Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

Yeah I genuinely don't understand it. His work is universally panned in the team, he's had multiple disciplinaries against him due to low quality work and keeps scraping through.

I could never be that person, I always strive to improve and become better.




Ah. I think it's an example of how you and your employer use different frameworks to attribute value to what your co-worker brings to the table.

Whereas you put focus on aspect such as maintainability, readability, adaptability, testability,... of the code he's writing, your employer might simply keep him around either because his code, well, simply "works" to a degree that is satisfactory, or because of a complex interpersonal relationships which have been established over decades turning him into much into a fixture.

Put more succinctly: No one wants to know what goes into making a sausage.

That is, there's little value in explaining or arguing the fine technical details of code optimization, architectural design, functional programming, etc. etc. etc. if you don't consider your audience.

Stakeholders who rely on your co-worker's work simply want to know what his work could mean to them, and how it helps them get the job done. Your concerns regarding code quality are totally valid, but unless you, as the maintainer, will be fully perceived by your employer as a formal stakeholder in your own right, your objections risk being thrown in the wind.

At that point, it's not just a co-worker issue, it becomes a workplace culture issue. If there's a dissonance in the manner in which he's held accountable for the quality of his work by the team on the one hand, and management on the other hand, then how does that same dissonance affect how your own work gets perceived?

If he gets to scrape through, does that then imply that you're putting the bar for yourself really high, whereas you could clearly get away with doing less? Or are you trucking on despite the fact that your work is held to a different standard because there's a different expectation towards your own performance?

I think striving to "improve" or "become better" is something that only means anything if you do it for yourself first and foremost. Because that's what you want for yourself. It's a valid pursuit to want that for yourself. Whereas you have to be mindful that few people selflessly care about that desire and go out of their way to let you self-actualize that. After all, your job is first and foremost a business deal between you and your employer, and the primary reason why you are there is because your employer feels there's value in what you bring to the table.

If you work in a group, it's equally important to understand how to compromise on where you set the bar for yourself and others. Of course, in your case, you don't want to compromise on what you want for yourself to the point where you start to cross personal boundaries, lest you want to end up resenting the entire situation.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: