[lixue]

The problem is, "nothing but trouble" describes both genuinely problematic employees, and those that simply push back against toxic cultures or bad management. If you were already disillusioned, it's possible that it really was a bad atmosphere, and they were just less shy about calling a spade a spade.

I've also noticed that people tend to measure whether someone looks busy, not whether they're producing results. Some people will just start writing code, and they get called "productive". Others nip off for 2 hours to think it over and sketch out architectural diagrams, and then finish the whole task in half the time - but they're the ones that get called lazy because they weren't at their desk.

[bartread]

> "nothing but trouble" describes both genuinely problematic employees, and those that simply push back against toxic cultures or bad management.

For sure, but that's not what I'm talking about here: every now and again one makes a bad hire. It happened very rarely, particularly in product development where this individual was, but that's what this individual was - just a bad hire.

Now there were reasons why they were a bad hire that I think were perhaps not their "fault" (although fault/blame isn't a helpful concept here), which I'm not going into the specifics of due to #reasons, but the fact remains they chose to deal with that by acting out and introducing toxicity into their team.