Pretty normal stuff at a certain level with insecure managers. Not exactly the same, but Steve Jobs wrote about how they relocated him into an empty building at Apple to make him quit. I was relocated too in fact.

The red flags I look for now:

- clearly not as smart as their peers in their own or other depts, they're likely struggling and will act irrationally

- very ambitious, but risk averse

- tells people what their title is whether they asked or not

- been at the company their whole career and just went along with the flow

There's likely some others, but I'm careful around those folks, they're just trouble.

If you decide this dude isn't gunnuh make it and start cutting him off projects rather than getting him more support, it's a self fulfilling prophecy. And it's pretty messed up to trash him that way.

If I'm being perfectly frank, this doesn't so much sound like a case where brutal honesty saved a project than a case where you lacked the tact and emotional intelligence to navigate a delicate situation (or perhaps were frazzled by a complex project with deadlines where you felt your colleague wasn't carrying their weight), and so you just took a sledge hammer to it.

That's such a brutal way to treat a colleague, it must have been devastating for their moral. Like, what was your relationship to this person like after that? Did they stay on? Were your team lead and manager really okay with how you handled that?

If you haven't fired this engineer yet, or started moving in that direction, feel free to contact me directly at eengstrom@gmail.com. I'm happy to talk through it with you. I am not an HR generalist or a lawyer; I am a seasoned manager with over 20 years of experience who takes his responsibility to team and company very seriously. I can tell from reading your post that you are clearly struggling with this.

While I do agree with portman's advice below as it clearly shows experience and thoughtfulness, I disagree with most comments in this thread on several principles:

1. I hire quickly, trusting instinct. 2. I fire very slowly, if at all.

One key trick to understanding humans and being successful with them is that despite marketing demographics we are all motivated differently and relate and filter things differently.

Each time you make a decision to let someone go, ask yourself whether the employee failed or whether you did as their manager and leader. There are clear cases where a person shouldn't be in your organization, but practice and experience has taught me time and again that an employee's failure is the direct result of bad leadership, laziness or a lack of character - in the manager.

Clearly the person was qualified enough to obtain the position. Everything after that is up to the managers and leaders in your organization. If the person just isn't fitting in, can't offer value for the cost, at least make sure after you've sacked them that you understand what about that person misled you in the hiring process.

Years ago I built several organizations and led each for over a year. One hire of the last company constantly irritated me, I mean really, constantly bounced up and down on my last nerve, cutting away with a hacksaw...

1. I was not understanding what this employee needed from me to be successful in assignments, or even about what I expected in terms of work ethics and acceptable use of time at work.

2. The employee understood that I was dissatisfied but I was giving him mixed messages by not being frank with him. I was trying to over manage his problem, which wasn't a technique that worked.

3. I was not fair with this person because I treated him the same way as the rest of the team. A big mistake considering that two team members were total rock stars, upbeat, proactive, interested and fully aware of how lucky they were to have their position. I really, simply, didn't know him nor did I really make time to get to know what made him tick.

So I started to work on his separation process and as a part of it, I pulled a few members of the team aside and asked them what they thought. No one really had a problem with him, except that, shockingly enough, he didn't seem to understand my direction and wasn't able to make progress.

One of my .. hah .. junior developers said to me, "Hey, Robert is just the kind of guy that needs a list.". Since Robert was on a team of people that generally needed less input that the rest of my departments, I was kind of put off by such simple feedback.

So, I started shifting assignments to Robert that were moment to moment, short tasks and within weeks we had his productivity up, I had learned a valuable method of evaluation and had realized fundamental gaps in my own skills and abilities as a leader. Within a month, Robert had taken over as a team floater and input/output guy. The entire technology wing of the company came to rely on him five or six times a day; when you're building a tech and a market at the same time under pressure and on tight budgets, this was invaluable.

Basically Robert became the technology group's go to guy for anything from packing up deployments to testing functionality to scripting self-tests. You name it. The key was understanding that Robert needed short term accomplishments, measurable tasks and in a short period of time, he and I and his manager learned a very rewarding style of working together.

At the end of the day, properly utilized and managed, Robert became a star in his own right. If engaged, he would easily get jobs done faster than anyone else in the company, and while needing more maintenance and direction than other team members, he was a huge savings in time and distraction for so many others.

Don't fire your guy until you've had a chance to analyze why there is a breakdown. You're doing yourself, your initial impulse on hiring him, and the employee a disservice.

It helped the company wasn’t doing great and cutting his salary was probably useful.

Years too late though. We’d lost good people because of him. I was only there because I could minimize my interactions with him (through role and power) so I didn’t have to deal with him much.

OH. The other thing was he got shuffled to a different manager who very quickly learned what he was dealing with and didn’t want to waste his time with it.

When hired it was my original manager to 2 employees; but it was obvious there would be some hiring. Which did happen.

Eventually it was 'too much' for said manager to be dealing with us on a daily. So he found a marketing person to be our new manager. He was lazy as well, so his contribution was more or less creating salesforce reports to track and grade each of us. I was constantly #1 so I didn't care but if someone went on vacation, they showed up in last place and would be chastised for poor numbers. Generally the team didn't like him.

Then comes the snitch sales person who becomes our manager, not above or below this other manager, but below the original. She tried to keep educated on the ongoing work, I dont blame her. Except about 1/3rd of the team refused to talk to her; they realized a pattern of her talking to them and them getting in shit an hour or 2 later. Personally I outright went to the original manager and asserted she's not managing me and if she is, please tell me right away. Because I was planning to instant quit. He of course said she's not and that I seem to manage myself fine enough, these other managers were to keep the team going.

So the team was getting a little angry with 3 layers of managers. What happens? A junior on the team proposes he becomes the manager and reports to the managers so they dont have to interact with the team. I had mostly excluded myself from this team by this point. It was a sinking ship and I wanted to be just far enough to watch what happened.

Now what happens? This junior basically was turned into the snitch on her behalf. He started getting hated by the team and decides he doesn't want the position anymore. So he orchestrates to be out of the office all day.

So then an outside management team was hired to figure out why this team was so dysfunctional. I was apparently uninvolved and never the subject of the meeting. But guess who is in the meetings? All the managers and none of the team. All of the problems of the team... obviously the team and not the managers.

I specifically again went to the original manager and asked about the meetings. He reassured me they weren't about me at all. That one of the primary discoveries is they need at least 1 more manager to manage the managers.

In those situations you have two options -- find someone he is close to who's more positive about you that you can leverage into brokering a truce, or try to use him for information. (You can straight up ask braggarts what they would do in your place, which usually makes it obvious why they aren't in your place already, in addition to giving you future bones to throw him to keep the hostility in check)

If it helps, consider that this person might have tried exactly the same ploy with whoever was in your shoes. I'm sure they had some issues going on in their life, and issues with the existing management that you inherited unknowingly.

Management stress is real. Part of it comes with maintaining confidentiality, whereas a disgruntled employee will rant and get things off their chest.

I won't say it's 100% about the role and not the person, since that's dumb - interpersonal relationships are real and significant. Equally, it's not 100% about the individual. FWIW, and taking your description at face value, I think your response was appropriate and theirs was not.

When I was hired I was told he was a problematic hire, that hadn't produced anything for long before my arrival. It was basically "We already know we're going to probably have to let him go but if you want to try to work around it, be my guest". I did try to go in with no judgments, as I always do, but he refused help, and refused to even let anyone look over his shoulder and find why this task was taking an order of magnitude too long.

He should have reached out to HR instead of quitting. He should have gone directly to his boss's boss. He should have documented every instance of improper conduct as much as possible and gotten a lawyer...

Clearly there were other options, but it seems like he decided to give up.

Just because it's a great company doesn't make every person there great. That's why we have HR and skip-level managers and lawyers, you just got to use them instead of curling up in a ball and taking it.

At least from what I've seen these sorts of things are systemic issues, and it is extremely rare for such problems to be caused by a single bad apple.

Again, not trying to discount your personal experiences or lessons, but I'd just be very wary of assigning scapegoat status to a single person for what is clearly a toxic workplace in general ("Management stayed quiet and attempted to push it under the rug for a bit", "Workplace politics were on the rise", etc etc). Often times this mentality plays to the people in power who are responsible for the lack of safeguards, and when you don't fix the underlying causes you're essentially just relying on HR to filter the "bad apples" out of the hiring practice... and we all know how much of a crapshoot hiring in tech is already.

Last, I'd re-examine your impulse to go out and celebrate when this guy was fired. I obviously don't know the details here, but it definitely sounds like an "us vs him" mentality was being fostered, and that could have very well contributed to the exacerbation of this guy's toxic behavior. Often times these sorts of people are just desperate for attention or social contact, and the only way they've figured to get a consistent response from people is to piss them off. Disengaging and relying on "management" to solve these issues very often can make a problem worse. Other times these people can be simply responding to being bullied themselves, often simultaneously, by other groups within the company, or are reacting to problems in their personal lives. These explanations are not absolving them of responsibility for their actions, but it's important to realize that most assholes aren't genuinely bad people, they're just normal humans like you and I who respond to stress and stimuli in a poor way.

Going to the guy as a group and discussing his behavior, while uncomfortable, often can be very illuminating and solve issues that would have just festered until someone was forced to be fired or leave. Worst comes to worst you'll immediately realize the situation is untenable at that point, and the solution will be quite obvious.

Again, disclaimer, I don't know the specifics here and I don't want to indict the parent, but let's make sure we don't use the above example as a primer on how to deal with toxic colleagues in general.

I had 18 months of pure hell. Only after I left did I realise I was in a sort of abusive relationship. I heard later he said that my problem was I refused his help. It was a miserable experience, made worse because I pretty much always blame myself if something is wrong.

The truth is he wasn’t very good, at least not to the degree he tried to present.

Some of management loved him because he worked so hard. He was always there, always the one holding things together.

The truth was he was doing that because his methods were shoddy enough that things were always falling apart. He didn’t want others working on stuff because that would either lose his control/power or people would see how bad things really were.

In the end it became too much. As the company grew and things were done without him it became clear just how little he actually accomplished. New employee worked as well and were easy to get along with, not hostile to help.

But we had to suffer with him sabotaging things and dealing with his outbursts for YEARS.

I'm trying to remember some representative anecdotes for you... for example, our receptionist made the mistake of sending out an investor email without bcc'ing, so the email addresses were all visible. He made her handwrite a note that said, "I apologize for violating your privacy. [The CEO] has instructed me on how to properly send email. I will not do it again" - and write it out 90 times - and mail them to each investor. (You may ask why there were 90 investors... another story.) She told me tearfully that she got RSI from writing out the notes.

Anyway, imagine a whole bunch of examples like that and you'll get the picture.

It was fascinating to observe how the different team members reacted to this person. Most retreated into a shell and didn't speak up as he abused others. There were a few scapegoats who accepted prolonged terrible treatment. There were also a few who acted courageously. For example, when the CEO yelled at one designer for leaving work on a Sunday and told him he would have to apologize to everyone for "letting down the team", the designer said, "In that case, I won't be back" and left. But these latter were a small minority.

It will surely help others avoid it.

Maybe. Sometimes one has to experience things for oneself. The key thing I would say about all this is: if someone is abusive, it doesn't matter whether he's abusing you. What matters is what it tells you about his character. Don't make excuses for people like that. Just avoid them. (Counterargument - Steve Jobs?)