Ask HN: Startup coworker underperforming
I'm half of a development team at a young (but very promising startup). We have angel funding and seed funding and are working our way towards proving our product is profitable for the next round. I was brought aboard by the other half of the development team, the subject of this post, who recommended me to the founder/CEO.
During my first few 3 months of being hired, we re-wrote the entire application to meet the requirements that the previous developers couldn't meet due to them being junior and inexperienced (who were later fired). When I say "we", I really mean "I". This is where the problems lie. The other developer on the team has productivity issues. He has the title of "principal engineer" but he his full time duties are development oriented. And he cannot perform. When tasked with debugging software issues, he cannot solve them on his own. When tasked with developing new components, he cannot make decisions or create them on his own. He's been in the business for many years, and I worked with him at our last job together, where he was let go for productivity reasons. He is a smart individual, but he cannot produce, and he cannot "play jazz" to solve software problems.
On top of this, his personal life is a chaotic mess, and he is constantly clocking in late and signing off very early to babysit his young children. Even if he could solve the issues he is tasked with, his personal life is so burdened with responsibility that he cannot put in the hours or focus required to complete the tasks. His days are frequently interrupted by needing to pick up his kids or drop them off, or whatever else he needs to do. These were the exact issues at our last startup job as well.
I, on the other hand, work my ass off. I pull long hours all week. I've always been productivity-oriented and have a high engineering standard for excellence. I build big systems fast with great test coverage, and they meet requirements. I don't need anyone to hold my hand to step into a debugger or provision machines in our infrastructure. I'm busting my ass to pull his weight along with mine. I schedule work, prune our stories, assign what needs to be done, and then do my part in solving it.
I'm beginning to form a toxic opinion about this coworker. I'm feeling very resentful towards him that he gets cut so much slack for his personal responsibilities. I'm resentful that he can be pretending to work all week but have nothing to show for it at the end of the week except excuses about why he had trouble. He's not putting in what the founder and I are. But he technically outranks me, so I cannot "sit him down" in the way someone with more authority could. I could sit down with him as a peer, but he is known for snapping at people (even the founder) who question his productivity. And I don't think the discussion would have any positive outcome anyways. His issues are systemic.
The founder knows all about this, and I've made it very clear to him how I feel. He knows that I've written the vast majority of the systems and solved the vast majority of the issues we've encountered. He knows we cannot rely on the underperforming employee for anything serious. However, he won't act because of how it looks to the outside. It will look like he doesn't know how to find good people. It will look like internally we chaotic if we let him go, and that will hurt our chances of raising more funding. I told him very recently though that it's reaching a breaking point for me, and I cannot work with him any longer.
I need advice on how to proceed. I am willing to walk away from the job if the founder won't fire the other employee. But I don't want to be that guy that is like "it's either me or him." I just want the founder to act on what we've agreed the situation to be. He needs to fire this guy. He costs money and drags down prod...
63 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 138 ms ] threadI'd put money down that the founder of this company is only going to keep the OP on until he can find someone to replace him.
It’s clear OP is asking for advice and may be amenable to ideas on how to coach themselves, if convinced they “are the problem”.
If you still want to stay, negotiate far more equity, like 4x what you have. If you have a 1 or 2% I’m sure they could go up to 5% once they realize you are serious about leaving. Then you can feel better about carrying dead weight.
Use that to your advantage and negotiate a higher stake in the company (unless you think the company is doomed with this other guy, then maybe negotiate a higher salary and just cash the checks until the ship sinks).
Either way, if the founder can't possibly lose any more developers, then have him make it worth your while to stay.
>I could sit down with him as a peer, but he is known for snapping at people (even the founder) who question his productivity. And I don't think the discussion would have any positive outcome anyways. His issues are systemic.
Do you know this for a fact? If no one has 'sat him down' perhaps he thinks no one is noticing and that he's not causing problems. Perhaps both you and the founder could sit down with him.
>But I don't want to be that guy that is like "it's either me or him."
Why not? It sounds like the founder is on your side and ultimately he's the one who needs to make the decision. Perhaps you can come up with some ideas for how he can implement letting the guy go while minimizing any perception that there's trouble.
You say you're willing to walk away. Do it.
Given your first line, this sounds like a bad faith suggestion. Why should I walk away from something promising vs helping our team become more productive?
And given the context of the person in question, who was fired from the last startup for lack of productivity, I don't think this will do much to my reputation. My reputation is pretty good right now. Yes, I feel a little dirty about how this situation is going down, but it's not out of malice. It's out of wanting to work with excellent people and build an excellent product.
Your comments are showing a very toxic approach to this whole situation.
I was unfortunate to have hired toxic people in the past, who believed they were better than everyone else, who don’t give a damn about other people, and believe they know better than anyone else. Very productive individuals, just like yourself. I kept them in the team for their productivity, but I regret deeply not having fired them on the first red flags. When they finally left, it felt like a cancer was removed from me, personally, and from the company. The productivity of the entire team increased as others now felt they could step up.
Don’t be that guy. You are heading that direction and it wont end well.
The company is not yours, so I believe you should leave for the health of everyone involved, including yourself.
Don’t worry about the company, they don’t need you to survive.
Since we can't psychically divine which, the principle of charity applies, I think you have to take OP at his word until you can point out a direct contradiction, say.
You presented two options: stay and try to fire the other guy, or leave. I presented a reason why you shouldn't stay, and suggested you leave. Not sure what about that appears to you as bad faith.
>And given the context of the person in question, who was fired from the last startup for lack of productivity, I don't think this will do much to my reputation.
But you're not going to control the narrative; your fired coworker will - unless you're willing to go door to door and publicize the fact that you got that person fired, which is a terrible idea.
>It's out of wanting to work with excellent people and build an excellent product.
You generally don't get to do that by punishing people who recommend you for jobs that you find fulfilling.
I've always found that the most talented people in a room tend to gravitate towards one another; so too do the most toxic. If you keep doing toxic things, don't be surprised when you find yourself surrounded with people just like yourself.
You need a strong stomach to see how the sausage gets made, and confronting people who are debilitating real-world results is part and parcel of working in the kitchen. It gets easier, though.
It never gets easy to fire people, but when you know that it makes it better for everyone (including the person fired) you learn to get on with it when needed - it is one of those unfun jobs that you just have to do.
You are in a unique position since you have history and are in the same (very small) boat now.
Makes clear justification for dismissal in the future and you may be able to get clear of some of the "toxic junk" you're harboring.
Stop trying to control other people and start learning how to control yourself.
Avoid the burnout and keep the negative thoughts away
In fact I could be that other engineer (I'm not, but I'm in a very similar sounding situation)
I was the most senior engineer and first to join a new startup with a bunch of colleagues from an old work place. I put in ridiculously long hours for the first year and a bit to get the product started, and got completely burnt out and my family life suffered
After we brought on a few more engineers I reduced my hours to a more normal 40 hours a week, and made use of the flexible start-up hours to pick up my kids from school some days and come in late on others (A great way to manage the stress of being in a busy startup)
Now I also spend a lot less time writing code and more time managing product requirements, an overseas team, on system architecture, and all those dev-ops tasks (big time-sink) that no-one else wants to do
I don't completely know the original-poster's situation, but quite often the senior person on the team is often shielding the other developers from all the daily crap that is going on in a company so that they can be as productive as possible, and you might not be completely aware about everything that is going on
If you manage to resolve it, that'll look really good to the founder and could help the company succeed. If you fail, you still look good because you're trying to make changes to help the company.
We had an employee that was underperforming and would work the bare minimum. It turned out that he felt overwhelmed, so work was very stressful for him and he would duck out as a defense mechanism. We changed his role somewhat (internal tools dev instead of product, product manager working with partners, main handler of support issues that got past tier 1) and he was a lot happier and ended up working more hours and meeting goals.
Working at a startup/small company can be very difficult, so finding the right fit in a team can be the difference between burnout and success. If he likes what he's working on, he'll make time to get it done.
This does a couple things, it puts everyone in check, including yourself, and does an honest review of everyone.
pick one
This sounds like a really complicated issue, and I don't think it's fair to respond briefly over HN. I'd be happy to exchange some thoughts with you in private over email (my email is in my profile). Feel free to reach out anytime.
And, for anyone else reading through this having similar challenges, feel free to reach out as well. Happy to talk you through the situation however I can.
Best of luck!
1) He has successfully brought on quality dev talent (you) and could likely do this more as the company grows. He's willing to hire people better than himself, which is more rare than you might think.
2) Angel & seed investors, who typically invest heavily based on the team, have already signaled their opinion by investing.
3) He is likely taking on a meaningful amount of non-development busywork that comes with any small business and that is incredibly thankless.
If anything, I suspect your raising these concerns to the CEO is telling them more about your own level of workplace maturity than it is about the other person's development skills. Startups are hard enough without coworkers sniping and complaining about who's doing the most. If you're worried about who gets credit, it's going to be very difficult to go from promising concept to a sustainable high growth company.
So something made you willing to join this company despite that. Potential financial rewards? An interesting challenge? Regardless, is it still there? Are you going to be kicking yourself later for missing out on that if you quit out of frustration if the founder doesn't do what you want? Is it worth giving up whatever those appealing things were just because you're offended by this guy putting in fewer hours and less code? What if you had the same title, so at least didn't look like a less-valued employee to others?
We've all probably worked with people like that. The best thing you can do is perform your own responsibilities, and factor in his abilities when planning & estimating.
If anyone should leave, it should be you - as you have the problem (I mean - you're not the cause of the problem, you just have it)
In my advice I'm going to assume that you and this other employee are a team of two and you both work for the same person (the founder) who I'll just call the manager ok?
If you can change the way you think about it, you might find it to be a very rewarding and life changing event.
First, and this is hard I know, realize that output of the team is your manager's problem, not your problem. I can hear in the way your wrote this that you have taken on tremendous amounts of ownership of the success of this product and so you do the work of two people because the other person is not working as hard as you are.
But here is the thing, if the choice is 'not successful' and you are burnt out, or 'not successful' and you are not burnt out, take the second exit. More importantly, change the criteria for 'success' in your mind from "product" to "what you have produced." Set clear dividing lines of what is 'yours' and what is assigned to this other person, communicate those clearly with the manager and get their buy in (if they are a sociopath be sure and get it in writing).
Then you can communicate with the manager in terms of how you've been successful at getting your parts done, tested, deployed, etc. That the whole system isn't done, tested or deployed isn't your problem anymore. Can you see how that works? It is the manager's problem.
My Grandfather had a phrase that went something like "You can't plow a field with an ox and an ass." It refers to using two farm animals hitched, as a team, to a plow that the farmer would walk behind while the animals pulled it through the field. The ass (or donkey) can walk much faster than the ox, but the ox is much stronger in pulling. Since a team is hitched together, our clueless farmer is trying to get the speed of one and the strength of the other to plow his fields faster. But the reality is that they can't work together because in the harness their attributes work against each other.
Your manager needs to match you up with someone who is closer to your talents if they want to get the job done, or they have to settle for plowing with one ox.
The second thing you can do to improve things is to develop some compassion for your co-worker, who in your words, "his personal life is a chaotic mess". While you are doing lots of great work, try to imagine how you would accomplish that if one of your parents was living with you and needed you for basic things like getting in and out of bed or using the toilet. You might imagine these outside family demands to be so chaotic that you don't know what you can commit to because you can't say for sure you will have 4 or 5 hours in one shot to work on something. Now add to that stress your own co-workers judging you harshly because you aren't getting things done that you are supposed to. Guilt, responsibility, fear, anxiety, it's the full depression cocktail and unless your co-worker is super human, they are probably in a really bad place right now.
Imagine the scenario where you convince the manager to fire this person and hire someone else, and that person who is fired commits suicide because they feel like if they can't hold a job they have no reason left to live. That is an extreme case but it does happen.
So if you can change your outlook on this person from being a slacker to being a superstar who has a lot of crap going on in their life that is keeping their performance down, then start to strategize with them on ways they can help even with their otherwise over whelming life issues. Talk to them about partitioning up the work into chunks they can manage in disjointed time opportunities. Maybe have them do less technical work and more technical d...
And given that the coworker was there before OP was, it's very likely that there's more going on than they see.
I was in a similar situation (lots of life stuff, manager of a team, accused of underperforming), and I had to deal with a lot of special requests because I knew basically everything at the company. When I left, my coworkers contacted me to say that they didn't realize how much I actually did and that they're surprised I was able to get as much done as I did.
You don't know their situation, and you don't need to. Get your work done, help out where reasonable, but leave it at that. If the manager asks why things are late, be frank (I did my part and X and Y for coworker Z), but don't point fingers. It's not your job to fix the company unless you're primarily paid in equity (doesn't seem to be the case), and even then, there's probably a better way than trying to get someone fired (options you mentioned).
We basically did what your suggested with another employee who was under performing, and once he got the right fit, he did much better. Sometimes it takes a third party to see your weaknesses and suggest a better fit.
Also you should try to negotiate more equity with the CEO.
Either way, situation won't get better for you personally. Just leave.