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Ask HN: How to deal with unproductive team lead/coworker

6 points by rybosworld ↗ HN
If I had to guess, most people have dealt with a team member that is unproductive and/or "Games" the system. I was hoping to hear from people who have been in similar situations, and maybe what they did to handle it.

Here is my specific example. My scrum team has 3 qa people. There is one person who is the "qa-lead". But I feel they only use the title as a way to pass off all the work to myself and the other team member. The lead has a tendency to fill up their scrum board with what I think are mostly "fluff" story's/tasks. And delegates the "real" work.

Here are a couple examples of the "fluff" work:

- A testing task, that doesn't involve the lead doing any testing. The lead asks a person from another team to review a new feature. The team lead marks the task as QA Passed once the individual from the other team has reviewed it. But since the lead's name is on it, I feel it gives the impression that they did the testing.

- Carrying stories in their name for days in a row, and making no progress on them (I mean literally zero). These end up getting handed off to myself or the other team member at some point, and we have to start from scratch.

There are many other examples of "fluff" work. And I think they are organized so as to give the impression that they are constantly busy. I am not quite sure if I can raise this issue with my manager though.

I was curious if anyone has ever successfully navigated a situation like this? I've seen similar questions asked in the past but it seemed like the most common answer was "find a new job."

8 comments

[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 32.5 ms ] thread
MattGaiser
Scrum is a framework prone to gaming simply because what gets recorded and measured is what gets used to evaluate someone and Scrum records and measures primarily tasks.

I wrote an answer on Stack Exchange about this (see link below), but Scrum tends to make everything about Scrum itself and all other actions begin to serve the sprint and not the project. When that happens, it becomes more important to look good according to Scrum than to actually get anything done (especially when the product owner/Scrum master are non-technical).

I know that in my job, people often judge me on the task board alone. It would not surprise me if something similar is happening in your company.

https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/4104...

If you read some of the other answers to that question, there are numerous stories of developers using Scrum as a way to slack off.

I don't know what you can do about him as I suspect he is acting rather rationally. The fact that he can get away with this seems to indicate that overall productivity and work product do not really matter.

rybosworld
Thanks for taking the time to reply!

I think a big reason people can get away with this behavior for a long period of time is because it can backfire if you are the person to bring it up. I have seen this happen in the past to other folks (not with this specific team lead in my original post). The manager is often inclined to side with the more senior member, for better or worse.

rachelbythebay
If you don't have the direct power to hire and fire, then yeah, you have to walk. Find another gig. It never gets better.

Put another way, some bad situations are not accidental. If you try to fix them, you become the problem in the eyes of those maintaining it.

rybosworld
That's more or less the answer I've seen to similar questions in the past. I think this is sadly, the correct approach the vast majority of the time.

But I am eager to hear if anyone has been in a situation where an issue like this was resolved as basic logic would expect. That is, the individual taking advantage of their seniority to do as little as possible was eventually talked with by a manager and the behavior corrected.

java-man
This is a rather good way to explain the phenomenon!

Add a simple criteria how to detect whether a situation is not accidental, and teach it to your young.

karmakaze
I have no idea it this will work, but how about leaning into the pattern? Whenever a fluffy item comes up, suggest that the lead take it "because they must be so busy with 'things'". Whenever a hard/extensive one comes up one of the non-leads can volunteer to tackle the challenge. After a while it should be clear that everyone knows who's doing what as a sort of running joke. If you're lucky maybe the managers will pick on this 'vote of non-confidence' through laughs at the lead's expense. Maybe the lead will start to get insecure and try doing actual work, or maybe they'll lash out in some unproductive way. Chances are good that something will change, but not guaranteed for the better.
rybosworld
Lol that's the first time I've heard this idea!

I might have try some flavor of this just out of curiosity. It seems like there's not a lot to lose from my stand point.

karmakaze
Awesome, can't wait to hear how it goes. There's probably a lot of variations you can experiment with. If nothing else, it will be an amusing distraction from the incompetence you have to deal with.