted to.
But today, if I see someone struggling for a day or two on something that in the end I'll be able to solve for them in less than 5 minutes once they do ask, then I do think that's too long given they have the whole wide internet, AI tooling as well as coworkers to help them out available to them. The worst for me is when they struggle with the same type of stuff over and over or when they are unable to pick up the strategies I used when solving it for/with them. I try to solve things with them as much as I can but with some people it's just too frustrating. Like you want to just throw lots of things at the wall quickly and see if they stick but they're too slow / don't even seem to understand the concept or don't have enough ideas of what to try and throw at the wall.
> “well there goes my morning hand-holding them through something they should already both know and have internalized".
So where you work everyone works on the same things every day and the same patterns?
Sounds pretty circular if everyone just lives by the subset of understanding you prefer.
This is what smacks truest from my experience; companies stagnant because of workers like you focus on memorized maintenance routines. Internal evolution comes to a stand still as attention is put on memorization of existing process not evolution.
Again just anecdotally coworkers like you describe could be put to evolving process they seem to not connect well to. But patronizing seniors who just know codified routine, hold orgs backs.
This is almost delusionally disconnected from the types of dysfunction I've seen among juniors after years of working at the same company where they should have learned some basic shit like being able to e.g. properly read a stack trace, diagnose an issue by reading/searching logs, not storing secrets in git, etc.
I'm always willing to work with people on code/system design - in fact it's my favorite part of my job when someone says "how can I do this beter?" - but it is excruciating to have to handhold someone through a basic diagnosis routine for or provide the same basic feedback about logging or security the nth time.
You don’t have to. You chose the work, the employer.
In my experience your special literacy is everywhere these days. Lots of unemployed with your skills.
Excruciating dealing with colleagues like you that think we come hear to read your intrusive thoughts about others effort. Whole lot of contexts you fall short in.
More sad little man needing validation for his prior effort to get where he is. Eh, tough. Like I said your skills are everywhere; good job you’re a VHS copy of a VHS copy?
Great work following the social trend!
…Aside from configuration of machines others make, with software others make, what have you done that obliges us to bow and courtesy and earn your validation?
This website is a toxic mess. Am psyched the world has seen enough of software dev now to understand it’s real economic value, and the end of ZIRP pruning tech of empty economic effort.
I actually do a lot of mentoring and pairing. I actively move to get people that consistently fall short out of organizations. I'm sure there's plenty of work for people that consistently fuck up but can kind of stumble through making computers do stuff, I just don't want to work with them.
Everyone: "Other people are so bad at what they do. Not me though"
Being/staying motivated is like half the battle. Once more than half of the team has stopped caring the project is essentially dead. You should get away as soon as possible. In my experience as long as you care about the stuff are doing you are better than the bottom half of developers.
Reality is always more nuanced. That's kind of reality's deal.
The coastline paradox, also known as "How long is the English coastline?", is the counterintuitive observation that the coastline of a landmass does not have a well-defined length. This results from the fractal curve-like properties of coastlines.
> The prevailing method of estimating the length of a border (or coastline) was to lay out n equal straight-line segments of length l with dividers on a map or aerial photograph.
> the sum of the segments monotonically increases when the common length of the segments decreases. In effect, the shorter the ruler, the longer the measured border
> The result most astounding to Richardson is that, under certain circumstances, as l approaches zero, the length of the coastline approaches infinity.
Am I the only one that finds nothing positive about the term “rock star” in when applied to people you work with?
I want to work with smart and accommodating individuals who are team players.
None of these qualities are what we expect of rock stars. When I hear “rock star” - I fear a cult of one.
You are 100% correct, nobody wants to work with a "rock star" on a team. When I hear "rock star" I think diva. The best teams are made up of a group of competent people who get on with each other and do great work together - not a team where one or more people are god's gift and the others are subordinates. That kind of scenario doesn't last too long.
thats a management problem. if management treats someone like a rock star, the team takes notice and reacts accordingly.
> They don't have vision for how they will accomplish what is asked of them.
Or they don't have the vision to know how others will accomplish what they are asking for.
This is a big struggle for me; people who want to play product owner, and make requests that are very ignorant of work required. Or think they know just what work is required and spell out development approaches despite not having any background or experience in software development.
They key really is getting to know what it is they really want to do and then deliver a solution. Which can be its own exercise in frustration.
100% agree and is exhausting.
The stress is just not that apparent in environments where projects tend to fail anyway, or environments that provide lots of job stability.
You basically get paid for being present instead of actually produce something useful.
I don’t understand why one would want to work in such an environment, except when you’re soft-retiring / soft-quitting
Oh man I wish I knew I was being paid to be present and available
In my last full time job I worked for a tech consulting company that rented us out to teams at financial instutions that managed insane amounts of money. This was in 2021 before AI was common. I worked remotely, and the first month didn’t do anything — just waited for the corporate laptop to arrive etc. Then I worked 2 hours a day.
But I had to put 8 hours in the timesheets, and select what projects I was working on. And I always had a feeling of guilt about that, like I was helping my consulting company charge hours that I wasn’t really working. I just kept finishing the tasks I was assigned in the sprints, and then there was nothing more to do. I didn’t aggressively ask for more work, just took on what others did. This went on for a while, and I felt guilty. Working on my startups in the meantime, like those people who work multiple jobs. I didn’t realize this happens a lot.
On one of my calls with my immediate manager I mentioned I had some downtime — and he was like “oh you have downtime? That’s not good.” And then it became his problem. And I didnt get more work but from then on I felt this tension with him, and probably others downstream of it. Nothing concrete, but just the feeling slightly changed, for a few weeks. So I nicely resigned after 6 months, saying to HR that investors funded my startups but they want me to work on them fulltime. So I left on good terms.
I regret it, though, in retrospect. Because of my ethics I missed out on income that could have helped my family and people around me. That was a great salary for remote work 2 hours a day, and I would have invested over half of it in crypto and probably 3xed it all by now. I only left because my ethics bothered me, but I learned later how often “full time” jobs really aren’t. Like, at all!
Yep. I totally feel you. And then you see people just fill in 8hrs every day for the same stuff.
They don’t care about reality. They care about accountability. As long as the numbers are right, everybody’s happy. And if you’re out of budget. Hooray, one difficult meeting and everybody, the consulting agency, the champion inside, a few manager, get a nice increase in their budget and team size.
Unfortunately it’s not about the product, impact, quality, etc.. it’s just a game, and everybody’s just taking from the corporation/their customers (ultimately consumers).
Thomas More would be proud.
> The stress comes from people who are bad at what they do and are trying to make it someone else's problem.
There's some irony in the way you try to pin the blame on a third-party, and while trying to denigrate it too. I think it warrants some soul searching. I mean, would you feel stressed if you had to endure a team member who threw blanket accusations at your competence and in the process blamed you for causing grief to other team members?
> They don't have vision for how they will accomplish what is asked of them. In their imagination, there is not a clear set of steps that can be burned down over the coming days and weeks to arrive at something of value.
There's a lot to unpack there. Only a highly disfuncional team would throw a team member to the wolves and leave them out to fend for themselves on a task that is relatively complex. No wonder people would feel stressed in that environment.
you have no idea how luxury this belief is.
having been the guy fixing the third party's bugs at almost every position, i side with the parent.
> you have no idea how luxury this belief is.
I know very well what working with non-10x engineers is.
I also know ver well that performance is a management and HR issue, not an engineering issue.
Your job as a competent engineer is to make your team work. Your responsibility is to help out fellow team members whenever they need to be unblocked, and create a healthy, accepting, tolerant work environment. Your job is to be trustable, not make others hate their job, and not be the toxic asshole who makes everyone miserable and drives others away from your team. Because otherwise it is you who create high-stress work environments, and burn out people.
Their belief just screams "DEI"
> Their belief just screams "DEI"
Complaining about "DEI" is a cope mechanism of incompetent individuals, who prefer to fabricate conspiracies to justify why someone else was chosen over them. It's a rehash of the old argument of complaining about low-pay immigrants for stealing jobs that would otherwise be rightfully theirs.
This industry has basically no standards for what a software engineer should know and chronically underinvests in training people, then people will jump on hackernews and bitch about people not knowing what they're doing like they haven't been saying university is worthless for the past 7 years.
[dead]
Sometimes "bad at what they do" is a manifestation of the environment in which they're doing the thing as opposed to incompetence. If the environment is healthy and is understanding of the asking of "stupid questions", that promotes a better exploration of both the problem and the potential solutions, which act to help form the vision of the path to the solution.
This is much easier when the relationships within the work environment are "good".
I work with a bunch of different personality types and geniunely like almost all of them. It just takes time to work out each individuals quirks and work with / around them.
I think it’s also possible to build relationships with people based on potential. Not every superstar was born that way. Most of them had help along the way.
Not being a rock star but showing potential is great. But there are some people who are allegedly always busy, in over their head, etc. And these are the type of people I agree that should be avoided. I've found that more often than not these people are always wasting time in meetings, chatting it up, only to complain about lack of time 1 hour later.
I'm not saying don't socialize and just work ; you just need to balance the two.
Folks might be surprised at how many of us would like to leave well enough alone. Crabs, bucket
> And the other is about keeping a polite distance to prevent repeated interactions.
or, the other is about providing them the vision and the clear set of steps. Then checking their progress along those steps. (including revising the steps when the original plan diverges from the evolving reality).
Training and mentoring the people so they can become rock stars.
This comment and a sibling both brought up the issue of less experienced people and mentorship, which is important to clarify.
Some incompetence is a known quantity, and when it is known it will not produce stress. The junior dev on the team might not know how to do something. The team leadership should already have priced that in, and have a plan to help them if need be. If the junior dev's incompetence is creating stress, the root cause is leadership incompetence.
The kind of incompetence that produces stress is incompetence that is too impolite to mention. It can't be addressed through "mentorship" or "working together" because that would call the legitimacy of the role and the person filling it into question. Engineering managers who don't understand engineering, product managers who don't understand the product, etc. The list is long, and examples are common. The organization is built around the assumption that these people can do things that they are unable to do. That mismatch is the origin of stress.
Investing time in the 1st kind of incompetence is a good investment because you will get a good return on your time invested. The junior dev with potential becomes the rock star. The 2nd kind of incompetence is often "Throwing good money after bad". These situations are not worth your time. There is unlikely to be an improvement, and you risk it backfiring especially if the problem is above you in the org chart.
You nailed it. I worked in a high-expectation consultancy for 15 years, and the biggest stress didn’t come from junior people being green. It came from leadership avoiding hard decisions.
One team member had a TBI. My manager gave him a custom track so he could succeed. That sounds kind, but it meant the rest of us had to constantly check in, fix problems, and slow down for him.
Another person had lots of field experience but couldn’t handle problems without getting emotional. He built walls around every challenge and pulled people into his frustrations. He had the title of senior consultant, but he couldn’t do the work without a junior staffer helping him every step.
Then there was a junior person who had already underperformed in another team. Instead of addressing it, leadership moved her to my team, where she had even less experience. If I gave her 10 basic tasks, she would typically only complete 7. Not challenging tasks, just needed follow-through. My boss told me to keep setting clear expectations and checking in more. But she just kept pulling time and attention away from the actual work.
She was also split 50/50 between her old team and my team. I kept telling my boss and the other SVP that this made no sense. If someone is underperforming, the worst thing you can do is give them two sets of responsibilities. There’s no way to hold them accountable. Any time she didn’t deliver, we’d say, “Well, maybe it’s because of her other team.”
And here’s what really got me. My boss admitted he wanted these people off the team while enabling them. I ultimately pushed the field guy to deliver actual work until he quit. I kept pushing for the junior staffer to be placed on one team that could pin down her underperformance until the other team took her back. Leadership talked about fixing things, but they wouldn’t act. And it put me in a role that I wasn’t supposed to fill, applying pressure on my teammates rather than support.
This is an organizational deficiency with promoting engineers to manager roles as a matter of course. My boss was a fine engineer, but he was a horrible manager and no one held him accountable for his bullshit. I saw people go around him to complain to his superiors, but it wasn’t well received or productive.
Shame on the organization.
a tech mentor once told me what makes a developer great is not how good or talented he is but how good he makes those around him be.
I think this is almost spot on.
There is also people with just toxic personalities that everybody tries to avoid. In Europe unfortunately, is not easy to get rid of such characters and they often victimize teams and jeopardize entire projects.
Septic avoidance and minimizing interactions, sticking to process and keeping the distance are absolutely necessary for mental health.
Not all relationships are equal, so don't just prioritize relationships, but those that are valuable.
You can't ignore people who bad at what they do and are trying to make it someone else's problem, but you can find allies who are good at what they do and want to take some pride and ownership in the same things you do.
If someone doesn't have a vision for how they will accomplish what is asked of them, that's an opportunity for mentorship. They might not take it from you, but you can offer it.
I actually think the really dangerous people are the ones you encourage people to seek out: those who think everything is easy. That to me is a sign of Dunning-Kruger. I'd rather sit down with somebody who says "I don't know yet how to solve this, but we'll work it out", than somebody who says "it's easy we don't need to think too hard about this" or "it's hard and so I won't even try".
Also, meetings, shared responsibilities - they're part of getting stuff done as part of a team. Instead of trying to avoid them, try to improve them. Learn the people skills needed to help a person change their habits towards being the productive ally that adds to a team rather than takes away from it.
It's not easy, it's hard, but you will figure it out. If I was working with you, I'd say "we", not "you" but alas...
>If someone doesn't have a vision for how they will accomplish what is asked of them, that's an opportunity for mentorship.
I agree with your overall sentiment, but there’s another dynamic which doesn’t always lend itself well to a mentorship role: when the leader has no vision other than some vague concept. Sometimes we can politely corral them, but it’s extremely frustrating when that “vision” is predicated on some magic, black box operation that they think happens and they won’t listen to any technical advice on why their vision may not be feasible.
To the OPs point, we have limited resources in time, labor, patience, etc. It’s worth consciously deciding where those are best spent.
In my experience there's several types of work stress in software.
One is people / process stress; related to the steps needed to get work done, including approvals and negotiations to decide what to do.
Another is operational stress; related to keeping a service running; some of that can be people or process stress, but if your service is growing rapidly it might just be organic operational stress.
There's also the stress of getting the work done in a reasonable time.
Some people are better at managing the different kinds of stress.
Anyway, I think the moral of the post is when you rage quit, say "fuck this shit, I quit" rather than "fuck you all, I quit" ... keep the rage pointed at the system rather than the people :P Unless it's just like one person who is really intent on making your job hell. You might be able to get away with singling out one person, rather than doing the Oprah thing and "everybody look under your chair, you get a fuck you" :P
This seems like a very specific perspective, I take it you're the "Live to Work" kind of person?
I think this characterization implies a dichotomy that bothers me.
Work is certainly not my top priority, but I spend a ton of my time on my job, and I would like to feel fulfilled and happy doing it. Have capable colleagues that you can trust to pull their weight is a big part of that.
In general, I’ve found that the clock-in, clock-out types seem to take their mediocrity as almost a badge of honor, with this feeling that by not working hard or accomplishing a lot, they ensure the business is not getting overmuch value out of them.
This is so sad, IMO. If at all possible, work should be fun. As programmers, we have more opportunity for that than most, and should take advantage. Is that perspective “Live to Work”?
I would say that you are in a unique place of privilege in that regard. I believe the common experience of many people is that any task, if it be work, cannot be pleasing. The requirement to continue to complete any task in exchange for the necessities of life induces a disparity of spirit that will dull even the most hedonic of activities. The snuffing out of the freedom to choose to do the task is what induces pain into the experience.
For my part, I choose to have a good attitude about work. I am grateful for the opportunity to work. I do the best I can so that I can be proud of how I have spent my life. But I would never expect any job or any work to provide me fulfillment or happiness.
The person I replied to claims their work based social interactions are totally utilitarian and transactional - very Patrick Bateman. Should work be fun? Of course, in fact every part of life should be good and fun for everyone all the time, yes? But realistically, I wouldn't have any fun working with this guy. If other peoples "mediocrity" is spoiling the "fun" for you, then you should consider building your own fun zone - no boring, mediocre people allowed.
The quotations feel unnecessarily petty. Do you enjoy working with people who are incompetent? Is there anywhere you’d draw the line with regards to competence, at which point you’d rather not have to deal with them?
I think your statements belie a sense of honor in both trying to find enjoyment and in developing master with what you do. But I also don't think the underlying dichotomy is the how the GP phrased their characterization of others as "bad" and "making it someone elses problem".
That implies not only a value judgement dichotomy but also an added heap of shame of the morality on those on the wrong side of that value judgement.
Those are not the same things as being okay doing the work you're paid for and not reaching higher - people who do that may have a much better sense of the business value they are providing, and may be trying to avoid an experience of being exploited, or prioritizing their health and well being for the long term rather than the short term needs of the organization that pays them. There's often not a good way to know who is who.
Most of the time when enticed with a reward, people will work harder. When they aren't enticed enough, they tend not to, and that level is different for everyone. Companies seek those who have internal reward structures so they don't have to offer very much to entice people.
I think there is a nuanced but discernible difference between people who are talented and time constrained, and those who are mediocre/lazy/disinterested.
I used to think the incentive structure was a dominant factor, but my opinion on that has shifted over the past ten years. I think companies need to incentivize capable employees to stay, because they will often have many other opportunities elsewhere. But in most cases I don’t think those incentives cause people to work harder or more effectively than they would otherwise.
Well, while certainly true, this is max few % of stressful reality. In fact, basically none of the workstress in my past 15 years was caused by this.
I had this mindset when much, much more junior but these times... not so much. Maybe in purely startup small shop env, but thats not where most of us get work done.
> The stress comes from people who are bad at what they do and are trying to make it someone else's problem.
People who are currently bad what they do have their own work struggle, go home to their issue, have their hobbies and ambitions.
I think the article strikes a very good point when it says you don't want to be remembered as that guy but I would go even further in that it's not only about your reputation. When you are that guy, you are actually making everybody life slightly worse including your own.
I think there is more value in acting and being remembered as someone who can lift up rather than as someone who is distant and self-interested. It's not that you should always be mindlessly helpful but you can be assertive, give honest feedback, help people realise when they should take responsibility and define directions without being a pushover or exploited. In my experience, that's how you make people actually want to work with you. These are obviously hard skills to develop (at least they were and still are to me) but they are how so valuable.
To go back to your conclusion, for me it's more about "How do I convince the people I want to work with to work with me?" than about cutting people. After all, you will probably be the sole constant in all the work environments you will be a part of in your life so you are the biggest factor into making them work for you.
Software that is for a customer or end user is not about the builder alone, or primarily.
Software is for people (end users/customers) to use, and is made to work for people.
Learning the people side of building, and delivering, and helping people with it is key.
Of course, some people in any office environment will play work in pursuit of achieving a daycare or high school for adults.
I've worked with many people like you, and I can say from experience that they are never as competent as they think they are. Often they are quite competent, and yet somehow they still overestimate their own skills and make life harder for everybody.
The type of person in question can be understood as somebody who equates technical skill with "not needing help." It's implicit in your post. Your mythical rock stars are extremely talented individuals, while what sets the incompetent apart is apparently their need for assurance from others.
The most competent software engineers (which I referred to as rock stars) don't know how to do everything. It can appear that way to someone unfamiliar with software. The best have a keen self-awareness of their abilities. They understand how much time it would take them to figure something out, and their likely success rate. When they give good estimates and have accurate confidence in their abilities, they create predictability for others around them. That makes them a net sink for stress.
Professional competence is literally the set of the things you can do without needing help. That doesn't mean you never ask for help. It just means there is an expectation that you can accomplish some things on your own. If you need help with everything forever, then you are fundamentally not useful and not coachable (which is worse). When needing help is anticipated and transient, that's a non-event. When your job is mostly things that you are expected to do yourself, but you need help with all of them, that creates stress for your peers and subordinates.
Indeed. Completely absent from the calculus are those who are glaringly ignorant as to their lack of knowledge or skill yet nevertheless supremely confident, and unchecked, will happily blaze a trail of carnage as far as they can travel.
It's a fine line, between blind, numbing incompetence and blind, bulldozing skill, and it's probably best to make sure youre never too close to either.
Similarly, once you’re looking for a new job, assuming you’re looking for roles with the same job title you had before, do everything you can to paint your previous job in a positive light even if it was miserable. If you don’t, interviewers are left wondering how to interpret your dissatisfaction at your previous job.
I think there's a degree to which this is true, I wouldn't walk into an interview and immediately start slagging off my old employer, but if you're interviewing me and get all worked up when I say bad things about them in answer to the question "why are you leaving your current job" that's on you and I won't regret not getting the job.
That's your choice. It's not a bad idea to answer "why are you leaving your current job" with "i'm looking for greater opportunities to [the opposite of why you are leaving your job]" and people can read between the lines AND have less of the concerns they would if you went guns blazing on the bridges behind you
You can be honest about why your previous employer wasn’t the right fit without burning bridges. I really dislike all of this “reading between the lines” aren’t Americans supposed to be direct?
No, American big business talking heads are supposed to be direct. American workers are supposed to be demure, grateful to have health insurance, and slot perfectly into the cog slot they've been assigned. Someone who openly criticizes their former employer is showing they have opinions and will resist being mistreated. I mean, showing they're not a team player.
Companies would much rather miss out on growth than have employees who have any kind of leverage over them.
> I really dislike all of this “reading between the lines” aren’t Americans supposed to be direct?
You're talking about a culture in which the standard greeting is "How are you?", and the standard response to said greeting is, "I'm fine!" - even when you're obviously not fine.
So, no, it's very much not direct. If you want to see what a "direct" software engineering culture looks like, look at Eastern Europe. There, people will routinely say things like "this code is crap", and no-one (including the author of said code!) bats an eye at it because it's supposed to be taken at face value, not as an insult.
Similar to goblin mode in dating you should 100% be yourself but only if you already have money and don't particularly need a given job. This works best when you already have a job.
You want the shitty PHB megacorps to reject you so you don't win to lose by getting a job you are going to hate.
I'm not sure I actually want to know, but what the hell is "goblin mode"?
Goblin mode as a consultant is charging whatever high price will make you want to work on a project, not doing sales, only answering the phone when and for whom you want, and letting your work speak for itself.
It's a Tuesday. You crawl out of bed. You don't brush your teeth, you don't take a shower, you don't do your hair, you don't even really get dressed. You grab a piece of cake or a pretzel or something from the fridge, climb under a blanket in whatever room your TV is in, and binge Star Wars content for the next 5 hours. Your boyfriend watches a portion of this from the kitchen table, sipping his coffee. Goblin mode.
> I really dislike all of this “reading between the lines” aren’t Americans supposed to be direct?
Only when talking to people beneath them. When talking to your superiors, you should be deferential and circumspect.
American society is more hierarchical than a feudal aristocracy. It's just based on money, skin color, and gender instead of family name.
Well, it's family name, too. You're just forgiven somewhat if you're outside the community and don't know which family is supposed to be given deference. Unless you're talking to a family of cops or the family that owns everything in the area, in which case you immediately agree with whatever political opinion they share (loudly).
I don't work for people who want me to read between the lines.
And bosses who read between my lines? Terrible.
Read some communications book. Reading between the lines and using tact are the (literal) textbook cases of poor communicators.
Are you suggesting lying? I'd rather say the truth. I'm sure you'll be more successful at getting the job.
This is the part of the interview where they seeking to understand your maturity and discretion. The actual reason for leaving is not the right answer. An answer showing that you understand social norms and have great self restraint is the right answer.
That part of the interview is a bunch of bullshit questions and socially acceptable answers from both sides. It is simply to check is candidate agrees to play the game by the rules.
Why are you looking for a new job? Because I have a dickhead manager and looking for a higher salary. But my answer will be I'm looking for new challenges, for opportunity to grow.
Both sides are telling lies during the interview.
I'm not sure this is always the best approach. You should not vent, clearly; and it takes two to tango. However, some concrete and professional differences in opinion do matter. This could be an opportunity to express how you deal with such a challenge. You might explain (without revealing proprietary information) a difference of how the company's (new?) direction diverged from your professional path, how you informed the organization with an open mind, evaluated options and collaboratively decided it was time to move on, with sufficient notice and transition assistance.
I think there's some truth to what you're saying here, but there is room for some nuance.
In the US context, you should refrain from blaming specific people and if you possibly can you should explicitly leave open the possibility that everyone involved was trying to do their best (even if you really don't think this is true). Project an assumption of good faith even if it's not deserved.
But that said, you are looking for a new job and no one is going to be surprised to hear that there were things you don't like. More importantly, it's valuable to surface those things because you want to know if the things you didn't like are commonplace in the place you're interviewing.
Having interviewed people who had previously worked at places I've worked, or where coworkers have worked, I can see this backfiring.
I've put candidates at ease by mentioning well known struggles at their current employer. Generates a laugh.
Newsflash, people looking for a job were either fired or unhappy about something.
The insistence on hearing only pleasurable falsehoods is not healthy.
This isn't always true. However, in the cases where it was incidental, your hiring manager is likely to be an enthusiastic reference.
The harder case is when your performance is lagging and there is a reduction in force.
The culture is unhealthy but unless you are in a position of power you have to play along.
Disagree. Change can start with anyone. Often its inspiring to see someone buckle the trend and “be real”.
There's that culture of positivity and can-do attitude rearing its head again.
It frequently doesn't work, but even when it doesn't you may still win yourself some unexpected allies who feel the same way. Sometimes those allies are in high places.
trust me, as someone who is probably genetically incapable of refusing the temptation to "be real", it's exhausting and often doesn't lead to good outcomes. but i'm glad it's possible that i inspire otherwise-quiet people with my bad attitude.
Honestly, this is the most toxic thing about job interviews for me - "hey can we do the thing where you pretend you didn't have a string of shitty jobs for 5 years? because obviously you were at fault if they were shitty."
Most jobs are pretty shitty, the idea that you need to demonstrate toxic positivity about how shitty it was is just so inauthentic.
As an interviewer it's too hard to tell if a candidate was indeed a victim of circumstance, like an acquisition that turned into a shitty job, or if they are just a disgruntled malcontent who will also be disgruntled and malcontent at your company. The downside of hiring a malcontent is huge. An interviewer can assume that most quality candidates are also aware of this dynamic and will wisely choose to represent the positive aspects of their job history. Hire a shrink to vent about the toxic shitty job.
> if they are just a disgruntled malcontent who will also be disgruntled and malcontent at your company. The downside of hiring a malcontent is huge.
Honestly, I get much better along with malcontents than with these "annoyingly positive" people. So, tastes differ.
> An interviewer can assume that most quality candidates are also aware of this dynamic and will wisely choose to represent the positive aspects of their job history.
Many highly qualified candidates are bad actors and/or bad self-promoters.
I prefer positive people but can deal with complainers if they’re actively looking to make thinking better. The problem is when malcontents only bitch and rarely do anything about it. That creates a toxic environment.
Also very much depends on whether they're right or not. You can always compain about something, are they actually complaining about the things that matter?
I don't know if you and GP are using 'malcontent' to refer to the same kind of person.
plural noun: malcontents :- a person who is dissatisfied and rebellious.
In Silicon Valley that is called a Founder.
And you don’t hire founders.
Pithily true, but what about acquihires?
They didn’t apply to a job posting.
Job posting's apply to them.
So you are saying it is better if the candidate lies.
Otherwise you will be forced to reject him because there might be a possibility that the problem was him.
Seems like you are hiring the best liars. Or at least the best at playing an arbitrary game of saying and not saying the correct things that won't trigger a rejection.
At this point, are you even needed? Maybe we could replace the interview process with a lottery system. Same result, less expensive.
> So you are saying it is better if the candidate lies.
This is a toxic framing of an essential test. Constructing polite fictions is an essential skill for collaboration - no less essential than coding. Saying you're leaving in part because "your vision for the product has drfted from leadership's" tells me you probably think they were a pack of moronic baboons and that if you feel that way about some of your future team mates you can keep it under wraps.
Exactly. It sounds like this test is working as expected based on the comments here. "Honest" might mean telling your coworker that their code sucks and you could do it better if they would just get out of your way. Tactful and positive would be saying they're off to a good start but here's some feedback. If someone can't describe their current or previous job in somewhat positive terms, I don't expect they'll be able to tactfully navigate difficult social situations in their new job.
Imagine if any other field operated this way, holy shit, how does tech only get away with this toxic shit? Good try their Joe, you only nicked the artery a little bit! Umm nope thats not how we cut the lumber Bill, don't worry though the rafters are invisible under the roof!
Tons of other fields operate this way.
Notably, in aviation, when things go wrong it is generally looked at in a non-blame way so that training cam be updated to prevent similar problems in the future.
It might not be what makes you happy, but ATC isn't in the business of making you happy. They're in the business of saving lives, which this method accomplishes better than what you're expecting.
This isn't a "tech" thing, it's a "professional managerial class" thing.
This same tests is applied in banking, finance, consulting, sales, or any number of other highly renumerative white collar professions. The farther up the ladder you go the more important it becomes.
> Constructing polite fictions is an essential skill for collaboration
This is very much culture-dependent, not some fundamental truth.
It is true for American culture, yes. There are many others.
Constant negativity kills team morale.
Even if the complaints are about things which are individually valid, the pattern is toxic.
Imagine a sports team. After running around for 45 minutes you're all probably tired. Would you rather work with someone who says "I'm tired, it's hot in here" or someone who focuses on encouraging those around them and talking about the team's accomplishments?
Part of the interview is proving you can avoid griping and focus on positives for at least 30-60 minutes, which is an essential skill anywhere.
Yes, and toxic positivity obliterates morale - being unable to acknowledge the negative outcomes of decisions means that you are just working towards some idiot's dream until you go play the roulette wheel again to figure out what the next people are not telling you about this place.
This is what literally makes tech workers go dream about farming.
Somewhere between toxic negativity and toxic positivity lies a middle ground and I think some of the comments here are presenting a bit of a false dichotomy.
When interviewing people, it’s usually possible to identify both extremes.
I’d prefer to hire someone who is not toxic. That goes for both extremes.
So going back to the originally assertion about not saying anything negative about the company when asked for reasons why you didn't like it? Why is saying something negative in that situation toxic? Crazy making man!
Saying something negative isn't inherently toxic. But saying something negative in a job interview is walking a line. Everyone everywhere has experienced negative factors in a prior job, so it's not exactly a revelation if someone has some war stories.
But what a person chooses to focus on does say something about how that person thinks.
If I ask someone what they dislike about their previous job, and they say something like "there were times when management would change directions at the last minute and cause the whole team to scramble", that's relatable and not necessarily a red flag.
If someone starts venting about low quality coworkers and shitty management, that's probably a red flag.
If someone volunteers negativity unprompted, that's probably a red flag.
My point here is that discerning between toxicity and honesty is usually possible, and what a person chooses to be negative about is a signal that helps tell the difference.
What I don't want on my team is a culture of negativity. A negative/pessimistic default is a wet blanket that shuts things down before they have a chance to get started. It creates tension where it need not exist. And it requires significant effort to counteract once it exists on the team. And to reiterate, I'm not looking for toxic positivity either. That's a separate problem.
I have never had a work environment ruined by toxic positivity—the normal healthy human reaction to that kind of environment is gallows humor, which hits the sweet spot between acknowledging the problem and showing a willingness to be there with your team.
I'm sure there are people out there who do have a toxic positivity problem, but my own anecdotal experience leads me to prefer to err on the side of rejecting unnecessarily grumpy people, because they tend to more frequently be a problem.
Toxic positivity in startups means the people not looking at the real issues role play startup while everything crumbles around them.
Maybe it works out in big orgs but if it infects the team of a small org your work environment will be ruined when you are all laid off after months or years of overworking to make a blind optimist happy. Unemployment coincident with burnout is worse than some negative feedback during the process.
What you're describing as toxic positivity is refusing to criticize things as they're happening. That's very different from not badmouthing people and teams behind their backs when they're not around to respond.
Yes, but I assumed that the lack of undercutting gossip not is what people are deeming “toxic positivity.”
> gallows humor
I think that may be a very cultural thing. I love gallows humor (I understand, enjoy, and cultivate it myself), but some cultures don't even understand it.
Yeah, probably true.
This entire subject is very culture-specific.
For example, if you try pulling US-style toxic positivity on a dev team from Poland or Russia, the result isn't going to be pretty all around.
Well you are insanely lucky, its the default in most startups and many companies that I have seen consulting, working directly with, or otherwise. Leadership has no strategy, the business is growing or shrinking regardless of their decisions, the rank and file are restless because its obvious they are led by folks who have no idea what's going on, and nobody is allowed to talk about it.
Precisely. Fuck "yes people", and the commitment to lying to ourselves / to each other about broken things, as an institutional strategy. If we always dismiss the negatives, then responsibility and accountability have no meaning. Every organization needs a few people who act as the org's mirror and conscience.
There's no reward for it, but it is required.
Nobody is asking you to lie. Your previous job and coworkers may suck enough to pull watermelons through a garden hose sideways but the job interview is not about your previous job or coworkers. It's about showcasing how awesome _you_ are and how well _you_ accomplished whatever you managed to accomplish despite the suck. Keep the gripes to yourself even if for no other reason that it takes time away from tooting your own horn in a time limited situation.
Is the candidate willing and able to find the positives in a negative experience?
This is an important skill, because this job sucks too :P
> the best liars
Maybe, but I think there's a piece where you can be genuinely demonstrating in the interview context that you know how to reflect positively on an experience which obviously wasn't that all great or why would you have left it.
As an interviewer I'm not looking for IT WAS THE BEST WOO but rather "these were the elements I most appreciated, these were where I had opportunities to grow and push myself and here's what I ultimately got out of it." Yes, the "what went wrong" will be discussed too, but that's a different question, and as interviewee I look to pitch the downsides less in terms of "I had the worst boss/colleagues/projects/clients/whatever" and more of a circumspect kind of "elements A and B that had been really good early on were less of a priority later in my tenure, and I felt that management and I had differing priorities which was increasingly leading to unhelpful compromises in how things were done; although I stuck it out for some time to ensure as smooth a transition as possible, ultimately I came to feel that my seat would be better filled by some more aligned to the company goals."
Of course, but many of the interviewers are looking for you to be a fresh faced young pup whose had nothing but love and kisses from every previous position, hell I had my new job ask if they could call my last boss and talk with them in an interview like format - its wild.
> most jobs are pretty shitty.
If everywhere smells like shit, it’s time to check under your own shoe. I’ve had shitty jobs, snd while nowhere is perfect it’s definitely a stretch to say most jobs are shitty.
> the idea that you need to demonstrate toxic positivity
Nobody is asking you to do that. When I’m interviewing a candidate I’m assuming that this is a situation that they’re trying to impress/show themselves and if you’re shit talking your previous jobs then what are you going to be like if we disagree, or when you are interviewing for your next job? All I’m asking for is don’t shit talk your previous jobs and managers. If you can’t do that for 45 minutes I’m not going to hire you.
> If everywhere smells like shit, it’s time to check under your own shoe.
LOL, are you kidding? The human condition is mostly shitty.
Most humans don't feel that way most of the time. Barring extreme cases of trauma we tend to be moderately happy regardless of circumstances. If you find yourself unable to be consistently at least neutral in a first world country that tends to be a mental health issue worth addressing.
> Barring extreme cases of trauma we tend to be moderately happy regardless of circumstances
This has been scientifically proved wrong. Sonja Lyubomirsky writes that people come with innate levels of happiness, and apart from temporary swings (in either direction, in response to life events and activities), and apart from hugely intrusive, foundational trauma, "level of happiness" tends to remain constant for any given person's lifetime, and said level covers a huge spectrum, when viewed across people.
You can train your mind and habits to increase your happiness, but still, in her famous book, she assigns 50% weight to what level you are born with, and says that, however you fine-tune yourself only amounts to the other 50%. And, since her book was published, more recent research assigns an even higher weight to the innate level of happiness (i.e., higher than 50%). The sun does shine differently on different people, and it's not a mental health issue, it's just a given.
Think about it: if someone is born with 100% happiness, and never thinks consciously about their own happiness level, they will still be more happy (1 * 0.6 + 0 * 0.4 = 0.6), roughly speaking, than a person who is born with 0% happiness, but does everything in their power to improve (0 * 0.6 + 1 * 0.4 = 0.4).
> If you find yourself unable to be consistently at least /neutral/ in a first world country[,] that tends to be a mental health issue worth addressing.
I do agree about this; just know that the playing field is not level at all, and people who are less than moderately happy most of the time are not outliers; they are frequent.
>is just so inauthentic
I agree and resent that work is just a place where I go to get lied to and lie right back. We've found that lying is a highly successful workplace strategy. But the point of the lying game is to never admit we're lying.
The pretzels people will twist themselves in to avoid the cognitive dissonance of lying all the time and not wanting to be a lair is maddening. I find facing it head on is a refreshing frame.
A bit of clarity taken from "The Complex Problem Of Lying For Jobs"
> But over the years, I have broadened my definition of a lie, and I have realized that most of my interlocutors (including my younger self) had actually narrowed our definition of lie into uselessness in an attempt to feel better about our behavior in the job market.
> If we set aside pedantic obsession over the technicalities of whether the exact words you said were a lie, as if we're all capricious djinn [...] If you have a good idea of what impression you are leaving your interlocutor with, and you are crafting statements such that the image in their head does not map to reality, then you are lying.
https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/the-complex-problem-of-lying...
I feel like this is broad enough to make most social interactions lying - if someone asks how you're doing and you say "good" and don't immediately vent about issues, you're trying to create a different impression, and so on?
in many polite circumstances people don't want to hear a truth, they want things to go smoothly and easily.
>I feel like this is broad enough to make most social interactions lying
They... kinda are tho. We even have a term specifically for that: "white lie."
Sometimes, like in your "how are you?" example, various patterns of white lie ossify into social protocol where both participants are saying things they don't literally mean, but both participants know the game.
You've probably heard of cases where anglosphere people go traveling, ask people how they are (or use any of our other non-literal pleasantries), and are surprised when a real answer is given.
White lies are a necessary wrong; we just shouldn't turn them into a "modus operandi" at a company. Indeed I cannot wrap my brain around how white lies managed to turn into a social protocol in the Anglosphere. Dishonesty encoded in the most basic forms of verbal interaction. In comparison, when I say "good day" in my own language, it's truly not far-fetched that I do wish you a good day, when I'm greeting you.
> if someone asks how you're doing and you say "good" and don't immediately vent about issues, you're trying to create a different impression, and so on?
This is exactly how many people outside of US feel when they observe the customary American greeting exchange of "How are you?" / "I'm fine, thanks." when it's patently obvious that the person asking doesn't actually expect any other response even though the person responding is obviously not fine.
Like, we get that this is a cultural thing and that it would be wrong to ascribe some profound meaning to such individual interactions. At the same time, it does make the overall culture look bad when that sort of thing is expected and even enforced.
Another way to think about it, are you able to tolerate the less than perfect aspect of a job while still being pleasant to coworkers.
A lot of people can’t, and a lot of companies try to avoid those people.
This approach is simplistic. People can usually direct their anger and frustration, to some extent. Most of the time, there's little reason to be angry at a coworker. Even if they mess up, it's usually not a huge deal, it's relatively easy to mitigate or undo; if you need mediation, there's a manager "nearby" in the org chart to escalate to, and so on. In addition, you probably have some camaraderie from past projects and assignments etc, which provides a basis of resilience when they (or you) screw up. Staying relatively pleasant and positive is not a huge challenge.
Conversely, when upper management fucks up, and refuses to take responsibility (for example: admit to making the wrong decision, or even reverse the decision), that's when cynicism runs rampant among the rank and file. And gee, what a surprise, VPs and CEOs try to avoid underlings that speak up about the screw-ups of the brass.
So a lot of companies try to avoid a lot of people? How does that work out?
In my experience most companies work with a wide distribution of people. This "we avoid hiring people who have defects" reads as disconnected from reality. Nobody is perfect, and most companies are average and have average people.
> are you able to tolerate the less than perfect aspect of a job while still being pleasant to coworkers.
I honestly tend to get much better along with cynic people (and find them much more pleasant). In other words: tastes differ.
Call it "inauthentic" if you want but the reality is that the people who are interviewing you know they are going to have to work with you, and 99% of people prefer working alongside those who might boost their morale by demonstrating positivity and optimism (even if somewhat manufactured) instead of dwelling insufferably on all the negatives.
You can demonstrate toxic positivity about the desired work place I guess? Like, focus on how amazing it is going to be and what opportunities you see here that will clearly overshadow your previous job.
You're already not getting past my first round.
"If you run into an asshole in the morning, you ran into an asshole. If you run into assholes all day, you're the asshole."
And yet despite this, miserable people who drag their misery and sorrow to every occasion and conversation continue to wander about and often will drag you down towards misery too if you let them. Avoiding misery is but a matter of self defence. The pat-down before you enter a nightclub doesn't feel great either.
When I interviewed people I took this the other way.
Someone who is going through the pain of looking for a new job is not going to like their current job.
If when asked, their answer is satisfaction with your current job, when most jobs are miserable, then i m thinking you're being dishonest with me.
In the kind of "high-stress work environment" they're talking about (it's a dysfunctional, toxic kind), the only example they give for value of relationships is getting recommendations afterwards.
Relationships can also help you mitigate the dysfunctional environment while you're there, with huge benefits to your health.
(Don't underestimate when people say stress kills you: it's not a video game health meter that recovers quickly and fully at the end of of an encounter; that bad stress is damage from which you never fully recover.)
But also be aware that supportive relationship oases in a dysfunctional environment can also slow leaving a place where you really-really should.
Some people need to be told to be more loyal than they are, but some people need to be told when loyalty is killing us and not doing any good. (Seriously, your supportive colleagues are probably bittersweet glad to see you escape, and you leaving might even give attention/leverage of management to help fix org problems, or encourage colleagues to expedite their own escape.)
I left a place that I'd been for a long time that had slowly become toxic (to me at least), but it took me maybe a year longer than it should have for me to leave, and the after-effects of the stress stuck with me for at least 6 months, possibly up to a year. My wife basically pointed out that I was "different": less of what makes me me (I'm fundamentally happy and optimistic).
Identify problems and act early, for the sake of your mental and eventually physical health.
Nah, realizing I don't have to constantly be thinking about relationship was what made things a lot less stressful for me. It's still stressful. But at least I get to mind my own business. Not saying everyone is like me. Maybe no one is. But it was better for me to mind my own business and internally say fork you to all the superficial relationships.
I would not know what is there, beyond relationships? Money does not buy happiness. Doing a good job and never getting credit for it... would make me feel miserable. Maybe I'm in such a lucky situation that I can say this, being able to put relationships above all else. Or maybe it is just my attachment grounded personality.
You should prioritize your mental health, but what the article is saying is that you actually need to GET AWAY from that type of situation, and the most likely route is using a chain of other people's hands to pull you out of the situation.
If you just want to hunker down and do your own thing you might survive, but the best thing to do is probably move on from such places (or work with your team when it gets bad to get out of it ya rite lol it goes on forever)
This is fine, until it comes time for layoffs. Like it or not, software development is an intensly social enterprise. Of course there are lone geniuses out there doing their own thing, and if that's you great. But it isn't how enterprise teams work. Particularly as you reach L7, every single aspect of your job will become political in one way or another.
Except the layoffs come from someone's spreadsheet 3 levels up, so even if everyone likes you that may not be enough. It definitely helps, but not guaranteed.
The point isn’t about saving yourself from the layoff, it’s about having a network to help you find a new job, because yeah, the layoffs are disconnected, heartless, and clumsy. If you’re always building at least a couple relationships, some of those people inevitably quit on their own, branch out, and after years of this, you end up with a decently sized network to help you out (and you can help them too when the time comes)
This is true even outside of software development. Working at pretty much any company is an inherently social enterprise dictated by those same rules you correctly pointed out.
There is a difference between tolerating a few things here and there because it’s a high stress environment and being okay with psychopaths mistreating and abusing you with the excuse of “high stress environment”. You do not need to put up with the latter. Fork em and you do not need those relationships to find your next job. The article trivializes a high stress work environment by putting everyone at the same baseline of “everyone is good, it’s just that the situation sucks”. In reality a lot of people are not good and the workplace is only “high stress” because those people are part of the workplace.
Indeed, often the workplace is high stress because the direct manager is incompetent and passes down their stress instead of shielding you off and empowering you. Networking- wise not such an issue to say 'fork you' to such incompetent soul, though I always keep in mind everyone deserves some degree of respect.
You're not alone, though we are rare. I desperately want to go back to minding my own business. Except... everyone I work with now seems to believe I've either lied my way in or desperately need a friend.
We're doing contracting without the upside/autonomy, let's not delude ourselves
Many of you are more valuable than you realize and it pains me to read so many comments about how you need to frame things "just so" in an interview, or "be careful not to lose your patience ever".
It's dehumanizing, and it undervalues your inherent worth and skill set.
Obviously don't be a jerk. Beyond that you will really damage your mental well-being if you're constantly trying to put on a certain face or worry how things will "play" with recruiters.
The best advice is to try to stay generally optimistic and collaborative, and to take pride in your craft and lead by example. But also not to discount the fact that you might in fact be more capable of following your passions and starting your own thing than you realize.
That was really nice to read, thanks. There's a lot of black and white thinking out there that can really get one down sometimes if you're not careful.
This reminds me of a research study Google conducted on itself some years ago asking the question: “What makes a team effective at Google?”. They found the most important to be psychological safety.
https://rework.withgoogle.com/en/guides/understanding-team-e... https://archive.is/fFEgI
> asking the question: “What makes a team effective at Google?”
considering "effective at Google" == projects destined for the Graveyard, I feel like they could've been asking themselves better questions
I try to apply this advice to almost all relationships. It reminds me of the famous quote, "Be nice to everyone you meet because they are fighting a battle you know nothing about, and that I can say from experience." [0]
I see life as emotional combat, that I'm always dealing with so many conflicting conflicts at the same time that I'm trying my best to manage everything and so is everyone else. It has been helping me SO much just to frame life this way.
[0]: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/williams-fighting-battle-q...
Could you elaborate what you get out of that quote? I consider myself reasonably kind to people in general, but if people treat me badly I tend to take it personal.
It's less out of the quote and more from just the phrase "emotional combat."
I as well take things personally, aka, I feel attacked and pull away, shrinking into my experience and actively not wanting to imagine what someone else is going through.
When I focus on emotional combat, I can start to see how I'm not just experiencing this one specific conflict but am getting hit from multiple angles: financial, physical, social, familial, etc.
And then it almost makes me see that the other person is going through this combat as well, whether I want to see it or not.
So in short it can help me broaden my perspective on the conflicts I'm experiencing, which then can almost trick me into broadening it for the other person, and I can feel myself expand.
Social relationships are an underrated thing in general. Reading a HN comment many years ago about how scientifically the strongest correlation with happiness is the level of social relationships, really helped changed my perspective (along with observational studies on socializing/loneliness levels).
Humans are inherently social beings (there's also a positive correlation of intelligence in animal species with the level of socializing (eg: birds, dolphins, dogs, etc.)).
It's also good to see the term "Social Health" starting to being used these days.
I reckon (tried on myself) that to be able to still prioritize one's personal and work growth, that one could remove self-indulgences like watching TV, browsing public reels (any social media outside of your family and friends), listening to music alone, etc. and instead spend some of that extra time with others. To an extent, these relationships help with personal and work growth as well, for example getting better at a sport or traveling and learning about other industries respectively.
Yup, my relationship failed, because I was grinding in a startup (that also failed). It wasn't the only reason, but it had a big effect. Don't be like me.
"Powered by Bear ʕ•ᴥ•ʔ" -> "A privacy-first, no-nonsense, super-fast blogging platform No trackers, no javascript, no stylesheets. Just your words."
Yet, about 30% of the source of TFA is a stylesheet. I guess they mean no external stylesheet?
This reads in essence as a reminder to be empathetic. Thanks for that.
This reminds me of my time in a high-pressure work environment. Every day felt like walking on a ticking time bomb, just waiting for something to explode.
Over time, I realized that excessive stress and anxiety weren’t solving anything. In fact, they were making relationships with my colleagues tense. So, I started trying to slow down, giving myself and others some space, and holding onto those connections that I might need in the future.
Because no matter how important work is, relationships will always be the most valuable asset.
In a high-stress environment, try to sleep well and eat healthy. Sleep is important!
Relationships are always the most important thing in every line of work, and are often valued more than how good you are at your job.
- Want a promotion? I hope your manager likes you
- Need collaboration from colleagues? Better not be a dick to them
- Want to look for new opportunities? Better have a network
We are social beasts at the end of the day.
Unfortunately this also seems to pave the way for cronyism, and people climbing up the ladder without merit to back it up. What should be considered is a balance between soft and hard skills.
True, but this is already how most management works regardless. If you don't optimize for the existing system you probably won't get high enough to change it at all.
I guess it depends. I'm not really good at relationships, but I can be a very normal guy in almost every scenario. So, I'm not like asking my manager what did he do during the weekend (but if he talks about it, I listen and follow the discussion), nevertheless he's a professional and if I do my job the way they like it, I'll get a promotion (if I don't, then I need to switch to another company). Similarly, I'm not friend of my work colleagues, but I'm definitely not a dick. It's easy to not be a dick; it's not easy to be "friendly". I don't have a work network at all. The people I have worked with in the past are Linkedin connections now (I do have the phone number of a couple of people, though), but I have never relied on them to get a job (among other things, because they live in different cities, countries and continents).
So, many of us are doing just good by being really really minimal social beasts. I think the key is to not being a dick, but that doesn't require being a social person in my experience.
To me this feels like you are thriving on regularly getting promoted? My guess... maybe that is for you the required confirmation that you are doing well?
Indeed I think the importance of a work network is overrated. My LinkedIn is hopelessly outdated and to switch jobs, all I seem to have/need is my CV and professional years. In my experience interviewing is very much like dating.
I relate to this a lot. A few years ago I was stuck in a toxic team. Every day felt like survival. I almost walked out one day after a heated meeting, but I stayed quiet, and a teammate quietly checked in with me later. That connection ended up helping me find a much better job a year later.
The job felt disposable, but that small human moment stayed with me.
In a high-stress work environment (that you are not happy with), prioritize getting out.
What if I'm an introvert and maintaining relationships cause more stress than the job?
I don't mix relationships with work. Being kind to people for the purposes of recommendations is not the same as a relationship.
Relationships are a thing I support outside work. Inside work, I might build rapport and expand my professional network; that is NOT THE SAME as meeting people for the sake of pursuing relationships, and as much as possible one should be kept away from the other.
If a workplace is split into different functions, and your coworkers in your function are not great, it can be difficult or seem bothersome to try to bond with coworkers in a different function
In companies with highly compartmentalized roles, too much work to do, and annoying co-workers, it's easy to say, "that's not my problem, go away." (With a bit more diplomacy, I'd hope.) I have always prioritized trying to be the stereotypical helpful person who might not know the answer to your question, but usually knows who to ask. The more your name comes up in the context of "who knows how X works?", the better your job security and future prospects through networking.
A lot of times that stereotypical helpful person is so helpful that junior people never learn to get rid of their dependence on that person. I know that because I've been that stereotypical helpful person. I realized something was amiss when a junior person who had been on the team for two years still came to me every other day to ask me questions. They spent minimal amount of effort thinking on their own, and then simply decided to ask me. And when I explained the solutions, they only remembered it for a short time and then one week later proceeded to ask me almost the same question again. I suppose this is the kind of proto-vibe-coder before the age of AI.
I think this falls into the category of learning how to be a good mentor.
In my case, this happened a few times. My solution to that is: whenever I get the impression that I'm becoming a critical path for someone else's day-to-day work, I start to wean them off the direct advice and start pointing them to where else they can find the answer instead. If they ask how to do X, I'll say, "Sorry, I'm a little busy with something else but here is the documentation for it. You might start by looking at Y or Z first. I'll check in later if I get a chance, let me know if you have any questions at that point."
There is an amount of this that needs to happen when you onboard to a team, but as new hires become more aware of the stack and where things are documented it should happen only for genuinely complicated things and the occasional brain fart. I have a junior who frequently asks me where things live in the code when you could ctrl-f to find the answer and it's pretty annoying.
That's when you give feedback that they should spend, say, 30 mins trying to sort the problem out for themselves before asking for help. And that they should take notes or ask over Slack so they can refer back to the answer.
I don't think OP is advocating for bonding necessarily so much as being on good terms with everyone, not burning bridges, etc.
Going through this now in my job. This was a great reminder that I’m not alone in all of this. It’s funny how easy it can be to feel like I’m the only one that’s struggling.
And it’s true about the “fuck yous”. It instantly reminded me of an old coworker that was let go and was trying to joke about it, but the F U sticks aside from anything else he accomplished while there.
In a high stress work environment, don't be an idiot who eats poorly, sleeps too little, drinks too much alcohol, and then thinks that during the day they can function at a high level without issues
So what is the name of your company, and what is the name of your "culture" where it's ok to be racist?
Yeah, I completely agree about the article. I left shitty jobs always with a bang, but reference checks are not a thing (yet) where I live and they even don’t want to see work certificates.
Unfortunately, in 20+ years and some 7 jobs in the meantime, I never ever got a job by means of an inside recommendation nor was I able to get someone I recommended to be hired.
And the reason is, I'm a lowly engineer and that's all. I have zero clout, HR and hiring managers couldn't give a shit of whom I recommend. So if you "prioritize relationships" with an ulterior purpose (get hired eventually by some "relation"), then make sure you relate to the right people :)
That’s exactly my experience. I got once a position from my network. It was a foot soldier’s position at classmate’s dad’s company. Decades later my network are same foot soldiers or leads of something like me. Nobody’s there, who could hire me immediately in the case of emergency.
It really depends on company culture.
To give a personal counter-example, I'm an engineer. Based on my recommendation, my current employer hired a person who was fired (not laid off, but actually fired!) from my previous workplace. And my recommendation was itself based on a recommendation of my friend who is a former colleague at the aforementioned previous workplace, and whose opinion I trust and value highly. Of course the hiree still had to pass the interviews etc, and that isn't easy in and of itself; but my personal recommendation was what got their foot in the door.
+1, every time I've been asked "do you know anyone to hire" it's been anything but upfront. Just another way to see how desperate you are [through your network]... and by proxy, how hard to push.
Stress is also what makes it hard to develop those relationships
Thanks a lot for posting this, I really needed it today. Sometimes it’s hard to see the forest for the trees.
The source of stress is usually someone else's relationship
Why not "prioritize keeping your resume up to date and shiny" ?
How do you do this in a remote environment?
Keep your camera on. Say hello to everyone on your team every morning. Engage in idle chit-chat on Teams.
The majority of work behavior and relationship advice can be summarized down to 3 points.
1. Be nice.
2. Don't be an asshole.
3. Don't be a push-over. (Arguably the hardest as many people read that as "be an asshole". It is not.)
The same applies in remote environments.
Fuck that.
I think I've been nice to my coworkers for over a decade. If I had felt the need to tell them "fuck you", I absolutely would have. Choose who you work with, and perhaps you won't have to say "fuck you".
I read the first sentence three times, and then realized the author just had atrocious grammar. I couldn't continue on.
> think of the other person who is begging you and how it impacts them.
Even though they are probably your manipulative narcissistic manager or coworker?
bars
funny how orgs reward people who hold grudges but not people who let them go or who just set normal adult boundaries.
i'm 'that guy' prety much everywhere, and one reason is that I really just like what I do and am usually committed to the mission over the org. defying pournelle's iron law plays out predictably though.
another reason is Pfeffer's triad, where power in any situation is a local weighting of Performance, Credentials, and Relationships. I trade on performance and cred, where my relationships are often polarized because of the imbalance being heavy in those other weightings.
a friend once described it as the relative skills of an indoors cat vs. an outdoors cat, where an outdoors cat catches all the mice and keeps off some larger animals but will probably scratch the furniture and cause a stink once in a while, whereas an indoors cat keeps the house mostly mouse-free, uses a litter box, but doesn't survive long outside, and if you don't empty the litter box often enough you get toxoplasmosis gondii and become a zombie.
managing indoors and outdoors cats together is an art.
Yes: do remember that your coworkers are enduring similar stresses as you.
Yes: do not snap, blow your top, yell, throw temper tantrums, act like a child.
However, no: in many places and industries, you do not have to rely on the good recommendation of your former boss or coworkers to get your next job. In fact, it may even be illegal for employers to disclose more than your dates of employment and job title. So, check the norms and laws in your region before staying in a toxic job, if you're there only hoping things will get better enough for a decent recommendation.
Now rank your direct reports and select half a million of salary worth from the bottom quartile to right-size your team by COB. Details to follow.
sent from my iPhone
Had this happen to me and a teammate after an onsite where we were explicitly told "our team is safe from layoffs"
[dead]
[dead]
[flagged]