a) They made up wholly out of thin air just so they could drop their "have to" line
and b) If an IC "is combative and fighting with their manager at every turn.", then holy hell, is it not an interpersonal conflict, it's even more of a management failure. The manager was the one who put the person on the team, how did they evaluate this person? Why did they not pick up on the warning signs? What stopped them from letting them go even faster?
The IC is 100% fired in this scenario but the responsibility is also 100% on the manager that this should have never happened in the first place.
An interpersonal conflict is when there is genuine differences of opinion that come from honest differences in values. Not when one or both sides are clearly wrong.
A lot of this entire thread sounds like "perfect victim" blaming. Only the perfect victims are allowed to point out abuse in the system, if you have some prior criminal history or you've made some sexual missteps in the past, then you "deserve" the police brutality/sexual harassment that was put upon you.
Standards are made wholly out of whole cloth over who gets to be the perfect victim and if you fail at any minor point of decorum, then we "have to" disregard your critique of the system because you "weren't professional enough" to have suffered management abuse.
If you are correct, and I am not saying you're wrong, the term is so vague that more or less any disagreement that gets a bit personal could be considered creating a hostile work environment. No company would be able to operate in a situation where any disagreement could be leveraged to get the other person instantly fired, regardless of level or what the comments were about.
The manager’s described behavior is bad, but the author’s reactions and responses are also bad. This reads like a meeting of two flawed personalities, neither of whom is willing or capable of adapting to difficult interpersonal situations.
The appropriate response to the (obviously) unhealthy manager in the situations described is to tactfully de-escalate while beginning the process of switching teams. Instead, the author seems fixated on “winning” every disagreement. If you think you can undermine your manager and backseat drive their processes, however flawed they may be, you are not going to produce positive outcomes for yourself or the team as described in the article.
A common misunderstanding of less mature employees is that only one person can be in the wrong in an interaction. The author writes as if the manager’s wrongdoings are a free pass for them to respond however they felt like, but the described responses come off as petty and unprofessional. Both parties can be in the wrong in interpersonal conflict situations, and these writings are a good example of what that looks like.
Going so far as to create a website publicly defending one’s behavior while seemingly oblivious to the fact that the described behavior is not a good look is an immature move. If I found this person’s resume in our application queue I would be extremely hesitant to hire them anywhere except maybe under the close guidance of a very strong manager who could mentor them closely and who wouldn’t hesitate to remove them from the company if they started demonstrating signs of combativeness or being a disgruntled employee. Advertising your “disgruntled fired employee” status online is not a good look, especially when you describe your own unprofessional behaviors in the process.
I didn't say it was hearsay. I didn't say I didn't believe the people reporting the problems. I'm just noting that there's a lot of room between "some employees were harassing others, largely unknown to most management" and "there's a pervasive culture of harassment that goes all the way to the top, and includes much of management".
And I can fully believe everyone reporting problems believes they are right while withholding judgment as to whether their interpretation of their situations, which were generally highly emotional and formed during extreme stress, is entirely consistent with reality once the other side has a chance to state their case. We should always get both sides. Humans aren't very good at representing stressful situations with other humans objectively.
I'd say there are basically too ways in which "inconsiderate" statements appear. One way is in people who genuinely are not that good at anticipating how others will view a given statement. The other way is in people who by reflex assert dominance and so don't care what effect their statements are going to have. A given boss lashes out at subordinates both because they can and to continue to show them "who's boss". An emotionally incompetent employee may lash out at a boss and get fired because they don't aren't being emotionally aware.
Even more, you can get a person who's always asserting dominance and they either rise to the very top or fall to the very bottom. Which is to say, there's a certain porousness between emotionally incompetent and "just being dick".
"but being asked to work with a tactless fragile person is asking for quite a bit more. :)"
No one can work with a tactless, fragile person. But plenty of people for tactless, fragile people.
When you are going over the line when dealing with an asshole, the company ends up with two assholes. You are not making the situation better.
This blog post IMHO makes the author unemployable, they publicly demonstrated they are a high-friction person and even tacked their name on it. Being able to handle social conflict gracefully without escalation is a virtue and they don't have it.
An employer is trying to figure out the motivations of the worker. How is this wrong? How is setting up a scenario manipulative? Why is everyone so hostile to this?
It is basically impossible for me not to find something I could be outraged about or offended by in any company I've ever worked in. If I was not able to respond in a way other than lashing out I would be unemployable, and for good reason.
There is off course nuance here. There are certain principals I am not willing to violate and will burn bridges to speak out against. But it's important to distinguish between those principals and other offensive ideas so you know when to fight those battles and when not to.
You seem to be reading this article and reading stuff between the lines that other people aren't. The article itself doesn't give you enough detail to know whose between the line reading is correct. Seems like maybe that's worth remembering.
In defense of premise 1: if the team members in the room are unaware of the fact that one of them is under performing, it's not a team. You have an entirely different kind of problem.
In defense of premise 2: that's pretty much the whole premise of the article, if people do bring it up then whatever problem you may have, team members not holding each other accountable isn't one of them.
But this really, really annoys me (and not just me, it's one of the thing I keep hearing from people find it hard to work with us geeks): "a better way of handling the situation other than saying it out loud in front of everyone".
For fuck sake, it's not like you're outing someones sexual preference for pink ponies in front of their parents and loved ones!
It's about the work, the stuff you're getting paid to do, and it's not even a criticism, it's an observation, nobody is blaming anybody.
If that's the case then the people who told them to "stay in their lane" had a legitimate reason to be defensive. Was it better for the business? Who knows since we are only getting one side of the story from someone patting themselves on the back.
But yes, I would say behaving like an interloper in your org and getting people fired because you deviate from your actual job is highly problematic. After the news gets out about that behavior you can better believe they are going to get stonewalled in their actual role.
The issue is that you’re letting your issues turn in to personal attacks instead of taking your legitimate complaints to a manager. A workplace where workers take their problems out on each other sounds toxic and unprofessional to me.
That could be a matter of context, though. Obviously this was not the situation for the author of the article, but that isn't automatically an inappropriate statement. Let's say the person who said it actually has a friendship with the recipient, and knows that she is in an abusive relationship. The manager/boss/founder may not know any of this, and the hair-trigger "you're fired" response is entirely unwarranted and fairly horrible.
Recently I was having a conversation with a coworker (who is also a friend) where I said something to him that would be pretty bad if we weren't also friends. (We often have a faux-confrontational relationship and hurl fake insults at each other.) Someone who wasn't aware of our friendship overheard, and mentioned it to our boss, who then calmly asked me for an explanation. In the end, our boss agreed that the 3rd party overreacted, but suggested (and I agreed) that I might want to tone it down in situations where others who don't understand could misinterpret my words. He didn't come at me angrily or with an accusation of impropriety, but instead asked a reasonable question in an attempt to understand the context of the situation. Immediately taking the matter to HR or threatening me with being fired would have been counterproductive.
This is really insightful and I love how it’s presented! The workplace is the most guilty of this in my experience and I wish my previous employers could’ve learned the darn difference.
(Also the nature of these comments is the ironic cherry on the vitriol cake)
Honestly, I could see HR legitimately reprimanding inflammatory statements, regardless of context, that were strong enough to get them involved. It's an escalation of a disagreement and employees should be expected to behave more professionally.
Saying a paraphrase of "I didn't quit, I gave my employer an ultimatum that they then rejected" [0] is a very toxic way to interact with people.
1) Ultimatums in general are not a healthy way to interact with others because they intentionally try to skew power dynamics towards the giver (Do what I say or else...)
2) To then act (upon failure of the ultimatum) as though her employer acted inappropriately implies that she really didn't even give an ultimatum, so much as made a demand that she couched as an ultimatum.
You can agree or disagree about whether she was entitled to act this way (academia is a unique field where toxic behavior like this is often normalized), but I think most people agree that if given the option, they'd prefer to not work with someone who approaches conflict in this way.
In particular, what I'm saying is that "fighting fire with fire" is a far cry from "taking the high road."
In another comment, oskarth posits that she "did everything right" by not going to her supervisor, so as to avoid "turning it into drama".
How does this not turn it into drama? Isn't that what supervisors are for? I understand the inclination to avoid being the snitch, but all this does is set her up for equally serious rebukement by management if and when it does get escalated there, and prevents her from having a leg to stand on.
Whether or not it is as offensive as the other, I think we all know that it was intended to be at least as annoying.
What she's effectively done is the digital equivalent to "I'm not touching you. I'm not touching you." while holding her finger one inch from the face of her co-workers. That's fine and dandy, but she doesn't get to respond like a two year old and also expect me to think highly of her actions.
Offence: Engineer is offended by customer and flushes the customers livelihood (website)
Cure: Management should be offended by engineers and flush THEIR livelihood (job)
Seems symmetrical, but perhaps over-simplifying the problem? Of course I realize that the article above doesn't directly advocate firing the engineer, but many high-functioning technical people just cannot realistically be trained to be social animals too. Those abrasive nerds are really productive outside of a customer service role, so wouldn't a better solution be to fix the mis-allocation of tech staffing resources to customer facing roles?
edit: and yeah, maybe the problem is that this particular engineer was just a dick, and we shouldn't use him as an example in the discussion of technical vs social roles in our companies.
a) They made up wholly out of thin air just so they could drop their "have to" line
and b) If an IC "is combative and fighting with their manager at every turn.", then holy hell, is it not an interpersonal conflict, it's even more of a management failure. The manager was the one who put the person on the team, how did they evaluate this person? Why did they not pick up on the warning signs? What stopped them from letting them go even faster?
The IC is 100% fired in this scenario but the responsibility is also 100% on the manager that this should have never happened in the first place.
An interpersonal conflict is when there is genuine differences of opinion that come from honest differences in values. Not when one or both sides are clearly wrong.
A lot of this entire thread sounds like "perfect victim" blaming. Only the perfect victims are allowed to point out abuse in the system, if you have some prior criminal history or you've made some sexual missteps in the past, then you "deserve" the police brutality/sexual harassment that was put upon you.
Standards are made wholly out of whole cloth over who gets to be the perfect victim and if you fail at any minor point of decorum, then we "have to" disregard your critique of the system because you "weren't professional enough" to have suffered management abuse.
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