I dunno, seems easy enough to give a set of rules to follow in the workplace but as someone who's worked as a college tutor, it can be hard to impossible to get some people up to speed technically.
True, you can't train anyone, but whether someone is trainable and eager to learn is usually apparent very quickly. It's not always something that comes across in an interview, but usually.
And you can set up processes to limit harm from untrained or malicious people. For some reason this doesn't seem to be widely done when it comes to internal "asshole" behavior.
Lots of companies require code reviews before software gets deployed or require two signatures on a company check. But they'll have freeform meetings where anyone can speak next if they manage to grab the "floor" and won't maintain records to prevent someone from claiming undue credit for an accomplishment.
Someone in authority has to tell them specifically what they're doing wrong and that they have to stop.
I've seen people fired when they didn't listen. The improvement to the rest of the company greatly exceeded the loss from that individual. It is a big factor in psychological safety.
I think it's hard to unasshole someone who doesn't want to be unassholed, or who simply doesn't value it. But I think if you really call out every single behavior that's assholey (in private, so they aren't embarrassed and defensive) then eventually people do start to get it and, if they want to change, can.
It could be one of those fake it 'til you make it deals. Someone is an asshole internally still but puts on a veneer of nonassholeishness because they are operating in an environment where it's not tolerated, and over time kind of mellow out. At the time of writing this comment, there's only one comment on my post and it's from someone who says s/he indeed was an asshole and it took this kind of incessant badgering to figure it out.
> Asshole behavior begets additional asshole behavior from others. Non-assholes are hardened into assholes over time to survive, and a spiral of incivility reigns.
I've been infected by this before. Never again. (I prefer to slap up so I ended up getting shown the door.)
Before we go through a hiring round with my team nowadays, I like us to review what I've seen approvingly referred to over on Metafilter as The Baboon Article:
> Dr. Sapolsky has no idea how long the good times will last. ''I confess I'm rooting for the troop to stay like this forever, but I worry about how vulnerable they may be,'' he said. ''All it would take is two or three jerky adolescent males entering at the same time to tilt the balance and destroy the culture.''
>''And if baboons can do it,'' he said, ''why not us? The bad news is that you might have to first knock out all the most aggressive males to get there.''
What's ironic is...the only people I can think of that I've worked with over the years who exhibit the signs called out in this piece were VP level or higher.
The signs listed of an asshole are pretty easy to spot but try sniffing out the 'hidden', highly-skilled two-faced exec. asshole. They are readily promoted and treat execs. one way and low-level employees another.
It makes sense, in a way. Sociopaths are willing to do things normies aren’t, therefore they have more options, therefore they have more paths to success.
Unfortunately, we have plenty of examples of successful companies where toxic behavior is rampant.
I agree that firing assholes improves a company's morale and environment, but sadly there is little evidence that it actually help a company's business.
I linked to as much hard evidence as I could but I'll agree that it's a little light. My hunch, just based on my own observation doing this for 20 years, is that an asshole is like a black hole of productivity, draining it from everyone else to such an extent that they're simply not worth having around, and that no matter how Brilliant they are, the rest of the team can figure out their areas of expertise with the morale boost they get after leaving (or drastically changing their behavior, though sometimes the bridges are burned too much for recovery).
Again this is mostly anecdotal, from what I've seen teams do when the Resident Jerk was fired or left. I've never in my 20 years as a professional software developer seen a single person leave a team and then see the team immediately fall to pieces because that person really was the critical lynchpin that people thought. I've seen lots of people stick around far, far too long because folks (management usually) were WORRIED that's what was going to happen, but it never actually seems to.
Disclaimer: I am an independent contractor mostly because I fled what I consider structural defects of the corporate world, so a bit biased.
Isn't it a matter of management though? Assholes can be productive to a company if you have a good manager doing damage control and sinking time into firewalling the asshole.
Given the prevalence of this disease and the abundance of managers, it seems like a good way to increase the hiring pool of a company.
As a manager, you want to contain an asshole just enough so that coworkers do not leave, also enough so that the asshole feels they have to make up for their social behavior with additional skill and hard work (which is not hard, they are often competitive).
I believe (and that's the reason why I don't want to employ people) that the optimal point for a business is when you maintain your employees on the edge of quitting. Assholes create stress and competition, an environment where projects often strive and individuals wither.
All the ethical managers or business starters I have known have been replaced by more assholish versions. This could be anecdotal evidence of course, but I think that assholes are better suited for a corporate world of greed and competition.
Why do you believe that the optimal point for a business is maintaining the employees on the edge of quitting? What are the pros and cons of doing this?
It seems to be a very simple way of looking at it: squeeze out as much as possible from the employee without losing the employee - hence on the edge of quitting.
However, I think it is way too simple to be useful. People who are happy and relatively less stressed are way more productive on average. (Yerkes - Dodson Law applies here)
I have seen that a couple times, mostly in startups: a highly functioning brilliant jerk was doing a pretty good job leading teams, but they had no patience towards poor performers and that caused morale issues.
Eventually the person got managed out (not fired, just isolated from the teams) and upper management thought the team would just eventually thrive after some short loss of productivity, but that never happened: the poor performers were put in front of the customer who commissioned the project (role that was usually handled by the jerk, who was highly competent at that due to their technical brilliance and assertive personality even with the customer), and after a few round trips the customer smelled the incompetency and literally said “we’re going to quit this project, we feel like there’s no technical direction lately”. Massive loss for the company, in the 7 figures. It almost caused the company to fail due to that being the largest customer at that phase.
In those cases, the jerk did an amazing job at keeping a very productive technical communication with the customer, and keep the high performers on track towards what really needed to be done in those projects.
Part of the problem is an a--hole is surrounded by a zone of disaster and chaos of their own creation, which makes them all the more indispensable. A--holes do not groom successors, they burn competitors (which everyone else is).
I think it's often about people's needs and goals. Assholes maybe could help your company's success short-term, but would infect the culture long-term. And it seems to me that most people want quick success.
I wonder if that is instead due to successful companies being unable to properly vet applicants when there is pressure to find applicants for fast-growing businesses.
> I agree that firing assholes improves a company's morale and environment, but sadly there is little evidence that it actually help a company's business.
Maybe the root issue lies with our societies putting business above ethics. "As long as you're making money, everything's fine, until you piss off someone with more money than you."
I have no proof, by my gut feeling is that success in business is generally a concept assholes are better adapted for.
The reason I say this is that most companies that we consider "successful" are in my experience mostly being assholes to their customers. Since a company doesn't have an independent personality of its own, I imagine that such behavior must come from the people at the top of the food chain at those places, or at least the people very high in that chain.
It’s actually not hard to sniff out assholes. You just ask them about how they resolved a recent conflict and picture yourself on the other side of the story. We had a great net eng candidate who zero of the interview team said they’d want to work with. Otherwise smart and capable, we gave him s hard pass.
I mention a question really similar to that in the article itself and yeah, I think that question and similar ones are probably the first tools we reach for... but while I think those might suss out some obvious assholes, or unintentional assholes, I think it's too easy for self-aware or intentional assholes to answer "what they want to hear" and pass the question. I'm definitely glad you sidestepped this for-sure asshole in your interview process but I think the fact that everyone on your team wanted to avoid him or her kind of supports my "only the world's biggest assholes get weeded out this way" theory.
That's why what I advocate for instead is to genuinely build a culture where asshole behavior isn't tolerated, and then warn candidates that you've successfully done this and take it seriously. Self-aware assholes will just bullshit through these kinds of questions, but if you can truly impart how seriously you take this sort of thing to them, they'll weed themselves out of your process.
As one grows and evolves, one learns to better themselves. A fairly significant number of smart and capable people have been guilty of acting in not so ideal manner when dealing with incompetent or otherwise incompatible people but the answer to questions like "give me an example of an encounter or interaction that did not go as well as it could" is not to sugarcoat or misrepresent, I think part of growing up is to own one's mistakes honestly, recognize them as such and learn from them and if an interviewer believes they can really ferret out liars that are in reality asshole but have ready answers for such question in order to take a hard pass on folks that disclose past mistakes honestly, well, I am not sure I consider it to be the best strategy, but I am still learning things.
I really love the euphemisms/double entendres/word play. It definitely makes it more fun to read.
One thing I realize as I read this is that, I’ve definitely engaged in certain ‘asshole behaviors’ at times. It’s been a long challenge to become more socially skilled and handle pressure/emotions better, but a lot of bad habits linger, I think.
The worst habit of which is definitely complaining about coworkers to other coworkers. Not in a hateful or personal way, but sometimes when I get frustrated by something someone does, I vent to someone unrelated instead of confronting the other person.
Another terrible habit that I had in the past was a tendency to respond while still fuming, which never ends well; usually it ends in both sides of an argument escalating while others grab the popcorn.
I hope I make enough effort to not be the kind of asshole that needs to be flushed out of an org, but similarly hopefully it’s not just me that is imperfect at the art of not being an asshole.
>Another terrible habit that I had in the past was a tendency to respond while still fuming, which never ends well; usually it ends in both sides of an argument escalating while others grab the popcorn.
Right there with you and I'm the asshole who wrote this post. I know I have a tendency to want to strike back when I feel struck and I also have a tendency to go way overboard, in that "don't throw the first punch but throw the last" kind of way. Honestly I think everyone has asshole behaviors every now and then, a true asshole doesn't know or doesn't care when they act like a prick. The fact that this is something you're consciously aware of and working on I think means you're fine.
One book I might recommend though is 'Nonviolent Communication' by Marshall Rosenberg. It definitely feels a little hippy dippy at times and the skeptical asshole in me occasionally rolls my eyes at it, but I think it's really helped me understand some of my own communication tendencies and given me a lot of tools to help curb my own shit.
Haven't come across Marshall Rosenberg, will have to look him up when I get a chance.
Have you come across Fred Kofman, he has this thing he calls Verbal Aikido, check it out here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O6N9nvk8bvE - he also has some books that fall loosely in to the hippy dippy category while still valuable in my opinion.
Rosenberg also narrates the audiobook version. His delivery is a big relief compared to the usual bravadoish and disconcertingly deranged manner of the self-help or ‘soft skills’ genre. Even though I'm still having trouble with the anecdotal nature of the argument, it's a lot better than e.g. “Don't Sweat The Small Stuff.”
> Eyerolling, sighing, or otherwise negative body language... Tersely worded group e-mails that make people feel uncomfortable... Interrupting people who aren’t done talking...
I need a dash of these, but I will hate anybody using it all the time.
i strongly believe in a diverse workforce, especially in large companies, diverse workforces often times mean better results especially since problems today are even more complicated. having said that, i totally understand and have seen some of the bad behaviors you mentioned like putting people down, insulting others, this can be quite toxic. i'm not saying i condone any of those types of behaviors because i certainly don't, but i think asshole labeling can be quite arbitrary, e.g. someone that's terse and seemingly abrasive may just be more direct/candid, is he/she an asshole? what i'm saying is that bad behaviors should not be condoned, but these individuals definitely have value to companies and can create beautiful work, and we shouldn't reject them based on certain labeling because the labeling is quite frankly discrimination and should equally not be tolerated. one person that particularly stands out in my mind is linus torvalds. asshole? for sure, by almost all counts of your definition of an asshole. given that he's improved lately and has admitted his issues, but he's still an asshole by my books :) would you want anyone else working on linux kernel which requires having a lot of different contributors working in large teams, probably not.
Excellent article. I hope managers read it. The toughest problem I've had w.r.t. assholes was convincing managers that certain people were in fact assholes and they were not essential to the company's survival. Assholes are extremely good at kissing up and shitting down. And managers don't like to hear they've been manipulated.
The a--hole royalty that I've encountered defeat every measure offered in this article precisely because of the effectiveness of their kissing up and sh---ing down strategy. Actively sabotaging literally every decent person they encounter (because the other people don't share their 'culture'), turning every item in their punchlist into a tool of political conquest where the rules are: make your victims look bad by any means possible, and then the kicker-- when they choose to turn on their social skills, expressing a highly superior feeling of confidence and ability to persuasively blame all the other a--holes for their own tyrranical behavior.
No, when you get a royal a--hole into a large organization, I really don't have much hope for average managers with typical business training to do anything but watch.
I honestly think this kind of hits the nail on the head. The industry (in my opinion) is far too tolerant of asshole behavior for many reasons, and it's basically just created a safe place to be a jerk without any repercussion. I largely wrote up what I did because I'd like to see this change, we should treat rude and annoying behavior the way that most other industries do by making it something we culturally don't accept. The same folks who realized they could be jerks and it wouldn't hurt their careers will simply figure out that now it will and knock it off.
Around these parts the term 'attitude disability' gets floated once in a while. It doesn't translate very well... but the translation doesn't need the negative connotation it has over here.
Nullifying a circle of tit-for-tat takes a lot of energy, and stable blood sugar. Too much short carbs in prefab food is causing all of us all kinds of damage.
Asshole: people who you don't like. Every interaction with others should make you feel good about yourself otherwise the other person is an asshole. You are never an asshole by definition, of course. Maybe a victim, but asshole -- never. Diversity means having people around who think and behave the same way as you do but have different hairdo or different thing between their legs. Introverted or depressed people are assholes, needless to say. Again, the most important thing for you to prioritize is your own good feelings about yourself because everything that's non-assholey in the world is designed to make you feel good.
There is a straightforward list of specific behaviors early in the article. None of it is defined by how anyone else feels; that's just the effect of someone who engages in that asshole behavior on a regular basis. The next comment down and probably half of the readers are trying to figure out if they're the asshole themselves, so I don't know where you got the idea that "you" are never the asshole.
(Sure is great how HN shows me this wonderful comment on top because it happened to be posted 9 minutes before I loaded the comments)
"Here’s a simple test: if someone walks away from another person feeling bad about themselves, they were probably interacting with an asshole."
I'll tell you that eg as manager there is no way that some of your conversations won't end with the other person feeling somewhat bad about themselves. You have to fire people. You have to explain that some behavior was clearly wrong. Sometimes you need to explain that despite best efforts the person is just simply not developing quickly enough professionally. That hurts, however you put it (you can do it carefully, sure). Hey, you will need to explain assholes that they're doing the wrong thing. Are you sure you can do this without making them feel bad about themselves?
Just be very careful with labeling people. It's usually not a great strategy, especially if you use terms like asshole. Try to be emphatic, understanding. Labeling people is one way of being an asshole.
Most conversations are (hopefully) not about firing the other person, unless the company is rapidly imploding. I think this is an implicit precondition of the test – it's about unnecessarily making someone feel bad, on the assumption that most conversations are not of the sort where the message to be communicated is inherently and necessarily bad news.
I agree with sz4kerto, these rules are too vague. For example, the rule against "starting shit and troublemaking" can end up being mostly used by assholes against non-assholes.
I can't help but regard some on the list with suspicion as being far more own fragile ego driven than any actual assholishness. More "you made the sociopath angry by not going along with his bullshit" ones which I see in the anti smart "jerks" one.
Some of them are unconditionally valid of course but the list includes questionable ones.
* Publicly calling out and blaming others
What if they actually are to blame or deserve to be called out? Putting it on the never list is a bad idea but it should probably be a last or N to last resort.
* Stirring shit and troublemaking
That is dangerously ambiguous as terms to include both in terms of what qualifies as stirring shit. If it is actually trying to rile people up fine but that exact phrase could be used for anyone who goes against the grain. Trying to stop bad practices which /will/ lead to literal disaster because "we have always done it that way" or reporting misconduct can also be called the exact same thing.
Related cluster
* Ignoring people trying to contribute
* Dismissing the opinions and ideas of others without discussion
* Undermining someone’s confidence for asking questions
There is one major problem with this sub-block. It never stops to ask if the "victim" is themselves massively wrong and doesn't get the hint that they are themselves negative in productivity and not even getting any learning out of it. To be frank the case where they aren't ignorant or even inept but an outright idiot who doesn't take a hint.
Like saying insisting the company should make their next car run on water and doesn't listen to why that is thermodynamically impossible (it would actually run on whatever substance it reacts with). While there are values to considering alternative approaches and departure from conventional wisdom willful ignorance isn't equal to actual expertise no matter how "polite" it may be to treat as such.
This may be where the you are never the asshole perception really creeps in - despite all of the talk about two way communications and feelings of others that the other party may be in the wrong and not "the asshole". It can look like every reference to the others is really just obfuscated grammar for myself to make the writer sound less self centered and like they have more support than theh really do.
I had a similar reaction. Haven't we all run into the opinionated junior who dominates a 10 person meeting and won't shut up, take advice, or focus on executing their job competently before chasing some "prestige project"?
There are better and worse ways to deal with that person, but after a while, most merely human people will do things on this list rather than (for the nth time) gently explain that said junior needs to "pull their head in".
No. Your response is the reasoning that every non-asshole makes as they get converted into an asshole because of their interactions with assholes. The response to someone being an asshole to you shouldn't be to be an asshole back to them. That is how assholes spread. It is possible to disagree without being an asshole. Just watch some videos of Obama responding to republican talking points for some examples.
Yours is one of multiple comments defending "Publicly calling out and blaming others" as a valid occasional behaviour.
In my experience, this has never produced any positive result for the companies I worked for.
I don't mean people don't make mistakes, I mean that the punishment strategy of blaming them don't seem to me to have any positive effect when used. Then again, I'm not very experienced, so have you (or anyone else defending this) had any positive experience with that ? (on either end of the interaction)
>The next comment down and probably half of the readers are trying to figure out if they're the asshole themselves
Well, you see, most of the readers aren't the management. The management will read this article thinking they're saints and half of their subordinates are assholes. And most of them are, under the author's definition. So you can see how regular employees might be put off by an article like this.
This article is overly fixated on overt assholery. Much of the worst asshole behavior I've encountered has been done by people who are outwardly polite and high functioning and have often never had a cross word for anyone.
I would much rather get a tersely worded group email (ooo) than have to do someone else's job for them.
Let's be frank. The #1 asshole thing not mentioned here is (shouting and swearing alert) NOT DOING YOUR FUCKING JOB. This is an immense source of frustration for other people, whether because they have to do the person's job for them, or because the person's failure to do their job creates disasters.
In many of the situations I've seen (or, frankly, participated in) where someone is behaving somewhat like an asshole, the root of the situation is that (a) someone isn't doing their actual job in a remotely competent way, (b) that someone isn't doing anything to fix that situation and (c) management doesn't know or care.
> Much of the worst asshole behavior I've encountered has been done by people who are outwardly polite and high functioning and have often never had a cross word for anyone.
Indeed, there are many ways to hurt, belittle and generally make someone feel bad or unwelcome without being blamable for anything.
> the root of the situation is that (a) someone isn't doing their actual job in a remotely competent way
Not really. I've worked with several assholes. They were all extremely assertive, and usually also very competent (but I've found also the utterly incompetent ones). The problem is that even if they're right 95% of the time, the 5% of the times they're wrong they force everybody along the wrong path, because their purpose as work is not to get stuff done right, but to assert their status. So talking them out of a bad idea is impossible, and they tend to favour solutions that serve more the purpose of demonstrating their skill than to get good results.
(As an aside, since assholery is widespread in software engineering, it is legitimate to wonder how much of the so called "best practices" floating around are just exercises in one-upping each other in a status game- "hey, you write your tests first, but you should really write them first in this obscure DSL that is being promoted by the creator of ... ")
How do you know if assholery is not also wide-spread in other industries. I often swop stories with my sister who works HR in tourism. Our experiences working with people are largely the same. I suspect it's a normal distribution of assholes in all industries.
I've seen a few cases of that, and in those instances I resent my country's worker protection laws, OR a company's reluctance to cut off underperformers (which costs severance monies).
Eh at the very beginning of the article, the writer states that this article is exclusively about smart assholes, assholes who are good at their job. Someone who is not doing their job is not a smart asshole and is much more easily identified and removed.
>I’m specifically addressing the epidemic of smart assholes that are actually good at their jobs, at least on paper.
There are plenty of smart arseholes, who can do their job well (if they wanted) but prefer to be an arsehole. I'm reminded of the Sociopath layer in the Gervais Principle.
You're not really addressing my point, which is that there's a big range of behaviors that are assholic and that some of them (as described in the article) are equally likely to be viewed as reactive to the behaviors of slack/lazy assholes (who are often smart and at least potentially good at their job).
If you think that it's always easy to identify and remove some asshole that's not doing their job, well, you're either not very experienced or you've had the good luck to only be in places with way more functional management than some of the places I've been in.
>Let's be frank. The #1 asshole thing not mentioned here is (shouting and swearing alert) NOT DOING YOUR FUCKING JOB. This is an immense source of frustration for other people, whether because they have to do the person's job for them, or because the person's failure to do their job creates disasters.
One additional problem that I have with this: I feel like the asshole in this situation.
I recall one instance where one of my coworkers was teaching the interns how to do things. When I was working on the code, unit tests failed totally. After spending hours figuring out what had happened, it turns out that the two interns hadn't run the unit tests locally before pushing. And then I had to round up the person teaching the interns as well as the interns and figure out what they had done and what had they had been taught about running tests.
Luckily people tend to learn from their mistakes, so hopefully the end result is that the interns remember the importance of testing with the expense that I look like an asshole.
The chain of events was really the combination of mistakes from the interns (since apparently one of them had been running tests, but with some misguided ideas), from the person training them and the management for thinking we should hire a bunch of interns at the same time and offload their training on couple of people. You can obviously form your opinions on how much of the blame is on which party.
Why would informing people about the importance of testing make you look like an asshole? You could do it in a polite and helpful way, instead of being an asshole about it.
Automation takes this and a whole class of problems out of the interpersonal domain. Failed tests make the build fail. Who ever breaks the build buy donuts for the team. Easy, solved and no personal issues. Include a linter in the build, incorrect formatting fails the build. The team decided on the standard format (tabs vs spaces, 4/2 spaces, brace same line or next line etc). More donuts. No arguments because linting rules were decided by the team. New members adapt.
> the article in question called it an asshole thing to do [publicly calling out and blaming others]
It's all about how it's done. In the case described above, an explanation of what happened, why it happened, how to avoid it in the future, and perhaps a little humor would be positively received by everyone involved.
On the other hand, someone could very well have the exact same situation and make it into a-hole incident by shaming the interns and making them reconsider even being there.
Setting and enforcing reasonable community standards, aka “this is how we do things around here”, is rarely experienced by the learner as an asshole action.
"not doing your job" is incompetence, there might be many reasons for that ranging from being promoted too quickly without enough support, life-hardships that occlude performance, or just NOT UNDERSTANDING what one's job actually is (yes, it happens).
Sure, it sometimes happens that someone feels so entitled that they can justify loafing and pretend-work, that's definitely a-hole behavior, but those other explanations are far more common.
In my experience its entitlement not incompetence that's identified as asshole behavior. Oh this person did half the work and bypassed all code review and automated testing and merged their code using admin privileges. Now somethings not working, can you take a look? I'm sorry, are you not capable of handling this? Why are you being so uncooperative?
Never attribute to incompetence that which is obviously malice.
OK, what you're talking about in the example goes far beyond "not doing one's job", however, and definitely crosses into the personality defect zone of a-hole.
This. I've been made to feel like the asshole in situations like this for "not helping" them figure out how to do their own job. Some people are beyond help (within the context of project) because they do not possess the requisite knowledge to qualify themselves for the position and we don't have the time to bring them up to competency. They were probably interviewed by an overseer of their craft rather than a practitioner or perhaps concessions were made in order to "save" money. I've seen this worsening throughout my career, but I believe that it's largely growing pains. When demand is high and supply is low, quality suffers.
To me, the definition of an asshole is slightly different. An asshole is someone who acts out every social interaction on the principle of "dominate or be dominated". It's the lack of a middle ground that makes an asshole, so that people can't just go into an interaction being each other's peers, and also finish the interaction with being each other's peers, having been nice and respectful towards each other, preserved each other's individual freedoms, and exchanged some information.
I agree that assholery has a tendency to spread, and the mechanism in my observation is as follows: You can start out NOT being an asshole. When there is an asshole for you to deal with, you'll realize "All of my interactions with this person end up with this person dominating me." But you don't like being dominated because that's natural (psychological reactance), and bad for your career. So next time you interact with that person you know you have to act on the principle of "dominate or be dominated", i.e. the asshole-principle. Soon enough it becomes a habit, and you may inadvertently behave towards non-assholes as an asshole as well, making you an asshole.
Another interesting corollary of this definition of asshole is this: If you perceive a lot of assholes around you, maybe YOU are the asshole.
It also explains why you find more assholes as you go up the corporate ladder: Being higher up means you get more opportunity for exhibiting domineering behaviour without repercussions (namely towards your subordinates).
>To me, the definition of an asshole is slightly different. An asshole is someone who acts out every social interaction on the principle of "dominate or be dominated".
Your definition is complementary to the author's. You are talking about relational motivation, the author about the feelings that are evoked in the person being dominated.
196 comments
[ 1.8 ms ] story [ 259 ms ] threadAnd you can set up processes to limit harm from untrained or malicious people. For some reason this doesn't seem to be widely done when it comes to internal "asshole" behavior.
Lots of companies require code reviews before software gets deployed or require two signatures on a company check. But they'll have freeform meetings where anyone can speak next if they manage to grab the "floor" and won't maintain records to prevent someone from claiming undue credit for an accomplishment.
I've seen people fired when they didn't listen. The improvement to the rest of the company greatly exceeded the loss from that individual. It is a big factor in psychological safety.
It could be one of those fake it 'til you make it deals. Someone is an asshole internally still but puts on a veneer of nonassholeishness because they are operating in an environment where it's not tolerated, and over time kind of mellow out. At the time of writing this comment, there's only one comment on my post and it's from someone who says s/he indeed was an asshole and it took this kind of incessant badgering to figure it out.
http://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2017-11-13/brilliant-jerks....
Saves one second per person, that's like a whole man-day across all the readers.
I've been infected by this before. Never again. (I prefer to slap up so I ended up getting shown the door.)
Before we go through a hiring round with my team nowadays, I like us to review what I've seen approvingly referred to over on Metafilter as The Baboon Article:
https://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/13/science/no-time-for-bulli...
> Dr. Sapolsky has no idea how long the good times will last. ''I confess I'm rooting for the troop to stay like this forever, but I worry about how vulnerable they may be,'' he said. ''All it would take is two or three jerky adolescent males entering at the same time to tilt the balance and destroy the culture.''
Never underestimate the ability of one or two jerky adolescent males to massively fuck everything up!
Oh dear.
What does "slap up" mean?
> Slapping down people of lower status in the company hierarchy.
This would be the other direction.
Register to vote!
Because after all, assholes are popping up in the news constantly.
I agree that firing assholes improves a company's morale and environment, but sadly there is little evidence that it actually help a company's business.
Again this is mostly anecdotal, from what I've seen teams do when the Resident Jerk was fired or left. I've never in my 20 years as a professional software developer seen a single person leave a team and then see the team immediately fall to pieces because that person really was the critical lynchpin that people thought. I've seen lots of people stick around far, far too long because folks (management usually) were WORRIED that's what was going to happen, but it never actually seems to.
Isn't it a matter of management though? Assholes can be productive to a company if you have a good manager doing damage control and sinking time into firewalling the asshole.
Given the prevalence of this disease and the abundance of managers, it seems like a good way to increase the hiring pool of a company.
As a manager, you want to contain an asshole just enough so that coworkers do not leave, also enough so that the asshole feels they have to make up for their social behavior with additional skill and hard work (which is not hard, they are often competitive).
I believe (and that's the reason why I don't want to employ people) that the optimal point for a business is when you maintain your employees on the edge of quitting. Assholes create stress and competition, an environment where projects often strive and individuals wither.
All the ethical managers or business starters I have known have been replaced by more assholish versions. This could be anecdotal evidence of course, but I think that assholes are better suited for a corporate world of greed and competition.
However, I think it is way too simple to be useful. People who are happy and relatively less stressed are way more productive on average. (Yerkes - Dodson Law applies here)
Con: none for the company
Eventually the person got managed out (not fired, just isolated from the teams) and upper management thought the team would just eventually thrive after some short loss of productivity, but that never happened: the poor performers were put in front of the customer who commissioned the project (role that was usually handled by the jerk, who was highly competent at that due to their technical brilliance and assertive personality even with the customer), and after a few round trips the customer smelled the incompetency and literally said “we’re going to quit this project, we feel like there’s no technical direction lately”. Massive loss for the company, in the 7 figures. It almost caused the company to fail due to that being the largest customer at that phase.
In those cases, the jerk did an amazing job at keeping a very productive technical communication with the customer, and keep the high performers on track towards what really needed to be done in those projects.
Maybe the root issue lies with our societies putting business above ethics. "As long as you're making money, everything's fine, until you piss off someone with more money than you."
The reason I say this is that most companies that we consider "successful" are in my experience mostly being assholes to their customers. Since a company doesn't have an independent personality of its own, I imagine that such behavior must come from the people at the top of the food chain at those places, or at least the people very high in that chain.
That's why what I advocate for instead is to genuinely build a culture where asshole behavior isn't tolerated, and then warn candidates that you've successfully done this and take it seriously. Self-aware assholes will just bullshit through these kinds of questions, but if you can truly impart how seriously you take this sort of thing to them, they'll weed themselves out of your process.
One thing I realize as I read this is that, I’ve definitely engaged in certain ‘asshole behaviors’ at times. It’s been a long challenge to become more socially skilled and handle pressure/emotions better, but a lot of bad habits linger, I think.
The worst habit of which is definitely complaining about coworkers to other coworkers. Not in a hateful or personal way, but sometimes when I get frustrated by something someone does, I vent to someone unrelated instead of confronting the other person.
Another terrible habit that I had in the past was a tendency to respond while still fuming, which never ends well; usually it ends in both sides of an argument escalating while others grab the popcorn.
I hope I make enough effort to not be the kind of asshole that needs to be flushed out of an org, but similarly hopefully it’s not just me that is imperfect at the art of not being an asshole.
Right there with you and I'm the asshole who wrote this post. I know I have a tendency to want to strike back when I feel struck and I also have a tendency to go way overboard, in that "don't throw the first punch but throw the last" kind of way. Honestly I think everyone has asshole behaviors every now and then, a true asshole doesn't know or doesn't care when they act like a prick. The fact that this is something you're consciously aware of and working on I think means you're fine.
One book I might recommend though is 'Nonviolent Communication' by Marshall Rosenberg. It definitely feels a little hippy dippy at times and the skeptical asshole in me occasionally rolls my eyes at it, but I think it's really helped me understand some of my own communication tendencies and given me a lot of tools to help curb my own shit.
Have you come across Fred Kofman, he has this thing he calls Verbal Aikido, check it out here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O6N9nvk8bvE - he also has some books that fall loosely in to the hippy dippy category while still valuable in my opinion.
I need a dash of these, but I will hate anybody using it all the time.
Sadly, it often doesn't work like that. Frequently, people just feel like "Damn, I'm good!" and give zero credit to the person who was good to them.
1. arrogance 2. cynicism
its not always the case that the above 2 make an a*e in most cases not but sometimes yes without having the extreme qualities described in article.
No, when you get a royal a--hole into a large organization, I really don't have much hope for average managers with typical business training to do anything but watch.
You give people a safe environment in which they feel free to voice what they really think without fearing repercussions, and there you go.
Nullifying a circle of tit-for-tat takes a lot of energy, and stable blood sugar. Too much short carbs in prefab food is causing all of us all kinds of damage.
<3
(Sure is great how HN shows me this wonderful comment on top because it happened to be posted 9 minutes before I loaded the comments)
"Here’s a simple test: if someone walks away from another person feeling bad about themselves, they were probably interacting with an asshole."
I'll tell you that eg as manager there is no way that some of your conversations won't end with the other person feeling somewhat bad about themselves. You have to fire people. You have to explain that some behavior was clearly wrong. Sometimes you need to explain that despite best efforts the person is just simply not developing quickly enough professionally. That hurts, however you put it (you can do it carefully, sure). Hey, you will need to explain assholes that they're doing the wrong thing. Are you sure you can do this without making them feel bad about themselves?
Just be very careful with labeling people. It's usually not a great strategy, especially if you use terms like asshole. Try to be emphatic, understanding. Labeling people is one way of being an asshole.
Some of them are unconditionally valid of course but the list includes questionable ones.
* Publicly calling out and blaming others
What if they actually are to blame or deserve to be called out? Putting it on the never list is a bad idea but it should probably be a last or N to last resort.
* Stirring shit and troublemaking
That is dangerously ambiguous as terms to include both in terms of what qualifies as stirring shit. If it is actually trying to rile people up fine but that exact phrase could be used for anyone who goes against the grain. Trying to stop bad practices which /will/ lead to literal disaster because "we have always done it that way" or reporting misconduct can also be called the exact same thing.
Related cluster * Ignoring people trying to contribute * Dismissing the opinions and ideas of others without discussion * Undermining someone’s confidence for asking questions
There is one major problem with this sub-block. It never stops to ask if the "victim" is themselves massively wrong and doesn't get the hint that they are themselves negative in productivity and not even getting any learning out of it. To be frank the case where they aren't ignorant or even inept but an outright idiot who doesn't take a hint.
Like saying insisting the company should make their next car run on water and doesn't listen to why that is thermodynamically impossible (it would actually run on whatever substance it reacts with). While there are values to considering alternative approaches and departure from conventional wisdom willful ignorance isn't equal to actual expertise no matter how "polite" it may be to treat as such.
This may be where the you are never the asshole perception really creeps in - despite all of the talk about two way communications and feelings of others that the other party may be in the wrong and not "the asshole". It can look like every reference to the others is really just obfuscated grammar for myself to make the writer sound less self centered and like they have more support than theh really do.
There are better and worse ways to deal with that person, but after a while, most merely human people will do things on this list rather than (for the nth time) gently explain that said junior needs to "pull their head in".
In my experience, this has never produced any positive result for the companies I worked for.
I don't mean people don't make mistakes, I mean that the punishment strategy of blaming them don't seem to me to have any positive effect when used. Then again, I'm not very experienced, so have you (or anyone else defending this) had any positive experience with that ? (on either end of the interaction)
Well, you see, most of the readers aren't the management. The management will read this article thinking they're saints and half of their subordinates are assholes. And most of them are, under the author's definition. So you can see how regular employees might be put off by an article like this.
Number 3 in the list:
Tersely worded group e-mails that make people feel uncomfortable
So literally not true.
And a lot of the other items are only slightly less literal.
I would much rather get a tersely worded group email (ooo) than have to do someone else's job for them.
Let's be frank. The #1 asshole thing not mentioned here is (shouting and swearing alert) NOT DOING YOUR FUCKING JOB. This is an immense source of frustration for other people, whether because they have to do the person's job for them, or because the person's failure to do their job creates disasters.
In many of the situations I've seen (or, frankly, participated in) where someone is behaving somewhat like an asshole, the root of the situation is that (a) someone isn't doing their actual job in a remotely competent way, (b) that someone isn't doing anything to fix that situation and (c) management doesn't know or care.
Indeed, there are many ways to hurt, belittle and generally make someone feel bad or unwelcome without being blamable for anything.
Not really. I've worked with several assholes. They were all extremely assertive, and usually also very competent (but I've found also the utterly incompetent ones). The problem is that even if they're right 95% of the time, the 5% of the times they're wrong they force everybody along the wrong path, because their purpose as work is not to get stuff done right, but to assert their status. So talking them out of a bad idea is impossible, and they tend to favour solutions that serve more the purpose of demonstrating their skill than to get good results.
(As an aside, since assholery is widespread in software engineering, it is legitimate to wonder how much of the so called "best practices" floating around are just exercises in one-upping each other in a status game- "hey, you write your tests first, but you should really write them first in this obscure DSL that is being promoted by the creator of ... ")
This is in my opinion way worse than being an asshole who does his/her job well.
>I’m specifically addressing the epidemic of smart assholes that are actually good at their jobs, at least on paper.
There are plenty of smart arseholes, who can do their job well (if they wanted) but prefer to be an arsehole. I'm reminded of the Sociopath layer in the Gervais Principle.
https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...
If you think that it's always easy to identify and remove some asshole that's not doing their job, well, you're either not very experienced or you've had the good luck to only be in places with way more functional management than some of the places I've been in.
One additional problem that I have with this: I feel like the asshole in this situation.
I recall one instance where one of my coworkers was teaching the interns how to do things. When I was working on the code, unit tests failed totally. After spending hours figuring out what had happened, it turns out that the two interns hadn't run the unit tests locally before pushing. And then I had to round up the person teaching the interns as well as the interns and figure out what they had done and what had they had been taught about running tests.
Luckily people tend to learn from their mistakes, so hopefully the end result is that the interns remember the importance of testing with the expense that I look like an asshole.
The chain of events was really the combination of mistakes from the interns (since apparently one of them had been running tests, but with some misguided ideas), from the person training them and the management for thinking we should hire a bunch of interns at the same time and offload their training on couple of people. You can obviously form your opinions on how much of the blame is on which party.
>Publicly calling out and blaming others
On the other hand, someone could very well have the exact same situation and make it into a-hole incident by shaming the interns and making them reconsider even being there.
Sure, it sometimes happens that someone feels so entitled that they can justify loafing and pretend-work, that's definitely a-hole behavior, but those other explanations are far more common.
Never attribute to incompetence that which is obviously malice.
I agree that assholery has a tendency to spread, and the mechanism in my observation is as follows: You can start out NOT being an asshole. When there is an asshole for you to deal with, you'll realize "All of my interactions with this person end up with this person dominating me." But you don't like being dominated because that's natural (psychological reactance), and bad for your career. So next time you interact with that person you know you have to act on the principle of "dominate or be dominated", i.e. the asshole-principle. Soon enough it becomes a habit, and you may inadvertently behave towards non-assholes as an asshole as well, making you an asshole.
Another interesting corollary of this definition of asshole is this: If you perceive a lot of assholes around you, maybe YOU are the asshole.
It also explains why you find more assholes as you go up the corporate ladder: Being higher up means you get more opportunity for exhibiting domineering behaviour without repercussions (namely towards your subordinates).
Your definition is complementary to the author's. You are talking about relational motivation, the author about the feelings that are evoked in the person being dominated.