just fire her ffs. no one should be able to act like that.

for real tho, what is her role? is she a dev or QA or business? does she actually get work done?

like how is it possible to have a job where you go to no meetings and only work 20 hrs a week?

She does the things no one else really wants to do and does some of them pretty well. She writes extremely gorgeous documentation and is decent at writing support/installation scripts. I guess technically her role is QA but ive been doing a lot of that in the last year.

But she gets a lot of leeway. My boss tried to get her to start coming in at 10 at the absolute latest and that lasted exactly one day. They just have no infrastructure to actually get rid of people cleanly.

Do you have authority to fire her? That is the best option. If there is such a process, put her on performance evaluation program and start documenting everything to build a case to fire her!

If you got rid of her, would team morale improve or worsen? I think that would be a good question to answer. If she’s a pain to everyone else despite being a rockstar, you gotta get rid of her. Otherwise if she outputs good work, everyone loves her but isn’t in the office often.. who cares?

I don't have direct authority to fire anyone but I can maneuver the pieces to make it happen. She has a documented history of issues with every single person in the company. So now I need to document everything and be extremely careful about falling into some kind of lawsuit.

Morale would DEFINITELY improve. She is just the worst. I have tried to help her for several months and I can prove it. I've put a considerable amount of work into improving her reputation with the rest of the team but I'm not going to do it anymore. I'm not gonna play favorites - but if she's causing problems, I'm not gonna shield her.

In fact the topic came up with my boss about her and I switching roles - i thought months ago it would be a great idea. She's much more organized than I am. She lacks a lot of the soft skills like communication and speaking in front of other people but idk i think if she really wanted to do it she could do well. She is really good at seeing the larger picture of things. So I think a lot of what has been happening is she (maybe correctly) thinks she could do my job better than I can. But the thing is she doesn't want to, she refused the promotion. *I* know and my boss does too that I am a better developer than her. If she got fired or left it'd be hard for a little while but I could easily do the things she's doing. In fact, in recent months I have been.

I am almost positive too she's the main reason we lost our other team. So she honestly should tread lightly but IMO she is kind of delusional and completely unaware of how things are and what her status is in the company. It's sad really, I think she could be really great. I want her to be great but if I am running this I feel it just can't/won't happen because she's completely unwilling to work with me or be managed.

It shouldn't be up to you to fire her or to babysit her. Tell upper management that.

Not should it be some sort of test that you get her to interact like a normal employee. I realize your company is crazytown but you gotta stop this sht right the *** now.

Trust me i know and I already have meetings next week to talk about this stuff now that I know we're all on the same page about my role and what they want from me. It's so absurd. But basically I have decided that it's a new regime and I'm taking no more ****. I told my boss that in the immediate future I need him to directly manage her.

There's also some pretty complicated politics between the upper managers that I am only now just being exposed to so I need to be careful there too until I figure out what's going on.

This post really makes no sense.

Who cares who is a better developer? She is QA and you are a project manager. Neither of you should be doing dev and esp not you given all of the work and the type of work you have just outlined to us.

How can she lead these projects from a business perspective if she is losing opportunities for the company? How can she lead the tech team of a project when she refuses to communicate

I mean if she fixed her personality issues i really think she could do it. Roles are fuzzy here.

jmakin, I don't know how much of your drama is real and how much is fictional but, assuming it's real, your behavior comes across as more toxic than anything I've ever seen in tech and substantially worse than that of the QA person you're battling aganist. In fact it's unclear to me if she's toxic at all or merely being the lone voice of reason in a toxic environment, though I have only read the last few posts, so it's possible some of your other posts add more in terms of character portrayal. I mean your toxic attempt to trick her into an ambarrassing situation aside, you and the management, it seems, are weirdly focused on the wrong things, which makes it difficult for me to trust your judgment. Let's go through a few things:

Literally every single engineer on my team would either quit or move to another team if any engineering manager or project/product manager tried to make coming in by 10am mandatory. This is so beyond the pale in tech culture that it's sort of shocking that you think this is "leeway" and taking the side of your boss.

IIRC, you work at some tiny company that has a handful of engineers. Again, assuming you have at least decent engineers, you shouldn't have any process that doesn't come organically from engineers. And process enforcement should done through automation and/or by engineers. If none of this is possible presently, you should replace your engineers with good ones.

It seems like you have a toxic authoritarian attitude towards your coworkers. If the process didn't work, maybe it was not a good one? Your job as a project manager is to help the engineers - if they don't think whatever you're bringing is not helpful - non-adoption seems like a clear way to communicate that to you - the correct response isn't to blame the customer, but to come up with a better product. Also, entirely absent from any of this is the notion of feedback - what do they not like about it and how are you taking that into account to make sure the new process works?

Well at least your boss is just as toxic, but a mandatory meeting to implement some process, at some tiny startup. So many red flags.

At good tech companies, every meeting that's not related to compliance is considered optional. I have no idea why the presence of someone who's not presenting, and whose opinions aren't valued in this context, is necessary in these types of meetings.

Is it customary at your company for a project manager to schedule a meeting to announce the scheduling of a new meeting? Supposedly it was such an important meeting that everyone had to attend and you literally concocted an embarrassing scheme to force someone to come. How does this meeting meet that bar? Why not call a mandatory meeting to decide on the color of the shirt you're buying over the weekend? Why was this, out of all these meetings, mandatory? Why was this even a meeting? Do your engineers not have important things to do?

So let's get this straight, making this meeting mandatory was your boss's idea, but instead of either 1) pushing back to protect engineers or 2) letting your boss enforce this himself, you decided to use this situation where you have your boss's backing to volunteer yourself as the enforcer so that you can demonstrate your power to her in a ridiculously childish way. Am I interpreting this correctly?

To be fair, I'm not sure if I believe any of this happened and I hope for the sake of actual or fictional people involved that it didn't, but this is like cartoon villain territory, maybe not by all corporate standards, but certainly by normal tech culture standards, where servant leadership is considered sacred and engineers are empowered to make important decisions.

Oh **** right off. This is exactly why i didnt post it. I didnt even read a quarter of your post and I won’t.

I will wager any amount of money that what I said is true and you can determine who you want to be the arbiter of that.

Like you tell me in all your wisdom if this prior “engineer driven” process worked at all:

Engineers coming an average of two days a week and behind on every deadline and deliverable you can imagine

Engineers arbitrarily checking in code to master without documentation or testing

Engineers writing code that doesnt even adhere to our own loose standards and no review process whatsoever

An engineer whos had frequent and documented problems with every person in the office and refuses to participate and any team related event, insists on dictating on what/when/how she works on things and yet her deliverables are constant garbage

You tell me how any of this is “working” and how upper management is apparently so desperate they are putting me in charge of rectifying it. If everythings so great, why?

You make your own ****ing decision abot whether you believe any of this or not. Unfortunately i am living it and it ****ing sucks. So if you dont care or want to know or dont believe it just dont even respond. You sound like you’ve never been in a remotely similar situation.

Show me on the doll candybar where the bad manager touched you.

Literally all i asked the group for was a weekly tuesday 11am meeting on a day we have company lunch anyway. 30 minute meeting. That was IT. You tell me in what ****ing company is that “authoritarian”

You’re a delusional prick and a troll.

Is this also how you would emotionally react to your coworkers' feedback wrt to your behavior? Assuming multiple people have observed this and you're not surrounded entirely by morons (though you seem to think you are), it would be strange if someone didn't also share my perpective on this. I mean, I don't know where you hire your engineers, but at least some of them must at least have friends at places that are run decently?

Keep in mind that this being fictional is the charitable interpretation.

Hey get ****ed. Seriously.

I'm an old man with a fair amount of engineering management experience. Most of my managers have been amazing, not just in terms of actually engineering management - they are amazing people. They care about people, they care about the impact of their work and they have integrity. The issue is that of contrast - this is so embarrassingly bad and you seem oddly proud of your pathetic behavior that was so out of line that I thought it had to be fictional.

And for that kind of ridiculously unimportant meeting, you were so offended by someone not accepting the invitation that you concocted a half-assed scheme to get her in the meeting, while wasting everyone's time. But hey, that embarrassed her and made her look bad, so it was great, right? I mean, how happy were you that you managed to embarrass someone who didn't like you? And afterwards, you thought this was so brilliant that you shared this on the internet, with the subtext that this is part of what makes you a leader. Again, this was so absurd that I thought you're deliberately trying to portray yourself as an unreliable narrator.

jmakin I spend almost no time on 2+2 anymore and I read that entire post you quoted into here and good lord that is one of the dumbest things I've seen in a while

I worked at an Applebees as a teenager where my line companion looked me in the face before a shift and said "I just smoked so much opium that this side of my face is numb" and then slowly ran his hands down the left side of his face and started lightly patting it. That place had more effective management than your company.

Many many many many startups are a complete joke and go on to fail.

Most everyone in the world is a complete idiot.

You need to start respecting your time way more and not wasting such massive amounts of time with clowns.

What does this have to do with process?

This isn't a process issue - it's about either incentives, competence or training. Do you hire good (presently or potentially) engineers? Are they incentivized to do the right thing? Are they good role models and training material for them to learn to do the right thing over time?

Again, this has nothing to do with process - it's incentives/competence/training.

Again, not a process issue and it's about the culture and incentives. Also how are her deliverables garbage if:

If you have someone competent that is working hard, her deliverables being garbage is a management problem.

Again, aside from this whole thing being fictional, the other charitable interpretation is that you're in a toxic place (this is a given), you're learning from toxic people how to handle things and all of these are making you also toxic. Again, it's unclear to me but if you're so much better than everyone else, you should go to a place where you aren't. If you're not so much better than everyone else, to be frank, your attitude is super toxic, everyone else is doing everything wrong, everyone is a moron. I mean, your QA engineer may have documented problems with everyone, but you also do have problems with everyone too, they just don't know yet.

Jmakin, candybar is being an ass, but I’m generally in agreement with his relevant points. Or, at the very least, there’s merit to what he’s saying and it’s worth thinking about those things.

In particular, if a meeting is mandatory* it better be very clear what it’s purpose is and run super efficiently. Getting “atta boys” for my work or hearing generalities about how things are changing would NOT be a meeting I was happy about attending. My eyes might literally roll out of my head.

I also agree with CB’s point about changes coming from the engineers at your scale. You should be a facilitator. If they can’t identify the biggest current problems, do that for them (with evidence). Then work as a group to figure out the process or changes that need to be tried to address the problem. There’s a bunch of ways to run retrospectives or these types of meetings.



* I disagree with CB that there are no mandatory meetings (without a reasonable reason for absence) but it’s probably more true than not true. Although any professional I’ve ever worked with will agree to attend if you tell them it’s necessary for them to be there and are flexible with schedule.

One example from a past company I worked with. Every week they’d have a meeting where you spent the first 5 minutes writing down everything good or bad that happened that week. Then the team would look at those things and pick 3 to talk about. Each item then had 15ish minutes to talk about with the goal to be concrete action items assigned to someone to do.

So, for example, there’s nothing inherently bad about checking in code to master that isn’t reviewed. But as we all know it’s almost certainly going to lead to problems. At a certain point one of those problems is going to be talked about in this meeting (probably sooner rather than later). And then you can hear why people are doing it and what they’re going to do instead. Maybe people are doing it because getting reviewers takes way too long. Or the build process is shorty. Or whatever. But it’s really rare that they’re doing it to be an *******.

A process like this tries to fix the deeper issues and build consensus on what types of processes and practices the team actually finds useful.


Edit: As an aside, you don’t need to make a meeting like this mandatory. It can quickly become a “decisions are made by those who show up” situation and people are strongly incentivized to show up and make sure their opinions are heard.

@candybar - your points are worth considering. Certainly worth more than a just go **** off response. My take is that she doesn’t have a a favorable opinion of jmakin. Also, we’re only getting jmakin’s side.

candybar is one of the most annoying posters on this site to get into a disagreement with. Anyone who does so needs to prepare for a bunch of psychoanalysis and total strawmen. "go **** off" isn't a terrible choice compared to diving into all that, tbh. Like:

lmao, what an introduction. Just a nice guy trying to help out!