It's now your fault they don't know about it

I learned a similar lesson in a simpler form when waiting tables.

Some people will run you ragged, asking for more napkins, then when you return with them, more ketchup, then when you return with that, there’s an issue with the food, then so on and so on.

If you don’t check yourself, you will actually leave your other tables without any of their basics, or their food will get cold waiting in the window, because you’ve developed tunnel vision to please this one needy table.

Sometimes things really do stack up, but there are strategies to avoid or deal with that. These strategies will fail with the Truly Needy table. And then they won’t tip well, or at all.

I learned it’s better to deprioritize that table and pay the normal amount of attention to everyone else. Better for those all to tip at a standard rate and give them a good experience than to let one group drag down the whole floor.

That super needy table didn’t need half the things they asked for anyways. Those napkins are sitting there unused when they leave. The glass of water they asked you to fill at halfway is still almost full. Life goes on.

What I find scary is that if you work in a sufficiently toxic environment/culture for long enough, that very behavior that you try to fight against and change begins to seep into your everyday actions. I've seen myself go from "positive and helpful" to "apathetic and helpful" to "not caring at all" to "chippy, negative and unhelpful" before. You hope that this is something you can pickup on, but when the culture of a work environment is like that, there isn't really anyone to give you feedback and catch you from sliding down this slope. Then when you do notice, the climb back up just feels so much more overwhelming.

I totally know that feeling. This is why I really cherish my current, by now 3 years old, job because sort of the opposite exists here. In fact, if I forget sometimes or make a mistake, my coworkers are more likely to fix it for me in the wiki or docs than they are to use it to complain or stop me from doing something. Working in a helpful and collaborative environment has had an enormous quality of life improvement for me. It is also the most productive teams I've ever worked on. I'm not writing this to gloat or anything but offer up something I didn't know before working here: Don't just hire for talent; do not hire jerks no matter how good they are as individuals. Software engineering is an inherently collaborative venture. When building an engineering team, really do build a team instead of a collection of individuals. It's fine for engineers to be critical but don't just stop there. Find fault but also offer up a solution to help the project move forward. I can't work in the type of environment the author described anymore. Now that I know functional, collaborative teams exist I will always want to be on one.

Thank you for this. This is why I tend to work alone. There has been a slow, steady cultivation of the perpetually helpless, antagonistic weiner personality over the last 10 years that is an absolute teeth grind.

That said, it's good to learn how to differentiate between people who are being genuine and just need guidance/attention and someone who's a wet noodle. It's easy to accidentally discourage the former mischaracterizing them as the latter.

Maybe it’s just me, but I notice a difference in response from the author that I personally try to avoid. To me these two things:

> There are no docs for [this thing you're doing].

And:

> Coworker: I have (specific concern) about [thing you're doing]. I couldn't find anything about it in that group post or on the wiki.

Would receive a somewhat similar response. Sure it’s annoying when people can’t find something, or when they don’t bother looking, but we also work in a field where someone might ask you something in a very hostile sounding way simply because they aren’t very skilled socially.

Telling them “yes there is”, sort of escalates the conflict in my book and while it’s totally understandable (and I’ll do this myself on my less good days) it’s also just asking for things to go south. Which is something I have learned not to waste time on.

If they continue being hostile after you respond openly, helpful and defusing, then sure, they can go fuck themselves. Just be sure that you use the corporate-speak fuck you instead of what you actually want to say to keep your hands clean.

"You: If I put it in the wiki you would have said to put it in the group, and if I put it in the group you would have said I should have put it in the wiki."

I learned this the hard way in a corporate setting. If someone's going to damn me for doing (A) and doing (not A) then they're really just attacking me.

OP's point is, tersely, a good faith coworker needs to do a bare minimum of work to show genuine interest outside of hostility. That's definitely a thing, too - few situations get to be one sided. Further, the example she gave sounds like a coworker who only makes demands or criticisms. When it's 100% demands or criticisms then it's actively destructive. This I learned from family who claim to "just be contrarians".

As an engineer I meet one of these people with the the just-feed-me mindset once in a while (luckily not too often). They are never very good at their job, because they lack perhaps the single most important ability for an engineer, to research on their own. An example is when an engineer could find the API doc with a 5 min search but choose to bother their co-workers for it repeatedly. They will also often complain about the lack of documentation but when they actually do projects the documentation are not more accessible either.

I also find people with this mindset hard to coach, just because it's a very passive attitude, and simple words of advice couldn't do much to change the passivity.

There is always a limit to guidance or documentation. Code changes every day in any decent software project and docs become stale quickly. Even if the docs are there, it's always a good idea to take a look at the code, do some research on your own and see if you find any discrepancies.

Posts and comments like this scare me.Not being a social person, while talking to others, my worst nightmare is when I ask someone a question, and they already have some presumptions about why I am asking that, and I would occasionally end up being scolded and not even know why.

In this case, because I asked about not being able to find the docs, I am already a hater because of the line of conversation others have had already.

I learned the hard way long ago that if your manager does this, pack your desk before you are fired and have to do it with an escort.

I'm in a relatively new job in an organisation with lots of systems and a complex web of scenarios that involve each of these systems, and I'm under-fucking-water in terms of how well I understand things in comparison to where I need to be for doing my job properly / competently. I've been working on a few diagrams and documentation to try to make sense of it, including asking questions of related persons, and all that has gotten me is three separate people questioning why I'm working on something that isn't "one of my assigned Jira tickets".

So I'm currently in a negative spiral of being not-particularly-useful because I don't know enough about how their shit works, and also now being reticent to ask questions in order to help solve the first problem, because it seems to self-nominate me as "not on task".

Will be applying for other jobs this weekend. Can't handle this BS.

This is therapeutic to read - I've been on the receiving end of this a lot. Once I even had someone go about 5 levels deep.

"We should have a doc for this process."

"We do - here's the link."

"I couldn't find this - it should be linked more prominently."

"It's the first link when you go to the docs page."

"It didn't warn me about this tricky part."

"There's a warning at the top."

"It should be more prominent, bold and in red."

"It is bold and in red. [sends screenshot]"

"Oh okay, thank you..."

There's a tangent behavior where people are difficult because it gives them power/control. You add just enough interpersonal friction and people will do it your way. It's similar to the described scenario - nothing is good enough and there's always a justification.

I've found it an incredibly hard behavior to manage with no good outcomes. People acting in good faith just need to align on the allowed variance and the issue's done.

I think this is a transmissible disease.

I emailed a vendor who sells my clients goods through their platform, and asked them questions about their payout report. They don’t read/answer my questions, send incomplete answers when they do, send links to their knowledge base with months old information. I’ve concluded they are either overworked, don’t care, and/or have a parasitic brain fungus which prevents them from using logic.

A few months back I cross posted a programming question to several online communities, and in each got one person answering the question they think you’re asking, rather than the one you actually did ask—literally in words and sentences. And then proceed to answer the easy question—which you provided as context—and ignore the difficult question you brought to the group.

It’s a virus. It’s people optimizing their own successful behaviors and failing to perform in new situations.

In the first case the company says they added features to the report for internationalization. What? 330m Americans is not a big enough group to have a custom payout report without confusing garbage in it? (Like VAT on a receipt for goods bought in US). They bought into their own BS and can’t see.

In the second case, months later I discussed the programming problem at a meetup group and an expert in the domain said what I want doesn’t exist. No wonder the forum peeps answered their own mis-interpretation, because to very high reputation users it’s just a game.

I've noticed this as a general pattern, when someone doesn't like plan X or doesn't want to do X, but the reason they give is bogus. And when you point out why it's bogus, they offer a series of other bogus reasons. Sometimes they are ultimately persuaded, and sometimes they land on a real reason, and sometimes they just wind up saying they just don't like it.

But no matter what, the series of bogus reasons (bogus German: vielenscheingründe) is a waste of everyone's time, and I wonder why people do it. Are they just doing it to stall while they wait for the hamster wheel in their head to offer up their real objection?

Manager: You didn't do <x>.

Me: Yes I did, <searches> here it is.

Manager: But you didn't keep me up-to-date that you did it.

Me: Yes I did, here are my weekly (as requested) progress e-mails.

Manager: But you know I don't read my e-mail.

Me: #%#&$@#

----------

Me: Assigns one of my team members task X before I go on vacation.

Manager: Reassigns my team member away from doing task X while I am on vacation.

Manager: Docks me for task X not being done right after I come back from vacation.

Me: #%^!$!@

---------------

Co-Worker: I don't know how to do <X>

Me: Have you tried the documentation on <X>?

Co-Worker: No.

Me: Well, here it is.

Co-Worker: But it doesn't explain how to do X.Y!

Me: The 2nd line of the documentation for X is a link that has Y in the title. Did you try clicking on it?

Co-Worker: I can't find anything!

Me: Did you try clicking the link?

Co-Worker: No.

Manager: You're not helping <Co-Worker>!

Me: #$%@^!&

I mean, it's kinda always been that way. There's this skill cliff you get to between power user and operator where you know enough to solve easy problems but getting all the information you need to put it together into something useful requires non-trivial effort. And you go through that cliff every time you take on a new project.

If you want to put together a self-hosted Spotify alternative, for instance, one of the first and most attractive things I found was mpd. I put a whole bunch of time into working out how to containerify it so I could run it on my cluster in order to find out why nobody else put in the work, mpd isn't designed to and has no functionality to serve music over a network. It's there to run a local music player. It was written in an era before Spotify and had no idea that was going to be something people would want to do.

And you can find online thread after thread of people asking how to do this with mpd and getting answers that aren't satisfying. It leads them to get on a forum themselves and ask themselves, in order to get the same unsatisfying answer.

It takes time and experience before you can figure out such things at a glance just by seeing other conversations about it. Time before you learn you need to read the available docs carefully because the answer you're seeking is very very probably in there already.

Nobody's born with this kind of patience but working on tech stuff long enough will eventually beat it into you.

It's just that more and more people are starting out and so online is simply dominated by these people.

This hits home really hard. I’m currently in my 2 weeks notice period after 6-7ish months at a company where this was (is?) a regular occurrence. At some point you have to chalk things up to willful ignorance and move on.

I tend to think people like this are just looking for an excuse not to work. My approach is to either facilitate them or force them to do more work.

If I decide to facilitate their not doing work, I would say "Yeah, I think there are docs for this. I'm in the middle of something, but give me an hour or so and I'll email you the link." Then, I'll forget about it. If they really need to know they'll come back and ask again.

If I decide to disincentivize them by making it more work for them to ask me for work I'd go along the lines of - "That's great feedback. Why don't you take notes of all the issues you have with the wiki while you're working on your thing. When you're done, update the wiki so the next person to use it can benefit from what you find. Thanks."

non-violent communication [0] and sales culture [1] both teach us that when someone makes a request, we can either take it at face value, or try to understand the underlying need. In Rachel's case, the requests kept on being red herrings, because whatever this person's underlying need, it wasn't for the design doc to be in the wiki or whatever. A process of discovery might have been a better track than continually trying to hit a moving target.

Then again, when I've been on the other side of a moving target -- when a supervisor kept coming up with things I was doing wrong that never quite jelled together -- it was because a decision about my continued employment had already been made in principle, but no one was acknowledging it head-on for political/legal reasons. In that situation, I don't think there's any way to get off-script except just to quit, which is exactly what your supervisor and HR department are probably hoping for.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21263894

[1] https://www.bizjournals.com/triad/stories/2001/12/03/smallb3...

Reminds me of my current job, but with general communication rather than specific projects. This convo has come up several times between us:

Him: "You don't post updates and I don't know what you're doing about [Project A]"

Me: "I post updates every day in the daily update list where you told us to. I'm one of the only ones on the team who does it consistently"

Him: "Yeah, well you need to tell the project manager of [Project B] the state of the project"

Me: "I did in these places over a couple of days, pinging him directly each time."

Him: "Well you need to do it more. It's not his fault that he's too busy to look when you mention him. You need to keep doing it to keep him in the loop."

Wow this was timely for me. Literally in multiple versions of the described interactions this morning. Two thoughts:

1. I don't think it's helpful to categorize people. Humans will be varying degrees of reasonable/unreasonable for a variety reasons and constantly in motion on that spectrum. It's more productive, for both selfish and altruistic reasons, to try to understand the why of their behavior.

2. Getting that understanding is hard. Especially over mediums that leave out non-verbal communication. But it's really worth your time to discern if there is any area where you've communicated poorly, so you can improve, AND it's really worth your time to recognize when a person has already made up their mind and not waste anymore effort trying to change it.

3. Even when a person has made up their mind beforehand, it might be worth your time to try to understand where they're coming from, depending on whether you are in a position to simply ignore them or not. If you can't ignore them, digging deeper can open up your options to get buy-in, or lead to workarounds. Of course, very relationship, and situation dependent.

I used to answer forum posts quite a lot, and I eventually realized something similar:

If the person doesn't tell you what they've already done to try to resolve their issue, they probably didn't do anything. And it's a waste of my time to try to answer them.

That isn't always true. Sometimes they're just too lazy to type it all out, but that's another uphill battle. It's not my job as a random forum viewer to pull all that information out of them. It's their job to provide it if they want help.

I answer a lot fewer questions now, but I'm a lot more satisfied with the results.

I hate this kind of behaviour, where people prioritise themselves and their own egos or insecurities over the project or mission. In my experience it's fairly common in large companies, which have the resources to work around it, but it's devastating in startups.

On one occasion I've was blamed for not doing my job, a senior role in a startup, despite the fact that mine was the only job that was successfully completed (a product launch). That can be a real problem when the incomplete jobs include things like capital raising and sales.

I think you often get this behaviour from people who are working outside of their experience. The revert to processes, book-smarts and magic bullets, instead of using experience and seeking goals. When nothing from the book seems to work, they lash out at others. "If only you did what the book said this wouldn't have happened!"

Since every book you read will tell you something different, there is a ready source of material to support such a person's attitude, which seems to have the effect of reinforcing it.

This is excellent knowledge about human nature. The only thing I would add is that it's usually the same person in different circumstances.

There's a concept of someone "tilting" or "going tilted" (analogy to an old pinball machine; I wonder if we need to update it? Do people still play pinball?). Essentially, as a software engineer, your job is to make order out of chaos (where chaos is defined as "Everything that doesn't work the way you think it should"). Some of that involves changing your reality to match expectations. A lot of it involves changing your expectations to match reality; that's usually the fastest path (though you'll get paid for the first).

But changing yourself takes cognitive energy. When someone has had enough of that for a time, they're tilted. There isn't any reasoning with them because they're in a mindset where they are demanding reality conform to their expectations, and every deviation from that will just make them angrier. A person Rachel's describing in the first scenario has tilted and until they un-tilt, it's unlikely there'll be anything that can be done to help them solve the problem they were working on when they tilted.

Some corollaries / consequences of this model:

- some people have, in some contexts, nearly zero patience with surprise before they tilt. We often call many of those people "users." ;)

- a manager or project lead prone to tilting can be a real problem because they have the authority to try to solve the situation by putting other people on bending reality. Be sensitive, as a team member, to whether a manager is tasking you with a project because it's a good idea for the company's goals or because they're grumpy about something and taking advantage of their position to change it without actually fixing anything other than their mental model not matching current consensus reality.

There are a surprising number of people in high tech endeavours with a very particular form of illiteracy. They can not learn things very well by reading longer documents. They always seem to get lost along the way. So it is possible that the sort of behaviour described in the article is really a cry for help. They might need someone to hold them by the hand and lead them to understanding.

I instinctly want to agree. I remember quite a few examples of that.

On the other hand. This post can be weaponized as a argument towards: 'I did enough documentation. If you disagree you are unreasonable.'

Or from people that don't do documentation but spam. With that I mean people who do not think about what to put into the documentation, but throw in everything, mostly unsorted. Like: 'It is in there. On page 756, section C, subsection 1.3.3.4. Easy to find. Just look.'

In the end I think it all comes down to the question how reasonable people work together and with respect for each other.

I've been thinking a lot about "Yes, and..."

For anyone not familiar, a guideline in improv is to avoid saying `Yes, but...` and instead say `Yes, and...`.

While maybe not using those exact words, I find that when I disagree with someone at work I can either set myself up in opposition with them or I can work with them to get to the desired state.

"Is this the doc you are looking for?" "Yes, but why isn't this in the wiki?" vs "Yes, and let's add a link to it in the wiki".

It's a very simple shift, but it really makes a difference in collaboration.

I see this pattern at every company I work at:

You're the new guy. You look for documentation, you find something outdated, untouched for 6 years with a note that the page was migrated from some other system and is "work in progress".

If that thing was untouched for 6 years, it is logical to conclude that it no longer contains correct information. You read a few lines, see dead links and wrong information, you conclude that it is no longer useful.

The person that wrote the original wiki, still works at the company, but they now work on a different system and have no responsibility for that legacy system.

See, the issue is always the same: transfer of knowledge deteriorates with every person that quits or gets promoted. The system is now maintained by someone else, who has their own "wiki" on their own machine. The original, now useless wiki, should have either been deleted or updated. This doesn't happen.

This creates such waste on a global scale, that it is beyond comprehension. Whoever solves this issue, will surely help the human kind.

In summary, when a transfer of ownership for a wiki occurs, there should be a mechanism to make sure that it gets either deleted or maintained. Having new hires hunt for information, benefits no one, especially not the organization. Get your documentation in order, and you will save a ton of hours and improve productivity!

Humans are political animals. That's why most technical criticisms are basically just reflections of personal problems rather than anything truly rational.

For example, someone who keeps coming up with reasons your tool won't work for a particular application, when the real reason is that it makes their previous tool less important or replaces it.

I have a client who has a 'trusted partner' (programmer) who does not have the skills or time for the scope of the current project. Yesterday he was telling the client my new tool doesn't work and that there was only three weeks left, so I needed to create a new hook to bypass the tool entirely and run a script on my server that he writes. The problem is that was nonsense, so I demonstrated the whole thing working last night. They require my API so they need to use my tool which configures the API (the API has always been a way to trigger the tool with certain inputs). We discussed this long before.

But basically the guy has done nothing but say that my tools or approaches won't work, because they are supplanting his own.

But everything comes down to political BS in this world. That's the main thing holding back technology. Idiotic primate manipulations.

I don't like this one bit! In many cases, finding the right docs in an org is like finding a needle in a haystack. When someone asks a question that's in the docs, I default to assuming they looked and they couldn't find it, not that they are lazy or trying to put down my work. FWIW with this approach I have not had people needling me like the author here, and I have a ways to go but I have been in this industry for 17 years now.

I think the people that could use more effort in communication will see this post as relatable, and will justify their behavior when interacting with other teams / team members. In my experience infra teams are particularly bad at this, which I attribute to lack of building up a "customer first" muscle that feature teams tend to build by necessity. Of course this is wreckless speculation. I do know that it's annoying when other teams are short with reasonable questions, and have this self righteous attitude that what they work on is obviously perfect and that I'm an idiot for asking these questions!

The biggest difference between junior devs and senior devs is the ability to dig for answers and information and only ask when you are completely blocked. It seems like you've surrounded yourself with junior engineers and aren't interested in mentoring them into doing better. You should talk to your manager, or find a more technical place to work with fewer people to mentor.

Instead of pointing them to check a specific email or providing specific wiki link, would not it make more sense for letting them do "some work" in trying to find the resources on their own? Like one could say, "ohh I think you have it in your email or you can search it on internal wiki and let me know once you read everything if you still have any questions?"

Reminds me of http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html

Writing the bottom line first https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/34XxbRFe54FycoCDw/the-bottom...

In german, this is sometimes referred to as 'bessermachen', i.e. this must/should have 'better made', in some arbitrary way. It is all about 'which monkey is in charge here'.

Recognizing these types of interaction early is a useful skill. It does seem pretty obvious most of the time, I can tell based on the first question whether the person I'm talking to is interested in a good faith discussion or not.

Conversely, I try hard to exhaust all available documentation before I finally go to someone and ask for their assistance. I want them to know I'm serious, so they don't just blow me off. And when I do ask for help, I try to make it clear I'm just trying to clear a blocker to my understanding, not wasting their time.

I have been the unreasonable coworker at certain times throughout my life.

There's a huge difference between taking the time to learn the internals of something widespread and useful, and being expected to spend hours or days performing (literally) exhaustive searches of random internal repos in order to find the documentation for some bullshit internal tool that only one person knows anything about.

We have products to ship. If my options are: - Work weekends - Delay a product - Annoy the one guy in the company who knows anything about Ultrabuild

I'm going to pick C every time.

Sounds like: "I have a specific protocol for interacting with me, and you did not follow my protocol."

Some possible responses to that:

- "How was I supposed to know this the only way to get your attention? It's your fault for not publishing your protocol."

- "I have tried to get your attention in exactly the ways you prescribed, and it's your fault for not responding to any of them."

- "Your protocol is unreasonable and I have escalated to management to discuss better means of interaction."

- "Oops sorry, let me try that next time."

This is a good reason to establish clear written communication and to use that as documentation to cover yourself when someone is being insidious.

"Let me confirm, you would like X, and that I should post in Y for X purpose. Can do!" then when they try to say you should have done Z, you just show them what they said and say, I did what we agreed to, happy to make adjustments in the future but let's make sure to establish a common ground/set expectations up front.

I usually try to avoid this by adding a question mark as early as possible to the conversation. It happens way too often that people are trying to answer a question without even knowing what the question is or solving a problem without knowing what the problem is. That leads to confusing conversations.

Regarding the example:

> There are no docs for <X>

Respond by: "What do you want to achieve?" or "How can I help?", and don't assume that you know what the other person wants to know.

Some people try too hard to be nonconfrontational instead of speaking their mind and it can play out like Rachel describes; they don't really want to work on or engage with something but won't say so. "no" is always fine to say, and they should.

And I agree with her point that if people won't say "no" but broadcast it with their actions then it's wise to treat it as a "no". "Maybe" is often "no" as well.

+10

An unwillingness to participate fully, or no active awareness or experience of actions and consequences can be frustrating and potentially dangerous.

In a previous life I employed a type of 3-strikes and you’re out strategy. A trivial example… Instead of relenting and responding to questions of, “What is the URL for xyz?” I reminded people that by asking me, they had probably not bookmarked the page and that they were now using me as their bookmarking service. As a bookmarking service, I offer 3 free URLs then I start charging.

Pedantic? Of course. Annoying? Probably, although no less annoying and unproductive as asking me.

The result? Some people understand the process, whilst others don’t. Until, of course, they are the target for these types of lazy question.

Life and situations are rarely as simple as this trivial example of course, although the introduction of some value payment, monetary or some other exchange, sometimes has a surprising elucidating effect.

Patience and understanding are clearly essential, irrespective of the situation. Perhaps I can gain some insight into their apparently unhelpful or destructive behaviour if I can see it from their perspective too.

A phenomenon I've never stopped seeing online is people asking a simple factual question ("what is X?") instead of just using a search engine which would get an answer instantly.

Or people who, when given documentation, insist on asking a series of questions which are all directly answered if you bother reading the clear, concise documentation at all.

This seems pretty common in our field. There will always be people who put down others to try and make themselves look good because that's how every corporate culture is incentivized to run. I have not seen any serious attempts to address core issues like this at any company. HR only reacts to protecting the business, and that means retaliation for speaking up usually, especially if the bad coworker is a boss favorite.

Also, managers will blame you even if you bring up an issue, but it's not slated into the sprint. Then when the issue blows up in production, they'll say you should have worked faster to address it previously when it was noted, or that you should have placed more emphasis on it during the sprint planning when really, the final decision wasn't in your control in the first place. I've seen this happen on my teams in the past.

Tech is just all around toxic, and these things happen quiet frequently at larger companies.

you see that a lot on hacker news. you make a comment and they attack you without taking a position of their own. This way they can pivot to anything that suits them and continue attacking you.

Sometimes people do this subconsciously. Like a manager who's been mostly made redundant by other managers, so they roam around doing random "managery" things like poking holes in people's work, redirecting work, refocusing work, planning pingpong championships, rearranging desks to improve the feng shui, etc.

The real issue here is how much information is shot at you when you’re working at a place like this. You’re likely in a number of groups where people are posting design questions, specs, announcements, new team joiners and leavers etc. Then there’s a wiki and a chat thread or two, and there’s probably even an old wiki page that’s still used for specific aspects that haven’t been migrated to the new one.

Bonus points if the group posts are just mixed in to a newsfeed with some kind of non-chronological algorithm.

Oh, and, you know, don’t forget to check email. And do your actual work.

‘I posted it to the group’ is as bad an excuse for not properly informing as ‘It wasn’t on the wiki’ is an excuse for not finding the info. The real culprit is just the disorganized firehose of information from all the teams and people you’re supposed to keep tabs on.

My current CEO and COO are exactly like this. Nothing that you say changes the predefined outcome that they've come up with.

Can someone point me to some book or material about how to deal with this kind of people? I don't wanna leave my CTO role, but it's extremely draining to work with them.

Usually it's the company's fault someone doesn't know about it because there's no one place to share information. It could be in Slack, email, wiki, Google Doc, checked into the github repo with the software, checked into some unrelated repo where some team decided to document code, I've even seen a team use an outsourced wiki host that only they had access to and they'd put documentation there. When you asked for the doc (assuming you knew that you had to ask for it), they'd print a page as PDF and send it to you.

If they want to be hands-off and let teams put documentation where it works the best for that team, they should have a good search engine that will search across all those spaces.

This follows a pretty simple pattern for me: "people don't want to be wrong"

They have a certain vision for themselves, they know what's important, they spent time to do it the right way. If something is wrong, its clearly because something else failed, in this case, you. It breaks their idea for themselves.

I think it is less about rationality as I've seen just about everyone do this at various points, and more being humble and willing to own up to when was had an oversight, letting go of the ego to be able to say,

"huh, I completely missed that you wrote this. I understand that you said you have brought this up before, even if I don't remember it, I believe you. I will dig into this and listen better here on out."

How rare is that behavior?

So, sure--there are people who will drill you down into an abyss of perceived inadequacy because of something totally unrelated. It may be that they don't like you. It could also be that they're just having difficulty communicating their values. I find it productive in these situations to take a step back and ask a question along the lines of, "What are we trying to solve here?" I.e. let's cut through the minutiae and call out what the actual problem is. Once we've done that, let's work on solving that.

I've been, I'm afraid, on both sides of this.

Being on the unreasonable side is usually due to stress, which could be because of the topic at hand or, unfortunately, something completely unrelated and you're taking it out on the topic at hand.

I guess the best advice I have if you're on the receiving end is to weather the storm, and hope for better dialogue (maybe even an apology!) later down the line. It's been my experience that you can shorten the storm by expressing empathy for the unreasonable person's situation.

Pareto principle - 20% of the people will be 80% of the arse-pain!

This is just somebody blowing you off who probably isn't allowed to just ignore you, and they're buying time by sending you on errands.

edit: the solution is probably to make clear to others that they're blowing you off, maybe by publicly requiring that they follow up on the next errand they're sending you on with some sort of deliverable on their end.

edit2: and if nobody else cares that they're blowing you off, look for another job.

What? A coworker did these things? Saying that information is not clear, whatever you try? How 'bout if your project manager behaves like this. Because of a combination of being incompetent and trying to cover that up by shifting blame. Well that's the situation I'm currently in right now and it is very stressful, it feels there's nowhere out, apart from updating your LinkedIn profile...

All that is great TILL you actually do your diligence, find something on the wiki, use that as a source of truth and it backfires because there was something somewhere in some group that you posted.

The point being just like it is the responsibility of the searcher to put in the effort to look before asking, it is the responsibility of the person writing documents to make sure they stay up to date.

I once worked for a manager like this for some fraction of a year. He was the deputy director of systems engineering, but it seemed to me that part of his brain was missing. During that time, the attrition in our group was over 50%/year. I got the worst performance review of my career from him and I was happy to move on to a better position elsewhere in the company.

My work life these days.

Article sounds like it was written by someone with Rejection Sensitivity Dysphoria [0].

[0] https://www.webmd.com/add-adhd/rejection-sensitive-dysphoria

90% of your work is for less than %10 of your clients, whether your "clients" are internal or external to your organisation.

Sack these clients where ever possible, (when they are not 90% of your income).

You will be more productive, happier, and all your remaining clients will be happier as well.

I'm pretty confident, what it's described here, is a symptom of the so called "Halo Effect". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halo_effect

Not having knowledge disseminated through your organization well is a huge issue at larger organizations. I left my last company because no one was on the same page. There was rapid turnover, new people come in and have no clue how things are supposed to be done. It got so bad that the company had all 400 members of the engineering department redo the new hire orientation for a week.

<shameless pitch>I created https://gainknowhow.com/software-companies.html to solve these issues by structuring documentation/skills as a tree. Currently, all documentation is stored in a flat data structure, which does not have knowledge of documentation dependencies. When documentation is structured as a tree, you know who to notify when their relevant skills change. I'm trying to solve this exact issue. I'd love your feedback on the idea</shameless pitch>

I mean, ok. Sure. But I had a really bad vibe reading the article too. Maybe the tone of voice, maybe the "jump off the pier" valediction ... My gut feeling is I wouldn't want to work with either of the two.

Relevant:

https://workcompass.com/the-cia-guide-from-1944-on-how-to-sa...

> Coworker: You should put it in the wiki.

> You: If I put it in the wiki you would have said to put it in the group, and if I put it in the group you would have said I should have put it in the wiki.

.. Yeah.. It should be in the wiki...

> Short of fully supplicating yourself before them, you will never please them.

Servant leadership is the best tactic in these kind of work situations, I believe.

On the other hand, if nobody wants, is asking about, or cares about Important Thing You Want To Do, that's a sign you probably shouldn't do it.

related paper: "Are disagreements Honest?" by Tyler Cowen and Robin Hanson.

Coverage:

https://www.overcomingbias.com/2006/12/agreeing_to_agr.html

https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=3766

> Coworker: There are no docs for [this thing you're doing].

> You: Yes there are.

> Coworker: You could make a wiki page.

> You: There IS a wiki page. [finds page, sends link]

Maybe this is just an exaggerated exchange for humour.

But if not, then this would be a very unprofessional way of responding to a coworker, even one who is being annoying/ignorant. You have to hold yourself to a higher standard. An exchange like this only increases toxicity - and, in fact, I think that “You” is the more toxic person in the exchange.

some people are stop-oriented and some are go-oriented.

i realized that there were a lot of the first at a company i worked at when i had a ready-to-go release shut down by legal, pr, and some other group all in the same week. if we were successful, they get nothing, but if we messed up, they would have to stay late.

And there’s those people who will just thank you after pointing out to the right resource. :)

Ya totally soul sucking people like that exist in a lot of companies. And it's mostly due to these two reasons they do it 1) To get a ego boost when you acknowledge your mistake. Till they get their boost they keep finding loopholes. These are the kind of people who didn't get enough hugs as children. 2) To showcase themselves as all knowing and superior to management or leadership. They don't care about you or your work. You are just a peg in corporate ladder for them. These are the kind of people who would have been certified as sociopaths if there was a universal mental screening.

Unfortunately, I don't have any advice on dealing with either of those two. Both weigh heavily on the general happiness in the workplace and make it a hellhole fast.

I read these posts on rachelbythebay.com so that indicates that I think the content is OK. But every time I do, my most visceral reaction is "Please serve your website over TLS."

> At the time, I was mostly referring to the open sewers that are certain web forums on certain days of the week and certain hours of those days

Any ideas which forums they're referencing here?

How the conversation also could have went:

Coworker: There are no docs for [this thing you're doing].

You: Yes there is, see this wiki page and the design plan I posted in the group.

Coworker: Sorry I missed that, thanks!

This sounds a lot like the difference between communicating with a subordinate and with a superior (and those “on your level” often behave as superiors).

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."

- Upton Sinclair

help vampires. the worst

I would do the exact same thing if I were her co-worker.

She clearly states that this is a project she came up with that no one else on the team wants. If no one wants it, or is engaging with it, why would you expecting your colleagues to get excited to work on this?

There is nothing more annoying in corporate that co-workers who start trying to give you projects and tasks you didn’t want, didn’t ask for and micro-managing you horizontally.

Some of my worst job experiences came from people like this. They come up with a dumb project, then “clear it with management” then come and try to make me do it for them.

Your co-workers are not your friends, especially not if you try to start assigning them work. Because who gets the credit?

You do, not them. Suddenly they have another layer of management.

I would both avoid and add friction to anyone doing what she is trying to do in this situation. I’m not paid to help my co-workers get promoted into management or do their pet projects for them.

You're being managed and hustled, that's what managing is in flat organizations.

The mistake in the example is that when Coworker (the antagonist) came to You (the protagonist) and presented a problem by saying, "there's no docs for this," the protagonist answered the question in the context of the problem and not the context of the person and the relationship.

The Coworker in this case invents problems not because he wants solutions, but because he wants You to solve them, and to report the result back to Them, and as soon as you tacitly accept that relationship by giving them an answer, you have accepted that you are obligated to satisfy them, and then they can take that to your colleagues and boss and say you aren't satisfying them. This is what people mean when they use the term "leverage."

If you are technical, you solve problems, so if you have an answer, you give it, and you've solved the problem. What a natural manager does is find problems and uses them as leverage to extract value and power from them. They aren't problem solvers, they are managers, it's a totally different kind of mind. Important, but also often predatory and bullying, so take care.

When someone comes to you and says, "can I get a status on this?" If you give it to them, you have set the precedent that you work for them, and they now have leverage and power over you, even though the org chart doesn't say they do. It's a pure tactic. Since you are generally an agreeable person, it doesn't occur to you to treat their question as an act of aggression, and that's what they're counting on, because their entire toolkit is based on exploiting peoples agreeableness for leverage.

The ability to have the sense to respond to "can I get a status on this?" with, "I'm updating my boss with it, and we can loop you in after," is a skill to be practised. Sometimes the person will just escalate their aggression, and repeat the request, and that's when you know you're dealing with an asshole hustler. The best way to deal with them is to talk to your boss and say you're glad to work on the team, but given the reporting structure, you don't make ad hoc commitments across teams because it breaks up team alignment and if you are a team lead, it rewards other people for interrupting your team members and starting fires.

Short version is, "when I work for you, I will work for you, but until then, that request is out of line." The art is in how you finesse that sentiment and while making it clear. Antagonist Coworker will probably make a scene, try to find people who don't like you and complain about how you are "hard to work with," and encircle you to push you out, and really, navigating that bullshit is 80% of most senior roles that deal with cross functional team competition in any mid size org. It's what I don't like about "flat" organizations, where it really means that this kind of politically aggressive type gets an option on everyones time and attention and then gets rewarded for starting fires. When we moralize weak leadership skills, we reward bullies, and then wonder why our orgs have toxic culture problems.

As a consultant who has worked in dozens of organizations, there's always one of these people, and you have to deal with them as the new kid in school dealing with the insecure bully who creates chaos that always seems to put themselves in the center of it. Sometimes it's the only tool they have, so they don't realize they're doing it and it's just their "personality." It's not. It's a tactic they've practised, and to survive in an organization, you need to actively respond to it, imo.

A rambling comment.

"Talk therapy" (in one of the other comments): yeah, I think so, maybe. But I don't know if "have you discussed the underlying issue with a trained therapist?" is in order in a professional relationship. I /do/ believe that if the person is otherwise reasonable there likely is an underlying issue, and that they're unwilling/unable to articulate it. It's dangerous to try talk therapy yourself and goes off the rails in entirely unexpected ways. Plus, I'm not being paid for this, and as an employee I am at least arguably putting my employer at risk (not that that would dissuade me if I thought it would work, because results); as noted it encourages people to share things at work that I do not want to know about; you will get projection and your role as therapist will confound your professional relationship.

I'm sorry, does this sound like I lack empathy? Because I do not. That's exactly what I'm afraid of.

A long time ago when I was management, my manager sent me to a Fred Pryor seminar about building and motivating teams. I dunno what your experience with Fred Pryor seminars is, they're usually pretty pedestrian but the facilitators often have amazing experience and know it too. I can't remember much of it, but the instructor went on a 15 minute tear about what he called "don't wanna" which I will never forget. This is exactly it. The upshot is that when for whatever entirely "rational" reasons a team member has decided to oppose something, they will use your resources to do it. Have you considered asking management "person X seems to be spending a lot of effort opposing Plan 0.9, do you think we should review or move forward?"

(Something obvious about spotting internally consistent psychopaths was pointed out to me while working in construction, but I won't repeat it here because I don't want to piss them off.)

It's insane that we think that technology choices are rational, or that "rational" is the same for different team members, especially when for example "management doesn't think we should focus on security" always comes up as a post facto rationalization: I've never seen it stated as a nonfunctional requirement when I took the job, in fact almost invariably people blow smoke about it during the courting process.

Recently had a co-op who would argue with you about literally anything; even if they were literally just wrong.

Something went down, contact X.

Coop: X isn't the same company. It should be Y.

No seriously, same person. Contact either will be same person.

Coop: Same name, different people. I need contact information for X.

No seriously, same person.

Coop: I called some absolutely third party and they didnt know who I was talking about.

So what are you going to do now? You really need to contact X. The sooner the better.