Ask HN: How to deal with a manipulative coworker?
- makes hurtful jokes and says you have no sense of humor if challenged,
- his "I don't know" is sounds like "blah, blah, blah, oh, you need to look up more in documentation",
- mostly talks about topics not related to job or even IT,
- spends lots of time talking about behavior and motivations of employees at the foreign client,
- said he tries to instill conditional reflexes in his girlfriend,
- asks quite a few personal questions, but says very little about himself,
- pretty often says he's busy when you ask him for help,
- once he manipulated me into helping him with cURL and POST requests, using words like "ah, but I thought you knew that",
- conspiracy theories are his hobby,
- when his pal was repeatedly calling me a dick etc, I told him I could wiretap it and take it to the boss, or he could stop. The evil coworker called me a black-mailer.
- spends a lot of time talking about money, or working directly with the client
- gives tips like "it's cool to go to a ZOO when it's closing,they don't check if everyone has left",
- sometimes when you explain something to another coworker, he's making jokes and fun of you to distract people,
- cracks many jokes and is quite charming, but his jokes are much sharp towards me,
- when boss is not at the office, the coworker enjoys taking charge in our weekly videoconference (just going through Jira tickets),
- clearly fascinated with ways of manipulating people, he talks about stuff like Pavlov's experiments, negotiation techniques, serving negotiation partners sweet and good food to make them sleepy and off-guard, etc...,
- never loses control, you get an impression he would make a good spy
19 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 54.1 ms ] threadI think I can just focus on work, put on headphones, tell people they can still ask me for help, and demonstrate that I'm a good and motivated programmer. Let the work do the telling.
The only thing I really worry about is that he becomes a team leader and gets to manage me. I would like to prevent that if possible without dropping to his level - if possible. I don't have illusions that I can make him like me. When we're the only 2 people left in the room, we don't talk unless necessary.
I just don't think I can prove he is a malicious manipulator, much less a psycho. It would become my word vs his word. Unlike his pal, who used to liberally sling racial slurs, he watches his words. If his remarks are consistently demeaning towards me, you'd still need to listen to perhaps hours of wiretapping to pick up a pattern.
Take a step back, distance yourself from him, focus on doing the right thing and others will follow. Learn to ignore him and learn about your buttons so they can’t be pushed so easily.
As for how he would describe me, I can tell you. He described me as sensitive, eager to please others, and a blackmailer (when I told his openly racist pal I'd record him repeatedly calling me a dick and take it to the boss). He criticizes my choice of tools (Bash, Vim) for being ancient without pointing out anything he can do better with a modern editor - quite the opposite, I see him struggling finding something that would be very easy to grep. What he says and what he does simply doesn't add up which is the definition of manipulation.
He gives another coworker advice on Javascript and one framework, but he didn't know what type 'var x;' is. Anyone who played with Javascript for more than a week should know beyond doubt it's undefined. Or out of the blue he says one of Python's advantages is high development speed and he hasn't considered that (but he was kind enough to blast it for being slow in the past...no, he only had brief contact with C++).
And it's only the 1 guy I have problems with. Boss likes me, the young and trusting programmer likes me, the racist pal has some respect for me because I work out and we can talk about exercise.