[throwarayes]

Having an unstable teammate on a project I led. Long story short, they:

(a) saw things in terms of them being persecuted, and took critique of their work or approach deeply personally

(b) tended to see things as us vs them, and not a two-way street, where both sides bore responsibility. And that sometimes crappy things happen with no malace.

(c) resented other's success at the company, and thought that the 'successful' person was only successful because management supported them unfairly in a way my colleague was not supported. My colleague perceived themselves as a secret failure for not doing what the other person was doing. They also thought others telling them they were successful was not genuine.

(d) lacked a kind of self awareness, and tended to take over meetings with their grievances and upsetness. They couldn't see that other team members needed to discuss their own issues, or with the issues they brought up, that other people also had valid emotions and points of view on them they needed to hear and appreciate.

The time we worked on it as a leadership team went beyond having difficult conversations. I've had difficult conversations, where you talk about someone leaving a job, or someone's difficult behavior. You give it in a loving, compassionate way. Some people can get defensive, maybe upset, but will hear the feedback and take some time to digest it. Even when they're upset, they take some part in the responsibility for the feedback they hear.

This person, assumed off the bat, you were going to attack them. They couldn't see the compassion you were trying to bring. They froze up and got defensive. They tended to carry their own narrative of how they were the victim, and didn't take responsibility for their side of whatever they were having a problem with.

I give credit to our leadership team that we kept at it. We didn't accept this person's sometimes abusive behavior. We tried, and frankly, by letting others know it was not OK, and that we kept our focus on it, it helped the rest of the team understand that "yes we get there's a problem here".

We wanted to help the person. We gave them lots of opportunities for improvement and to do the kind of work they said they wanted to do. We gave them coaching and their own time to develop their own interests into new business directions.

After trying and trying, probably helped a bit through some coaching, this person realized the company wasn't a good fit for them, and they left on their own accord. This was a good outcome. Though I wish there was some way to have accelerated it and/or let the person go so they weren't as destructive to the team.

[29athrowaway]

In the "Big five personality traits" model, you have:

1. Openness to experience (inventive/curious vs. consistent/cautious)

2. Conscientiousness (efficient/organized vs. extravagant/careless)

3. Extraversion (outgoing/energetic vs. solitary/reserved)

4. Agreeableness (friendly/compassionate vs. critical/rational)

5. Neuroticism (sensitive/nervous vs. resilient/confident)

Excessive neuroticism (aka emotional instability) can be very hard to deal with, at a personal level and at a professional level. But note that excessive confidence can be just as harmful to an organization as being emotionally unstable, and sometimes just as hard to deal with.

Then, psychological safety in an organization is also important. Honesty and disagreement should be seen as acceptable as long as they happen in a context of respect and in a constructive manner.

You have to ocassionally give developers some time and autonomy to do stuff they consider important. They want to do what they perceive is right, and while not every time you can let them do it, sometimes you have to listen to them, trust them and let them do it. It will not be a waste of time, believe me.

If you don't, you are at risk of them getting burned out. You do not want burned out developers, it's a waste of time for everyone.

[giantg2]

Wow, I feel like I fit both sides of 4 out of the 5 categories depending on the context.

[janto]

These are 5 dimensions so it sounds like you could tend to be closer to the middle of them. IIRC as you mature one's behavior "spreads out" a bit over these dimensions.

[29athrowaway]

Being in the middle of each spectrum is perhaps a good thing.

Being in the extrema (e.g.: being overconfident all the time, being anxious all the time) is bad.

[racedude]

Agreed, I am working on this myself

[underwater]

I've been in the position of managing this person. After a lot of effort and too much time I realised I really couldn't do anything for him.

I am not in the business of fixing gaping personality issues. And any work related coaching was impossible due to his victim mentality and inability to accept feedback.

Some people asked if your engineer was technically gifted. For me the answer is it doesn't matter. The toxic attitude always undermines any technical contributions they makes. Even a talented asshole just ends up taking on more and more critical projects, which widens their sphere of negative influence.

[jmcgough]

This has been my experience as well. Coaching is part of your job if you want to be a lead or a manager, but it can be very difficult to coach people who aren't receptive to feedback.

When I started as a lead I devoted a lot of time and energy to someone who was underperforming and difficult to work with (and whose self-perception didn't match reality) when I should have devoted myself more to engineers who were doing well and receptive to feedback.

[beachy]

I've often thought about how easy some issues must be to deal with with the US's "fire at will" regime.

In my country you really can't fire anyone without a major HR process that saps everyone's energy and morale.

In your case it sounds like everyone would have better off if this person had been fired early on in proceedings.

Once I made someone redundant, which can be a back door mechanism for firing in some circumstances. He just wasn't cutting it. I felt ghastly afterwards.

I ran into him months later and he told me he had no hard feelings, and the shock of it had made him reappraise his career path and he had made his way into a job which was much better suited to his skills. He was far happier.

[spaetzleesser]

I have had to deal with this too. In the end i told my manager that I never want to work this guy again because it causes way too much aggravation no matter what I try. Some people just aren’t compatible.

Maybe other teams are better at dealing with him.

[seer]

Early in my career I witnessed a our company’s founder being able to literally convince anyone in their vision.

It was very subtle and masterful, you would see people trying to tell him of their problems, and an hour later leave believing they got their way, only to have agreed on the exact opposite, and being happy about it.

I was too young then to fully appreciate and learn from it. It was probably something like what people were saying about Steve Jobs’ “distortion field”.

He would sit and listen quietly, try to figure out what you were passionate about. He would himself get excited about _that_ too, and then slowly move the direction to seeing the world from his point of view.

After a while I got to know the guy pretty well, and I am sure he was not a sociopath and there was no malice in it. He was genuinely interested in people’s opinions and wanted to help them, he just had a grand vision and managed to find purpose for people in it. He was something like the embodiment of what the book “How to win friends and influence people” was about.

What I believe now is that there is a way to talk to almost anyone about their issues and help them overcome them. Every time I have trouble resolving issues like that I would try to go back and think “what would this person do”. Usually helps.

[uh_uh]

Sounds like quite the nightmare. Was the person at least technically competent in their role?

[ohazi]

I think I understand why you phrased it like this, but using "at least" here might be read as implying that technical competence can excuse these issues. It can't.

I can understand management being hesitant to fire someone technically competent, but this kind of disfunction can tank the productivity of an entire team of otherwise technically competent people, as OP alluded to at the end of their comment.

[apozem]

Completely agree!

Something I realized lately is if you don’t ha e soft skills, it literally makes you worse at coding.

I always knew you needed them to be a good employee, but it wasn’t until I worked with a “senior” without an ounce of social grace that I realized lacking soft skills makes you worse at writing good code.

The “senior” didn’t solve the application’s problems because they didn’t care to ask. They thought they knew everything. They didn’t spread their knowledge onto the rest of the team. Instead, they spent their time working on a half-baked idea no one asked for. They would get stuck on a problem and never ask for help, a junior mistake.

My hot take is you need some minimum of social skills (doesn’t have to be a lot!) to be “technically competent.”

[nickthemagicman]

Don't business analysts figure out what would solve the applications problems and the engineers code it?

[throwarayes]

They were very competent... and they held together really well with clients. We were a small consulting firm. But I think the 'mask cracked' with us internally, where they had their dysfunctional behavior.

[uh_uh]

This is quite an interesting data point. I'd expect one with this level of dysfunction not to be able to communicate well with clients either. People are complicated.

[pavlus]

I was in the place of the person described above (or at least, to some degree), and from my perspective, if they work with clients well, then their behavior comes from the good place of caring about the product and customers, but they seem to be overly demanding of their teammates and themselves.

That's why they resented other's success -- they see flaws in others work, and being overly demanding to other people, it seems to them, that those people are not worth of being successful. Also being demanding of themselves makes compliments look not genuine, because they "know" that they are not good enough (in their eyes).

There is also a stress factor, if there were overtimes, or the project is highly demanding (something to do with money, or health, for example), it can be stressful, and multiply that stress by their lack of confidence (because of high demands they put on themselves), and you can get a very stressed out person on the edge of paranoia, therefore some mistakes are found to be acts of war (coz, you know, if you cared about the product at least to some extent, you would have found it, but since you didn't, you either didn't care, so you are the enemy, or you made it because you are the enemy with ulterior motives and it was a diversion, not because you are a human being and make mistakes sometimes).

Also, when they are getting abusive, outline bounds right away! Tell them, that their feedback is more than welcome, but their tone/language does not need to be hurtful, because it actually takes the focus away from the issue they care about, and if they want it addressed, it's their job to keep other's focus on it. BTW, most likely, they have already came up with valid problems, but because of the problematic communication style, they couldn't make other people care about it or even understand it, since no one cared or understood it, or even worse -- said they did, but there were no resolution or even an attempt to resolve, then once again -- "it's all idiots or enemies around with their laziness/stupidity/diversions!". Yes, they got into this vicious circle themselves and don't know about that, but you are in it now, so it's your job to escape it too.

For me, some quality vacation helped, less regular meetings, more written communication unless really necessary (because, it's easier to manage anger over the text, but easier to converse emotion and intent over the call, plus make those calls up to 2-3 persons, since on a meeting of 4 persons, one of them is not paying attention, and we don't want to make our friends think that we brought an idiot or an enemy to the meeting, you know), more casual conversations with teammates, where you don't bring up work at all (drinking beer over Jitsi/Zoom works too!).

Also, I tend to be very accepting on work challenges, so it's not like I would say no to something I don't like, if it needs to be done. I'll do it, even though I probably wont be happy about it, so don't believe that me or such stressed caring person will see your offer to agree or disagree to do something as a genuine offer instead of polite way to demand it to be done.

You may think they would love to do it (even more, they probably brought up existence of the issue to you themselves!), but it's not necessary, that they won't get under even more stress. Instead, try to make lots of small fully defined tasks (don't make them do it, they'll overthink it and there is more stress again, and more problems), put them into backlog, and ask such person to pick which tasks to do themselves. If you see, that they are overthinking/overworking some other tasks instead, make them do those small tasks, at least few a week, small successes help them to overcome stress, see progress, and are unlikely to be scrutinized on code review or QA.

I hope, someone can make TL;DR of this if it makes sense, I'm too tired today. But leaving my long time job soon, where I was working on the project for some years, was this kind of person for some time, and also wasn't, seen a few rotations of the team, multiple managers, and I can definitely tell, that it is a manageable problem, even if not by the ways I tell here. Few good managers worked with me and little by little I've become a better teammate. I still let that side of myself show up sometime in a managed way, when I see someone is cutting corners, and does not listen to reason repeatedly, but anyways, I've heard enough of good feedback, and even raised few other developers to a new level since those times.

[jansommer]

When someone is that kind of person, they likely don't have many relationships, but a lot of time. I'd be surprised if that person wasn't good at their job, and if not, what motivated grandparent to put so much effort into trying to heal what seems like a fundamental distrust in other people.

[neutronicus]

Just so you know, there's a gendered pronoun at the end of point (d).

Since it looks like you were trying to avoid this, I figured I would let you know so you can excise it if you wish

[bad_username]

I found it difficult to read this comment due to the usage of "they", as my brain subconscioisly interprets "they" as a group of people. I am not sure what the goal here was, because revealing the gender does not deanonimize the subject.

[szej]

It can probably help reduce gender bias - sometimes people will judge the same actions differently based on the person's gender