Signs a Coworker is Going to be a Problem

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

There are two statements I’ve heard from people I’ve worked with that were always indicative there was going to be a problem. The first is whenever I hear someone tell me they’re there to work and not make friends. While I’m sure that’s true for all of us to one degree or another, everyone I can think of who has said that out loud to their coworkers has been an insufferable jerk nobody missed once they were gone. They’ve all made in clear through their behavior they didn’t consider it important to treat anyone with respect or compassion. It’s especially odd when I’ve had coworkers in HR tell me that.

The other statement that raises a red flag with me is whenever a coworker tells me they’re indispensable. “They can’t fire me, nobody knows how to do what I do.” That might be true in some instances, but again, usually when I hear someone say something like this it’s because they’re arrogant and typically aren’t doing as good a job as they think they are. It’s amazing how often those are completely surprised when they get fired.

Any other signs? It can be something they say or their behavior.

2

I once took a new co-worker out to lunch to welcome her to our office. She’d been in a satellite office for several years, and took a promotion to the HQ location. While we were at lunch, I was pretty amazed at her order. I don’t remember exactly what she wanted, but it was something like, “Burger medium-well, but crispy-charred on the outside and very slightly pink in the middle, no sauces but small cups of ketchup, mayo, and mustard on the side. Salad with dressing on the side, no tomatoes in the lettuce unless they’re local and fresh but not cherry tomatoes. Unsweetened iced tea with no ice and Splenda on the side, not [the other major artificial sweetener].” My order? “I”ll have the cheeseburger combo and water, please.”

She was very high maintenance.

3

There was Judy who would literally lean to listen in on phone conversations, especially if they were of a personal nature. She was more interested in that than doing her job. What was worse, she was from my parents’ church so obviously she and I had a deep personal connection. :roll_eyes:

4

In 35 years at my job in various sections and with varying responsibility, I worked with a wide variety of people of different competencies, sociability and general sanity. The one thing I decided on, really within the first five years, was that I would rather work with a good-natured incompetent than a skilled asshole.

The incompetent might be frustrating at times, but in my jobs there was generally enough slop in the work demands that you could work around them. Even carry them to a minimal extent without making your own job too much worse. The tension they caused was of the minor irritation variety.

But assholes cause major tension and it doesn’t matter if you’re the most skilled worker on the planet. A little less work is not worth a whole lot more annoyance. Many of those types also fell into the arrogant category, as well as being assholes in myriad other ways.

A red flag to me was older highly-skilled workers switching jobs from within the area. At my former terminal level the better places of employment were close enough in wages and benefits that job hopping was not that beneficial. It’s a really expensive housing market and content workers mostly stayed put. If you job hopped I wanted it to be a.) because you had gotten stuck at a shitty contract job and just wanted that better gig or b.) you were moving into the region anyway for reasons other than the job. Far too often when an older “local” skilled person was hired they turned out to be assholes that had left their last gig in a huff. Or they had flat out been staring at a possible termination, but managed to jump ship before the axe came down. Younger guys I didn’t worry about as much, but seemingly competent middle-aged guys often seemed to come in carrying some baggage.

Ageism? Yeah, kinda. But fear not - I didn’t do the hiring so my biases were never a factor :slight_smile:. I just had to deal with the aftermath. When an older guys comes in and immediately starts bad-mouthing the incompetents at their old job (‘I’m hoping it will be better here’) there aren’t enough :roll_eyes: in the world.

5

I once worked on a large software development project with a hardware designer, because we needed custom hardware to supplement the standard computer systems we were using. The guy was very good at what he did, but his arrogance eventually got on my nerves. This was almost entirely a software project and I was the software architect, but he kept telling me how the software should work. I eventually snapped and told him that he should just do his job and stay out of my way.

I still fondly remember our very diplomatic department head intervening in this feud. He told the hardware designer that his opinions were always welcome, but told him that before offering an opinion on a software issue, he should follow it by saying “but of course I could be wrong – I often am”. IOW, go ahead and continue to offer your suggestions, because we know you’re very smart (and something you suggest might even be useful!) but when speaking with your colleagues on the software team, please qualify your statements with that statement, disclaiming your omniscience.

That pretty much took care of that problem!

6

I’ll get basic. Never really worked in an office.

Altho’ I’ve worked many hours alongside people, volunteering.

The ones who showed they were a problem always wanted to talk crap about everyone else.

Volunteers often just need bodies so the level of integrity often isn’t top drawer.

7

If you ever have to manage someone who knows they can’t be fired (barring the grossest kind of rule violation) and whom no other manager wants or will take on a bet, buckle up and prepare for a rough ride. Constant complaints to my boss or HR about my rudeness, and no support for me from any of them, were the least of it.

I did outlast this employee, who had mental issues but also had ironclad security (for what I will call political reasons); she finally gave up the job and left on mental/medical disability grounds. I discreetly did a happy dance that day.

8

Another one, that I saw more than once: A new employee signs on, and completely turns the workplace upside down even though that wasn’t part of their job description.

At my old hospital, there were two very memorable pharmacists who did this. I won’t give further details because it could identify them, besides both of them being women who moved to this city for their husbands’ jobs, but the worse of the two realized after working there for TWO WEEKS that a 60-person department was not going to revise all their policies to accommodate her, and she went into the director’s office on Friday afternoon and said she wouldn’t be back.

Before that, I worked at a hospital that has since closed (although not because of her LOL) where they had an Unfireable Technician who used the N word while referring to black people, deliberately filled orders incorrectly, and said, “Make me, bitch” if I asked her to do something. I was not the only person she had treated that way, either. I don’t know where she came from or why she was allowed to work there.

9

As the old saying goes, the graveyards are full of indispensable people. No matter how specialized your skillset, eventually your workplace will have to get by without you.

A truly good worker will try to make sure that that happens as smoothly and easily as possible. Someone who works hard to try to make sure that everyone can work to the best of their ability? Now, there’s someone that nobody will want to fire.

10

“When I worked at the Widget Corporation, we did it this way.”

This usually came from a new hire who insisted the processes we had on hand were not the way anything should be done, in their not-so-humble opinion. This person had invariably been fired from their last job (or two) for the same irritating behavior. You don’t walk into a new job on day one and question your new employer’s methods, even if you disagree with them or think they can be done better.

11

In my field (software), the more difficult folks to deal with are often the “lone-wolf geniuses”. Software attracts a certain, peculiar, kind of intelligence… and to stereotype, that intelligence often accompanies a certain kind of personality (think “engineering brain, not necessarily great with people”).

Once in a while you get someone who is exceptionally bright and/or skilled, so much so that it makes the rest of us look dumb. Often, these superstars are former solo founders or people who’ve otherwise bootstrapped their way to glory through sheer intellect and willpower. Then their solo enterprise gets bought and they find themselves part of a team, but nobody really ever taught them how to work together with a team, or taught the team how to work together with them — they’ve never really needed to rely on others before.

The most immediately visible outcome of a situation like that is that the team will inherit a product (piles of computer code) that is organized like the founder’s brain: To the genius themselves, it probably resembles Sherlock’s “memory palace”. To everyone else, it’s more like an abandoned library after a major earthquake. But that abandoned library is worth millions, so everyone else just has to slowly sort through the piles and try to make sense of it all. There is almost never any documentation or commentary about the code — because why would there need to be? It’s very clever, efficient code that should be self-explanatory! (It never is.)

Whenever clarification is needed, the genius might deign to sit down with you for a few minutes to explain it, but only if you appear sufficiently pitiful and worshipful. They’ll try to simplify the problem for your feeble mind by slowing down their brain to explain it from 1 to 50… which is already half the speed they normally work at. But that’s still 50x too fast for you, who just needed a basic 1, 2, 3.

Working with them is a mix of frustrating and fun. On one hand, a lot of the shortcuts they take are unnecessary and frequently self-defeating: they save a few minutes during its initial creation, but then cost the team/company 10x that time not even a year later, when everyone else struggles to read or maintain it. On the other hand, their code is often a delight to unravel, like solving a puzzle… makes the job more like playing an escape room than regular, boring business programming.

Thankfully, at least I can say that (in my experience at least) these geniuses are almost never intentionally assholes. They’re usually not assholes at all, in fact, just very differently made compared to the rest us plebs. If not for the existence of the software industry, they’d probably have become your eccentric professor or mad scientist type. Their brains are literally operating on another dimension, and it’s not their fault us “normies” can’t keep up.

About 5-10% of the people I’ve worked with are like that. They’re over-represented in my field. And probably on the Dope too :slight_smile:

12
  1. They were a bear.
  2. They were a tree leaning over a trail that simply had to fall the opposite way it should have.
  3. They were a live tree with really deep roots exactly where the trail had to be made.
  4. They are lightning.

I miss building trails. Oh, and they are a boss that orders me to be a ranger since i am out where the rangers aren’t.

13

I’m not in any sense a professional programmer, but I’ve done some programming. One thing I’ve learned is that you always need to make your code comprehensible to other people, because sometimes, that other person is “you, but two years later”.

I’ve also been the person unraveling someone else’s code, and I can assure you that it’s not just the geniuses on another plane who write cryptic, undocumented code. I’d much rather have code written by a cryptic genius than the far more common case of a cryptic idiot.

14

The coworker who constantly gossips about and badmouths other coworkers to you. If they’re badmouthing and gossiping about others to you, they’re doing the same with you to others.

I used to work with someone who acted sweet as pie to everybody in the department, like they were your best friend. But they weren’t good at their job, and to deflect from that, they’d blame everybody else on a project team-- take you aside and say “wow, team member (X) really screwed the pooch on project segment (Y), didn’t they?” Or “we wouldn’t be as behind the timeline if it wasn’t for team member (Z)'s incompetence”. And they’d do it in this “just between us top-level performers” way, to make you think they weren’t stabbing you in the back, too. Which I’m sure this person was doing to me, falsely criticizing me to our manager. I was very happy when that person retired.

15

I’ve found that there are really two sorts of problem co-workers- there are the disruptive ones who basically are very talkative, gripe a lot, have personality conflicts with people, and that sort of thing. They’re almost always what I’d call “dramatic”. There’s always some kind of drama going on with them, their jobs, or between them and their customers/co-workers.

The other type are the “difficult” ones. They’re not necessarily dramatic, but for whatever reason, they’re hard to deal with. They’re usually some combination of lacking in social skills (arrogant, poor communicators, overly sarcastic, think their shit doesn’t stink, etc…) or incompetent for some reason (not very bright, undereducated, or just their self-perceived ability is far in excess of their actual ability).

The difficult ones can be worked around like @Tamerlane points out, or they can be managed in some way - if they’re abrasive or something, you can manage access to them in various ways.

Dramatic co-workers are harder, in that they’re often very social, and reasonably competent, so it’s hard to manage access or just work around them. They pick up on that, and it becomes the next drama.

Usually what I do is just patiently listen and hear them, and then assiduously avoid doing or saying anything that sparks any drama. I’ve found that hearing them is often what they’re ultimately looking for, and you’ll be perceived as a good guy and huge ally if you just hear them out.

What’s really hard is when someone in the difficult category is managing someone in the dramatic category. That’s a recipe for major fireworks. I have a coworker who’s on the dramatic side who’s being managed by someone whose social skills are lacking and who’s (IMO) not as competent as she really needs to be. And she’s an A #1, blue ribbon rule-follower. So the major source of drama there is that the dramatic person is gettiing constantly dinged for really minor lapses and infractions of the administrivia that surrounds projects, in spite of the fact that she’s a bang-up project manager on the whole. As a peer of the difficult person, I keep thinking that some flexibility on her part would go a long way toward keeping a better working relationship and would let her pick her battles a bit more judiciously.

16

Excessive jokiness…especially when they aren’t actually funny, but either can’t tell or don’t care. That kind of insecurity/awkwardness will manifest in other ways, too.

Back when I was a proposal manager, I came up with a way to remind myself to be patient with difficult people: I wrote SMART/STRESSED/STUPID in the top corner of my whiteboard. While of course there are plenty of people who are simply assholes, if someone’s being particularly challenging I’ve found there’s a good chance they’re either super smart, super stressed, or super stupid…and, adding the middle one to either of other two just exacerbates things. In none of those three cases, though, is it the person’s fault: it’s up to me to take deep breaths and figure out what they need/how to get what I need. I switched from business development to project management six years ago, but I still have a small SMART/STRESSED/STUPID note on my whiteboard. I’m not always the most patient person, and that little reminder really does help sometimes.

17

I was digging through some incomprehensible code one day, and I started muttering “who wrote this crap, it makes no sense.”. Then I looked up the mod log.

It was me. I wrote it.

We have a rule where I work. After 5 years it might as well be someone else’s code, because you won’t remember what you wrote.

One big red flag where I work is a new programmer who thinks that code is basically “self-documenting”. In other words, your choice of function and variable names is enough and you don’t need to add any comments. You read their code without a single comment in sight and you know that you are going to be spending a lot of time trying to figure out what the F*** their overall plan was.

I’m very fortunate to work with a very experienced group of engineers, and we’re all very good at our jobs (IMHO). The work we do is complicated and very safety critical (worst case if you really screw something up is basically a Bhopal-level event). When we hire new people, no matter how much education or experience they have, it’s going to be six months to a year before they can really do some practical work for us. Newbies who come in and accept that, and listen to us more experienced engineers for advice, tend to do well. Newbies who come in and think that they have experience or an advanced degree and they can do things their way and they don’t need to listen to us are the ones that royally screw things up and tend not to last very long.

The bad thing is that our core group of engineers are mostly all up around retirement age, and we’re starting to disappear from the work force one by one. Upper management seems to think that an engineer is an engineer, and they can just hire someone off the street, give them two weeks of training, and that’s all they need. That never works.

18

There’s some truth here. But I remember a time when medical residents and faculty in my department were discussing candidates for new residency slots, and one of them was dissed because while brilliant, he seemed like someone who could be hard to get along with. In a setting like that you’d think that they could afford to have a couple really talented trainees without great people skills, but safe mediocrity was the order of the day.

On a related note, there was a highly successful official in pre-WWI Germany who rose to be Imperial Chancellor with the aid of a good deal of chicanery. One of his methods of getting competitors to fight with each other (to his advantage) was to pull one of them aside and say “You know, so-and-so doesn’t like you.” Supposedly that was a foolproof method of sowing discord.

19

This thread reminds me of a video I stumbled on a while back:

For those who don’t want to watch the video, the “one question” to ask to find out whether or not someone is an asshole is:

“Are you an asshole?”

Supposedly, non-assholes will just think the question is kind of funny, but assholes will get offended at being asked.

20

Hah, this is great. Who did you work for?

I was briefly on a trail crew and can kinda relate. For us, the real terrors were trees + fire, whether it’s needing to lift a fallen redwood out of a riverbed or dodging them as they fall. One crashed not 10 feet behind my crewmate, and the front of the line three miles away heard the explosion. The look on that man’s face…