I will take someone nice and incompetent every day of the week over a competent jerk.
The competent jerks destroy team morale, make good people leave, and paralyze junior employees and those lacking self-confidence. They may be good at their job, but they make others worse.
Incompetent nice people, as long as they are not so incompetent to be a liability can at least contribute to a strong team culture and make good competent people want to show up.
Of course, ideally, everyone is somewhere in that top right quadrant, but in my experience on large enough teams you usually have at least one not so nice person on the team and one or two not so competent people on the team.
I used to think the same way as you, and then I started a company and had to pay out of pocket for employees, and the sad truth that I almost hate myself for admitting is that if you have to pick between incompetent but nice, and competent but a jerk, you take the jerk. And yes, multiple people will even quit because you picked the jerk over the nice guy, and I still found it's worth it to take the jerk because of how competency scales. A good/competent software engineer can genuinely do the work of many, many mediocre developers and you're almost always better off with a small number of really solid developers over a large number of nice but mediocre ones.
Now of course we can always exaggerate things to an extreme and compare a racist, sexist, jerk who swears nonstop, to someone who is mildly incompetent, and there are certain principles and boundaries that are worth upholding with respect to how people treat each other regardless of their productivity, but in actuality that's not really the difficult choice you end up facing.
The really difficult choice you end up facing is someone who is nice and gets along with people but is ultimately too dependent on others to do their job versus someone who works independently and does an excellent job but is very blunt and can be an asshole in regards to the expectations they hold others to. Good software developers often expect their peers to also be at a high standard and will speak in very plain, rude, and blunt language if they feel others are not pulling their weight.
And finally, I have observed that in the long run, competent people tend to prefer to work with others whose skill they respect and they feel they can learn from because they're really good at their job, compared to working with someone who is pleasant but is always dependent on others. Being nice is a good short term skill to have, but people get used to those who are nice but they never get used to someone who is incompetent.
"Incompetent nice people, as long as they are not so incompetent to be a liability can at least contribute to a strong team culture and make good competent people want to show up."
I think incompetent nice people completely destroy team culture. Competent jerks are also a problem but at least they get something done. The IT department at my company used to be full with very nice people that got absolutely nothing done (it's a bit better now). They talked nice, were good at meetings and really good at dinners after work. But at some point deadline pressure kicks in and you realize that you have to do their work if you want to finish. It causes a lot of resentment. Even worse is when nice incompetent people are gatekeepers for something you need (in this case security policies) and block your ability to make decisions.
My conclusion is that both nice and incompetent people and competent jerks need to be removed if you want to have a strong team. But if I have to choose I'll take a competent jerk because I can get at least something. Incompetent people are useless.
Follow up: I have seen a mass exodus of a high performance team because of a single competent jerk that was allowed to wreck havoc.
I have also seen an entire smallish company nearly completely collapse into itself because being a competent jerk basically became normal operating procedure and you either adapted or were bullied out of the company. Eventually the only people left were bullies and none of them could work together well enough to deliver.
I have never seen an incompetent nice employee ever do anything so damaging.
I think incompetent but nice can also lead to morale problems. Not as bad as the jerk situation, but eventually everyone notices this one person who does no work but is still getting paid. Which can lead to jealously and feelings of unfairness.
I think the term "jerk" is underspecified in these types of conversations. The "competent jerks" in the minds of the "pro competent jerk" people are not the same that the "anti competent jerk" people are thinking of. I suspect these groups would agree in many cases on whether to keep someone who is competent but excessively blunt (without malice), and whether to fire someone who is competent but tears down their coworkers with political games. Both of those people might fall under the heading of "jerk", making it too broad a category to base sweeping predetermined choices on.
"Incompetent nice people, as long as they are not so incompetent to be a liability"
This is veering into tautological territory but "not competent enough to be useful" is where my personal definition of "incompetent" would land. ;)
I also don't want competent jerks but... neither end of this spectrum is good.
(IMO the real trick is that neither of these scales (either competence or jerkhood) is universally the same across companies. Different people interact in different ways, and different teams have different problems to solve. Putting up with bad fits on your team for too long hurts your team regardless of the precise sort of bad fit. If you've tried to coach them on what's needed for months on end already with no luck, you have to make a hard decision, and "no action" isn't actually avoiding that decision.)
Minuscule side note: a lot of competent jerk are just immature and fearful young dudes who fall into the "people can respect, accept (maybe even love) me if I'm infallible on that one thing". I was like that, and recently I ran into 20yos who had the exact same psychology.
> Incompetent nice people, as long as they are not so incompetent to be a liability can at least contribute to a strong team culture and make good competent people want to show up.
Until everybody realizes they are working harder to compensate for the dead wood on the team. The first person I ever fired was "incompetent, but nice", one of my team members said "We can always find someone who is nice AND can do the job to replace them" and that stuck with me for a long time.
At the end of the day the nice incompetent kills morale. You can only carry water for someone so much. We all have our own work to do, fixing Jimmy's fuckups gets real old real quick, no matter how nice they are. You need to cut the nice incompetents or the competents are going to leave to work with other competents.
I dunno, what if we considered that competent jerks could be put on an improvement plan as well? Some people come off as jerks because they're unaware, not ill-intentioned. Even straight up racists etc. can mostly learn and would be more than willing to given a real opportunity without constant judgement and shaming.
If not being a jerk is such an important part of performance, maybe more company resources can be put into mental health, etc... just as training on the job skills is seen as an investment, so could that.
It's funny/strange/interesting how social skills are something that you're constantly judged on yet there are very few resources to help people with. Needing help with it is treated as more shameful than needing help with the technical aspects... at least the technical aspects were at some point explicitly taught to people!
There are some just straight up incorrigible narcissists and psychopaths, but there aren't that many, and TBH, they usually tend to have some of the best social skills... probably they're upper management already.
The flip side of this is that people will also leave because they get frustrated by having to either clean up after or repeatedly bail out the "incompetent but nice" folks, and will leave for that reason too.
Part of 'competence' in a professional work setting has to do with getting along with other people, at least to the minimal extent necessary to get a job done. A 'competent jerk' is incompetent, in other words, at least when it comes to some aspects of the job.
If their job requires a lot of communication with other people, then they're definitely grossly incompetent. If their job can be done mostly in isolation, well, they're only minimally incompetent, and maybe that can be brought along, give them a thick-skinned assistant or manager and only have them talk to that person, etc.
However, it's probably easier to train people with poor social skills in the art of getting along with others in the workplace, then it is to train those with poor grasp of complex technologies to understand them, let alone in resolving difficult bugs or finding creative solutions to novel problems.
a nice and incompetent one is common, if anything, they tend to produce more bugs then they can fix.
if I'm the boss, I will hire a competent jerk and manage him/her well, instead of feeling good with a few incompetent nice guys while the company will sink, soon or later.
the keyword is to survive you have to be competent, other things(nice vs jerk) is secondary, and that's a management's job to "fix", the incompetent-but-nice is nearly impossible to fix to me.
> will take someone nice and incompetent every day of the week over a competent jerk.
Not that simple.
On an easy going project, deadlines far enough, work well defined, people know their parts, yeah you'd like a nice person on the team to have lunch with and share cat videos.
In a project with your ass on the line, real $$$ at stake, you presenting progress to management every week for a visible real promotion path, I'd bet you want a competent person regardless of how foul the language or body odor. Niceness just doesn't matter.
the $hit gets real when you find out, said competent person is just an imposter.
But there is a sweet spot though, keep the competence high, and turn the niceness knob high and low as convenient. At work, being nice is just an act after all. People can and will see through the act, but they themselves are guilty too, you're not offending anyone
Yeah, I'd agree with this. Of course, both the 'brilliant jerk' and 'incompetent but nice' folks are a liability in the long run (they both drive away genuinely nice, talented contributors), but the jerk tends to drive them away more quickly, and they also tend to discourage less competent people from getting better at their job too.
And that eventually leads a team or group to stagnate. The only people who will stick around are either jerks themselves, or generally lack a back bone.
I think the key question is whether they are nice, incompetent AND teachable, because if the person can get where you need them with some coaching, then it is not a wasted effort.
> Incompetent nice people, as long as they are not so incompetent to be a liability can at least contribute to a strong team culture and make good competent people want to show up.
Hard disagree. They demotivate the competent. People start to wonder if they can perhaps slack off and be nice instead of delivering...
> I will take someone nice and incompetent every day of the week over a competent jerk.
I won't. I had this dilemma before. And I chose to take incompetent people. My life became miserable. I don't care about people being rude. I feel uncomfortable with people who would like to be rude but can't because they think it's inappropriate or w/e other thing they tell themselves. Somehow, they are more disgusting than people who are open about what they think.
Plenty of posters on moderated Web user boards belong to that later category: they'd like to be rude, but try to formally obey the rules of the board and still be rude. Just enough for the moderator not to ban them.
Same kind of people who'd delete complaints about their crappy program on a public bug tracker claiming the ticket author violated their code of conduct.
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I don't like to teach. Some people get off on telling juniors what to do. Most those that I saw teaching did it to feel important in their own eyes, beside the eyes of the junior.
But when I made the mistake of agreeing to hire incompetent people, the amount of chores increased by a lot in my life. I'm also not the one to force my convictions on those I have to teach, but that led to the "students" making bad choices when it comes to the tools they decided to use. Before they've made their choice, I made it clear that if they chose tools different from those I use, it becomes their problem. Unfortunately, they wouldn't be able to deal with that problem. And so their productivity was in the negative. They would still be unable to accomplish even very basic tasks, but they would also drag me down by trying to make me solve their problems with the tools I advised against.
Instead of just being able to split the work somewhat evenly, I couldn't trust juniors to do things that required independent research -- they felt overwhelmed at such tasks and, if assigned one, would just waste my time by scheduling meetings with me to "discuss" their objectives, where, essentially, they'd expect me to do their work for them and dumb it down so that they could also understand what's being done.
I also had to report to my boss on the progress my assigned juniors were making. I felt guilty that they didn't do squat, but at the same time felt like I might become the reason for firing them, and I didn't want to be that person either. Yet, at the same time, I didn't want to do stuff like taking over their branch and finishing their task, both because I think that not even the worst programmer deserves that and because, on a personal level, I didn't want to upset them -- after all, they were nice. It's harder to be a jerk to nice people.
There is no incompetent nice. They are usually "nice" but they end up wasting significant time as they try to "show off their work".
There is also no competent jerk. There is bad management. Not everyone wants to train juniors or deal with them on a daily basis. There is also a set of people who wouldn't mind telling snarky comments to each other; and another set of people sensitive to any gesture you make. Put every set separate from the other.
tl;dr; There is only competent nice and incompetent jerk. Otherwise, it's a management failure.
I was this person! I was eager and kind. But I was incompetent. I was a graduate of the first ever cohort of the first ever coding bootcamp. The teachers were great, but they didn’t check in on me or have evaluations. I left not really being able to do…anything.
But I got a job as a Ruby developer from resourcefulness and eagerness. It was a great company. It was clear, however, that I wasn’t pulling my weight when the intern was technically running circles around me. They do the only right thing. They made some “bare minimum” requirements in the form of an evaluation and gave me three weeks to complete it. I couldn’t do it. I was getting much better by the end of the three weeks thanks to a coworker who decided to mentor me, but it was past my ability level. When this was clear and they were firing me I said to the CTO “you can fire me, but I am getting good at learning, so I am going to just study really hard and reapply in 3 months and you’ll have to give me another chance!” I said this in a motivated way, not an insane person way. He decided he would find another spot to put me in the company.
He ended up putting me on the technical integrations team. The other person on that team was an incredibly kind human who loved teaching people. It was perfect for me. I ended up performing super well in that role and became very good at it. It was a win/win for the organization.
I will tell you one thing, however. The weeks before they gave me that evaluation were the most stressful weeks of my life. I was waking up in the middle of the night immediately stressed. It feels terrible to be bad at your job. It felt so freeing to be given the evaluation. Because it was cut and dry. I could do it or I couldn’t, but at least there would be finality. It is kind to not let someone flounder in a role that is past their abilities. I am grateful he found another spot for me to fit at the company. That CTO has passed now at a young age, but I owe my career to him recognizing my passion and finding another spot for me. Thanks Brandon Dewitt!
One option: be extremely open to them doing something else at the company. Most people would have to drop acid to hit this level openness. “Put him in marketing? But he’s a software engineer!” Well, apparently he’s not, or least not the kind you want. And don’t half ass it and have them split time or do the old role on the new team. The easiest way would be to look down a list of open jobs and seriously consider them for like 30 seconds each. It’ll be a brutal 10 minutes of focus, but only 10 minutes.
I’ve almost never seen this job switch in a company work, but I’ve almost never seen it attempted. I have seen it work many times between companies. Everyone who switches careers does it.
I think there’s a hang up around “incompetence”. Maybe it’s something inherent to the person, but you don’t have much evidence for that. The evidence is the person/job pair. So, switch up the job if the person seems good.
Sometimes when I’ve struggled with a role that doesn’t feel right and I start blaming myself I think “Not everyone can do this. What if some super smart, healthy, well adjusted person was in this role but was this bad at it. What would he do?” I imagine some baseball player, marketing genius, or renowned writer and that he ended up in this job instead of that one. I guess he’d leave? I’ve actually struggled to come up with an answer but it feels important.
These discussions usually focus on incompetent developers, but in my experience there are way more incompetent managers/product people. I have run into multiple socially skillful liberal arts majors with zero experience or interest in tech working as pms. They don't understand the work enough to actually be effective, but while the developers do the work they are in meetings with managers all day, and consequently are the ones to get promoted to management. Then when it comes time to hire, they hire more people like themselves and the cycle repeats.
They are never held accountable for hiring a bunch of pms instead of developers. If something fails, some hapless junior dev will get sacrificed for being "incompetent" when in reality the problem was management.
His quadrant scheme was Clever vs. Stupid and Hardworking vs. Lazy
"I distinguish four types. There are clever, hardworking, stupid, and lazy officers. Usually two characteristics are combined. Some are clever and hardworking; their place is the General Staff. The next ones are stupid and lazy; they make up 90 percent of every army and are suited to routine duties. Anyone who is both clever and lazy is qualified for the highest leadership duties, because he possesses the mental clarity and strength of nerve necessary for difficult decisions. One must beware of anyone who is both stupid and hardworking; he must not be entrusted with any responsibility because he will always only cause damage."
The problem with Nice/Jerk is it's purely subjective. Whenever you hear a peer review that says "They're a jerk" you, as a people leader, need to be very on guard about the situation
1. The person making the claim maybe poorly calibrated, burnt out, or have an ego
2. In so far as peers compete for political will and promotions they have a vested interest to use whatever weapons they can against others, subjective / data free ones are the low hanging fruit
3. The person being called a jerk maybe desperately trying to fix something -- the tech debt, the broken culture, overwork/oncall etc. attacking their character in this scenario is the work equivalent of victim blaming
The truth is it's maddening being the only (or minority) competent ones in the room, and with apathetic peers suddenly you're the jerk because they'd rather rest and vest than do effortful things to improve the situation.
In my matrix doing the job is the base line. Can you do the job? Are you doing the job well? Are you not being blatantly terrible? (disagreeable is fine, abusive is not) Veing able to do the job is necessary, else there's not point carrying your dead weight.
I don't think many realise but most people are incompetent sometimes. We all go through phases of varying productivity and it can swing from one extreme to the other. It happens when people have kids, discover hobbies, get burnt out, have an existential crisis etc. At any one time 1/10 usually-good people will be like this.
An effective strategy for dealing with this in an organisation is to move quick and minimise damage. When the shit hits the fan and this starts causing problems, its usually not because a person didnt do any work, but because they did crap work that burdened others. This is especially difficult in engineering. You can identify this and get them off the line quickly, then take the time to figure out whats happening and assist them back on track.
The development of a culture that doesn't incentive people to hoard power helps, the last thing you want is a person performing badly to be in some critical role. People should be able to back down / step up depending on their current "phase"
"Incompetent" is very broad. I think you're going to let go of anyone who is somehow totally incompetent so I'm not sure that's a real case.
I think most of the time though, someone who appears incompetent is suffering from one of three things.
1) They are being tasked with things that simply don't align with their talents. For example, there are certain tasks which are just very mathy. You can pass college calculus and still suck pretty bad at lots of math. This is a case where someone else should be doing this task.
2) They are being tasked with problems which are out of their present ability to breakdown and solve. Essentially, they haven't learned to be an engineer.
3) They have a skills gap (as mentioned in the article they need to get better with a specific tool).
I think the thing that happens by far the most with people who get managed out is that they are a #2 but people try to help them as if they are a #3.
I have been in a situation many times where I have seen other leads giving tasks to their junior engineers and then getting frustrated when their subordinates don't make progress. They try to help by pointing them to tutorials, docs, etc. but what these people often need is someone to sit with them for a significant amount of time and demonstrate how one breaks a problem down, builds small pieces that demonstrate functionality and then put those pieces together into a solution.
This is expensive because it takes time. And it takes time from some of the most skilled people on the team. As often as I have seen people fail a team, I've seen teams fail people. A Pluralsight subscription is not a substitute for mentorship. Talking about networking and career planning is not mentorship (yes I believe it is important too).
I had to lay off an employee who was incompetent but nice. She was constantly anxious and paralyzed by blockers. I did everything I could to reduce her stress levels, give her mentors, ensure her work was reasonable and achievable. She could not make forwards progress unless she had a pair programmer basically doing the work for her.
She was in the wrong job at the wrong time. She didn't have the skillset to have a successful start. Her work patterns were unhealthy and ineffective. She couldn't learn how to unblock herself within the org, and became paralyzed by stress.
We had multiple people to compare her against who did not suffer from any of these challenges. I am sure she can find a job that will work for her, as she was nice and did have successful moments, but a fresh start was clearly needed.
For much of my career I fell into the incompetent but nice bucket. It turns out it was/is ADHD. I would be very interested in my new job, but after a few months I'd make no progress, have no outdoor and couldn't really put my finger on why. After multiple such jobs I ended up quite depressed, that certainly doesn't help with productivity.
Unfortunately, ADHD is not temporary. Most places will eventually let you go when you don't perform. The article is extremely generous in stating that firing is not the right choice, but for someone who is severely and permanently impaired I don't really know what the solution is either...
Neil Gaiman has a similar formulation with three criteria instead of two:
"People keep working, in a freelance world, and more and more of today's world is freelance,
- because their work is good, and
- because they are easy to get along with, and
- because they deliver the work on time.
And you don't even need all three. Two out of three is fine. People will tolerate how unpleasant you are if your work is good and you deliver it on time. They'll forgive the lateness of the work if it's good, and if they like you. And you don't have to be as good as the others if you're on time and it's always a pleasure to hear from you."
We're all characters. At the end of the day, some people do need to be treated a little bit differently. It's not "unfair"/"unjust", it's just called being human.
If you fire everyone who isn't some homogenous nice person we'll have pretty boring teams.
Who hasn't worked with someone a little brash, a little odd, a little immature, but if you actually took the time to get to know them is a pretty good person overall?
I worked with an engineer who clipped his nails at his desk and took his coffee into the bathroom. Socially, he could be rude. Professionally, he did not take criticism well, and liked to do things "his" way. But he was also generous with his time if you needed help. If you broached things very delicately, he could take some feedback. He was given projects to work on that allowed him to work pretty independently. And his rudeness was probably just social awkwardness, as he could be alright if you had a chat with him one-on-one.
It didn't destroy team morale. Everyone recognised he was different. He wasn't a jerk, he just had autism and/or anxiety.
Someone once said to me "meet people where they are at".
> People who are good at the work but not very nice are the “brilliant asshole” archetype. I could write quite a bit about how our industry mostly gets this archetype wrong – spoiler alert: they mostly don’t exist – but that’s another article.
I would really like to see that article, because I've personally worked with a few brilliant jerks in my time. I'm still friends with most of them to this day. I guess I'm just good at working with them and ignoring their jerkiness, so I keep ending up working with them?
I'm not sure why the author says this but I've seen quite a few in my day.
I once worked with a "director of support" who was incompetent but nice. I was a lead developer. The problem was the director of support tried to treat me like level 2 support, they wouldn't do any problem solving, they wouldn't get clear explanation of problems from customers, they wouldn't collect the information we needed. (It was a small startup and "director of support" was a 1 person department with an outsourced assistant.)
But, this person was very, very nice to everyone. It made it harder to see the problem.
How I solved this: I sat down with the person and "explained common sense." I pointed out that, when they were on the phone with the customer, the customer wanted them to solve our problem. They needed to be an expert in our product so that they could do their best to solve the customer's problem on the phone without 4-6 back and forth. I also pointed out that it was very embarrassing for us to ask for "obvious" information after the initial support contact, when they knew that I would ask for "obvious" information. (Like a clear explanation of the problem, or just very basic clarifying questions.)
I then pointed out a very clear example where the director of support really dropped the ball. The customer was trying to share something and was typing in the wrong email address. I simply shouldn't have been involved, because the kind of troubleshooting I was doing was something that the "director of support" should be knowledgeable enough to diagnose, understand, and figure out.
1. Nice, but clearly (in retrospect unfortunately) had some kind of executive function disorder like ADHD. I fired them and, later, helped them get their next job which they excelled at. They bought me a beer when they got promoted.
2. Really Nice, just had terrible long term memory, would constantly forget critical details about what they were working on. They wrote everything down but couldn't process it into long term memory, they would even forget they wrote it down. Could fix small bugs all day but couldn't work on anything that required multiple days of effort as they would forget everything by the next morning.
3. Really Nice, could not work remote. Sort of combo of the first two, bad memory and bad focus.
4. Really Nice, worked with them at a previous company, totally burnt out before coming in at the new place. I literally could not believe it was their code that a co-worker was complaining about and had to check the commit logs. Actually, this has happened twice to me.
In general, the bigger problem is nice but on the threshold between good and competent ... those people stay on forever and can drain a lot of resources as you try to move them fully into the "nice and competent" category.
I've always liked working with competent jerks, by which I mean "more competent than me". I assume their jerk-ness isn't that they blame me for their mistakes - but no CJ has ever done that to me (only incompetent jerks).
I have very limited experience of running organisations. But I think that if your organisation is small, then it can't afford incompetent people, even if they're nice. That means that I think that to run a small organisation, you have to be a jerk, otherwise you're incompetent.
I failed to sack a probationary employee before the probabtion period ended; I thought he would come up to scratch. Also, I had no taste for sacking people. I was wrong, and I cost the company money. I was nice, and I should have been a jerk. Ergo, I'm not competent to run a small organisation.
[Edit] Incompetent people, however nice, are a permanent drag on everything. If they can't be taught, then they have to be removed. You can't make your other staff carry them forever.
Your decision cost the company and likely also that person. You kept him on in a position he was either going to still get fired from, quit, or cost the company more than his paycheck.
All because you didn't want him to have a bad opinion of you. You wanted to seem like a good guy so you avoided doing the thing everyone needed done. You caused everyone way more problems for your selfish ego.
That's a jerk move. You weren't really nice.
The nice thing to do would have been to acknowledge the hard truth in front of you and cut him during the probationary period.
In my experience, you give these people a long leash and lots of help to try and find a role where they can make some sort of positive impact, but if they are truly incompetent at everything you have to let them go.
Two reasons:
1. At least in some cases they know they're not doing a good job and they likely have anxiety about when they're going to get let go. Ripping the bandaid off and firing them is kind of putting them out of their misery.
2. Probably the more common scenario is that the Nice Guy's incompetence starts to affect the people around them. If Nice Guy is so incompetent that other people have to pick up their slack and fix their mistakes people end up getting upset that they have to do extra work to address Nice Guy's shortcomings. If you remove Nice Guy from anything meaningful and only give them work with no deadlines or consequences for failure, other people eventually start to resent the fact that Nice Guy gets all the easy work.
One of my frustrations is incompetent but nice people, but defined more like: can’t be trusted to not have their work checked but is adept at social games. When your manager, you cannot ‘just do’ anything they ask because it wouldn’t of been thought through, when your colleague, you can’t brainstorm with them or trust anything from them has been done to minimum viable. This requires people to push back, but doing so risks being seen as a jerk, and risks actually becoming a jerk if you one day realise how much of your time is babysitting.
But they play golf with your boss, they make friends with people (instead of working), it’s always someone else’s fault that something went wrong. Which is to say these people form cliques, and they gossip constantly to develop and maintain in and out groups. They play favourites something shocking too, and focus on the weaknesses of people they’re threatened by and point them out constantly. They seem nice, but imo I’ve seen highly competent but direct and mission focused teams be reduced to petty infighting and guarded position jostling in less than a month upon the hiring of just one such person.
Hey, am I, or we, actually talking about autistic traits vs narcissistic traits? Not sure. Wasn’t my intention going in, just wanted to point out that nice people have coping strategies too, and their incompetence might just be that they don’t prioritise trying to be good at their job and find their success in ways I personally find manipulative and toxic far more than someone being directly rude.
To reword the top comment: the incompetent destroy team morale, make good people leave, and paralyse junior employees and those lacking confidence/assertiveness. They may contribute to a friendly environment, but they burden others.
Jerks, as long as they are not so jerky as to be abusive, can at least contribute to a strong team culture by stripping away uncertainty and fluff and make less assertive but competent people want to show up and succeed.
Final reword: the need for jerks increases the more BS is in the system. A system with enough BS will produce jerks out of necessity.
I've found the "competent but nice" crowd is actually usually:
1. Too mentally ill to do ANY job. ( 99.9% of the time it is just untreated anxiety or ADHD they have avoided treatment for )
2. Not doing any work and deflecting when people start to smell their stink.
Either way: this "nice but incompetent" person stresses out, nay, TORTURES the rest of the team trying to wipe their ass and keep them afloat.
"They're nice but..." No they aren't nice. They are emotional vampires sucking the blood from the rest of the team. Put them on a PIP, and if they don't improve fire them.
I've seen enough ruined dreams and burned out engineers to no longer feel pity for the "nice but..." people. I cannot be atlas carrying the burden of everyone else's problems. And it is unfair for someone to ask that of me.
[+] [-] etempleton|3 years ago|reply
The competent jerks destroy team morale, make good people leave, and paralyze junior employees and those lacking self-confidence. They may be good at their job, but they make others worse.
Incompetent nice people, as long as they are not so incompetent to be a liability can at least contribute to a strong team culture and make good competent people want to show up.
Of course, ideally, everyone is somewhere in that top right quadrant, but in my experience on large enough teams you usually have at least one not so nice person on the team and one or two not so competent people on the team.
[+] [-] Kranar|3 years ago|reply
Now of course we can always exaggerate things to an extreme and compare a racist, sexist, jerk who swears nonstop, to someone who is mildly incompetent, and there are certain principles and boundaries that are worth upholding with respect to how people treat each other regardless of their productivity, but in actuality that's not really the difficult choice you end up facing.
The really difficult choice you end up facing is someone who is nice and gets along with people but is ultimately too dependent on others to do their job versus someone who works independently and does an excellent job but is very blunt and can be an asshole in regards to the expectations they hold others to. Good software developers often expect their peers to also be at a high standard and will speak in very plain, rude, and blunt language if they feel others are not pulling their weight.
And finally, I have observed that in the long run, competent people tend to prefer to work with others whose skill they respect and they feel they can learn from because they're really good at their job, compared to working with someone who is pleasant but is always dependent on others. Being nice is a good short term skill to have, but people get used to those who are nice but they never get used to someone who is incompetent.
[+] [-] rqtwteye|3 years ago|reply
I think incompetent nice people completely destroy team culture. Competent jerks are also a problem but at least they get something done. The IT department at my company used to be full with very nice people that got absolutely nothing done (it's a bit better now). They talked nice, were good at meetings and really good at dinners after work. But at some point deadline pressure kicks in and you realize that you have to do their work if you want to finish. It causes a lot of resentment. Even worse is when nice incompetent people are gatekeepers for something you need (in this case security policies) and block your ability to make decisions.
My conclusion is that both nice and incompetent people and competent jerks need to be removed if you want to have a strong team. But if I have to choose I'll take a competent jerk because I can get at least something. Incompetent people are useless.
[+] [-] etempleton|3 years ago|reply
I have also seen an entire smallish company nearly completely collapse into itself because being a competent jerk basically became normal operating procedure and you either adapted or were bullied out of the company. Eventually the only people left were bullies and none of them could work together well enough to deliver.
I have never seen an incompetent nice employee ever do anything so damaging.
[+] [-] rukuu001|3 years ago|reply
a) How good he was. Just like really really good quality of work.
b) How bad he was. Crying client. Regularly destroying team morale and productivity with incredible drama.
[+] [-] bawolff|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] andrewflnr|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] majormajor|3 years ago|reply
This is veering into tautological territory but "not competent enough to be useful" is where my personal definition of "incompetent" would land. ;)
I also don't want competent jerks but... neither end of this spectrum is good.
(IMO the real trick is that neither of these scales (either competence or jerkhood) is universally the same across companies. Different people interact in different ways, and different teams have different problems to solve. Putting up with bad fits on your team for too long hurts your team regardless of the precise sort of bad fit. If you've tried to coach them on what's needed for months on end already with no luck, you have to make a hard decision, and "no action" isn't actually avoiding that decision.)
[+] [-] agumonkey|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Ensorceled|3 years ago|reply
Until everybody realizes they are working harder to compensate for the dead wood on the team. The first person I ever fired was "incompetent, but nice", one of my team members said "We can always find someone who is nice AND can do the job to replace them" and that stuck with me for a long time.
[+] [-] not_the_fda|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dmn322|3 years ago|reply
If not being a jerk is such an important part of performance, maybe more company resources can be put into mental health, etc... just as training on the job skills is seen as an investment, so could that.
It's funny/strange/interesting how social skills are something that you're constantly judged on yet there are very few resources to help people with. Needing help with it is treated as more shameful than needing help with the technical aspects... at least the technical aspects were at some point explicitly taught to people!
There are some just straight up incorrigible narcissists and psychopaths, but there aren't that many, and TBH, they usually tend to have some of the best social skills... probably they're upper management already.
[+] [-] CuriouslyC|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] neotrope|3 years ago|reply
if you're tolerating < A players, you might want to take a hard look at yourself.
[+] [-] photochemsyn|3 years ago|reply
If their job requires a lot of communication with other people, then they're definitely grossly incompetent. If their job can be done mostly in isolation, well, they're only minimally incompetent, and maybe that can be brought along, give them a thick-skinned assistant or manager and only have them talk to that person, etc.
However, it's probably easier to train people with poor social skills in the art of getting along with others in the workplace, then it is to train those with poor grasp of complex technologies to understand them, let alone in resolving difficult bugs or finding creative solutions to novel problems.
[+] [-] synergy20|3 years ago|reply
a nice and incompetent one is common, if anything, they tend to produce more bugs then they can fix.
if I'm the boss, I will hire a competent jerk and manage him/her well, instead of feeling good with a few incompetent nice guys while the company will sink, soon or later.
the keyword is to survive you have to be competent, other things(nice vs jerk) is secondary, and that's a management's job to "fix", the incompetent-but-nice is nearly impossible to fix to me.
[+] [-] paulddraper|3 years ago|reply
A competent jerk IC can be put in a corner and be productive. More or less.
That said, fire jerks and incompetent people.
[+] [-] gofreddygo|3 years ago|reply
Not that simple.
On an easy going project, deadlines far enough, work well defined, people know their parts, yeah you'd like a nice person on the team to have lunch with and share cat videos.
In a project with your ass on the line, real $$$ at stake, you presenting progress to management every week for a visible real promotion path, I'd bet you want a competent person regardless of how foul the language or body odor. Niceness just doesn't matter.
the $hit gets real when you find out, said competent person is just an imposter.
But there is a sweet spot though, keep the competence high, and turn the niceness knob high and low as convenient. At work, being nice is just an act after all. People can and will see through the act, but they themselves are guilty too, you're not offending anyone
[+] [-] sacnoradhq|3 years ago|reply
Edit: Interestingly, depressed people can also bring down team morale.
[+] [-] CM30|3 years ago|reply
And that eventually leads a team or group to stagnate. The only people who will stick around are either jerks themselves, or generally lack a back bone.
[+] [-] A4ET8a8uTh0|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] megablast|3 years ago|reply
What a genius decision.
[+] [-] tasuki|3 years ago|reply
Hard disagree. They demotivate the competent. People start to wonder if they can perhaps slack off and be nice instead of delivering...
[+] [-] crabbone|3 years ago|reply
I won't. I had this dilemma before. And I chose to take incompetent people. My life became miserable. I don't care about people being rude. I feel uncomfortable with people who would like to be rude but can't because they think it's inappropriate or w/e other thing they tell themselves. Somehow, they are more disgusting than people who are open about what they think.
Plenty of posters on moderated Web user boards belong to that later category: they'd like to be rude, but try to formally obey the rules of the board and still be rude. Just enough for the moderator not to ban them.
Same kind of people who'd delete complaints about their crappy program on a public bug tracker claiming the ticket author violated their code of conduct.
---
I don't like to teach. Some people get off on telling juniors what to do. Most those that I saw teaching did it to feel important in their own eyes, beside the eyes of the junior.
But when I made the mistake of agreeing to hire incompetent people, the amount of chores increased by a lot in my life. I'm also not the one to force my convictions on those I have to teach, but that led to the "students" making bad choices when it comes to the tools they decided to use. Before they've made their choice, I made it clear that if they chose tools different from those I use, it becomes their problem. Unfortunately, they wouldn't be able to deal with that problem. And so their productivity was in the negative. They would still be unable to accomplish even very basic tasks, but they would also drag me down by trying to make me solve their problems with the tools I advised against.
Instead of just being able to split the work somewhat evenly, I couldn't trust juniors to do things that required independent research -- they felt overwhelmed at such tasks and, if assigned one, would just waste my time by scheduling meetings with me to "discuss" their objectives, where, essentially, they'd expect me to do their work for them and dumb it down so that they could also understand what's being done.
I also had to report to my boss on the progress my assigned juniors were making. I felt guilty that they didn't do squat, but at the same time felt like I might become the reason for firing them, and I didn't want to be that person either. Yet, at the same time, I didn't want to do stuff like taking over their branch and finishing their task, both because I think that not even the worst programmer deserves that and because, on a personal level, I didn't want to upset them -- after all, they were nice. It's harder to be a jerk to nice people.
[+] [-] ekianjo|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] csomar|3 years ago|reply
There is no incompetent nice. They are usually "nice" but they end up wasting significant time as they try to "show off their work".
There is also no competent jerk. There is bad management. Not everyone wants to train juniors or deal with them on a daily basis. There is also a set of people who wouldn't mind telling snarky comments to each other; and another set of people sensitive to any gesture you make. Put every set separate from the other.
tl;dr; There is only competent nice and incompetent jerk. Otherwise, it's a management failure.
[+] [-] mattcantstop|3 years ago|reply
But I got a job as a Ruby developer from resourcefulness and eagerness. It was a great company. It was clear, however, that I wasn’t pulling my weight when the intern was technically running circles around me. They do the only right thing. They made some “bare minimum” requirements in the form of an evaluation and gave me three weeks to complete it. I couldn’t do it. I was getting much better by the end of the three weeks thanks to a coworker who decided to mentor me, but it was past my ability level. When this was clear and they were firing me I said to the CTO “you can fire me, but I am getting good at learning, so I am going to just study really hard and reapply in 3 months and you’ll have to give me another chance!” I said this in a motivated way, not an insane person way. He decided he would find another spot to put me in the company.
He ended up putting me on the technical integrations team. The other person on that team was an incredibly kind human who loved teaching people. It was perfect for me. I ended up performing super well in that role and became very good at it. It was a win/win for the organization.
I will tell you one thing, however. The weeks before they gave me that evaluation were the most stressful weeks of my life. I was waking up in the middle of the night immediately stressed. It feels terrible to be bad at your job. It felt so freeing to be given the evaluation. Because it was cut and dry. I could do it or I couldn’t, but at least there would be finality. It is kind to not let someone flounder in a role that is past their abilities. I am grateful he found another spot for me to fit at the company. That CTO has passed now at a young age, but I owe my career to him recognizing my passion and finding another spot for me. Thanks Brandon Dewitt!
[+] [-] travisjungroth|3 years ago|reply
I’ve almost never seen this job switch in a company work, but I’ve almost never seen it attempted. I have seen it work many times between companies. Everyone who switches careers does it.
I think there’s a hang up around “incompetence”. Maybe it’s something inherent to the person, but you don’t have much evidence for that. The evidence is the person/job pair. So, switch up the job if the person seems good.
Sometimes when I’ve struggled with a role that doesn’t feel right and I start blaming myself I think “Not everyone can do this. What if some super smart, healthy, well adjusted person was in this role but was this bad at it. What would he do?” I imagine some baseball player, marketing genius, or renowned writer and that he ended up in this job instead of that one. I guess he’d leave? I’ve actually struggled to come up with an answer but it feels important.
[+] [-] confidantlake|3 years ago|reply
They are never held accountable for hiring a bunch of pms instead of developers. If something fails, some hapless junior dev will get sacrificed for being "incompetent" when in reality the problem was management.
[+] [-] m463|3 years ago|reply
His quadrant scheme was Clever vs. Stupid and Hardworking vs. Lazy
"I distinguish four types. There are clever, hardworking, stupid, and lazy officers. Usually two characteristics are combined. Some are clever and hardworking; their place is the General Staff. The next ones are stupid and lazy; they make up 90 percent of every army and are suited to routine duties. Anyone who is both clever and lazy is qualified for the highest leadership duties, because he possesses the mental clarity and strength of nerve necessary for difficult decisions. One must beware of anyone who is both stupid and hardworking; he must not be entrusted with any responsibility because he will always only cause damage."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurt_von_Hammerstein-Equord
[1] what short name would you use for "General Kurt Gebhard Adolf Philipp Freiherr von Hammerstein-Equord"?
[2] opposed to hitler, btw
[+] [-] H8crilA|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nicbou|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] maerF0x0|3 years ago|reply
1. The person making the claim maybe poorly calibrated, burnt out, or have an ego
2. In so far as peers compete for political will and promotions they have a vested interest to use whatever weapons they can against others, subjective / data free ones are the low hanging fruit
3. The person being called a jerk maybe desperately trying to fix something -- the tech debt, the broken culture, overwork/oncall etc. attacking their character in this scenario is the work equivalent of victim blaming
The truth is it's maddening being the only (or minority) competent ones in the room, and with apathetic peers suddenly you're the jerk because they'd rather rest and vest than do effortful things to improve the situation.
In my matrix doing the job is the base line. Can you do the job? Are you doing the job well? Are you not being blatantly terrible? (disagreeable is fine, abusive is not) Veing able to do the job is necessary, else there's not point carrying your dead weight.
[+] [-] ian0|3 years ago|reply
An effective strategy for dealing with this in an organisation is to move quick and minimise damage. When the shit hits the fan and this starts causing problems, its usually not because a person didnt do any work, but because they did crap work that burdened others. This is especially difficult in engineering. You can identify this and get them off the line quickly, then take the time to figure out whats happening and assist them back on track.
The development of a culture that doesn't incentive people to hoard power helps, the last thing you want is a person performing badly to be in some critical role. People should be able to back down / step up depending on their current "phase"
[+] [-] motohagiography|3 years ago|reply
Source: decade+ consulting in govt.
[+] [-] DubiousPusher|3 years ago|reply
I think most of the time though, someone who appears incompetent is suffering from one of three things.
1) They are being tasked with things that simply don't align with their talents. For example, there are certain tasks which are just very mathy. You can pass college calculus and still suck pretty bad at lots of math. This is a case where someone else should be doing this task.
2) They are being tasked with problems which are out of their present ability to breakdown and solve. Essentially, they haven't learned to be an engineer.
3) They have a skills gap (as mentioned in the article they need to get better with a specific tool).
I think the thing that happens by far the most with people who get managed out is that they are a #2 but people try to help them as if they are a #3.
I have been in a situation many times where I have seen other leads giving tasks to their junior engineers and then getting frustrated when their subordinates don't make progress. They try to help by pointing them to tutorials, docs, etc. but what these people often need is someone to sit with them for a significant amount of time and demonstrate how one breaks a problem down, builds small pieces that demonstrate functionality and then put those pieces together into a solution.
This is expensive because it takes time. And it takes time from some of the most skilled people on the team. As often as I have seen people fail a team, I've seen teams fail people. A Pluralsight subscription is not a substitute for mentorship. Talking about networking and career planning is not mentorship (yes I believe it is important too).
[+] [-] julienb_sea|3 years ago|reply
She was in the wrong job at the wrong time. She didn't have the skillset to have a successful start. Her work patterns were unhealthy and ineffective. She couldn't learn how to unblock herself within the org, and became paralyzed by stress.
We had multiple people to compare her against who did not suffer from any of these challenges. I am sure she can find a job that will work for her, as she was nice and did have successful moments, but a fresh start was clearly needed.
[+] [-] annie_muss|3 years ago|reply
Unfortunately, ADHD is not temporary. Most places will eventually let you go when you don't perform. The article is extremely generous in stating that firing is not the right choice, but for someone who is severely and permanently impaired I don't really know what the solution is either...
[+] [-] wittjeff|3 years ago|reply
"People keep working, in a freelance world, and more and more of today's world is freelance,
- because their work is good, and
- because they are easy to get along with, and
- because they deliver the work on time.
And you don't even need all three. Two out of three is fine. People will tolerate how unpleasant you are if your work is good and you deliver it on time. They'll forgive the lateness of the work if it's good, and if they like you. And you don't have to be as good as the others if you're on time and it's always a pleasure to hear from you."
https://www.uarts.edu/neil-gaiman-keynote-address-2012
[+] [-] tastysandwich|3 years ago|reply
We're all characters. At the end of the day, some people do need to be treated a little bit differently. It's not "unfair"/"unjust", it's just called being human.
If you fire everyone who isn't some homogenous nice person we'll have pretty boring teams.
Who hasn't worked with someone a little brash, a little odd, a little immature, but if you actually took the time to get to know them is a pretty good person overall?
I worked with an engineer who clipped his nails at his desk and took his coffee into the bathroom. Socially, he could be rude. Professionally, he did not take criticism well, and liked to do things "his" way. But he was also generous with his time if you needed help. If you broached things very delicately, he could take some feedback. He was given projects to work on that allowed him to work pretty independently. And his rudeness was probably just social awkwardness, as he could be alright if you had a chat with him one-on-one.
It didn't destroy team morale. Everyone recognised he was different. He wasn't a jerk, he just had autism and/or anxiety.
Someone once said to me "meet people where they are at".
[+] [-] jedberg|3 years ago|reply
I would really like to see that article, because I've personally worked with a few brilliant jerks in my time. I'm still friends with most of them to this day. I guess I'm just good at working with them and ignoring their jerkiness, so I keep ending up working with them?
I'm not sure why the author says this but I've seen quite a few in my day.
[+] [-] gwbas1c|3 years ago|reply
But, this person was very, very nice to everyone. It made it harder to see the problem.
How I solved this: I sat down with the person and "explained common sense." I pointed out that, when they were on the phone with the customer, the customer wanted them to solve our problem. They needed to be an expert in our product so that they could do their best to solve the customer's problem on the phone without 4-6 back and forth. I also pointed out that it was very embarrassing for us to ask for "obvious" information after the initial support contact, when they knew that I would ask for "obvious" information. (Like a clear explanation of the problem, or just very basic clarifying questions.)
I then pointed out a very clear example where the director of support really dropped the ball. The customer was trying to share something and was typing in the wrong email address. I simply shouldn't have been involved, because the kind of troubleshooting I was doing was something that the "director of support" should be knowledgeable enough to diagnose, understand, and figure out.
They quit the next day.
[+] [-] Ensorceled|3 years ago|reply
1. Nice, but clearly (in retrospect unfortunately) had some kind of executive function disorder like ADHD. I fired them and, later, helped them get their next job which they excelled at. They bought me a beer when they got promoted.
2. Really Nice, just had terrible long term memory, would constantly forget critical details about what they were working on. They wrote everything down but couldn't process it into long term memory, they would even forget they wrote it down. Could fix small bugs all day but couldn't work on anything that required multiple days of effort as they would forget everything by the next morning.
3. Really Nice, could not work remote. Sort of combo of the first two, bad memory and bad focus.
4. Really Nice, worked with them at a previous company, totally burnt out before coming in at the new place. I literally could not believe it was their code that a co-worker was complaining about and had to check the commit logs. Actually, this has happened twice to me.
In general, the bigger problem is nice but on the threshold between good and competent ... those people stay on forever and can drain a lot of resources as you try to move them fully into the "nice and competent" category.
[+] [-] denton-scratch|3 years ago|reply
I have very limited experience of running organisations. But I think that if your organisation is small, then it can't afford incompetent people, even if they're nice. That means that I think that to run a small organisation, you have to be a jerk, otherwise you're incompetent.
I failed to sack a probationary employee before the probabtion period ended; I thought he would come up to scratch. Also, I had no taste for sacking people. I was wrong, and I cost the company money. I was nice, and I should have been a jerk. Ergo, I'm not competent to run a small organisation.
[Edit] Incompetent people, however nice, are a permanent drag on everything. If they can't be taught, then they have to be removed. You can't make your other staff carry them forever.
[+] [-] bena|3 years ago|reply
Your decision cost the company and likely also that person. You kept him on in a position he was either going to still get fired from, quit, or cost the company more than his paycheck.
All because you didn't want him to have a bad opinion of you. You wanted to seem like a good guy so you avoided doing the thing everyone needed done. You caused everyone way more problems for your selfish ego.
That's a jerk move. You weren't really nice.
The nice thing to do would have been to acknowledge the hard truth in front of you and cut him during the probationary period.
[+] [-] neotrope|3 years ago|reply
assholes respect competence and push out shitty performers.
we've all been sold a lie.
[+] [-] superfrank|3 years ago|reply
Two reasons:
1. At least in some cases they know they're not doing a good job and they likely have anxiety about when they're going to get let go. Ripping the bandaid off and firing them is kind of putting them out of their misery.
2. Probably the more common scenario is that the Nice Guy's incompetence starts to affect the people around them. If Nice Guy is so incompetent that other people have to pick up their slack and fix their mistakes people end up getting upset that they have to do extra work to address Nice Guy's shortcomings. If you remove Nice Guy from anything meaningful and only give them work with no deadlines or consequences for failure, other people eventually start to resent the fact that Nice Guy gets all the easy work.
[+] [-] regpertom|3 years ago|reply
Hey, am I, or we, actually talking about autistic traits vs narcissistic traits? Not sure. Wasn’t my intention going in, just wanted to point out that nice people have coping strategies too, and their incompetence might just be that they don’t prioritise trying to be good at their job and find their success in ways I personally find manipulative and toxic far more than someone being directly rude.
To reword the top comment: the incompetent destroy team morale, make good people leave, and paralyse junior employees and those lacking confidence/assertiveness. They may contribute to a friendly environment, but they burden others. Jerks, as long as they are not so jerky as to be abusive, can at least contribute to a strong team culture by stripping away uncertainty and fluff and make less assertive but competent people want to show up and succeed.
Final reword: the need for jerks increases the more BS is in the system. A system with enough BS will produce jerks out of necessity.
[+] [-] yetanother12345|3 years ago|reply
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35367245
[+] [-] honkycat|3 years ago|reply
1. Too mentally ill to do ANY job. ( 99.9% of the time it is just untreated anxiety or ADHD they have avoided treatment for )
2. Not doing any work and deflecting when people start to smell their stink.
Either way: this "nice but incompetent" person stresses out, nay, TORTURES the rest of the team trying to wipe their ass and keep them afloat.
"They're nice but..." No they aren't nice. They are emotional vampires sucking the blood from the rest of the team. Put them on a PIP, and if they don't improve fire them.
I've seen enough ruined dreams and burned out engineers to no longer feel pity for the "nice but..." people. I cannot be atlas carrying the burden of everyone else's problems. And it is unfair for someone to ask that of me.