My experience? unless you have like a bottom quintile boss, you can tell him/her almost anything, if you do it verbally, with the door closed.

I mean, in most cases, yeah, I'm technically more skilled than the boss... and the boss knows it, that's why I was hired. The fact that the boss hires people who are more technically skilled than they are means that the boss is good at their job.

Now, of course, there might be other issues related to the business or to other systems that I don't know about... the boss might not take my advice, but only a terrible boss won't listen to the advice of a technical individual contributor that they hired.

the places where I've seen people get in trouble for arguing with the boss is when they do it angrily and publicly, and when they don't get over it after the boss explains why it has to be another way.

In my limited experience, most people have a kinda low self awareness, especially in the lower end of the food chain, the higher I go in the chain, the less naive people I meet. Why was he even worrying about a badly planned project? If your job is to code, just do that unless you are getting pay to be worried about the planning, which would be even a higher salary and at most have a very low key conversation about the problems with the superior of your manager, so when he gets fire for performing badly you can have more odds of getting his job.

OK, so you are explicitly making this a part of the job description. Which, arguably, was not the case for that particular employee at that particular job.

>If someone with this attitude worked for me, I'd get rid of them ASAP.

When people are "got rid of ASAP" for their attitude and not due to their performance, that's more than reason enough to keep silent about, well, everything.

Because who knows what kind of attitude the boss might have on that day, or seek from their employees.

---------------------------------- Everything below is skippable ----------------------------------

Now on the me-note: in my current job, I do my best to automate and document processes to save my and my co-workers' time. But, unlike in the case above, that's my job as a software engineer. And I know that when I make things better, I am rewarded - either with a thank-you, a bonus, or joy from improving my own work flow. I don't have to fear being reprimanded or fired for that.

In my previous job, which was a Teaching Assistantship, I went over and beyond trying to improve things (I rewrote the lab assignments that everyone hated, and turned them into something useful and enjoyable) - and got hit with a plain, literal, "it's not your job" from the administration when trying to push these changes. Initiative was unwelcome there.

The moral? I've seen both sides. If you are the manager, it's on you. You create the environment where people will be either eager to be improving things, or will be scared to try (and will keep mum if they do).

>All businesses must move forward, lest they die in the dust.

And so do the employees.

>The old cushy 9-5 job where you just do the same thing over and over your whole career is dying out quickly.

Indeed, and that's why people move on to other jobs. I think the puzzle will solve itself once you put yourself in the shoes of the person your story was about.

>We don't want people sitting around saying ... 'I wasnt hired for that'

But surely you hire people for something? I hope you don't expect your software engineers to, say, clean toilets - and vice versa. And if you do, I hope you pay your cleaning staff as much as you pay your engineers.

Which, again, was not the case in the story you posted (the person doing the automation was neither expected to do it, nor was paid at the level that people whose job it is are).

I had a coworker like this. Not only would he not get anything done but at standup he would say clear BS to our manager who seemed to not understand it was BS. The BS was the thing that really got under my skin. Because his BS seemed to pass the test with the manager but was such elementary BS to the other engineers.

Finally one day I flipped out and called him out directly and wrote a long lengthy email to the managers. In my head I thought maybe this is what high performance teams do, like Apple and Microsoft, and I needed to step up.

I lost the job, and I still have regret three years later.

And it was my fault. Getting angry was very dumb.

I don't know what the right move is, but I had to create this account to urge you not to do what I did. I picked that battle and it was a mistake.

Let me add, in his defense, he was nice and didn't get in the way, and I had no idea what was going on in his situation. For all I know he went on to be a star employee (I have no idea). I screwed up.

You're trying too hard to rationalize away personal problems and your inability and/or unwillingness to address them.

The opposite of disagreeable is not "kissing ass". The opposite of disagreeable, to start off, is not being a total asshole. No one's technical prowess is impressive enough to ignore the fact that they are completely insufferable. A project survives extra weeks or even months, but a team does not survive an eggeegious team member who makes everyone around them miserable.

Take a long hard look at yourself before throwing blanket accusations at anyone and everyone around you.

As the saying goes, "if someone is an asshole, they're an asshole, if everyone is an asshole, you're the asshole"

Man, this. I was dealing with the same shit and just did what you did.

I stopped to show what I was doing in a low level, because he is a super technical guy and would try to find issues in things that don't matter and/or were not high priority.

And then I started to show and discuss only what matters. My mental health had a 100% improvement.

There’s your problem.

My advice would be to be very open about this with your manager and let shit hit the fan next time your coworker push something that will break in production and/or create problems.

The sad reality of many environments is that grunt work that keeps the light on is very often not even acknowledged, and it’s usually more cherished the person who fixes the issues instead of the person who prevents them or never causes them in the first place.

I’ve seen this happen over and over again, sadly.

Another extrema ratio: if you’re not satisfied with your manager’s response, go talk to your manager’s manager.

No, solving the company's problems is both our problems. You have a tremendously adversarial attitude toward your coworkers. Why don't you trust them to know the cost of interrupting you and decide whether or not it's a net gain?

Let’s say you were right: It was a bad technical decision and it was politically motivated. What outcome can you expect from arguing with him on technical grounds? He knows what you’re saying is right, but he already knew that before making the decision. What you need to do is convince him not to act in bad faith. Try to figure out how to do that, and acknowledge if it’s not feasible.

Not to call you out in particular, but I see this as a common mistake by people arriving in a big company. Things are not as you wish, everything is too complicated, motivations are subtle and usually hidden. The trick is to get past frustration that reality does not match your mental model. (People aren’t being honest! How can I even work with people who don’t tell the truth!?) Abandon your mental model, acknowledge reality for what it is, choose goals that are achievable, choose actions that make progress toward your goals.

That hit home for me. I once got called down to HR to find my boss there. I discovered at that moment that she was frustrated with how long it was taking me to do my job. Part of my job is pulling data for mailings out of our database. We have ~1 million constituents, and regularly send mailings with tens of thousands of recipients. She had performed that role before me, and she felt that it could be done much more quickly that I was performing it.

Turns out, I could perform the task as quickly as she expected, but I had totally misunderstood a conversation we had months earlier. Word had gotten to my boss that a person had called in because of a factual error on a piece of mail we had sent them. She came by my desk and asked me about the error, as I had specifically said the file was 99.5% error free. I mentioned that the incorrect information had been put in the database by someone else, and the error rate was about what I had expected. She told me that she wanted 99.9% error free mailings from then on.

Later on, I sent her data for another mailing. She came by my desk and asked if the data was 100% correct. I said I was confident it was 99.9% correct. She said we couldn't have any errors this time, and we needed to make sure that the data was 100% correct. I told her that it was fundamentally impossible to be 100% sure the data was correct. She said that she understood, but she wanted it 99.99% correct, as we couldn't mail constituents information that was wrong. I said it would probably take 10x longer to run the data, but I could do that if she wanted it. She did, so I proceeded to make sure the data was 99.99% correct.

She was absolutely flabbergasted when I brought these conversations up. To her, she thought 100% confidence meant "pretty damn sure" and 99% confidence was somewhere around "It's probably right, maybe." From my perspective, 99.5% correct meant we'd have 5 or fewer bad rows for every 1000 rows in the data.

It was so weird for both of us, because we both thought we had been incredibly clear with the other person. I thought I had been very clear with my point -- I had spoken with her about how long it would take to ensure the data was 99.99% correct several times, because I was concerned about the delay. She had thought she was being emphatic, ad I was just being a pain in the ass. The thing is, that I'm generally not particularly hung up on the difference between literal meaning and figurative meaning, and she generally pretty clear when expressing what she wanted in technical conversations without hyperbole. So she hadn't even considered that I was interpreting her comments literally, and I hadn't considered that she was being hyperbolic.

It was definitely a huge learning experience for both of us. We had both been really stressed for months because we failed to communicate effectively with one another, despite both of us recognizing the same problem and trying to bring it to the other person's attention.

Dude, intelligence is not nearly as useful in this world as we are made to believe.

And, you say you are smarter than him? That automatically makes it so that I would never want to work under you. People that tend to waste cycles on comparing their intelligence to others tend to be insufferable, egotistical, and boring. (To say nothing of the fact that intelligence is largely incomparable.)

Management need people that make good, obedient little minions for upper management. Who can make their bosses look good while simultaneously shielding the team from them. You don't have to be 'intelligent' to do that, in fact it might make the job harder.

> I feel incredibly stupid. I am losing confidence in making good decisions.

Why you gotta be so extra about it? You lost out. Big deal. Pick yourself up and move on to the next opportunity.

My career advice: If your boss tells you to not be afraid to disagree with them, don't do it. It's a trap. I've been suckered into this one numerous times, and there was not a single occasion where it didn't backfire. People like to think of themselves as being that enlightened, but rarely (in my personal experience: never) are.

in others. Many people, at least in my experience, myself included, have great difficulties seeing it in themselves. Reading about why you'd fire somebody (that I can identify with because of a few lines of context) can lead to questioning my behavior and/or attitude.

I don't think incompetence is rant-worthy, really. "This programmer I hired can't program, so I fired him", that's not news. "This programmer I hired can program but he doesn't share his knowledge, so he's becoming a bottleneck and single point of failure, and I cannot afford to have that, so I'm going to fire him if he doesn't change" is something else.

This is entirely possible too. I just had an experience where I unwittingly cut the technical lead of my team out of an important conversation simply because I didn't realize he would care. I wanted to limit the scope of the conversation because of time constraints.

I told him to his face in a meeting that I was trying to limit the scope of the conversation. He was not very happy about that.

Needless to say, once I realized what a butthead I had been, I apologized profusely, explained that I had misunderstood the situation, and promised not to let that ever happen again. It ended up being fine after that, but boy did I feel dumb.

Point is, don't just assume that new hires will automatically infer what everyone's role is.

Never understood this attitude. I'd have told him that what he was doing was very inappropriate (without buy-in from the team), and if he doesn't back off I'll quit. He can ask around for other opinions so it's not just coming from me but it's a hard line.

Of course this mostly works cause as a developer you don't need to be afraid of finding another job. But that's good. Workers having leverage over bosses is good.

A daughter of my friend was not very happy in her job: a Silicon Valley company hired her as a security pro, but was using as a coder, which she hates. She was going to leave, but decided to wait ten months or so until her stock options vested. She and a big group of other engineers were fired right before the vesting moment.

All this time the CEO was generating absolutely politically correct sounds: people are our best capital, diversity is our strength, etc. She would be better off if he was honest.

Agreed. This is exactly the type of person that shouldn't be working on these types of projects.

Yes, take the job seriously. Yes, feel responsible for your own actions. But don't assign all blame to yourself before you even start. Treat yourself as you treat others.

Doesn't this make you feel good but piss of the other person even though they may be wrong? On the other hand it never wears off if you don't let it out, but the problem is there are lot more peoples opinions to consider other than the person you are dealing with. Its lose-lose situation.

I'd be more incredulous than angry. The vast majority of my work is well tracked in VCS and easily shown to be my work - such claims of... what, insecurity? Greed? Fear? Are typically self-defeating, easily disproven, transparent, and rather pitiable. They merely invite closer scrutiny and undermine themselves, the value of their word, and destroy the trust people have in them. They're probably not even smart enough to claim just my work as their own, but probably that of several people. It's worth speaking up to try and nip the problem in the bud, but everyone probably already knows they're an untrustworthy braggart.

They're not hurting me, they're hurting themselves, and they're often too trapped in their maladaptive coping patterns from previous toxic relationships and environments where such actions were perhaps not only effective - but perhaps even necessary to succeed within those environments - to stop.

Maybe they'll recover.

Maybe they'll get fired.

Maybe they'll be able to get stuff done while being rendered harmless. Yes bob, good job doing the entire project A while simultaniously fighting off both godzilla and mothra (eyeroll). By the way, you can do project B all by yourself, right? Since you're so awesome? No no - we're sure you can handle it. I wouldn't want to step on your toes.

Maybe I'll get a better job.

> It might also be your life situation is such that people don't really try to take advantage of you or mistreat you very often.

You can control that life situation a lot.

If someone consistently mistreats you, remove them from your life, because you can do better than that. Repeat to taste.

If your "customer is always right" job tells you to smile in response to verbal abuse, find another that lets you ban them from the store instead. Where anger might focus on "getting even", instead focus on "preventing this from becoming a pattern."

If you can't quit your job yet, discount their verbal lashing out as the angry adult temper tantrum that it is. Discount their tirades as the worthless ventings that they are - targeted at the world, not you specifically - and pity them for their failure to become a worthwhile adult. Or perhaps they're screaming because their dog just died, and they don't know how to process that. Perhaps they just learned they have cancer. Perhaps they don't know about their brain tumor yet. Perhaps they fear. That doesn't justify their frothing spittle, but one can pity and sympathise with a person unable to properly express their emotions in a constructive and healthy way - because we've all been there, and so many of us are fortunate enough to not live there like some of these poor bastards do.

Which isn't to say it's never worthwhile to get properly angry, but often the biggest victim of the angry and the cruel is themselves. They push away friends, family, coworkers, opportunities, and kindness - and are often left with only mindless hedonism and misery themselves. No wonder they're such a miserable prick.

I also realize much of this is easier said than done.