Ask HN: Not treated respectfully by colleague – advice?
I work with a competent jerk: https://www.pickardlaws.com/myleadership/myfiles/rtdocs/hbr/Competent%20Jerks,%20Lovable%20Fools%20&%20Formationa%20of%20Social%20Networks%200605.pdf
Backstory -- I joined my current team a year ago. It was falling apart. The team members hated each other and were trying to get each other fired. The team lead who’d joined a quarter before had quit to join another team largely due to conflict with one difficult coworker.
Then I joined as the lead. I helped to stabilize the team over the last year. It’s grown from four to ten engineers. Three engineers joined specifically to work with me.
Yet the entire time I’ve been on that team, that one difficult coworker has been criticizing and fighting almost everything I’ve done. That coworker was relatively inexperienced, yet was told by a previous director that he was meant to be the lead of this platform. Hence the fighting with the other lead from a year ago. And with me over the past year. It’s burning me out bad.
It mostly comes across in passive-aggressive comments, and in trying to argue and prove he is right about trivial things, with every bit of disagreement. It used to come up in terms of aggression towards his peers. That stopped when me and my manager intervened. Yet continues with me. It's clear he doesn't respect me as lead, and makes that clear in team meetings.
It makes everything harder. Even in an incident that caused a global outage for three hours, and where we didn't have alerts and had to get told by our users we were down, I get pushback on calling for a post-mortem since his work was involved. Now I have to back-channel to my manager (who wasn't in the room), and still face the . Just the friction alone that he adds in getting anything done makes doing the right thing often not worth it.
I'm at a loss. My other teammates love working with me. I was promoted last year. I'm two levels above this guy which means my company trusts me. I'm frankly wishing I could leave the team but it's difficult to transfer since I'm in something of a specialty and there aren't other positions at my level in the company.
My manager's been resistant to doing much of anything. I think he's tired of me bringing it up. He says that the engineer "gets along with [junior engineer who never disagrees with him]". He says the difficult engineer is improving and sees him trying. His feedback to me is not to let it bother me so much. He asks me what he should do to change his behavior (he's the manager, not me...).
I really just want to be able to come in to work and do my job without dealing with an asshole trying to one-up me or "score points" against me all day and without expecting conflict every time we're in the same meeting. I'm tired of the status and perception games and his overall impact on the team vibe and culture.
VP of Eng here. If we take your statements at face value, your manager isn’t doing his job. Toxic employees are death to companies and it’s management’s job to get rid of them. (After attempting to address the issue. But my experience is that toxics are gonna toxic. Don’t coddle them.)
If you’re willing to lightly scorch some bridges, talk to your skip-level manager. If that doesn’t work, or you don’t want to, your best option is to go work for a decent manager, either at the same company or another one. Life’s too short, and you’re not going to be able to fix the toxic employee.
In other words, get someone who can help, or get out. Take your friends with you.
Now how do I deal with an engineer who seems to be brilliant - though this is sometimes hard to gauge since code quality can be subjective - who always leaps in to answer things quicker and is loved by upper management because he, I guess, constantly codes even outside of work hours, but who is extremely grating to get along with. Lord I need a different job.
That sounds very familiar to me... I know of a guy like that, who will rapidly jump on and propose and implement half-baked "tactical" solutions to any production incident. As you say, he is valued by management, because he is very responsive, at all hours, and always has some kind of snake oil "fix" to offer for any problem, and generally maintains a bit of a "mad scientist" vibe.
The issue is that, most of his "fixes" are just rearranging deck chairs, increasing timeouts, decreasing timeouts, adding memory, upgrading random libraries, etc., and he's constantly operating in "emergency mode", trampling on other people's work and priorities to get his "urgent" stuff out the door. He also just sort of throws things at the wall - "what if we change / disable X to fix this, would that break any client use cases?"... well, I dunno buddy, you are the one proposing the change, you have access to the logs, you are the genius, why is it _my_ job to evaluate your stream of half-baked ideas to separate the wheat from the chaff?
Ultimately, we co-exist, and I'd even say there are things to learn from him, i.e. being responsive is important and hugely valued. Over time, I've learnt not to get sucked into his urgent, half-baked proposals to save the world, I just say look, if you think that's a good idea, go for it, do it, but... you don't get to force it down everyone's throat and pretend there is consensus, I have my own, different priorities that I am not going to drop for you.
This sounds similar to the guy I'm working with. He's great in certain ways and takes his job seriously but can be really grating to work with. (Frankly, I think it probably has something to do with taking stimulants, just based on similarities between him and another engineer I worked with who was open about being on a big dose of stimulants, and who resembles this guy but about 2x worse.)
Thank you for your advice.
> your manager isn’t doing his job
Yeah, I do believe this and agree. My manager's new, and hasn't gotten much guidance or mentorship. I feel like he depends on me for a lot, and since I don't have a clear answer for him in this situation since I'm actually involved in it, I think he doesn't know what to do. He's said in the past with respect to this engineer's conflict with a struggling engineer on the team -- publicly pointing out that engineer's mistakes and lack of progress -- that he was afraid to have this come up to our director's (his skip's) visibility to avoid making a bad impression.
I can see talking to my skip, and overall I think it'll have a decent chance of him being receptive, and that he has a good amount of trust for me. I think my manager will be understanding about what I've done and why, but it'll put friction and distance between me and him -- so far he's been an incredible advocate for me in everything. Everything except this, which is exactly what I really need him for, since it's affecting my well-being.
The hard part is pointing to specific behaviors that I'd like changed. It's really difficult since it can all be covered up as just doing work and participating in the team -- that's the nature of passive-aggressive behavior like this.
Based on what you’ve written, you owe it to your skip to have this conversation with him. This issue isn’t just affecting you, it’s affecting the whole team, and I guarantee it’s dragging down the performance of the team as a whole. (Team performance always jumps up after a toxic employee is removed, in my experience, no matter how brilliant or essential they seemed to be.)
Your manager’s fear of looking bad to his boss reflects his inexperience. (Or a dysfunctional organization, but let’s hope that’s not true.) It’s your skip’s job to provide mentoring to a new manager, and to support him in creating a high-performing team, which includes guiding him through using the company’s performance management process to take care of underperforming employees like your toxic coworker.
Since you have a good relationship with your skip, I think a frank conversation about the effect this person is having on the team will go well. You can also share that you’re worried about it blowing back on you, and your manager’s fear of looking bad. If your skip is smart, he’ll use that opportunity to take a more active hand in mentoring your manager without bringing your name into it.
This is phenomenal advice. The post itself strikes me as either lifted directly from reddit (experienceddevs or another sub), but your advice is generally great for any reader curious about how to handle this type of problem employee.
From the perspective of a line manager, your statement about not coddling and directly confronting the issue intuitively sound correct. If it's possible to address behavioral issues in this type of high-talent high-friction engineer, it actually doesn't hurt to bruise their ego a little--if anything, doing it respectfully means they listen, and value the feedback more than usual.
Edit: also, took a look at your profile--couldn't tell, what type of org are you VP of eng at? (Private, equity-funded, late-stage, early stage, fintech, biotech, saas, etc.). Curious as the advice rings sound, but I only saw your consultancy work.
Life's too short-- tell your manager you can't work like this. You resign unless something is done about it. If they value you, something will be done about it.
Pretty much everything else about my job is basically my dream job. I don't think the "it's him or me" position will work out, especially given I'm more two levels more senior. I think that would just cause me to lose a lot of trust either way. I'd rather fix his behavior, or have him encouraged to move teams without me threatening to leave.
I once had a dream job. I was employee #2 and today the company is worth multiple billions of dollars. I built much of the company's core technology myself.
It didn't take long for a few employees to turn that dream into a nightmare. It's not worth it, regardless of what you would be giving up.
It's not your job to "fix" them. I also wouldn't approach the employee myself as that may backfire. I'd voice my thoughts to their manager and offer to have a sit down between the three of you to see if it can be worked out. If nothing changes, I'd make a change myself.
Why the heck would you resign before talking directly to the other employee about the issue?
Have you discussed with HR? Toxic employees should be their responsibility too.
As others suggested, take note and proof. Start by copying the exact same content you've published here, and complete it with new toxic behaviour. What will create a body of proofs HR will need and will "expel it" from your head.
I would also meet your manager's manager, this situation has taken too long to resolve and your manager is not doing enough (as far as we know at least). Ask your N+1 whether he has heard of the situation, if he has not your manager is in troubles.
Finally, you have not described how others employees are living through this situation, they may be upset to and be able to help: - they can report the employee behaviour - they can react when the employee is not behaving correctly - they can provide feedbacks, ideas, support?
I wish you all the best, this is a hard situation you're living!
I haven't, because I want the support of my manager, and he's resistant to going to HR because he is afraid of looking bad to our director. Really crappy situation.
Another thing is: it's really difficult to point to specific cases that really are "HR-worthy". That's the nature of passive-aggressive behavior. His treatment of another engineer, who has since been fired for performance, early this year really did qualify for HR based on how distressed the other employee was.
I think I may have to bring this up to my manager's manager, since my manager doesn't want to. It'll hurt my relationship with my manager, but I think this is feedback he really does need to hear and receive, or he'll just keep tolerating competent jerks on his teams.
Several other employees have had issues with him. The sense I get is they're really just seeking peace at this point and it's clear they're avoiding him. Since he's been there since the beginning he knows a lot that no one else does, but they rarely approach him for help -- he's made it clear to me in early 1:1s he isn't interested in investing more time in trying to up-level his peers.
He does have a good relationship with a junior engineer on the team, though, and may be developing a good one with another engineer that he probably has more respect for than me.
The devil's advocate would lift a few points. The OP equates disagreement with conflict and sees the main cost as being loss of status and "hurting team vibe". They seem to make a point that their own main contribution is bringing stability (good vibes?) to the team.
It could be the story of a weak or unaware engineer/employee that has been promoted to a level they thought implied some sort of impunity. Because being reviewed or questioned weakens the public perception of them, they experience it as unfair and toxic. Using the word "trivial" to characterise critique directed towards them could be emotionally rather than technically motivated.
I think from what I've written, it could be possible to interpret this as the case. At least part of it's true -- I'm not nearly as experienced in some of the technologies this team uses as the other engineer who's been working on the team for a lot longer. I think I'm self-aware about what I know and what I don't, and defer to him in those cases. I do think that plays into why he doesn't seem to have much respect for me.
But the cases where we have the most conflict aren't those in which I'm reviewed or questioned, but in which I'm reviewing or questioning something about the other engineer. As an example -- there was recently an incident that resulted in a global outage for three hours due to a bad code change. The root cause was related to his change, which enabled another change to break the code. Users had to report this to us -- we didn't have alerts. The impact would directly affect growth and revenue, but in ways we can't quantitatively determine.
I said we should do a post-mortem, add an integration test that would prevent recurrence, and add an alert -- the other engineer vehemently pushed back, claiming that it was another team's fault, since the code was shared with them, and pushed for another action item that wouldn't improve our operational stance. The other engineer has never worked in an operationally excellent team, whereas I have -- any other engineer who has would see a post-mortem as obvious. I think the opposite that you describe is the case; the other engineer still sees himself as effectively 'the lead', and wants to prove it, so is vulnerable and sensitive to loss of status or criticism.
Overall I don't think what you've described is actually the real story. Several engineers both on the team and off the team have had complaints about this engineer, and the same thing happened with the previous lead, who was much more experienced than either of us. One engineer was distressed enough that it really should've warranted going to HR, which I suggested to my manager, who didn't follow through out of fear of it reflecting poorly on him, which is really unfortunate. I was brought into the team exactly because my style of leadership isn't top-down, brusque, or imposing -- I made it clear from the start my intention wasn't to unseat the other engineer as 'lead', and deliberately tried to make a lot of space for him to have ownership and growth and put him back on the promotion track.
You don't have to take my word about this, but the intention of my post is to get advice. My main goal isn't to solidify my performance or status -- I'm already comfortably trusted and performing well. My goal is not to come into work with a high risk of conflict and stress each week, and needing to contort myself to avoid this. What would your advice be if I am representing the truth?
Do you have someone functioning as senior engineer? That person should help establish the direction. Sometimes people think they are smarter than the head engineer and you get a lot of non congruent engineering that is hard to unwind from. I’d review the landscape and see what support you and your team is getting and what support this guy is getting. Who does his reviews? Do you have input? Could you influence his removal or not? He may be resentful that he is not running the team. After reviewing what levers you have, I’d consider meeting him in your office. Let him know you want to discuss some things. Let him know you will want to hear from him. Explain that it’s a challenge running the group, historically there have been issues even before you showed up. Point out that many skills are needed to run the group, and when he acts a certain way, it’s way harder for you and his is also demonstrating he is weak in these executive level skills. Then listen to him in his points. Discuss if relevant. Does he have points or is he a nut. Then, tell him you need to re-baseline expectations. Explain how things need to operate. Summarize the discussion in email and send it to him. Separately send a write up to your boss in the conversation. Again, this is not an attempt to throw him under the bus, just to get him aligned with direction. But if the re-baseline of expectations fails, you can work to take more steps regarding his review. I wonder if your team does not have a good well defined engineering leader.
I'm the "senior" engineer in this situation (actually, senior staff -- the other engineer is 'senior', though titles in this company are inflated by ~1 relative to standards at FAANG). I'm the designated engineering leader, and the rest of the team very much likes working with me and respects me a lot -- three of our engineers joined the team citing wanting to to work with me specifically, including one engineer from a previous team of mine, an internal transfer, and an external hire. I think the problem is he simply rejects me as the designated engineering leader, because he recognizes he is more knowledgeable than me about a set of technologies he has more experience with than I do.
I'm glad you brought this up, though: The only other person is the principal engineer, who I do think I have to continue to build a relationship with. That principal engineer worked very closely with the difficult engineer, and the difficult engineer has a lot of trust for the principal. The principal has a lot of trust for me, and supported my promotion to senior staff.
He's certainly resentful he's not running the team. He was told really early on by our previous director wanted him to be the lead of this team, despite big gaps in experience. He made a big deal about "officially" abdicating his role as lead to me when I joined, which was a bit much -- I had no intention of replacing him, but just to get the team functioning and working and not trying to get each other fired. At that point I had been moved against my own will and wanted to keep the door open to me going back to my previous team, which was closer to my interests, in 6-12 months.
I think he was put into a position of too much responsibility too soon, did a very good job on parts of it (the technical parts), and an awful part on other parts of it (the team leadership parts).
I think the direct conversation you mean is one potentially effective way to handle this, but things blew up with the last lead too, who was much more brusque. If I'm not careful, and he sees this as "pulling rank", I can see things blowing up once again.
I think your conversation with him could be professional, but you just need to point out You’re the leader and they gotta follow your direction and he doesn’t wanna be on board with that then he needs to find some other role which means leave your group and then work with management above you to make that happen but I’m assuming you can do the reviews for him and then penalize in that manner if you don’t have that ability to give them a poor review then something else is structurally wrong and where you are in that organization.
> was told by a previous director that he was meant to be the lead of this platform. Hence the fighting with the other lead from a year ago. And with me over the past year.
Have you (or higher ups) pointed out his immaturity and behavior are likely the exact reasons he wasn’t selected to lead the team, and if he continues on this path he is ensuring he will never advance at the company? That could do one of two things… get him to shift his attitude or find a new job where he can advance.
Do you have the power to get rid of him? Competent or not, this behavior sounds toxic to the team and likely isn’t worth it. Assuming what you said is accurate, as we’re only hearing the story from one perspective.
| Have you (or higher ups) pointed out his immaturity and behavior are likely the exact reasons he wasn’t selected to lead the team, and if he continues on this path he is ensuring he will never advance at the company? That could do one of two things… get him to shift his attitude or find a new job where he can advance.
This is currently my top option I'm considering. I'd like to deliver (or have my manager deliver) the feedback based on the leveling guidelines that include team leadership skills, and make it very unclear that this is the biggest blocker for his promotion, and unless he changes, he will not be promoted on the team.
I'm eager to move that forward to end up solving this problem and moving it out of the current state, which is intolerable to me, but it's not review time. Next time I meet with my manager I want to float this idea to him.
I personally can't get rid of him, and I know of at least one good engineer on the team who would be upset if he left, since he has a lot of historical knowledge about the stack no one else has -- no one on the team enjoyed working with him except for one junior engineer, so no one else has learned certain parts of the stack.
About whether he's toxic: things really switch back and forth. More recently, he's mostly stopped working with everyone but a junior engineer who he does have a good relationship with. He is responsible and a strong owner for the thing he owns. He does a lot of generous, unglamorous work for the team, like clearing up tech debt -- though he doesn't commit to things on the roadmap that'll help move the stack forward, I think out of a fear of failure, since I think a lot of his behavior is partially explained by insecurity -- but that's another conversation.
I think from his perspective, he would say that I'm not good enough to be the lead of this team, and he would be better at it than I am. In a couple dimensions (his historical knowledge/background, and his experience with the stack) he'd have a point, but still wrong overall, I think.
But either way, whether he respects me or not, I am owed to be treated as if he respects me. That's part of being a professional and a good teammate, and he should owe that equally to anyone on the team -- he doesn't do a good job at hiding his disdain for other people on the team, or many people outside the team either; when we were a bit closer, near to when I joined the team, he badmouthed almost everyone he currently works with, or has worked with.
There is advice to talk to upper manager or HR. You could do it, but it won’t solve the issue. If it was easy, there wouldn’t be these problems in the first place.
In situations like this, the best solution is expose externally and leave.
Ignore the guy.
Never give up against him. Push through your ways every single time.
Sooner or later he’ll get the point and he’ll leave.
> Push through your ways every single time.
This kind of sadly has been the most effective. Previously when I did this he'd re-litigate this over slack and in meetings again and again, trying to prove this was a bad decision. He's stopped doing that after my manager told him to knock it off.
I say "sadly" since this is basically pulling rank, which I don't want to have to do. But I don't think he'll leave -- he seems really entrenched in, having worked on the team for a lot longer, and seeming to enjoy it anyway.
It's also hard to ignore in team meetings without things being tense and awkward. I can easily come across as "the bad guy". And the last lead was a lot more willing to lay down the law like that -- the team completely fell apart and everyone tried to get each other fired, and it just took a single quarter for that lead to leave.
It's all risky and high-stakes, since I do really value my position and enjoy it (except for this) -- I can easily turn into the bad guy.
Have you brought it up directly with the other person?
Twice so far, though not in as stark terms, and not recently. Once, I told him to knock it off trying to make a peer engineer who was underperforming look bad in front of the team, and instead to inform our manager of cases where he believed the engineer was underperforming, but not to try to embarrass or humiliate him -- the other engineer was extremely distressed by this engineer. He did stop. Another case he seemed to understand in our 1:1, but ramped up writing long slack comments that read to me as passive-aggressive.
There's a very high risk of things blowing up since there isn't a strong groundwork of trust to begin with, and since things blew up with the previous lead who was too direct with him, so I'm wary to do this without the involvement of my manager.
At first when I joined the team we seemed to have a good amount of trust since I was sympathetic to things that happened in the past to him -- he was treated very unfairly from a director who'd since been fired who let blame travel down directly onto this engineer. The director way over-promised and underestimated and caused the team to face tons of criticism. Most of the burden fell on this engineer; his peers were very little help, and the project was way too large. It was doomed from the start. Everyone on the team flamed each other in year-end reviews. The lead said everyone on the team, including himself, should be fired. It was extremely bad.
Eventually as I disagreed with him and saw he really didn't want /anything/ he'd worked on to change, we started to have conflict. I ended up having a lot more responsibilities added, and decreased the rate at which I held 1:1s with all my peers -- I think he felt insulted, and called off our 1:1s completely.
> not in as stark terms, and not recently
What’s stopping you from having a frank talk with him on Monday?
I obviously know absolutely nothing about what is really going on.
>I'm tired of the status and perception games and his overall impact on the team vibe and culture.
I have never heard this sentence said by anyone who wasn't deeply invested in status and perception games.
>He says the difficult engineer is improving and sees him trying. His feedback to me is not to let it bother me so much. He asks me what he should do to change his behavior (he's the manager, not me...).
Which kinda shows that your manager does not agree with your viewpoint. If you take his words at face value, he is pretty much telling you that you are the problem.
Again, I don't know what is really happening. But if I read between the lines the picture seems to be the following: You have a engineer in your team who thinks you are a looser and incompetent. This is why he second guesses you at every point, because he does not believe that you can make adequate decisions. At the same time other coworkers "love working with you", I am absolutely sure they do, but I guess that they have very little respect for you as a leader, they love working with you because it allows them to do what they want. The opinion of your boss towards the "problem engineer" seems quite positive, which also suggests that your manager does not consider your judgements of your teammates as particularly relevant.
If you take all of this together the picture becomes quite clear. Nobody respect your leadership. Your staff doesn't and your manager doesn't.
I take issue with comments like this, firing off inflammatory criticism based on nothing but guesswork and extremely tenuous “deductions”. There’s like, 8 extremely debatable assumptions here.
Reading between the lines is fair but architecting entire narratives is a stretch. Even then, the narrative lacks logic: why are we arbitrarily trusting what the manager and engineer says “at face value” but not OP? Where on earth is it even remotely implied that OP lets the engineers do what they want?
Repeatedly saying “I don’t know what’s really happening buuut” is not a coupon to let you arrive at such a negative conclusion.
>why are we arbitrarily trusting what the manager and engineer says “at face value” but not OP?
Trust does not matter. The manager might be totally wrong and the guy is getting worse and worse. This does not matter for my argument, which is that the manager puts his opinions above the one of the team lead. And he sees the team lead as part of the problem. Do you think there is an alternative explanation besides the manager not believing in the leadership qualities of OP?
I am also not trusting what the problem guy says, except that OP calls him a competent jerk, which tells me that OP does not disagree that the problem guy is a capable engineer.
>Where on earth is it even remotely implied that OP lets the engineers do what they want?
I wrote it below. If you are the leader of 10 people, 9 of whom trust you and 1 constantly disagrees with you, you can still push through any decisions, because the 9 people will stand up for you and force the one guy to accept whatever you decide.
Imagine having to go to your manager because one guy in your team of 10 does not want to do a post mortem. There have to be 9 other guys who do not care at all about your decisions, else they would have immediately stood up for you, for something as reasonable as a post mortem.
So why do you love working for a leader, but do not care at all when the leader gets criticised for something extremely reasonable. They do not like him because of his leadership abilities. Maybe they like him because he is a nice person or because his lack of leadership gets them something they want.
In the first instance, even if you’re right and the manager thinks team lead is the problem here, it’s quite the leap to go straight to “questions his leadership qualities” over a single interpersonal conflict or difference in viewpoint. It’s plausible, sure. But the manager could just as easily be trying to avoid (needed) conflict.
To your second point, there’s MANY other explanations. We don’t know how the team reacted for a start - maybe they did back up OP. Or maybe, based on the alleged jerk’s aggressive behaviour to the team in the past, they felt scared to speak up. Or maybe they’re junior. Or maybe you’re right and all 9 people unanimously felt OP was in the wrong.
My point wasn’t any of this though, it was mainly: avoid coming to such harsh judgments based on so much extrapolation. Criticise the reported actions, sure, discuss some hypotheticals, but going straight for “you’re a bad leader” goes a bit beyond.
>We don’t know how the team reacted for a start
We know they reacted in a way which forced OP to go to his manager.
>Or maybe, based on the alleged jerk’s aggressive behaviour to the team in the past
If that were the case OP would have mentioned it. Workplace bullying is certainly more important than disagreeing and this would make a reasonable case to fire him. If the jerk was bullying his team and OP did not notice, that would prove my argument even more.
>Or maybe they’re junior.
There are 9 other people. And they weren't asked to stand up for their own opinion, but for their team leads opinion. I do not think this matters much. 9 people not standing up for you as a team lead is a very bad sign, even if they are all juniors.
>Or maybe you’re right and all 9 people unanimously felt OP was in the wrong.
This isn't my interpretation at all. My interpretation is that OP had one opinion the other guy had his and the rest did not particularly care either way.
>Criticise the reported actions, sure, discuss some hypotheticals, but going straight for “you’re a bad leader” goes a bit beyond.
But having to go through your manager to force through a totally reasonable decision that is yours to make is being a bad leader. I do not think that there is any alternative interpretation then that this event at least is a failure in leadership.
I am saying this because I want to tell OP how his situation sounds to a complete outsider. OP was there if the 9 guys all immediately stood up for him and told the other guy that he was clearly in the wrong, then this obviously disproves everything I said and OP knows that I am wrong. But if they did not, then he should reconsider his actions and at least allow for the possibility that this was a failure on part of his leadership.
> but I guess that they have very little respect for you as a leader, they love working with you because it allows them to do what they want.
How did you jump to this conclusion? I was following you all along and here you made a logic jump I don't understand
I think there are four pieces of evidence:
- One person on the team does not respect him. That is pretty unambiguous.
- His manager puts his own (in all likelihood, based on quite limited information) opinion about the one guy over the opinion of the team lead. The team lead definitely knows the guy better, yet his manager disregards that. Why would he do that if he believed that the team lead was doing good leadership? Questioning the behavior of your subordinates is something you do when you don't trust in their abilities.
- The post mortem. If you are the team lead and you want a post mortem, then you will do a post mortem. "Because I say so", should be enough of a reason. Yet somehow his own manager needed to get involved, to force through the decision of the team lead? This also relates to the point before this.
- The Team. And I think this is the biggest tell. Imagine you are a team lead and you tell 10 people "we are doing X", one guy disagrees. There are still 9 other people, if they trusted the team lead as a leader, they would take his side, especially if X is something as obvious as doing a post mortem. This whole situation can only develop if the 9 people "who like to work with him" refuse to stand up for him at all. If you as a leader have 90% of the people behind you everything you say will be done.
The real question is why the rest of the team is doing nothing. Either it is because they are more afraid to go against the one guy (unlikely) or because they do not think it is worth it to stand up for the team lead. The real thing OP should consider is why his team does not appear to care the tiniest bit about his leadership position. If they did, the one guy would not be a problem at all.
One question remains, why do they love working with him. I do not think they are flattering him, I think they mean it. Often working for a weak leader is easy, because you can set your own rules and you can push your leader around. They probably enjoy that the atmosphere in the team is more relaxed, they get to have more influence on decisions and they can deflect work they do not want to do.
If you already don't believe me, and want to think the worst, I won't be able to change your mind.
In another comment I've explained why I think this "OP is the real problem" narrative probably isn't the case, just based on other data points I've had.
> You have a engineer in your team who thinks you are a looser and incompetent. This is why he second guesses you at every point, because he does not believe that you can make adequate decisions
I do think this is broadly correct, though.
> they have very little respect for you as a leader, they love working with you because it allows them to do what they want
This is incorrect. They actively seek guidance from me regularly. As I mention in another post, three engineers joined the team specifically to work with me. I don't have doubts about this.
> The opinion of your boss towards the "problem engineer" seems quite positive
This is wrong too. He's called him an asshole.
> Nobody respect your leadership. Your staff doesn't and your manager doesn't.
This is also wrong. I was promoted recently. My reviews are strong in a tough, calibrated org. My team is widely trusted, a complete 180 from the state before I joined when it was falling apart.
Again, if you're already dead-set on reading the worst, you'll be able to do so. But I came here for actionable advice. You gave judgment, but not advice. What's the point?
I am sure that you will be able to change my mind.
If you read the discussion below there is one aspect I didn't bring up in this post. What does the rest of the team do when you get challenged? Do they stand up for you and defend your decision and your right to make the decision?
You brought up the post mortem. That was your decision to make, not only did you get challenged, but you also had to bring in your manager. What did the rest of the Team do? I have a hard time imagining a scenario, where you make a decision, where everyone but one guy goes against you and you still need a manager involved.
>This is incorrect. They actively seek guidance from me regularly. As I mention in another post, three engineers joined the team specifically to work with me. I don't have doubts about this.
I don't doubt any of that. And they may very well respect you, but that does not automatically translate into them respecting you as a leader.
>What's the point?
I gave you an outsiders perspective. Even if I am wrong about everything, the one thing I am absolutely certain about is that this one engineer sees you as a failure in leadership. And if he sees you as a failure in leadership (and has at least some positive opinions about his teammates, if he doesn't you are in far deeper trouble with him) then he must believe that the rest of your team does not believe in your leadership either. If I am wrong and the rest of the team stands firmly behind you, then you only need to show him that.
> I have never heard this sentence said by anyone who wasn't deeply invested in status and perception games.
100% agree. It’s almost always an engineer who’s used to being respected because they’re an engineer and have 0 soft skills.
In feedback and promo docs my leadership and soft skills were called out as exemplary and distinctively strong.
If anything it's the opposite. I don't think my technical skills are as strong as some peers at my level. A big part of the difficulty is that the other engineer is more experience in certain technologies than I am. I'm self-aware enough to recognize those cases, and don't try to override him.
Seems like your company has an issue with avoiding tough conversations? How much do you trust the feedback you got?
If your soft skills are so good why are you getting bodied by this guy?
If your are such a great leader why are your reports siding with the jerk?
If you've already managed to assert your boundaries and they've failed to respect them, then your boss is failing to listen, do their job, and maybe simply there to collect a paycheck and follow the path of least resistance rather than have a backbone.
Try to have them see the light or you'll need to find somewhere else to be for your own sanity. Maybe bring your boss a copy of the No *sshole Rule by Prof. Sutton.
Never put up with excessive toxicity because silence gives consent and your feet vote. Just as there are many other workers, there are many other jobs.
Yes, I am disappointed with my manager, especially given the number of times and the insistence with which I've raised this. It's clear to me both that he's afraid how this will reflect on him to his manager, and he's afraid of how the other engineer will react. He wants to keep the peace, which means me just sucking this up.
I don't want to leave this job unless I've exhausted all other possibilities. With this exception, it's great.
But the thing for your manager is, if you leave because he didn't handle this, that will also reflect badly on him. And it sounds like leaving because of this is a real option for you. You wouldn't just be saying it to blackmail your manager - you're really thinking that you may have to leave because of this.
A few things here.
The first is dead stupid but it tends to work with these sort of people. You need to be very question focused. The "correct" answer to every question you ask from here on out has to be NO. Is the sky purple today... NO. Is really dumb thing a good idea... NO.
> I get pushback on calling for a post-mortem
You're the lead, so just assume that you have cart blanche to just book the meeting. Set it up... If they say NO, just agree and have the meeting with the rest of the team. Let them exclude themselves.
> His feedback to me is not to let it bother me so much.
This is probably good feedback. What if they were more abrasive but amazing at the job??
> expecting conflict every time we're in the same meeting
Call him out on it. In public. Out loud. Dont be nice about it. It's time to tell him to "cut the shit".
Your other job, every day in the shower, or making coffee your ritual is to think of a new and interesting way to say NO. At some point your gonna get good at this (and its a life skill I swear). Have the one liner ready. And if he follows up "we can have a chat about this after the meeting" or "lets take this offline"
This. You’re the boss, would you let your grade school kid keep talking back to you like this? You are the authority figure here. I seriously doubt he will begin to treat you any differently unless he has some fear put in him (and a slim chance even if that happens)
I would suggest that to come out on top here that you need to pitch a perfect game from here on out, even if it means following some suggestion from this guy or something. Being correct and being willing to verbalize when you don’t know something or don’t know the ideal answer to a situation is the number one trick to establishing a reputation as a rockstar IMO. That may give you a lot of sway.
Keep a great paper trail both on this guy and to cover your own ass.
I would probably begin building a case to fire him, aka “managing him out”.
I would start by documenting every incident and every fuckup by this guy in detail with links to tickets, slack and commits related to problems he has caused. Meeting notes about his poor professionalism could be used against him. You need that evidence, once you have a pretty good book on him, 5-10 incidents, especially with production downtime or company revenue ramifications, and you will have a good base with which to PIP him.
Make life as uncomfortable for him as possible while remaining professional. What’s the worst thing that happens, he quits? As long as you document the shit out of everything he does wrong, your ass is covered.
Best of luck, I can’t stand obnoxious people at work so I hope you can get him his comeuppance.
I hate this bullshit employee. But, in reading the post, I was not sure the OP was "the boss" as he stated he was "team lead" [Then I joined as the lead. I helped to stabilize the team over the last year. It’s grown from four to ten engineers. Three engineers joined specifically to work with me.] So, that's why I advised to better understand what is going on. I've been a "powerless" team lead more than once, and if you are not doing reviews and if the "manager" is not actively involved in making the team better but using input to perform a review, then its really frustrating. So, either he has the levers to fix the problem or he needs to go to his manager and figure out what levers there are to fix this.
> If they say NO, just agree and have the meeting with the rest of the team. Let them exclude themselves.
Sorry, let who exclude whom?
This is off topic, but I am not sure why you insist on saying "they" if even the OP says "he". I do not think you run the risk of offending anyone here.
But the "they"s are especially disorienting, as the context specifically requires distinguishing "them" (the team) and him (the competent jerk), so the pronoun replacement significantly reduces the clarity of your communication.
> You're the lead, so just assume that you have cart blanche to just book the meeting
You're right. I should just push this. I'm attempting to be collaborative but I'm ending up just being conflict-averse to the detriment of everyone. I'll do this this upcoming week.
> This is probably good feedback.
I'd like for it not to bother me so much. It just accumulates and has festered. I should've been more forceful and insistent sooner. It's been on the verge of being worthwhile to force the issue for a long time; it's an ambiguous case since it's mostly passive-aggressiveness, not plain meanness.
> Call him out on it. In public. Out loud.
I really can't see this turning out well for me. It's easy for me to smirk and laugh, and for me to end up looking like the asshole. I'd be playing his game and losing.
> And if he follows up "we can have a chat about this after the meeting" or "lets take this offline"
This is more my style.
Thanks a ton for this -- very helpful.
> I really can't see this turning out well for me. It's easy for me to smirk and laugh, and for me to end up looking like the asshole. I'd be playing his game and losing.
Your style doesn't jive with this sort of aggressive posturing. Thats fair.
I would advise that you find a strategy and voice that does work for you. You need to have the things you're going to say "loaded up". Spend the first week taking time after the meeting taking an hour to write down all the things you should have said to "disarm" this person. It's less about the delivery and more that you have a message to send ready.
You don't seem to have gained his respect with your engineering skills.
Publicly challenge (and beat) him in a small engineering contest, otherwise he will never respect you.
Make it time limited, eg. 3 hours to implement a specific goal with clear indicator of what is "better" as a score, ie. to avoid arguments that eg. "mines fast, mine scales". Have a neutral party pick the challenge.
This will solve nothing. Best case OP 'wins' ands the competent jerk becomes even more difficult, worst case OP 'loses' and loses any authority.
OP is being too nice. He is the team lead. His job is to lead, ands sometimes leaders have to be direct and harsh.