Re: Problem Co-worker

Subject: Re: Problem Co-worker
From: "abby initio" <abby -dot- initio -at- gmail -dot- com>
To: "Gene Kim-Eng" <techwr -at- genek -dot- com>
Date: Tue, 1 May 2007 04:51:47 -0500

Gene, Rob, and others --

Yep. I tried to assure PM that one-to-one wasn't necessary. I was a
professional and would do my job, no worries. She wasn't having any of that.
F2F or nothing.

Perhaps focusing on the "proper English" comment in my earlier email was a
mistake. In meeting with PM, I made clear that I understood that she
couldn't act on it. I wanted to use it as an example of the behavior, which
Ned seems to have grokked.

The incident is indicative of a general issue: a willingness to quickly move
from professional to personal. PC deflects the issue from a coding problem
to something that is your fault. She can't do X because of YOUR (fill in the
blank) personal problem -- with the problem being your English, your
personality, your inability to let a matter rest when _she's_ angry.

I'll detail a couple of more incidents, below, maybe the behavior will ring
a bell with others. Or, perhaps there's a way of seeing it that I'm
missing.

An email she didn't understand caused her to get angry and raise her voice.
This was stated in the meeting, without irony. When she gets angry, the
problem is that you should realize that she needs to be left alone, so
asking her to move the discussion to a conference room is you engaging in
escalation. By asking her to talk quietly, you are making her more angry and
that's why she keeps raising her voice. By quietly responding to her
questions, you are making her more angry. You should know that these things
bother her and not do them.

In the meeting, she described herself as very easy going and she doesn't
understand other people who try to get her to discuss a problem when she's
angry. If I were more easy going, I wouldn't let her raised voice get to me.
It's that simple.

heh. (I think Ned is spot on about hyperactivity, btw. And no, no comments
about meds from me! That would set her off, no doubt.)

As one colleague put it, PC likes to be the center of attention. My
colleague's comment came up when PC was assigned the task of fixing some
code. She spent a day and a half on the project, successively calling over
the pm, the ops mgr, and two UI programmers who've been mentoring us in the
company's standards and complex architecture.

My colleague observed that she pushes herself front and center to take on
tasks or fix problems, but sometimes relies on other people to actually do
the work. He normally doesn't get upset about this -- and after all, she
does learn -- but it finally got to him the other day. He was quite annoyed
as he had to listen to her working on it with all these people. He read it
as her showing off about being given the task of fixing the code.

The problem never got fixed. However another guy, a new hire, took a look at
the problem around 5:30 and fixed it in 10 minutes.

It's a good example of the behavior. To be fair, this isn't always the case
-- happens about 1/3 of the time. It isn't necessarily that she claims
responsibility for the fix. If a colleague fixed the problem by showing her
how, the fix is described as 'It was fixed' and not as "I fixed it.' If the
fix was something a more tenured person was responsible for, then PC
lavishes them with praise at daily or weekly meetings. Of course the PHP
programmers notice, but are too professional to make a fuss in meetings or
bring it to the PM. Their attitude is teamwork, right?

I described the behavior as low-grade bully: they exploit what we normally
think of as human virtues, like malware sometimes exploits features in
software.

Take another situation. One day, she raised her hand to fix a bug that I'd
actually fixed well before QA began. But, with lack of version control, my
fix was overwritten. I hadn't noticed the bug had reappeared, so it was
spotted in a site review with the product group. PC immediately jumped in,
said she'd fix it. I told PC in the meeting that I'd email her the fix.
Anyone else can jump in to fix bugs (no rules here), but in the interest of
knocking it out, why let someone waste time. It was a 30 second fix.

We briefly discussed it at her desk, me clarifying the email. She said she
did what I said, but it didn't work.

The next day, the first thing she did was look at the page. She came
marching over to my desk, yelling, "If you're going to fix something I was
assigned to fix, Abby, then you could at least email me. You got into "my"
file and changed things without telling me." I put "my" in scare quotes
because it was, actually, "my" file. My name's in the comments.

As she yelled, I had no clue what she was talking about. Turns out that
she'd been examining the bug in Firefox. The bug is only present in IE. I
matter of factly noted this, trying to mitigate the problem by painting it
as, "Oh, we can all do this sort of thing. No biggie." I said this quietly,
wanting to de-escalate, especially in this situation since this isn't the
first time she's been bitten for forgetting that she can't test in Firefox
alone.

I didn't bother to take this to the PM. It seemed to me a behavior that had
to happen more than three times before that was necessary. I do try to
understand that there are different temperaments, and everyone has a bad
day. (It's a feature, not a bug! :)

I went back to work; deadlines loomed. The problem still hadn't been
resolved at COB. It was a simple matter of replacing a number in a line of
code. The next day, prepping for a meeting with the product group, I came in
early to dot i's and cross t's. I fixed the issue.

I emailed all concerned parties: PC, Project Manager, another UI programmer
who'd tried working on it as well, and the sr.PHP programmer who'd stood in
for PM at the last site review when the bug was discovered. I thought
everyone would be relieved that there was one less thing to worry about.
Since I'd also changed a master file to do it, I made sure the person in
charge of that master file knew. NOrmally, we'd IM each other, but no one
was there to IM. She'd also explicitly asked the day before that I email if
I fix a problem that she's been assigned. Email it was.

She ranted and raved about the event. She made it out to be me working in
her file while she was in it. (Thank ghu I emailed at 7:15 a.m., when no one
was in the office but me.). I noted that I'd done what she asked the day
before, notify her by email. She was busy ranting; didn't hear.

You might ask why she was assigned the task of fixing bugs on code she
didn't write. See above. She pushes herself front and center to do
everything -- and then ends up relying on others to actually fix some of the
problems. She's not incompetent, don't get me wrong. She's very good at some
things and brings a lot to the project. It's just that I get the sense she
has little self-confidence or sense of accomplishment from work alone, and
feels the need to obtain it in the ways described above.

I don't think there's much fix to this problem The fix is to redouble my
efforts to obtain employment or bide my time and remember that it's mostly
her own weaknesses that are at issue. I can take note of the things that
bother her and avoid them -- as long as I'm not being walked over. PM has
made clear that she has no problem with me firmly taking some matters in
hand.

As to the latter, I don't entirely trust that's true.

Now that I've kind of had the opportunity to rationally describe the issues,
it seems doable -- biding my time. While I'm sad to have to leave this
company -- I quite like it for other reasons -- she'll be their problem, not
mine. I can't get them to change they way they train employees. And, this
woman has been in this business for over a decade. She's in her mid-forties,
so has been allowed to get away with the behavior a long time.

BTW, in other venues, I don't mind PC. She can be quite funny and charming
when she wishes. And my virtue and vice is that I just don't hold grudges
terribly easy. I'll document things to CMA, but the joy of working or doing
what I love, is usually more present to me than some past event.

Thanks for all the good advice!
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