A Response to Jacob Kaplan-Moss’s “Incompetent but Nice”

Alternatives are: overloading pull requests with multiple distinct tasks (bad), sitting on my hands (bad), updating the code for each PR as others are merged (bad, error prone), or creating pull requests that merge into other branches pending review (less bad but annoying to maintain). I tend to do the latter.

It's easy to rationalize this behaviour, and it can feel amazing when you're on top of everything, but it can take a toll and end up in burn-out or disaster when all those (to mix metaphors) plates you've kept spinning eventually fall.

I finally decided to get back off meds, and my anxiety really subsided. By that time, I had built a pretty effective external structure of calendar, reminders, etc. to handle the ADHD aspects of my brain, but without the anxiety to also deal with (which ramped up my ADHD exponentially), the ADHD is totally manageable and I don't feel so out of sorts and, for lack of a better term, "domesticated" into being what corporate America thinks they want.

I get along just fine, and I attribute a lot of that to finding a job I enjoy and having a boss who is patient with my unpredictable, but important contributions.

The word 'admit' suggests you had to drag it out of him, that he's hiding slow progress behind a smoke screen of busy work like opening many tickets. That month-long background task wouldn't have had any work done otherwise so it's unfair to call it delayed.

> Until you adopt my old-fashioned approach of single threaded work

That's the problem with people who think they're technical managing the actual workers, they always end up micromanaging and slicing things into shapes that don't fit. The world isn't single threaded and changes usually aren't entirely unrelated.

You should change your management style to simply specifying the business goals you want and asking for as many to be completed as possible. Let your team do what works best.

> The funny thing is you probably consider your approach agile

No, because all those labels just encourage people to pick a style and do that thing regardless of circumstances. In a real project I've got to coordinate everything with someone. I can't push code without a review, I can't code to a team's API without sending them the spec for review, etc. During these times I could facebook like some others do, but instead I "multi-task" by doing other work.

Also, it's not very obvious from simple metrics like number of lines of code committed which work is hard and which is simple fluff which can be fixed without a distraction. A change to a logger might percolate through every method call and appear big and complex despite having been made in seconds by the IDE. If I was implementing a new feature I'd probably want to update the logging style first rather than coding to the old standard, so I'd make the big change (probably covered by another ticket) because I'm already in there and have to test that stuff anyways.

> There's no value until you finish, and I mean done-done.

As I said, there are a lot of down periods in that process. It feels like you think you know some deep secret ("only delivered features count!") that you think you can't get people to acknowledge.

This is actually like day-one stuff in engineering school, that you need to measure benefit of your work in delivered advantages so done isn't done until it's in use. But there's a lot of other stuff as well, such as not delivering something until it's safe to use even if it works in test scenarios.

You should have a discussion with your team about your idea and brainstorm where it fits into a full product development cycle and what has to be considered. I imagine you will find they don't discount it, but they have a wider view of the process than your business focused one, and that they have to balance all of this while also managing your perceptions.

Unironically, my first few times actually finally trying medication not helping me very much is what made me get over the stigma. When it simply... didn't help much, rather than making me a pill-addicted raving addict, something clicked.

Falibility to addictive behavior is one, to me, feels like a big one that is almost universal because it plays so well into the underlying issue in the brain. But of course "normal" humans are faliable to addictive behavior to some degree!

I also agree that there's something distinct about working when someone is directly watching you, versus working without direct observation (e.g. over Zoom). Perhaps this is why I'm far more productive working remotely from coffeeshops than I am from home.

Yep, a variant on bright/"gifted" + ADHD presentation. ADHD as fuck, but smart enough that they get by kinda OK-ish regardless, and maybe even excel... until, perhaps, one day, that's not enough anymore and everything falls apart. The intelligence masks the ADHD enough that it might go undiagnosed and untreated for a long time.

Fortunately, spotting these kinds of "twice exceptional" situations is a big focus in modern gifted education, so that's getting a bit better.

The way I describe it in a few words: focus and motivation are outside my control. I have no say in how they operate and what activates them.

I’ve been that guy many times. Having to do my PR 3 separate times over the course of a week because of feedback. IMO each solution worked fine, and the feedback was also fine.

The trouble with explicit guidelines is it’ll make clear that your high-clout engineers are always breaking them.

The reality is some peoples time matters more. And ideas aren’t always better, it’s about reducing the mental workload of one person at the expense of another person.

There was a comment on previous thread about how they beautifully offered the autistic guy his own somewhat independent projects and he excelled. This is unthinkable in many places. It’s common to have the one high clout senior guy who wants to maintain clout but doesn’t have the mental resources to offer autonomy of the underlings. One can dream, though.

That is the point. By the point you know you need to fire them it is easy. Getting to that point is the hard bit.

Maybe they just need a different style of assignments? Maybe there are interpersonal issues in the team you as the manager should address. Maybe they have a health issue they can address with time. Maybe they are burnt out and you should reconsider how you are running your team, or even worse how the whole company.

Depending on the situation you have many more things you can do to address an underperforming employee than just firing or not firing them. Whether or not it will be successful depends on multiple factors some in the control of the manager, some not so. A sane manager should not stress or worry over the ones they can't control, but easy to imagine them stressing over the ones they can.

Maybe we should fix that? Nah, let's just treat people like expendable resources so we don't have to increase taxes on the wealth elite who never need be concerned with such things.

I suspect they often do the PIP as legal protection, documentation they can produce later if needed. Even in an "at-will" environment, employees can sue for wrongful termination.

Yes, there are cases where the employee needs to go. But there are others where that's not exactly true.

All that said, it's a relationship. Life is too short for unhealthy and unproductive relationships. When I find nyself in such situations I update my CV and start looking to move on. Somethings are what they are and not worth the fight.

Actually, these efforts often don't help much. As a rule, if you find yourself doing elaborate cover-your-ass excessive, you probably are doing something very systematically wrong. I've seen plenty of situations where the well-meaning managers documented everything, did the whole document poor performance, and a single deposition of a manager made it clear that the entire process used to document and remedy under-performance was simply collusion to fire someone for a protected reason... even though in reality, it was not. It goes kind of like this:

"So after four years of not a single entry in ___'s file, suddenly a poor review and a complicated PIP?" "____ just wasn't fitting in on the team."

"Hmm. _____ is the only _____ on the team, despite _____'s race/religion being ___% of the population. All hires made after you became manager were (insert manager's race/religion/sex). No other employees on your team are on PIPs. So, why is it that ___ wasn't fitting in?"

"I can haz consult with lawyer now?" (followed by settlement for 2x manager's salary)