How To Deal With Toxic Coworkers

Welcome Friends in today's office hours I'm going to answer some questions about toxic and difficult co-workers along with some more general questions and give you three pieces of advice on how to handle things if you're new to the channel welcome my name is Steve and I am for at least another week at the time of this shoot a principal software engineer at Amazon on this channel we take a structured and Engineering approach to your life and career think of me as your own principal engineer if you don't have one at work that you can talk to if you'd like more of this type of content make sure to subscribe to my email newsletter or if you want to chat join my Discord if you've got a question that you'd like to ask me leave it in the comment section below and I'll get to it in the next video if you're wondering why I'm wearing this obnoxious hat no I didn't go to Michigan the reason is that I lost a bet with my buddy Kevin nton a fellow YouTuber and Michigan Alm my team Washington lost to his team for the national championship for college football so to fulfill my side of the BET thanks for this hat and go Blue Shido asks how do you deal or work with people who like to hide things and even lie just to get what they want toxic co-workers come in many shapes and sizes before I get into my first point let me give you a word of warning it may be really frustrating to see others lie and get away with it Steve this guy is lying and cheating and he's getting ahead because others aren't seeing it but people that have a reputation for lying and other toxic behaviors like backstabbing are going to limit in the long run their career growth for folks that are lying hiding information saying one thing and doing another it might work for them once twice or even more as a tactic you may be able to win a couple of battles this way but here's the thing about your reputation it takes a long time to build but you can lose it really really quickly so as a tactic it may be a winning one but as a strategy it's a terrible one one day they will be caught in their lie and their reputation is going to immediately plummet when that happens you're not going to be selected for that juicy project and come your annual review time much less a promotion push things aren't going to be pretty and so so that's my first point don't scoop to the level of toxic co-workers no matter how tempting it may be it's just not a winning strategy for your life in career your career is going to last decades don't engage in tactics that don't win in the long run so when you notice this Behavior you should take a breath try not to get triggered and let time take care of it don't take the bait hope that helps Kim shei asks one issue I found with Engineers retiring early doing YouTube is that they kind of run out of things to talk about they either Swit to skits or they switch to a topic they talk about entirely so that it's no longer about working as a developer what's your plan for Content should you decide to go into YouTube full-time well here's the thing in terms of phases of my life I went to school for about 18 years and I've worked at Amazon for 18 years there's a lot to process and continuing to work more isn't going to add a lot more novel life experiences or depth to my content I've been coding for 30 years I've got a lot of things to talk about and I've got a backlog of over 100 ideas that I'd like to shoot but I've never had the bandwidth to execute on I'm not starving for ideas I'm drowning in them I also want to go bigger I just recently passed my 3year anniversary on YouTube and I've only made like 30 something videos that's less than one video a month I also want to make more in-depth content that requires more research and is more challenging to execute on plus I've got a lot of content about my soon to be former employer now that I'm done with Amazon this week I'm much more comfortable talking about things so to answer your question no I'm not afraid of running out of ideas anytime soon my problem is more that I have too many ideas and I can only pick a few of them even with all of this new found time got a lot of Runway before I have to resort to doing skits and only fans Ain Soko asks is there a point where technical ability is no longer the bottleneck great question I'm assuming you're referring to your career and career bottlenecks not to projects so a bottleneck is the thing that's holding everything back if it's traffic the bottleneck is the accident that everybody has to slow down for now here's the thing about bottlenecks there's only ever one bottleneck people are constantly jumping ahead anticipating the secondary and tertiary bottlenecks when they should be focused on what's in front of them when you first start in software development or at a new company it's likely that technical ability or tribal knowledge will be your bottleneck but when you spend some time on a team you'll pick up that stack and learn that knowledge and the next bottleneck is likely to be technical this phase can last several years what I found though is that as you get higher and higher in your career somewhere around senior engineer the bottleneck is sometimes Tech but often times it'll be behavior that starts to be the thing holding people back in their careers I've seen things like written in verbal communication holding people back people neglect to cultivate a good reputation they don't root cause issues they don't Mentor people or uplevel those around them so to answer your question no there's not a point where technical ability stops becoming the bottleneck but so many other things other than Tech could be the bottleneck as you get more and more senior if you can adapt to that it will set you up for Career Success if you ignore it because hey you're a coder you code and all that other stuff is a distraction then yeah it's going to hold you back thanks for the question Adrian naps asks from the perspective of an engineer what makes a great product or project manager a product manager is someone that works closely with the tech team to Define what the heck we're going to build I think a good product manager knows what problems they want to solve for customers but is agnostic or at least flexible on how those problems are solved Technically when working with a tech team good PMS provide enough context to understand the problem and can easily communicate the why I've seen too many product managers that neglect describing the customer problem to devs and instead bring solutions to the team like specifying exactly how the software should be written the problem with that approach is that software can have a lot of subtle behaviors limitations and constraints that make simple Technical Solutions unworkable what ends up happening is that the developers will try to educate product managers on the situation and then it'll seem like developers are being uncooperative when they say that that's not going to work when product asks how we can alter the solution to work devs can't really make suggestions because they don't understand the problem that they're trying to solve so if you're a product manager make sure to write requirements in the form of I'd like the system to do X so that customers can do y that context is super helpful when dealing with big complicated software if you're a Dev make sure you're clear on what the product managers want and don't take their solution at face value to answer your question about project managers a good project manager is someone that uses a schedule as a tool to determine when the launch date is a bad project manager is someone that uses an aggressive date as a tool to keep people productive if a project is slipping you can only do a combination of three things you can cut scope you can add more people and resources to the project or you can move the date a good project manager will be upfront about which of these three levels s are going to be pulled and to what extent if the date can't move then scope needs to be cut or resources need to be added if there are no more resources to be added then scope needs to be cut if the project manager is unwilling to budge on all three well then they're a bad project manager if you're a project manager don't let date pressure be your only tool it's exhausting and people will start to avoid you there are other lovers that you can pull it just requires doing the work to get ahead of things a good project manager is proactive if you're a developer understand that dates are often frustratingly used to keep developers productive when the team is not tracking towards a date put those frustrations aside roll up your sleeves and work with the project manager to figure out how you can pull all of the levers to navigate out of the situation thanks for the question full masterino asks I left a company which had pretty bad management for what I thought was a better one I interviewed carefully asked all of the right questions and ended up in a company with a manager who is micromanaging enforcing his technical opinion on the whole team of five senior software Engineers nobody can say anything I mean we say and challenge but he's abusing his power to get his way my point is that I asked how the team works and everything to try and understand how they operate and was happy they have outride like to me and now I'm looking to get out I'm thinking as I hand in my notice to give him feedback and explain my reasoning for leaving Steve do you think it's a good idea or just not even bother sorry to hear that you're in the situation before I get into my second point about toxic co-workers I want to make it clear that managers can also be toxic and it's terrible because the relationship with your manager is the most critical one at work a good manager can make your career take off and a terrible one can stunt your career I've had over 20 managers in my career at Amazon and I've had the same manager for the Last 5 Years so that means I've had more than 20 managers in a 13-year span and when you have a population of that size you're bound to have toxic people that are your bosses it's happened to me you may not have as many managers as I did over the course course of your career but you are likely to have several and so you need to be on the lookout it looks like you did as best as you could to interview your manager before you joined that's really important interviews need to be a two-way street and people often don't realize that because especially in to J's job market and the focus of finding any job that you need to also interview them but even if you take amazing care to make sure that you have a good manager it might not work out and so here we are in a previous office hours a viewer had a question about how to manage a new manager that had just transferred into the team that was exhibiting toxic Behavior I told him the same thing that I'll tell you right now which is my second point a toxic coworker is not likely to change their behavior a tiger doesn't change its stripes now it could happen people can change but it's unlikely If your manager is terrible use that as motivation to find another team in the meantime I think it's a good idea to talk to your skip level boss and to get a clear indication about whether this behavior is acceptable or not if it's acceptable and your skip isn't going to do anything about it it will make your decision to leave easier if it isn't acceptable then ask your skip what they're going to do about it you don't want to stick it out in a toxic environment especially early in your career Because unless you're super careful their traits will rub off on you so it's best if you have the opportunity to find a boss that isn't terrible to work for it's not just an uncomfortable place to be in but it could make you the difficult and toxic cooworker in the future the Zeus asks as a senior solution architect band n in a major Tech firm I manage a portfol folio of Fortune 100 clients solving a wide array of challenges without Tex stack constraints the demand of this role has been wearing on me for the past couple of years I'm contemplating handing in twoe notice to seek a less taxing position I'd appreciate any advice that you could offer sounds like you've been grinding for a couple of years now and you're realizing that your workload and work life balance aren't sustainable when evaluating Solutions you need to keep that Concept in mind sustainability what you don't want are quick fixes that fade away way you've probably noticed that the effects of taking time off or a vacation don't last very long that's because time off is a quick fix the solution to burnout isn't no work the solution is to find the right balance and work that is sustainable so before you put in your notice I would recommend talking to your manager and sharing that your current workload is unsustainable if they know that it is but nothing changes then I'd recommend putting in your twoe notice otherwise they might be able to work with you and to take away the most taxing aspects of your job I think that you might like where you work based on how you worded your question other than the fact that it's kind of burning you out so I think that it makes sense to take some Cycles to try to save it if that's possible if you do decide to leave make sure that you aren't trading one problem for another one when it comes to interviews and offers remember interviewing is a two-way street they get something valuable a capable employee with deep experience and you get a place that pays you decently and where the workload is sustainable these positions exist you just need to find them hope that helps good luck Cayenne asks your company just went through a recent merge you survived the cut due to beating your kpis and high performance and were sent to another team with members from another merg company you like everyone in your team things are great but you feel super sad about your co-workers that were laid off and you're having a hard time concentrating at work and are worried that you might be included in the next round of layoffs I'm sorry to hear about the layoffs at your company you are probably friends with many of them and losing your job is a very difficult thing to go through I'll leave with two things first unless there's a Cleaver layoff where the entire unit is eliminated High performers are the ones that people keep you noticed it yourself you got saved because you beat your kpis well what does that mean keep on being a high performer you can control that you can't control the economy or the economics of your company directly it stinks your former co-workers had to go through all this but think about it this way layoffs are usually the last resort they were let go so that the company could survive and so that you could still have a job don't waste their sacrifice that that would just make the situation even worse the second thing is that whenever there are layoffs or reorganizations that uncovers opportunity if people are looking for it if people are let go there's more scope with a merger the idea is that you can consolidate redundant operations so there's probably a lot of projects to realize those savings these projects need leaders I think of layoffs in reorgs as earthquakes they're sudden cause a lot of damage and things aren't ever really the same ever again but they also represent the start of a rebuilding stage see if you can't transform a tragedy into something positive hope that helps Anonymous asks I got fired multiple times now I think the common reason was my behavior towards superiors mostly what can I do to prevent that in the future and also how can I reapply again without showing red flags if you think you got fired for the same reason multiple times it's time to stop exhibiting the behaviors that got you fired if you don't work on yourself then it's just going to happen again Behavior change like I said earlier is one of the hardest things that you can do the first step is to gain awareness of the situation where you exhibit that bad behavior make a list of the critical interactions where you were insubordinate what could you have done differently what could you have said differently how do other people react in similar situations without this introspection step you don't have any chance of changing then the important part is to catch yourself in future situations are there places in your personal life where you get triggered in the same way if so you can try to be aware of that fact when you're going down that unhelpful default path and reroute yourself I also recommend seeking therapy as software developers we have this need to figure things out on our own but it may be due to something that you can't see right now which will make it impossible to stop I've seen therapists for many years in my life and they've helped me immensely once you've root caused your issues you are free to reapply to the company I'd make it clear that you've taken concrete steps to address what caused you to get let go and that it's unlikely to happen again because of all of the work that you've put in if you don't change anything it's just going to happen again and that's not useful I hope you get get the help that you need I've got a three-part question from Mr trust Kawa he asks how do you cope with corporate talking if you'd rather just be straightforward I'm just tired of all this artificial excitement in every meeting saying what I think has sometimes led me to bonus one-on ones with managers though I know that the fake excitement of corporate speak can get really annoying but you don't get a talking to from your managers for being straightforward you get a talking to you because you aren't being helpful probably because you've countered fake optimism with pessimism look you're a professional even if things can get a bit annoying you have to take the edge off instead of being pessimistic a professional is realistic so suppose someone says we're navigating challenges in our project but I think we're still on track by R strategizing and pooling our expertise we're confident of overcoming these hurdles and surpassing our goals that's really corporate and really annoying one way to respond is that you could say something like everything is going wrong with this project the specs are a mess deadlines are impossible possible and the code is an absolute disaster it's like we're just setting ourselves up to fail and it's really frustrating everything that was said is true you may think that because it's all true that you're being straightforward but it's not useful and it's definitely not professional instead you can say the same thing but take the edge off hey I think that we should take the obstacles to the project seriously we're encountering several challenges with the project including misalign specifications some spaghetti code and tight deadlines let's talk about how to overcome these issues before we Pat ourselves on the back you're saying the same things surfacing the same issues but this way you won't get an unwanted one-on-one with your manager about being immature what do you think about merger SL acquisition of it companies do you think that working in a company that's being acquired creates some possibilities or would you rather suggest running away like I said in the previous question mergers and Acquisitions aren't all bad necessarily because there may be some new scope that could be good for you and give you an opportunity to take a bigger role and to to grow but what I didn't say was that sometimes mergers and Acquisitions and reorgs are bad you'll know they're bad when people leave nobody seems to know what they're doing and the chaos increases over time instead of decreasing if it feels like you're in a sinking ship you have two options you can try to wait it out hoping at some point it'll stabilize or you can jump ship so to answer your question when R Orcs happen make sure to at least stay until the earthquakes and subsequent aftershocks end and then assess every reorg that I've been a part of has some New Opportunities appear but it isn't guaranteed if it never stabilizes it's probably a good time to brush off your resume and to start preparing for interviews you need to make sure though that before you leave you're looking at things correctly there might be a big opportunity during the rebuilding phase that may never occur naturally otherwise don't just leave because everybody else is if the thing holding you back for promotion for instance is more scope reorgs and layoffs may be the perfect opportunity if you're open to it and are looking for things the right way I'd like i' like to take a second to thank today's video sponsor brilliant.org I say this a lot but I have an unlimited budget for Learning and self-improvement I spent thousands of dollars upleveling myself after college what I found is that brilliant is the best way to learn math science and computer science interactively passive reading or watching videos is the worst way to learn something it gives you a false sense that you understand things deeply brilliant has lessons on mathematics computer science Ai and more with new ones added every month they've just added a course on llms that I'm in the middle of I'm no beginner when it comes to machine learning and computer science but I'm also not an expert on the bleeding edge of generative AI I use brilliant to make sure that I have a solid understanding of the basic concepts and terminology if I get the basics wrong during a meeting or a video I lose a lot of credibility which at this point in my career is my most valuable asset brilliant is a wonderful resource so that I can stay up to date on things that aren't my core areas of expertise to try everything brilliant has to offer free for a full 30 days visit brilliant.org aifeng engineered or click on the link in the description the first 200 of you will get 20% off of brilliant's annual premium subscription new content is added frequently They just added a course on predicting with probability creative coding and exploring data visually I'd like to thank brilliant again for sponsoring today's video I'm trying to get promoted to staff level you're supposed to be an Exquisite individual contributor but with strong team spirit as I'm very knowledgeable and experienced I have a hard time supporting less experienced team teammates it requires a lot of patience it's also hard to determine if your co-workers are just dummies and what to expect from them on what level how do you manage that without hurting anyone's feelings the promotion to staff level is really hard as you pointed out you have to be really good as an IC and you have to grow others that's hard but before I answer your question and get into my last Point let's talk about your language look your co-workers are people you shouldn't call them dummies getting past a software engineering interview and getting being hired is one of the hardest things to do they just don't have the knowledge and know how you have yet you really need to learn how to take the edge off your Communications I can see personally that it's holding you back and if I was your manager I would pull you aside and give you a bonus oneon-one you're not telling it like it is you're being a jerk I have two pieces of advice for you the first is to think of learning as an investment with all Investments there's a period of time when the investment hasn't paid itself off yet but the idea is that eventually you'll recoup the invested time and then there's a big upside if it takes 3 days to teach somebody to do a task that takes an hour as long as the next time a similar task comes down the pipeline it only takes them an hour it won't take that long for that investment to pay off especially if you taught them so well that they can teach others there's a possibility that you're working with incompetent people if they're actually not capable of the job then talk to your manager but I find it hard to believe that that would be the case for all of your co-workers the second thing to remember is that you shouldn't get impatient that your investment doesn't immediately yield results remember there's a high upside to investing in others around you when you buy a stock the expectation isn't that it's going to the moon tomorrow the idea is that it'll pay off over time the reason that growing others is a Criterion for getting to the next level is because you're scaling yourself and being a force multiplier you're literally making copies of yourself if you do this for some amount of time the investment's going to pay off and it's going to pay off in many multiples so if you find that helping others isn't yielding good results over time maybe you need to inspect your teaching ability what I found to be effective when growing others is to not teach them specific tasks but to show them how to solve a more generalized version of the problem and to teach them how to get the answers that they need for different variations basically you need to teach them how to be you suppose you teach them how to do a task but there's a slightly different version of that task that comes in and they still need your help what I'd say is that you need to uplevel your teaching ability so make sure that when you're training others you do a good job it's just as challenging to be a good guide as it is to be a good engineer which brings me to my last point you need to make sure that you aren't the toxic person at work it's really easy to treat yourself as the hero of your work story and to treat others that aren't aligned with you or get in your way as the villains but the world doesn't reduce to that there are no real good guys and bad guys because if you take that perspective of others with that mindset it may turn out that you are the villain if you're watching this video I think you're thoughtful enough to at least entertain that idea and to be reflected of your actions even if your intentions are good because here's the thing others judge us by our actions while we judge ourselves by our intentions you are the toxic person at work if you exhibit toxic Behavior even if you have good intentions so I think it behooves you to think about whether you're the toxic person at work wearing a stupid Michigan hat because if you are it's within your power to address that by taking off that hat and changing your behavior if you enjoy today's office hours here's a link to my previous session where I go in depth about whether you should stay on your team or leave it's a tough decision with a lot of variables

Channel: A Life Engineered

Views: 28,561

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Id: gd_q_evF6QI

Length: 23min 2sec (1382 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 02 2024