Ask HN: How to handle a workaholic colleague?

The whole team bands together and gives your teammate their full support, so that he/she is promoted into management as soon as possible.

Well your relative performance is worse, so either tolerate that or work harder. Nobody's work-life balance is someone else's decision to make.

Changes jobs.

A good start is to not be an H1b indentured servant. You are one, correct?

Try to find work where your company doesn't view you as disposable or have unreasonable expectations. You may be hard pressed to do that here in the states, though.

From a fellow workaholic:

Talk with him and see what really excites him. Suggest that you work together with him on an open source side project (possibly related to a something your team is building). A piece of the project he can get excited about and occupy his excess energy.

Help him promote it so he can get him some recognition / feedback outside of just the internal company employees. And your team might still get some additional benefits from the open source project he's working on.

Sun Tzu: When you cannot win the battle, deny the field.

Switch teams or departments, or mention to your manager that you're getting discouraged by how the incentives are set up in your company. Most managers are happy to have a hard working team member, but not at the cost of their other 5 good team members leaving or getting discouraged.

To me:

1. If there is a direct correlation between hours worked and productivity for the team, then compensation is not relative.

2. To the degree that emails late at night is cast as toxic office politics, so are attempts to normalize the productive efforts of the coworker.

3. Pathologizing a coworker as 'workaholic' delegitmates the person and their values. It tends to provide an excuse for treating the individual poorly 'for their own good' rather than accepting the individual as what they are: a hard worker.

Hint: emails to execs throughout the night are mostly unwelcome.

Most of the comments in this thread are ridiculous.

Just as you (hopefully) get to choose how many hours you work, your coworkers also get to choose how many hours they work.

I'd ask yourself two questions:

1: Are you happy with your current work/life balance?

2: Can you achieve your career goals at your current workplace while maintaining your desired work/life balance?

If the answer to either of those questions is "no", you should have a conversation with your manager.

The problem isn't that your co-worker works much more than the rest of the team. Based on your description, it sounds like the "relative performance" evaluation has a serious flaw in it. For the purposes of raises, bonuses, and stock, you should be compared to your peers at a comparable level of promotion only, not against people at a higher level. Likewise, for the purposes of promotion, you should be compared to your peers at the level you'd be promoted to, not people multiple levels higher. If your workaholic colleague has received a promotion, then after that happens they should be at a level where the rest of the team's compensation and potential promotions no longer depend on the now-promoted person.

If your company's evaluation doesn't work that way, you need to have a talk with management about why it should.

(Also, if your co-worker is working long hours but not actually more productive, and your management can't tell the difference between those two but you can, you may need to have a conversation with management about that too.)

Create your own company and hire the guy.

I have met people that have God complex. They feel that things cannot run without them.

You'd be surprised how little weight hard work carries relative to positive attitude coupled with an acceptable amount of work (former manager here).

Performance reviews aren't usually that objective. If you're getting dinged, it might be a problem with your attitude vs your performance. It's unfair, but you're working with humans, not vulcans.

Said another way: If management likes you personally, and you work hard enough, you're not going to get bad performance reviews.

If this coworker is a ball hog, that's a different story, and management will pick up on it over time. The best thing you can do in the meantime is worry about your own output and do good work with people who do want to work with you.

In my experience, workers send emails late at night to explicitly demonstrate that they work more than others. I believe that it's unhealthy and it's pretty clear that it's not correlated to work quality.

This may be due to any number of reasons – from proving false a manager claiming that they don't work to impostor syndrome to office politics to actually compensating that they don't really work – but that's probably something you want to address directly with the mate. That's also a reason for which a number of places/teams I've worked at/with tend to normalize reports to once per day or once per week. That and the fact that managers just can't cope with twenty reports per night.

You also want to address the issue with the manager and make sure that you are not judged by number of emails but rather by actual impact. If that fails, you're probably working in the wrong place.

P.S.: When I write "in my experience", I've been the "worker who sends emails at all hours of night", in my case because of an abusive manager and an ongoing burnout.

Changing jobs doesn't reset good will and trust. When you change teams, you get to build even more good will and trust with others.

In my experience managing people I find a much prefer predictable, low noise, task completion. Every time someone who reports to me sends something I have to read it because it might be a critical issue that needs to be immediately addressed. As a result I appreciate folks who limit their off hours communication to more urgent matters, and I would rather something be done, as committed too, in a couple of weeks to someone trying to get it all done in a week or less.

But I also try to establish that understanding with folks I supervise early on. I have known managers who use someone in their group who is really over working to "get everyone to be more productive" (usually by praising the level of output of the over working employee). It always blows up the team in my experience and they wonder why nobody wants to work for them.

Sometimes people just wake up in the middle of the night and have trouble falling asleep so they send emails or do other boring stuff, so they can fall asleep again. I've done that on occasion. If it were me, I would just concentrate more on my job and less on what my coworkers were doing.

Send Later plugin. Write emails and set them to go at 1:15AM, 2AM and 4AM.

>> I am been rated above average in the current appraisal system...But after advent of this colleague, I see everything declining...as "irresponsible"

I see this as a huge red flag. It is clearly evident that you may not be marked above average for the next appraisal. Obviously being marked as irresponsible shows that the upper level is expecting you to work like a donkey!!!

I would just start preparing for my next move.

>> Changing job would be resetting all the good will and trust that I have built here.

To this, I can say from experience, that our job is to look for the next better job. While this is a bit sarcastic maybe, but really, as we know, that companies won't think of that goodwill when the next round of letting go people comes along. And going by your description, your goodwill is because of your quality of work, so if you plan/prepare/put the efforts for the next move while you are in this job, you will really be better off.

>> I don't really want to portray my peer as bad(He is mostly nice on the face),

Most likely and I think you imply politely that he is not nice really and he understands the game being played and is playing it. You don't want to play that game, which is fair enough, but you will lose as a consequence.

So overall, just my opinion, is that now this job is no longer the right fit and moving on seems the most sensible thing to do.

The problem isn't your co-worker, it's the company and how they relatively value that. I'm definitely a workaholic, but my coworkers who work "normal" hours are equally valued. (but we're a small company, so we don't have a rigorous review process, and soft skills are highly valued)

In general, and true in my situation, when you work crazy hours, other aspects of your work life may be subpar (for instance, another team member may be a better communicator or a thoughtful architect)

How to handle him? Ignore him.

If the company evaluation process is so bad that one person on a team signalling - plausibly or otherwise - how hardworking they are with a few late emails reduces your salary raise then you should probably consider moving to a different company anyway, depending on how much you care about that raise. It's not that individual's fault the process is broken, and that individual changing their behaviour isn't going to fix it. If the company process isn't that bad or nobody in management bothers to read the timestamps on his emails when they read them the following morning anyway, then who cares about his showing off (or unusual pattern of organising flexible work)?

tbh if you have remote email access and sending the odd late email actually counts in your favour, and you actually care about the internal politics of appearing to be harder working than you actually are, it's not that difficult to hit the send button on an email you drafted in working hours after you've sat down at home and had your dinner. Or use a plugin to automate the process with some email systems.

In my opinion, you need to understand the difference between hard work and smart work. Software development is like an art. A person may spend 18 hours a day to create something that just works while another may spend just 8 creative hours to create a masterpiece. There are many disadvantages of being a hard worker / workaholic:

* The expectation of your manager will get elevated and if one fails to be consistent in working for long hours, it's a negative.

* One does not have much room to accommodate something else at times of need. Think of an outage, you have already worked for 18 hours and fail to deliver at that crucial time.

* It's very difficult to innovate in an insomniac state.

Remember, doing hard work is easier that smart work. It requires much more learning and thinking. But, if you are able to do it, you will be able to contribute much more.

Appraisal based on relative performance: This sounds logical. If a person contributes better to the company's goal, he/she should be appreciated for that. Think yourself being that person it should make sense.

Note: I am not taking the political aspects of your office into consideration. If your manager loves late night availability, long emails at weird hours, it is his weakness. Probably, you can be smart and automate sending 'corporate bullshit' emails at night ;)

Or just find yourself a right workplace.

I work a lot. I'm working right now (took a break to read HN). I just enjoy getting things done and it's paid off well for me. I've learned though that my ability to work many hours and my drive to do so doesn't mean I should enforce that on others, so I don't let my teammates know when I work outside of normal hours. I don't send emails at night or weekends. I don't send code reviews on nights and weekends. I try to stay invisible outside of normal work hours to avoid creating an environment where people feel like they must work as much as I do. I realize that also means it might look like I produce a lot more code during my 40~ hours, but I think that's better than the team receiving non-stop emails and code reviews from me.

I figured I'd work hard while I have any bit of youth and energy left and relax later in life.

It's not about working hours but your value proposal. You can't compare yourself to him in hour to hour comparison unless you work some mundane job where your appreciation and productivity is only measured in terms of hours of work put in.

Since it seems like you want compete with this guy but not put in the hours (and I don't think you should) you need to work smarter. Look up some posts about value proposals and find a way to increase your value for the team. I.e. focus your efforts in increasing your output per worked hour.

If you're working at a place where your "performance" is determined by the number of emails that you send at a given hour of the day, then you'd do yourself good by finding an alternative.

(If you really love the place and want to fight your "workaholic" team mate, start scheduling a couple of your emails at random times during weird hours.)