Ask HN: How do you work with people who are "not quite smart"?
This is a touchy subject, and that might be a lack of awareness or empathy from my part. But trust that it comes from a genuine willingness of making things better for everyone.
We all work with people who we find "not as good", have different ways or work ethics. After being told for decades that this is usually a problem with communication or point of view, I had somewhat internalized the idea. And it is often true, but what I've realized as of late, is that there's a category of people who are not just working a different way, but are - to put it bluntly - plainly not smart.
What I'm talking about is people below average when it comes to understanding concepts, or conceptualizing altogether. Their intuition is always twisted and wrong. Completely lack critical feedback. Work needs to be decomposed for them in extremely precise steps if you want anything to happen. The type of person where you know anything assigned to them will be badly done. When you open a document or code written by them, you do it with the anticipation that it's gonna be bad in novel ways. And despite all of your efforts to try and coach them, seem to make no progress (where the same coach/coaching on others works).
And I know there might be other causes for that, maybe something that happens in their life, lack of interest in the task or motivation overall. But I think I can make a clear distinction between someone who doesn't give a crap, and someone who does but is not equipped to achieve the task at hand.
Some of them are direct colleagues whom I can provide feedback about - but then what do you tell them/their manager? "It's very hard to explain you concepts, you should work on conceptualization"?
Some of them are transverse. I don't even know what to do about these people. An "experienced" PM who systematically gives you hot garbage, apart from pointing the lack of research and the absence of evidence-based reasoning, how do you tell someone "what you gave me is plain dumb, and that's not just a difference of opinion in how we should approach this product/feature, it's inconsistent and pure shit"?
I'm not in a management position, I can't "just fire them". Plus I don't want to go and tell them "you're just not equipped for your job you should find another". It's quite disheartening, does anyone have techniques they've used? Am I just missing something?
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[ 2.3 ms ] story [ 143 ms ] threadThe next time they ask I'm simply going to point them to the existing documentation and give them a very terse reply of the highlights of how it should be done. If they continue to ask follow-up questions, because they want basically someone else to do it for them, I will ignore them for longer and longer stretches of time. I will also keep notes on the times that I've discussed these things with this person just in case my manager comes back and acts as if I'm not being a team play. This way I can have a very frank discussion with my manager about the times that I have helped them out and I can also speak to my own workload and then ask them what my current priorities are. Should I be prioritizing my own workload or should I be prioritizing continual re-education and retraining of this person. That way my manager is now deciding how my time gets allocated because there's only so many hours in the day.
This allows the manager to actually see what's going on and the amount of time these people are taking away from those who are more productive or need less guidance. In the companies I've worked for the manager usually realizes this and when the person who keeps trying to engage someone smarter to do their work realizes that tactic is not working anymore they will either step up their game and become productive or they will be let go.
But it is quite critical when your manager is involved in this that you not be seen as being critical or talking down or shaming the other person. You have to keep notes and keep records and documentation of how you've helped and how you've assisted them but also managing your current work duties. This way you always approach it as a time management problem rather than you being frustrated with someone you're having to carry and not being a team player. Because you want to be a team player and you want to help the other person but you also have your own priorities and your own duties to account for. Until the manager adjust your priorities you must take care of your priorities first before you can assist someone else.
"Weaponized incompetence" is the term, I think.
But I've worked with people who match the description OP is providing. I don't think they're Machiavellian geniuses. Some of them I felt bad for - maybe with more guidance than I could provide, they could shape up to become better engineers. Some, just felt like they were not mentally equipped to ever be able to write software.
Don't make it personal / use generalizations ("you always", "you never"...) like "It's very hard to explain you concepts, you should work on conceptualization"... just explain the thing clearly, with point to an example/documentation, mention the steps involved and timeframe expectation, tell them they can ask questions for anything that's not clear. Then, they'll either take it on board, or they wont.
As you allude to, some people are just not motivated, checked out... maybe they have a side project or personal problems or whatever. You can't make anyone motivated, all you can do is provide clear information and stay professional. If you're an employee, accept that you don't own the organization, choose coworkers or define the product direction, so you kind of have to get along with things that you'd do differently if it were all up to you.
It pays to have empathy and just get on with it. People can be smart in their own ways
This x 10000.
When I started at a large Telco in 2015 people would print an email they had just sent me, walk over to my desk and say "Did you see this email I sent you?"
These people were ecstatic when the new phone book came out each year, and shocked when I declined to have one on my desk.
The company was pushing hard to install a fax line in every home and office (in 2018!), because of huge government subsidies, and so these people were toeing that line and were all about it.
All of that aside, they knew the ins and outs of the business better than anyone, and could explain why things were done the way they were done going back 30 years. Their knowledge and expertise was irreplaceable. Also they were extremely kind, friendly, thoughtful people. And that really matters when you're spending 40+ hours a week in an office.
Perhaps it's your explanatory+empowering skills that are not quite good.
If asked for feedback, you tell their manager that the employee's performance is subpar and you provide very specific examples of that. Leave it up to that person to manage their performance -- that's what they are paid to do.
In terms of you working with this "not so smart" person, suck it up and remember that it's just a job.
An alternative is to mentor the low performer and become their manager eventually; of course this can backfire too, especially if you’re not interested in the management track.
My point is, working with a not so smart coworker isn’t that bad, at least comparatively.
I have absolutely no problem working with people smarter than me.
The smarter someone is, the more they will be used to working alongside people less intelligent, and still work together effectively, and not make others feel bad about it. Particularly smart people can find it shocking when someone else belittles or ridicules another for not understanding something, because they are used to always understanding more than everyone around them their whole lives, but usually keeping it to themselves to not make others angry or feel bad about it. They're not going to be angry or upset when other people struggle or don't understand as well as them, as it is the norm, and something they've almost never not experienced.
Lastly, in a leadership position, look to figure out where peoples strengths do lie, and give them that part of the project. If they have no strengths or abilities consistent with the job at hand, that might not be possible, but seems like a major failure of the hiring process in the first place, and shouldn't be possible- it isn't the fault of the person that was hired inappropriately.
And then when looking at who is publishing all the "science" behind the PI tests, I mostly found the company that is selling it. That literally made the entire thing worthless in my opinion. If we believe the salemen from big corpo, then sugar is good for your health, cigarette doesn't cause cancer, lead in gas is safe, etc.
And the fact that anyone with a brain can easily manipulate their own answer by not being honest with what they think is the final nail for me. Others said this doesn't happen, but I took a look at the test once and with some self suggestion effort, I could completely change how the test ranked me. So to me, whoever say they need to run this test to evaluate their candidate is an absolute incompetent buffoon to me.
There is one Balkan joke which illustrate this:
Two Bosnian workers in Germany were taking a break when their boss approached them.
“Why isn’t the work done yet? Are you being lazy?” the boss asked.
One of the Bosnians replied, “Oh no, boss! The Montenegrins are the lazy ones; we’re the stupid ones! We need more instructions
——
In your case, it’s crucial to explain management with specifics rather than generalizations: detail exactly what you communicated—“I told this person X, Y, and Z”—and then describe the specific actions they took in response.
My longish life has bore witness of the near opposite. I learned that folks generally operate at the level they can. Folks aren't walking around with deep wells of unused capacity that they can trivially convert into profoundly different outcomes.
Among the evidence: 1. The time and intensity of investment required to make a sea change in my own life and 2. climbing into the head of my toxic spouse (after 25y marriage) and working out what drives her destructive behavior.
Regarding the latter, I came to realize there was no choice she could make today that would yield a different outcome tomorrow. Meaningful change needs years of consistency. However, her internal deck is continually reshuffled; will alone can only do so much.
Someone can be really clever at finding ways of being stupid. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3O9FFrLpinQ
on the other hand, a difference of 85 and 115 might very well be what OP is talking about. i can't remember ever having a coworker who was so much more stupid than me that it would have been an issue, but i do know that i've had colleagues who were so much smarter than me that i suspect i might have been the stupid one in comparison - which would have been more noticable if our work had required higher intelligence (i only realized how much smarter he was than me when talking about private projects outside of work). so the difference in our mental capabilities wasn't necessarily a direct indicator of productivity and success with workloads where my lower capabilities were enough to get the job done, but that doesn't mean it wouldn't have been a stark contrast in a different setting.
i guess the people outside of the norm tend to specialize in work that either doesn't depend much on intelligence at all or selects for very high intelligence, so they're mostly among peers again.
If you feel like you're the smartest person in the room, it's time to change the room. There is absolutely no way for someone average in grasping complex concepts to suddenly become smarter. The problem seems to be that someone at your company hired these people and assigned them to roles they don't fit. You should consider moving to a better company — one that has higher standards and employs better specialists. There's no other solution to this.
It could also be the Peter Principle in effect.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle
However, if we assume that promotions are generally given to the most competent individuals within a group, then ultimately, while such a person may be incompetent, they will still be the least incompetent option compared to others.
but ... there always has to be a smartest person in the room!
Another might be you should change the room itself. Instead of leaving figure out how to modify the room (presumably to help the growth of others). Possibly until one surpasses you.
I've always find it strange about the exclusion of "scripting" from programming. Scripts are programs, writing script is programming.
You'd be surprised at how much engineering effort is NOT going into that skyscraper despite everything being built around it.
I recall another bias from the past regarding windows administration. People looked down on windows administration as a real job, I believe because it was gui-based and "anyone can use a gui".
On the other hand, I have also seen a lot of people hamstring themselves.
One friend I knew was exceptional at math and actually quite a proficient fortran programmer. He had a lot of experience, but he was just missing a few key concepts. For example, some function with tricky arguments, he would just call it a bunch of times in a row instead of figuring out how to use a loop.
Or people who hunt and peck, have been doing it for decades, know exactly where all the keys are, but only want to use their index fingers to type.
I think there are some people who are SO CLOSE, but lack a few bridges to fluency or independence or something similar. Sort of frustrating to see from the outside.
I remember my first internship, we tried to install IIS and 2 different PHP version (along with their crypt lib, that's what caused difficulties), it took us 3 weeks. Using two PHP version on any unix, even for people who have no idea how to, is extremely straightforward. Mad respect for windows sysadmins.
Being the dumbest person in the room can be an extremely awesome experience. You can learn a lot, very quickly.
This gives me hope that there are non-bright developers and I should just apply :]
You can use tools and external logging / notes to expand your workflow as needed.
The real danger is when you don't know what you don't know and think you're done prematurely / in an error state.
In this case, I'd suggest accepting that it's just your job as a relatively senior engineer to coach more junior people, even if it's the wrong thing for the company and its customers in the long term. And in this case, it's just your job to decompose work in extremely fine detail. But make sure you're rewarded for it.
It's your manager's job to decide whether this effort is worth it, or whether to cut the other person loose.
Talk about this stuff in your performance review and in 1:1s with your manager. Don't be a dick about it, and don't put others down. But talk about how you lead the team, how you do a lot of design work and work breakdowns. And how you also write a lot of code.
If you don't get rewarded for it, be open about that. Ask for the space to focus on technical work. And if that still doesn't work, find another job.
The people who are "transverse" are a bit trickier to deal with. If you're in a large enough company, you might have the ability to move around a bit (but it might require a bit of agitating). It's not easy, but try to position yourself away from these "experienced PMs".
In general, the way to succeed and grow is to focus on what you can control, build relationships and collaboration with the highest performers you can find. Don't waste your time hand-wringing about lost causes. Talk is cheap, anyone can criticize, and there are always plenty of mentally weak people ready to join in a pity party about how fucked everything is. Do NOT let yourself develop a victim mentality. Instead figure out how to do the biggest and best things you can, and if your current environment doesn't support that, then go find a new one.
That (familiar vocabulary in unfamiliar context) is one kind of question I've found LLMs to be able to be helpful. I tried in sonar (useless) and llama 70b (unhelpful, only offered ideas I'd considered), and then remembered I'd been meaning to try Claude. It surprised me. It offered a decent guess I hadn't considered ("lateral thinker") but that was clearly wrong in this context -- which it requested alongside the guess. With context, it immediately deduced the French speaker option, explaining transverse was quite ordinary business language in French, with a meaning along the lines of interdepartmental, cross-functional, or matrix reporting.
It later pointed at sixish other bits of phrasing that supported the idea (e.g. "systematically" where "consistently" would be more natural, where "systématiquement" in French would be natural), while readily cautioning that it was still just a guess.
Just curious if it was insightful or off the mark.
Fun, I'll note I shouldn't use those!
If more is expected of you than your conditions allow, estimate accordingly, and if it's a real problem, start looking elsewhere. It's a huge mistake to burden yourself mentally with things you can't change but feel you should be able to.
If you're in a position of delegation but not authority, then it's important to simply figure out how to navigate that; some people simply aren't 'curious' or have much in the way of complex thoughts, they can't carry a conversation, they're just dull, and to a person who's the opposite, it's very frustrating. Some of those people though are very good at getting some rote mechanical work done, or extremely narrowly scoped stuff. You don't want to be trying to micromanage them or anything, but give them low-risk work and gradually ask more of them in a way that helps you build trust.
I’ve managed groups and divisions of companies with up to about a thousand people. There’s always going to be an IQ and EQ bell curve and scale in people’s motivation. That said, I’ve found that everyone has some quality that got them to where they are.
Make an honest effort to determine what that is, and optimize for that.
If you don’t, that’s cool… but you’ll be surprised to learn one day that someone thinks you’re just a narrow focused engineer capable of limited tasks.
I found myself in a position where I clashed with a dude out into a technical leadership role way over his head. We were peers, in different areas, and my emotional reaction was “this guy is an idiot”. Reality was he’s a pretty mediocre tech talent, but a savant about understanding the bigger picture and managing up. Once we figured each other out, we got along and became friends, we have lunch every once in awhile years later.