
Prove the badness of coworkers at your own risk (2012) - signa11
https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2012/01/09/rigor/
======
DoreenMichele
_Next, I asked an honest question: even then, why was it automatically up to
me to get these things to work? There was no division of duties on the team.
Everyone was responsible for the system as a whole._

So, it was up to her because everyone was responsible for the system as a
whole. That includes her. She is clearly in the wrong here.

What "experiment" did she think she was running? I see no experiment here. All
she did was not address the issue until someone higher up complained. That's
it.

She made zero effort to find out why this happened, who did it, etc. She
assumes her coworkers are wrong and bad and lazy. Maybe they were busy doing
other things and didn't notice this issue. If you are more competent than your
coworkers and not getting paid extra or whatever, that can be aggravating. But
management doesn't care about your petty BS. They care that the system runs
properly, not which individual routinely has to catch and correct the anomaly
while pouting about doing their job.

She even indicates it was incredibly trivial to resolve. So this post sounds
like someone looking for BS reasons to be wrapped around the axle about
something.

"Once, at work, I spent vastly more time conspiratorially complaining to my
boss and then faux monitoring the system than it would have taken to just fix
the problem that it was my job to fix because I had delusions of grandeur and
wanted to indulge in some completely pointless witch hunt."

Wow, honey, get new hobbies. Fucking with coworkers for giggles and then
blogging about it does nobody any good at all.

~~~
ModernMech
She obviously felt under appreciated by her team, and resented the workload
that hand fallen into her lap, viewing her other coworkers as lazy. For their
part, they saw she did it without complaint, and obviously didn't mind that.
Sure they may have been lazy in this scenario, but the author certainly didn't
communicate she viewed them that way.

So she conducted this passive aggressive "experiment" and then got mad when
she was called out on it.

This is just an example of a communication breakdown resulting in bad team
dynamics. Worst of all, IMO, the author concludes not to disengage in her
anti-social behavior, opting to continue doing it but this time in secret.

~~~
DoreenMichele
She went on a completely pointless witch-hunt. The odds are good that had
someone risen to the occasion to track down the anomaly and fix it, we would
still have some poison pen piece about the incident. She just would have found
some different catty angle.

"Let me tell you about that time I kindly stood idly by failing to do my job
as an experiment to graciously let my bad and lazy coworkers grow and they
completely botched it. Thousands of dollars in damage done and servers had to
be replaced."

"Let me tell you about that time my male coworker decided to steal my thunder
and get promoted over me by doing my job when I couldn't be arsed to because
sexism is clearly alive and well!"

People who spend two months looking for some BS excuse to fingerpoint instead
of spending 30 seconds fixing the problem are going to find something to
complain about. She not only spent two months pursuing this at work, she then
blogged about it. She invested all kinds of time and energy into this bizarre
little scenario in her head.

She clearly has Big Feels about something. Why? I don't know. But that is the
real issue here.

~~~
angersock
Politely, you don't know what you're talking about here.

If you read up on the author you get a much better picture of the orgs she's
been a part of, the work she's done, and the problems she has done
troubleshooting on, I think you might adjust your opinion a bit.

She suspected her team was underperforming and unfortunately the quietest way
of verifying that is just not to be the one to step up. There was no "witch
hunt" here.

~~~
DoreenMichele
Her stated goal of _proving the badness of coworkers_ is clearly outlined in
the title of the piece. The piece itself in no way supports the assumption she
asserts concerning their badness.

Perhaps it is just bad writing that neither stands on its own nor indicates
that there is additional material needed to fully appreciate it. I don't feel
any personal obligation to do a lot of legwork here to bend over backwards to
give her the benefit of the doubt, especially since I see no reason to doubt
my conclusion.

~~~
angersock
_> since I see no reason to doubt my conclusion._

That's because you clearly haven't worked in a technical role that involves
babysitting, ma'am.

If you can't spare the effort of researching somebody before calling bullshit,
please continue that trend and spare the effort of spouting off. :)

------
mfonda
> There was no division of duties on the team. Everyone was responsible for
> the system as a whole. [...] Basically, I asked why he didn't take care of
> it. His response floored me.

> "Oh, well, you always take care of it."

I've found that it's almost never the case that there is no division of
duties. Sure, there may be no _explicit_ division of duties, but there is
almost always an implicit division of duties. If Person X is always the one
that handles Task Y, then the team will come to view Task Y as a duty of
Person X. Other team members may then just simply assume that Person X will
take care of it, or they may even actively avoid it to avoid stepping on
anyone's toes.

~~~
rhizome
And that is the kind of low-touch crab pot[1] management practice that irks
me.

I have to wonder if structure is actually evolving away, or if it's just a
side-effect of the internet birthing so many businesses that management skills
are rare in general so people just figure they might as well do without. I'm
not nostalgic for the Mad Men era and rigid org charts, but there has to be a
better way. If careers are just going to be one long Choose Your Own Adventure
game, we all might as well go contract and freelance.

1\.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crab_mentality](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crab_mentality)

------
alexashka
Manager's perspective: We have Rachel on the team, she thinks she's so smart.
She tells others to just 'figure it out' in a condescending manner, bringing
the team morale down. Nobody likes her but we keep it polite and cordial
because we're professional.

She one day told me about some 'experiment' she's going to do, I don't know
what she meant. We received a complaint 2 months later, it turns out it's
because of Rachel. What is wrong with her?

\---

It can take some time for idealistic, intelligent people to understand how
other people may not be into system admin, or into programming, or managing,
or whatever their job is. They stumbled into it, realized they don't really
like it, but don't want to uproot their life, to 'find their passion'. They
just want to work, and go home.

Those people are not to be hated, despised, or complained about. They are not
happy. It would be like getting angry at someone in a wheelchair for taking up
so much room on the bus. They are in a wheelchair, you're not. It is up to you
to accommodate and help them if you can, because you actually have that
ability in you, they're just getting by.

Empathy does not come natural to everyone, and usually comes with age. I hope
Rachel has moved on to better things.

~~~
taneq
She told her manager precisely what was wrong, that it wasn't an issue, and
that she was going to leave it to see if anyone else gave a rat's ass.

If the manager was going to object to this plan, the time was then. Having a
whinge about it months later while taking no responsibility and trying to make
it sound like she'd just skived off? Nah.

~~~
alexashka
The entire point of my reply was to show that there is Rachel's side to the
story, and then the manager's.

You can spend your entire life thinking other people should act a certain way
and say things like 'the time was then'. I understand the smug satisfaction of
thinking you know better than somebody else. I also know the loneliness and
frustration of living in a world of perceiving other people as being wrong,
less, or better etc. It's exhausting for you, it's at best exhausting for
others to deal with you, so who is winning?

I know the ego-trip side of thinking you're right is feeling like it's a
winner. Go see if your heart and gut agree - the gut will communicate by
clenching or being relaxed, the heart by being closed or open.

I know there are plenty of people walking around with a clenched gut, a closed
heart and a very busy mind that's gleefully judging everything in sight and
gossiping about it with other minds, posting on HackerNews etc. I just don't
know anyone who's happy, engaged in that lifestyle :)

~~~
taneq
I've taken some time to think about it and my gut says that manager was an
asshole. I'm not a particularly judgemental person, but one thing that does
incur my ire is managers not taking responsibility for things under their
control.

------
dlanouette
I'd argue that instead, she should have emailed the rest of the team and asked
what's going on. Raise the issue and let somebody take responsibility.

A potential side benefit is that you can teach more people the "right" way to
do things.

Also, the comment about the docs was a really poor choice of words. A better
comment might have been "Yah, they need work. Feel free to update them to make
them better."

~~~
blub
I agree with your comment, except the last part. This feel free to do X is
just a covert agressive response, not unlike feel free to submit a patch.

When I get that from a project where I report a problem I immediately think
"feel free to keep your buggy docs/code".

A straight but assertive answer is IMO much better: "we don't have time to do
X, could you please help?" or "we have higher pririty bugs that we need to
work on, but we could sure use your help if you have some time". Heck, even
"let's take 1h and work on improving it together" would work for me.

Bottom line is that unless there's a clear responsibility involved, other
people don't have to perform certain tasks, so they should be politely asked
for help...

------
sidlls
There are a number of problems with this person's behavior.

1) Letting an incorrect configuration persist without either notifying the
team or manager is irresponsible (and, no, her "chat" wasn't informing the
manager; if anything the writing indicates it was deliberately light on
information as part of her "ruse").

2) Engaging in a passive-aggressive experiment to "prove" laziness is
demoralizing and hostile.

3) Failing to address a co-worker's concerns (however poorly or
inappropriately articulated) about documentation by helping him over his issue
or updating the docs is itself lazy and irresponsible.

This person passed an opportunity to exercise leadership by setting an example
and act as a member of a team and instead chose to be aggressive and hostile
toward her co-workers. If I were her manager I'd have dinged her in the
performance review, possibly worse than she was dinged.

~~~
blub
I'll add that she probably had some bad experiences in the past which turned
her cynical in regards to her team and made her take this passive agressive
route.

The manager missed an opportunity to improve what's likely a problematic
working environment.

~~~
sidlls
We don't know that from her blog post. Maybe the manager had negative feedback
for others on her team stemming from this, and she just isn't aware (or didn't
include it).

I would agree that the manager has done a poor job of managing to let things
get to the point where this person felt the need to act as she did. Even if he
didn't miss an opportunity from this, he seems to have missed many previously.

~~~
rachelbythebay
If only there were years of context to refer to!

------
maxxxxx
That's a classical political problem. Sometimes it's good to be the problem
solver that takes care of things but often you end up being the sucker to do
things nobody else wants to do. And you get no credit.

I had this once with answering questions for a new dev. He asked a lot of
stuff. I first answered happily but after a while I realized that he didn't
even try to find out things himself but instead asked me immediately. So I
stopped answering and promptly got a complaint from his manager for not
helping with critical stuff. Thank God I got support from my team so it was no
problem.

Lesson learned: Be selective in taking on things that are not directly your
job or could be done by somebody else. Set some boundaries.

~~~
hnzix
My approach to learned helplessness is to still assist the person but don't
give them the final answers or do it for them. Instead, ask them leading
questions. "Why do you think foo is failing? What happens when you add some
debugging here? Have you read the foo section of the docs?"

That way you can't be accused of not helping, and the person is developing
their critical thinking skills. Unfortunately our Western educational system
is still based around rote learning, which can really hamstring some folks
when converting facts into actions.

~~~
maxxxxx
There is also a difference between learned helplessness and laziness. In my
case it was plain laziness

------
influx
If I encountered this situation, I would create an automated alarm to detect
this condition, a run book to describe how to resolve it, and then have it
page the oncall.

Bonus points for having a metric that showed improvement over time, and extra
extra bonus points for creating automation to remove the human element
completely.

At the end of it, you can demonstrate a clear result of how you improved
reliability and increased knowledge across the team.

~~~
tempestn
Sometimes having a human in the loop is a good idea. Taking down a master
server probably one of those times, especially given that taking it down isn't
time-sensitive.

Aside from removing the human completely though, agreed!

------
rdtsc
> "Oh, well, you always take care of it."

That could have been a nice chance to say "Oh cool, I implicitly got this new
responsibility? Let me solve this, get to the bottom of it, own the solution,
present to the management. Maybe ask for a raise later?".

Part of the the road to success is taking situations like that and turning
them into your favor.

> He took what I had set up as a little pseudo-managerial experiment to see
> just how lazy these people were and turned it against me. Meanwhile, nothing
> happened to the actual people who were lazy!

Now come to think on it, I wonder if she was the experimental subject after
all. Notice how people expected her to handle it. I wonder if somehow the
manager turned "the experiment" around into another experiment "I wonder how
much time she'll waste running the experiment instead of fixing the problem?".

------
JasonFruit
I'm not impressed --- she took an already not-great situation, where she had
co-workers who weren't really pulling their weight, and made it
confrontational and poisonous. This is pretty obviously not a good way to
treat your co-workers, and it doesn't help build the sort of positive
relations that will allow you to help them improve, so you have people who
still aren't pulling their weight, but now have reason to dislike you.

My advice? Don't do that, no matter what your boss thinks of it.

EDIT: I can't type.

~~~
anfedorov
Sounds like there was bad blood or a general cultural problem there already. I
can't imagine a well gelled team of people who like each other ever being
unable to solve this kind of problem.

An employee should be comfortable going to their manager and their manager's
manager about problems like this, and a manager should "nip it in the bud"
when an employee begin running such "little pseudo-managerial experiments" on
their colleagues instead of voicing your frustrations directly. What even _is_
a managerial experiment? Colleagues and subordinates are not experimental
subjects.

------
indigodaddy
Sounds like perhaps just bad top down management at that place. My
coworkers/teammates are not lazy, we work as a team, and if not they'll be
gotten rid of.

~~~
johnpmayer
Yep. It boils down to wanting to work at a place where it's OK to make
mistakes, but unacceptable to not learn from mistakes. It's a culture thing,
and it comes from the top.

------
deeteecee
Didn't look that bad from the co-worker. He could grow up a little bit but
that's all I see really.

Problem was your boss cause one could easily retort "oh okay, you accepted
what I had mentioned I was going to do and you later go against it, saying it
was the wrong decision"? (obviously he's your boss so you're stuck and saying
that wouldn't have helped much)

------
crawfordcomeaux
Blame others for what happens when you choose to passively test your coworkers
instead of using direct communication to raise and address an issue at your
own risk.

------
darpa_escapee
The term 'team' pops up about five times in the article, yet passive
aggressively leaving an identified issue that is responsibility of the team
unaddressed to prove something to yourself is the least team-like behavior I
can imagine.

------
alexryan
If you have a problem with someone's behavior, the moral and healthy thing to
do is to address it with that person directly and to not leave that
conversation until the situation is fully resolved to the mutual satisfaction
of both parties. Conflict can make a relationship stronger if it is genuinely
pursued with a positive sum intent. What this woman did was to try to make
herself look good to her boss and to make her team mates look bad.

Finding fault in others seems to be a conscious strategy for this woman. She
has even written a book called "The Bozo Loop".

Who in their right mind would choose to hire someone this toxic?

------
ludston
> There was no division of duties on the team. Everyone was responsible for
> the system as a whole.

The authors point is valid: It is necessary to be aligned with your team
leader. :(

I think that this author has had a key misconception about their team.
Regardless of what the 'official policy', it turns out that that the team is
happiest (excluding the auther) so long as this author is continuously
monitoring certain issues. It's less efficient for multiple persons to be
doing the same monitoring.

If I were in her position, I would attempt to divest myself of the menial task
of checking/monitoring and write some code to do it instead.

(And automatically deal with this "extra master")

------
neya
I know this is a piece from 2012, but I can share my experience from the one
being on the receiving end of this. I had a very very similar colleague and I
really repent my working experience with her. What people like Rachel post as
acceptable behaviour is actually not conducive to the workplace at all.

In my case, I was just transferred to another position and I was required to
maintain some production machines for clients. These machines are all hosted
on the cloud running their own CRON. My job was just to ensure everything was
smooth and no downtime happened. This person, SSH-ed into the instance,
removed the CRON tasks on one of the machines and let the system on. I was
still fairly new and I was only a few days into this new position. Eventually
I found out based on login logs that this person did something and when
confronted directly, she said she wanted to see if I would do the work
diligently in the right situation. Almost like what Rachel did, except she
didn't go out of her way to do something nasty. I think you don't have
permission to do these things to your colleagues because you're exactly just
their colleague and not their boss.

We had some heated arguments and my ex-boss sided with her because she played
the minority woman in tech card (no kidding) and it affected my appraisal as
well.

Just a note to any of you reading this really bad article. Just don't do this.
There is no win win for anybody here. If you feel you have a problem with
someone, directly confront with them. Don't do all these indirect things which
may have serious consequences in your career in the long run (eg. Management's
Perception of you). What Rachel did is exactly what you're not supposed to do
at a professional work place. Don't do stuff like this and play the victim
card. It's really uncalled for and annoying.

In the end, a lot of people left the company because of this one nasty
colleague and management wouldn't take any action because of her gender as
they kept her to maintain the gender ratio. About a week ago I learned that
about 7 engineers quit this position over a span of a year for the very same
reason.

These kinds of actions are the foundations of passive-aggressive behaviour and
culture rot and are breeding ground for politics. Please don't do this.

~~~
jschwartzi
Yeah, the best thing to do when you have a problem with a particular person is
take time to calm down, and then:

Figure out what your problem is. Are they doing something you don't like? Are
they not doing something and you really think they should? Why don't you like
that? Why does it make you feel that way?

Figure out what needs to change so #1 doesn't affect you. Are you upset
because you're doing a bunch of menial work with no end in sight? Ask the team
to pitch in more. Is your coworker not writing enough documentation when they
submit pull requests? Tell them that, and tell them that you're frustrated by
it if you need to.

Talk to the people you are having trouble with. Tell them what your problem
is, why it's a problem, and be really clear that you own your emotional
response but that you're hoping they can change the things that are upsetting
you.

Be willing to negotiate. Be open to alternative solutions. Take ownership of
things that you have agreed to do, and don't be afraid to remind others to
take ownership of the things they've agreed to do.

Also, don't be afraid to leave a place where people aren't paying attention to
you and basically don't care about you. There are plenty of other companies in
the world. They don't all pay the same, but it's possible to value more than
just money. Sometimes the best way to signal that conditions are bad is to
leave.

~~~
neya
Well said. Appreciate the sound advice. Very actionable.

------
pasbesoin
Warning sign 1) People aren't doing what they're supposed to, and rather than
wanting to improve/rectify the situation, they don't care.

Warning sign 1.5) Manager didn't consider this a problem.

Warning sign 2) Manager burned you, the employee trying to do things right.

Given my experience, at this point I'd leave. The department, or the
organization, if I believed the problem went higher or would continue to haunt
me.

I've spent way too much time and energy making up for others willful
deficiencies.

Move one. Let them put themselves out of business.

------
jimmywanger
I don't agree with the author, like most of the comments.

She's setting herself up for a win-win. Either somebody fixes it and nobody
else notices and she gets to escalate the severity/subtleness of her testing
of teammates, or else nobody fixes it and she can yell about something that
she thinks should have happened. It just seems like she's setting other people
up to fail.

I generally don't play those gotcha games. There is no winning path. If your
coworkers play these games, LEAVE.

------
smackay
Ouch, ouch, ouch so much distaste for somebody with high standards and perhaps
one who demands high standards from the people they work with.

One thing to consider is the environment in which these machines were running.
If the group Rachel was working in is getting phone calls about mis-configured
machines in one of the clusters they manage then perhaps there was a lot at
stake - the description of the cluster setup would seem to indicate this was
the case.

------
_rpd
> January 9, 2012

~~~
dang
We've added the year above.

