Ask HN: Any experience of senior colleagues who had a consistent rude demeanor? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Any experience of senior colleagues who had a consistent rude demeanor?

I am in a situation where someone at a VP level is consistently using a rude tone with everyone around them.

I personally feel that they are behaving that way since the company is undergoing a lot of restructuring and they are feeling intimidated by it.

Have you had situations like this in the past? How and if you dealt with it?

PS. I am not really looking for advice on my situation, I am keen to hear your experiences.

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This person was several levels above me in the hierarchy, and famously known to be short-tempered. Before my first meeting itself, I was given generic tips on how to handle, none of which however seemed effective.

I realized that the person was very smart and always interested in understanding everything in depth. The teams however would fail in explaining properly, which would lead him to frustration.

As he was trying to do this for a large number of domains, he was often behind in his understanding of the state of the art, would not know the jargon, acronyms, etc.

People on the other hand habitually skip defining terms they use, miss putting units on physical quantities, not label the axes of a graph, etc., all of which would instantly frustrate him.

The same thing would happen when he won't hear back crisp and/or correct answers for his questions.

Going slow with him, managing to get him understand what you had to say, he would now spot loose ends, hidden assumptions, fallacies in your arguments with ease. He would try to explain, but would be frustrated fast if the team won't get it.

With just around two-to-three meetings, I could see where his frustrations were coming from, and was then comfortably able to present to him. At some point, I started becoming known as the face of the project to put before him.

He was a nice person actually. He would not mind accepting his mistakes, and the same applied to me. He once spotted a mistake in my analysis (the metric I was optimizing itself was not really correct) some twenty minutes into the one-hour meeting. I not only immediately accepted, but also announced that the rest of the meeting time is unneeded as I need to fix and come back later. The meeting however gracefully continued as he started focussing on other things in the presentation that were secondary but still valid.

To summarize, the true tip for working with him was to be good at explaining with simplicity and strive towards the truth. That was all.

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In another experience, someone I worked with was again very smart, and would usually get his team to produce unquestionable results. However, he would favor people from his own cultural background more, give them undue trust, and in the process nearly humiliate people who were actually correct. In this case, I ended up changing the team. This person at a later point heard back from the human resources team for complaints made against him, and believe that he improved after that.

'Rude' has such a wide variety of interpretations that it's impossible to tell.

It's possible you may be in a demanding situation, with high impact professionals who are more direct, possibly even terse, and you're just not used to it.

It could be a situation where leadership is from a different generation where they just were not PC or didn't mince words - that's hard to describe other than they may not have any reluctance to use slightly uncomfortable expletives.

There's also a huge difference between rude actions, and rude manner - frankly, people who seem crufty I find are actually more honest. Often, the truly manipulative people are the one's are those who 'seem nice' but take negative actions behind your back.

Maybe they're just really cold and direct, or don't smile. My girlfriend thinks those who don't smile or use pleasantries to be 'rude' while I find prefer candor without the sugary coating.

Someone making 'bad actions' i.e. really selfish behaviour, controlling information, not sharing, siloing teams - this is bad but very often is not accompanied with rude manner.

And of course, you have basic manner that can be toxic, i.e. constantly demeaning people, calling them 'stupid' or 'idiots' or whatever which is really not ever acceptable in normal situations.

You'd have to be really, really specific in terms of the actual communication because someone raising their voice and saying "This is a fing mess, we really need to work on this!" is kind of rude, but not that big a of a deal. Someone saying "Jared fed this up once again, why don't you explain to us all how much of an idiot you are?" - which is totally unacceptable. etc..

'Rude' is just a very vague term that could mean so many things.

YES

There is such a difference in being short, curt, or whatever you want to say, and being awful. Pointing out obvious mistakes, flaws, and other issues is part of being a supervisor/manager/executive. Some do not have time to mince words and beat around the bush.

When it becomes personal attacks/insults, that's the line.

The question you have to ask yourself is - am I listening to the feedback or am I ignoring it because it wasn't presented how I wanted it to be presented?

Yes, I worked with someone who at some point aimed his ire at me, despite having the same project seniority as myself. He was overwhelmed and never met his targets but chose to spend his time disagreeing with me. Unfortunately the devs in the team fell in line with him, because they were Indian I guess and so am I, and I was bypassed for a lot of things. I continued to take their money and looked for a better job and then left. They continued to fail to meet targets and deliver anything that worked. Ultimately you need to decide what happens if you are rude back, will they respect you, or use that as evidence to fire you? I suspected the latter because I was showing him up, so I jumped. Look after your income first, forget about trying to fix bad people.

Yes I’m sure plenty here have - what’s the question you have?

My advice is if they’re sufficiently senior and influential, and nothing is being done about their behaviour it’s a toxic workplace - you should leave the company.

The question - What's the experience and how / if they dealt with it.

I am not looking for any advice on how to deal with this situation, I am influential and at a senior role as well.

But I wanted to hear experience that other's have had.

My experience was as a direct report to someone like this, they were very toxic.. regularly demeaning their team. They siloed us so it would have been very difficult/impossible for other departments to understand given their influence so I moved on as did everyone else in the team.

If you’re also senior I suppose you have a chance of helping other peers to subtly see the behaviour… good luck

Yes. I have on many occasions.

It’s important to remember Hanlons razor. Never explain with malice what can be explained with ignorance. In many situations they were often not sensitive to how their authority gave their opinions so much more weight to their colleagues. Feedback could be felt much more harshly from a senior dev as they might have influence on your career growth.

Also senior devs I’ve found were more personally invested in existing solutions as they themselves often built them. They often can be right in their opinions but not have the people skills to communicate well and persuade others.

Could it be a cultural difference? A team of mine once had to deal with Dutch and British people.

To some of my Canadian colleagues, they seemed rude and unengaged. Same with many Americans to us Canadians. Many of us interpret bluntness with feedback and aggressiveness as rudeness.

Knowing this, you can adjust your expectations though and see that it is within the bounds of behaviour expected for their cultural background.

Good point - cultures are vastly different

The person is actually Canadian. Generally a mild culture.

Are you also Canadian?

Yeah, three times.

The first time it was my boss in a very small company (8 people total) After trying to work it out with her, receiving an apology, but then going back to the same attitude, I went to the company owner, and we arranged a way to work 100% separately. I left a few months after.

Second time it was a high level person in a big company, similar to your case. I tried to stay out of their way, then I transferred inside the company but far away.

Third time it wasnt my boss, it was the boss for a contractor. He continuously mistreated his employees, yelled to them, and they were mostly young people around 20 years old in their first job. I tried to get all of them jobs elsewhere and mostly succeeded, I also don't really talk to him unless needed and actively ignore him.

So: going over their head or GTFO

I have experienced senior people behaving like this. The rub is when you are not in a position to challenge. Whether because of hierarchy or lack of complaints procedure. I bide my time and then leave. I have observed this is what happens in general. Bad manager, good workers quietly move on.

Yes, two things:

[1] it taught me a lot about how to present information and conduct discussions dispassionately without being rattled; and [2] past a certain point, people like that are toxic and they stifle innovation, productivity and wellbeing around them. only answer is to GTFO.

Yes, it's very common around here. Teachers, parents, and politicians are often rude. So people emulate it thinking that it's how authority should behave. I went to a management class taught by an ex-Deloitte employee - we were taught that employees are like donkeys, they need a carrot and whip to get anywhere. If they weren't donkeys, they'd be the managers. These people are not born sociopaths, they're trained to be so.

My resume and portfolio is dotted with these companies that shoot themselves in the foot. They were great teams, great products, but the managers decided to be rude and demeaning for no reason. It probably works for factories, but not in a world where it takes 6 months to fully replace a critical role.

Eventually a company or project bleeds all the good people. The project becomes increasingly hopeless. Stress levels increase because of missed deadlines. You get panic hiring where newbies are forced onto a late project (making it later). People are forced to work weekends. More burn out or quit. Stuff gets hacked together to last for a few months or so while the hacker is interviewing for another job.

It's conditioned me to stay far away from asshole leadership and run at the first hint of it.

You've mentioned two beliefs:

- the person is using a rude tone

- they are doing it for reason X

Neither of these are objective facts.

If I had to deal with a situation like this, the first thing I would do would be to examine what I have actually observed.

You may have a theory (e.g. "he uses few words and doesn't start with pleasantries before making a request" -> "he is intending to be rude"). But making that theory explicit will better allow you to examine it.

I've mentioned in my post that I'm not looking for inputs on how to deal with my situation.

I want to hear about the experiences of others in such situations.

When I have experienced this, I have understood it as a personality trait. I never thought it was due to organizational changes. But it could be, I guess.

Maybe have a chat with them and explain how it's affecting you?

If you are not comfortable having a chat like that you need to play it via an intermediate like HR, but remember that HR only acts in the companies interest.

I am not always in favor of the "victims should grow a thicker skin", but sadly that's how many need to survive in the workplace.

Try to judge others behavior like you would judge a rude child. If a child is rude you may think they are tired, stressed or hungry and not take it personally. If a VP is rude he must be a shithead, while stress might explain a lot as well.

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