Colleague doesn't want to work at all
Posted by Sfedosman@reddit | ExperiencedDevs | View on Reddit | 122 comments
I have a colleague who consistently avoids doing his assigned tasks. He frequently tries to delegate his work or reach out to other people from the team (including myself) for help, mainly because he is bored. I think it also has to do with the fact that his technical skills appear to be quite limited.
He also doesn’t do any code reviews, he just approves every single PR without providing any feedback, like ever. He admitted to me that he has no intention to do anything related to this type of work (he probably means being an IC), but stays because the pay is good.
However, he is a really nice guy outside of work related things. I’m not the kind of person to actually talk about this kind of behavior to management and I believe everyone is accountable for their own work. But at this point, his lack of engagement is starting to negatively impact my own workflow and daily experience, and it's becoming increasingly frustrating.
Any opinions on how to proceed on this matter?
eurodollars@reddit
Upper management written all over him
marx-was-right-@reddit
we have a principal engineer like this who just holds a clipboard and tells people to do their tasks, doesnt do any design, planning, grooming or investigation into technical issues. any time he's had to work on something by himself he has gotten unrecoverably stuck and someone has had to pick up the work or 'connect' with him constantly. blows my mind in the age of layoffs someone like that is immune to scrutiny=
PragmaticBoredom@reddit
I'm amazed at how many people slide into "cloud architect" or "Senior Principal Staff Engineer" roles and then steadily decline into a meeting machine. They get comfortable in a job where nobody can remember exactly what their role is supposed to be but it seems plausible that they're too high level to have any time to code. Years pass, and their skills just evaporate and/or become so outdated as to be useless.
It works well until something upsets the equilibrium and they have to find another job
trtrtr82@reddit
Try this blog from Alex Ewerlof. He says everything about Ivory Tower Architects that needs to be said
https://blog.alexewerlof.com/p/ivory-tower-architect
einstein95@reddit
Failing upwards
hohoreindeer@reddit
An actual physical clipboard?
marx-was-right-@reddit
Figurative - he just collects status updates and "delegates" any responsibility
FlipperBumperKickout@reddit
If he at least stays out of the way he might be above the average micromanaging time-wasting manager 🤣
marx-was-right-@reddit
If only. He loves to interject by suggesting we have AI do things and will try to just randomly screen share and start blabbering and mumbling, derailing everyone.
FlipperBumperKickout@reddit
oh... one of those 😫
gimmeslack12@reddit
It’s not that I’m lazy… it’s that I just don’t care.
kenybz@reddit
How about you tell management, huh?
…
That’s what I thought.
gimmeslack12@reddit
What is it… you do here?
johnpeters42@reddit
Well-- well, look, I already told you, I deal with the goddamn customers so the engineers don't have to. I have people skills. I am good at dealing with people. Can't you understand that? What the hell is wrong with you people?
gomihako_@reddit
Yeaahhhhh hmmmmmmmmm
Consistent_Mail4774@reddit
How would someone like that move to upper management? Aren't people in management supposed to be working a lot, driving projects, coming up with ideas, attending many meetings and being called when emergencies happen in projects? At least that's what I saw working at startups in EU, unless I'm assuming the US is different.
marx-was-right-@reddit
You see this often with folks who are shameless enough to take credit for other peoples work and always pipe up in meetings with buzzwords, and management is too lazy/incompetent to follow up and validate that they arent just blowing smoke
eurodollars@reddit
Woosh
bravopapa99@reddit
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O95fnszzI6I
Main-Drag-4975@reddit
Attending meetings and sending messages, that’s the job! Some folks would rather do that, even if it means weird hours sometimes.
karmiccloud@reddit
They're making an Office Space reference
PM_ME_UR_PIKACHU@reddit
This guy is ready to gobble up all the seed round funding for a project to the latest and greatest in ai
mothzilla@reddit
delegate.ai. An AI platform that puts assigned tasks out to tender from other AI platforms.TheOneTrueTrench@reddit
He gives trash code reviews, increment the number of required reviewers.
Not a lot of commits, sounds like you look better by comparison.
Don't get rid of low performing coworkers, they're the ones making us look good. Obfuscate who's not pulling their weight as much as possible, after all, you're a team player, aren't you?
gdinProgramator@reddit
Him being cool does not justify shit. You should take this up with his / your manager and get him out.
pheonixblade9@reddit
Why take it up with the manager? That's between the manager and the lazy, not OP. Only thing OP should do is keep track of when lazy gets in the way of them completing their work.
If OP wants to be more proactive, they can provide very specific actionable feedback to the manager, but I have never had that go well for me, especially for stuff like "they rubber stamp code reviews". When I had that issue, management basically was okay with it because code got out faster. It was a cultural issue.
Fair_Permit_808@reddit
Why not? Why should I get paid the same (or even less) as someone who does no work?
pheonixblade9@reddit
Not your job. With even somewhat functional management, the difference will be self evident. There are also sometimes things you don't know.
Mad Men has a great scene on this - "there are other rules" - probably not this specific case, but this situation is more common than you'd think
https://youtu.be/moH1Dctkozw?si=8uJjgzUQdMnvplLZ
Fair_Permit_808@reddit
I'm not saying to manage that person, but if somebody is slacking off I'm not just going to do extra work because of that. A manager will have a hard time if the team is hiding issues.
And even if you don't interact directly, you are on a team and that person is going to eventually do something that you will have to fix.
Ivrrn@reddit
be very careful with this, you never know what stones you’re turning over and how this might blowback onto you
remember: it isn’t your job to manage this person
bighawksguy-caw-caw@reddit
Let your manager know what your experience with this person is. Let them figure out how that fits into the whole and what they want to do about it.
Current-Fig8840@reddit
Exactly, you can tell some of these people don’t have street smartness
mxldevs@reddit
If it's your job to report this kind of behaviour, then it kind of is your responsibility.
If it's not your job, then report to whoever is supposed to, and if they don't, then THEY aren't doing their job as managers and they both will need to be reported.
bluetista1988@reddit
You meet these types every so often in your career.
Regardless of what their actual title is they just become this project management type person who directs traffic and rubber-stamps everything.
They tend to survive because busy manager types need a person who can direct traffic and give them easy-to-digest updates.
PedanticProgarmer@reddit
This is the kind of work an AI agent would be perfect for. Change my mind.
fuckoholic@reddit
Understand this: When only one person out of two does the work, but both are getting paid, you need to understand that he is robbing you out of your money. You are paying him with your salary to not do anything. By just being there he increases the supply of programmers and pushes down your salary. What he earns should belong to those who actually do the work.
Fck him and fck communism (for the same reason).
fpeterHUN@reddit
He is doing it right. We aren't paid for performance, we are paid for hours.
chpatton013@reddit
I would do exactly what you said you wouldn't do. Talk to your manager about how often you need to do this person's work for them. How much more effective you could be if that time were spent on your own tasks. How you can't trust the quality of a code review from this person. How much time has been lost addressing problems that they didn't bother to review.
Think about what your team would be like if you had someone that actually tried. Headcount is a zero sum game. You're paying a salary for an office chair ornament. You'd be much better off with the empty seat. It would be free, it wouldn't distract you constantly, and you'd have the option to fill it with someone who isn't exploiting you, your team, and your employer.
cortex-@reddit
If it doesn't affect you: live and let live, it's a problem for management.
If his loafing creates additional work for you: give this feedback to him. If it continues to happen give this feedback to his manager.
SalusaPrimus@reddit
I think it affects the OP. His colleague is filling a role that could be filled by a competent dev who actually helps the team deliver. There’s a limited number of spots on the team, I wouldn’t want one to be filled by an under-performer.
I have seen this many times and generally don’t say anything, hoping that it’ll become clear to management. If it doesn’t become clear, then the org. isn’t evaluating performance well. If it is clear that a dev. is under-performing and the org. doesn’t care, that’s a bigger problem.
functorial@reddit
This is the best advice. If his actions are creating problems for you or the team then it needs to be flagged with management. It doesn’t matter if he’s a nice guy, he should expect honest feedback if he’s creating problems.
ToThePillory@reddit
Well, I suppose how much is it actually affecting you, and how?
If it was me, if he was an equal colleague, I'd probably just work like he didn't exist.
If I'm his lead, then I'd probably encourage him to do more, in a friendly way.
RickJLeanPaw@reddit
The person who is assigning and reviewing the tasks must/should be aware, so it’s their issue, not yours.
Of course, when he asks for help, you’ll be busy and unfortunately unable to assist on this occasion.
If that means he starts pestering others, then so be it; it’ll be their issue, and they may not be so accommodating.
anubus72@reddit
it’s a team issue if the person is admitting that the rubber stamp code reviews. the whole team needs to deal with bugs in prod
officerblues@reddit
Yes. The team needs to start holding reviewers accountable for stuff, too.
A bug in production leads to an incident -> the reviewer has to fix it. And a few more measures might be necessary regarding code quality.
But the right way to do it is bringing it up on your 1:1 with your manager, and letting him know it's getting on your way.
Legal-Trust5837@reddit
HARD disagree about holding reviewers accountable. When you push code I assume that your code works and that you did the legwork to verify your work and wrote the necessary tests for the critical flows.
Reviewing a PR is a best-effort type of work but the responsibility is ultimately of the code's owner.
Certain_Ad_163@reddit
This is not the case if PR is created from a Junior and reviewer is a Senior.
gjionergqwebrlkbjg@reddit
If you approved code which is not tested sufficiently you should absolutely be held accountable.
SituationSoap@reddit
This is a bad take. In a lot of shops, you wind up with one person doing 75+% of the reviews. Trying to push responsibility for one of those PRs going off the rails onto the one person who's tirelessly working to keep the team actually operational is a good way to wind up with zero people willing to review code.
Your attitude here is basically to say that you're worried about code quality, so you want to punish people more harshly the more they try to contribute to raising the quality of the code. You're actively disincentivizing the very outcome you want.
forgottenHedgehog@reddit
If you work for an absolute garbage team, you work for an absolute garbage team. I don't think anything they said is wrong for even mildly well functioning ones.
steeelez@reddit
Ehhh there do exist teams where occasionally working code is shipped without tests or real review. It’s not how I’d like to do anything but I’ve seen it done.
SituationSoap@reddit
The situation I'm describing is not unique to garbage teams. In fact, I'd expect it's probably the case on 80% of the teams I've worked on in the last 15 years.
You're right! But what you're missing is that if you make this change, what ends up happening is that you make it so that the rubber stamp guy doesn't review anything at all, because (a) he's already a pro at shirking responsibility and (b) he doesn't care about the team's success.
Attempting to use a stick to punish behavior you don't want on your team means that the negative consequences are always going to fall on your best employees. You cannot punish people into doing better code reviews.
Itsmedudeman@reddit
So what is the point of the review if you’re not checking for their edge cases are actually tested or not? You just want to point out some naming convention that doesn’t matter? The responsibility of PR reviews is that everyone performs them with diligence so it’s not unfairly weighted towards a specific person.
SituationSoap@reddit
The actual answer to this is that code review is cargo culted by teams because "that's what good teams do." The overwhelmingly vast majority, likely 90% or more, of code review in the software industry, is of either zero value or negative value.
I'm speaking descriptively here. I'm not saying what should happen, I'm saying what does happen.
OK, but this doesn't actually happen. Anywhere. Not with any consistency.
You cannot force people to do good code reviews. You simply cannot do it. You can try to teach them and you can try to give them incentive, but you cannot force them. It will not work.
Sure, but the vast majority of shipped code can fully survive some fuckups, so there's no downside to bad reviews from bad reviewers. The vast majority of bugs don't matter. Spending time to try to weed them out is often negative value.
Itsmedudeman@reddit
You can incentivize people to do good code reviews by holding them accountable or rewarding them. I always do diligent code reviews because it’s also a good learning opportunity for junior engineers to improve.
I have no clue why you are saying a vast majority of code reviews are useless when you can only speak anecdotally as I can. I’ve also anecdotally had good conversations and back and forths from PR reviews and I personally don’t care what others are doing because I’m going to uphold my standards of production ready code. It only makes me look better if others are doing it poorly.
I feel like we’re coming from completely different backgrounds here. If a senior or staff engineer on my team let an obvious untested bug go through to production and consistently made low effort reviews they would be fired.
SituationSoap@reddit
You can use a carrot or you can use a stick. But if you use a stick, people are going to opt out so far as they can. Forcing someone to do something that they don't actually want to do is going to have them do the bare minimum they can do to avoid getting fired.
It's the Office Space 37 pieces of flair conversation all over again. Unless you motivate people to do a good job through extrinsic motivation, only people who are internally motivated will do anything more than the bare minimum.
I don't mean this as an insult, but I already knew all of this about you because of the conversation we're having. There are people who believe that code review is an inherently valuable thing to do (it is not) and as a result, they make being good at code review a key part of their professional personality. You are the kind of person who goes off and does a bang up job on every code review every time, because you believe that code review is fundamentally valuable, in and of itself.
Again, I don't want to insult you here. I'm not trying to say that you're a sucker for thinking that, or anything else. That is simply not how the vast majority of developers approach code review. The vast majority consider it a box that they have to check and nothing more. And for the vast majority of software changes, that is an accurate understanding. It has to be, or else nobody would ever ship software. You cannot have in-depth conversations on every pull request. If you do, or even on half of them, that's a failure of your team. Most pull requests shouldn't be that involved. Most of them are much closer to changing the color of a button or a text string than they are building some new infrastructure.
As someone who's currently a staff engineer, why is the first step not to fire the person who's regularly asking for code review on untested code with obvious bugs? The point of code review is to make code review unnecessary. Why not punish the person who is regularly shipping bad code, over the one who isn't perfectly catching that every single pull request is free from errors?
SituationSoap@reddit
This is how you disincentivize people from ever reviewing code at all.
FlipperBumperKickout@reddit
No, it is how you end up agreeing to code guidelines which makes sense, and which makes code and changes to code clear enough that you within a reasonable amount of time can review a piece of code.
Typical example: Small commits that only do one thing ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯
SituationSoap@reddit
Very literally nothing you're describing requires punishing people who review code that contains bugs. It's an entirely orthogonal situation.
FlipperBumperKickout@reddit
Accountable does not necessarily mean punished if a bug slips through. But I would judge someone who let some very messy unreadable code go through a review without comments... bug or no bug.
SituationSoap@reddit
It's what it means in practice, and what it meant in the context of this conversation. The proposed situation was that if someone approved a PR, they were responsible for debugging and fixing the bugs that shipped with it.
I judge coworkers all the time for a lot of different reasons. But the point I'm driving at is that any time you try to place responsibility onto people who are peripherally connected to work, that responsibility will only fall onto the people who are already trying to do good work. Because the people who don't care about doing good work will just find ways not to do the work at all. They don't care if the work's bad; that's their defining characteristic.
FlipperBumperKickout@reddit
Ok sure, the original context was something about who have to fix an incident... which seems a bit impractical, but if you want to restrict it to that sure, let's end that thread there.
Hopefully it would not be someone who is peripherally connected who have to do the review since such a person wouldn't have the necessary knowledge to do the review in the first place.
Having people not doing work at all seems like an entirely different can of worms which there aren't any good solutions to without involvement from management... one could hope you could get rid of them ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
SituationSoap@reddit
I'd genuinely recommend going and looking at other teams in your company, and seeing how often PRs are approved by a specific person. I expect that you'll find that for most teams, one person is involved in substantially more code reviews than any other person on a given team. We can call this an antipattern all that we want, but it's the reality on the majority of teams I've been on for the last 15+ years.
All those other people on those teams who aren't getting involved with PRs regularly now also aren't going to get involved if you make the cost of doing PRs higher. Instead, you just push that cost onto the person who's already doing most of the work. Because they're the ones who care about code review.
There just is no way to force people to care about doing better code review. You can try to teach them how to review code better, and you can try to incentivize them to do better PRs, but you cannot force them to do it. It's not possible.
FlipperBumperKickout@reddit
People not motivated to do their job often times find their employers not motivated to keep them.
The alternative Bering that the few people actually doing the work becomes very motivated to find another workplace 😁
NUTTA_BUSTAH@reddit
Don't necessarily have to pile on work if they rubber stamp to begin with. That sounds like the means to endless PR battles. However, they are held accountable (at least on every shop I've worked in).
The developer asks for your review to check for correctness, suggest improvements and cooperatively acknowledge shortcomings, but most importantly they also ask you to be their comrade in arms when shit goes south, it's now on both of you (even when the eventual blaming will be shifted towards the developer, obviously).
If someone fails to see that as the reviewer, you have some glasses to clean.
Derp_turnipton@reddit
How many new minivans can you use?
How many obvious stupid things can you get him to approve without comment?
PerspectiveLower7266@reddit
Right, people are wrongly telling him to get involved. This isn't his issue.
pigtrickster@reddit
Is there a chance that this person has another job and is collecting two paychecks.
I've seen this a few times and even reported it.
I was getting disillusioned with the company until I found out that the Manager was already aware each time and working on the "remedy".
Helpjuice@reddit
Sad to say this, but it is not about working hard, but working smart. This person is able to delegate all their work to others, free up their time for whatever they choose and their lead is not reporting any issues to management at all. This right here will get them a wonderful work life balance, more time to spend with management, and grow into any management opening with all of their free time due to not having to do any technical work at all. /s
If you want to see them promoted faster than anyone has ever been let this continue, as far as management is concerned they are doing perfectly fine. You allow dead weight to do no work it will eventually cause angst within the team and pull down the high performers due to them having to pick up this person's dead weight.
You should be taking notes on all the deficiencies and report these serious problems to management so corrective action can be taken. This not wanting to work, not actually reviewing PRs, slacking on assigned tasks and just waiting for someone else to pick things up is a needs improvement, PIP category employee. Though, this formal notice of change is needed will never happen if nobody reports the problems.
Only path forward is report the problem to management to get it corrected, or do nothing and watch them get promoted.
kyle-sin-lynn@reddit
r/antiwork
Aggressive_Ad_5454@reddit
Sounds like nice work if he can keep it.
If you’re stuck with this guy use him as what we called a Corporate Turkey back at Digital Equipment Corp. Never give him a raise, instead use his salary cost to pad your raise budget and give bigger raises to the people on your team who work for a living.
If you’re no stuck with him, why are you asking us. “You’re fired” is a complete sentence.
Mountain_Sandwich126@reddit
Pip....
PerspectiveLower7266@reddit
So he's shown you what the bottom of acceptable is at your employer. Pretty big gift to you. Just ignore it. Do your work, not his. Don't cover or take the extra time. Just do your normal work on your normal time frame and stop carrying so hard.
positivelymonkey@reddit
Yup, I'd also take up his approach to code review. Maybe throw Chatgpt at it if you want to seem like you're still doing the job.
Delicious_Mousse4188@reddit
In my experience if their technical ability is quite limited them not contributing much isn't the worst case scenario.
Nothing will destroy your project faster than a person who is highly incompetent but also highly motivated.
anondevel0per@reddit
I work with a guy who only raises bugs and updates packages. It’s crazy out here.
XdtTransform@reddit
There are thousands of devs out there desperate to get work, any kind of work at this point, and this dude is just skating by.
martinbean@reddit
Not skating. Stealing a salary.
edimaudo@reddit
You can bring it up with your manager to outline your concerns. Its up to your manager to take action, other than that keep doing good work.
Martelskiy@reddit
I would not start with raising this with management.
I would talk to him directly. You need to find a smart approach so you don't mess up your relationships with him (he seems to trust you, considering what he told you), but also let him know that it affects your work in a negative way (he probably does not even think about it).
If that does not work out, go to the management and start politely describing the situation.
-fallenCup-@reddit
Don’t put any scrutiny on him that you are not willing to also receive. Usually the things that bother us mirror the ways we are also lacking.
If you take any of his work, make sure it makes you look good and thank him for letting you grow your own reputation at the company. Do this publicly.
bwainfweeze@reddit
I’m not sure that even works with people who are using their social skills to skate. They don’t have to come after you for the same thing you’re after them. They can come at you for anything like coming in late or not staying as late as everyone else or being grumpy. Shit I’ve seen people get punished for not finishing a story because they were putting out a fire that literally everyone thanked them for.
-fallenCup-@reddit
Just because bad things happen doesn't mean we should cower in the face of adversity.
Who is the nebulous "they" in your comment? Management? Other teammates?
I've been doing this since '96 and have seen plenty of bad actors doing stupid things, punishing my teammates or myself over petty issues. HOWEVER, there was ALWAYS something better right after that, a new job, accolades, a raise, better living situation, etc. as long as the one targeted stood resolute in the face of that adversity.
Being a target provides an opportunity to excel and grow; it's up to OP to either face that head on with a good strategy including gathering social support from his teammates or become small and unseen eventually being forgotten.
UKS1977@reddit
https://www.executiveagenda.com/resources/blog/five-dysfunctions-team-level-5-inattention-results
Inattention to results is the biggest rot in teams. If he doesn't care, soon you won't care. soon no one will care and at that point you all get fired - if you are lucky.
If you are unlucky, you have to support this mess for the next ten years, your skills decay to nothing - and THEN you get made redundant. And at that point you are unemployable.
If you want to have any self respect, you will ignore these people advising you to ignore it and "it's not your problem." It is 100% your problem. You will be judged on the weakest link in the chain - Him.
But before you throw him to the wolves - Help. Explain to him that this is causing damage for all of us. Try and offer him a way out.
And if he still doesn't take it - It means he cares nothing for you or your teammates. At that point I would do what needs to be done.
Because software development is a team sport - and he is killing the team.
Vetches1@reddit
In this case, if he doesn't care, what do you think would need to be done to properly address this behavior?
muslito@reddit
from experience this doesn't work unless you have a good manager and odds are if this is happening your manager doesn't care much either.
You will be seen as combative, you'll be creating more work for your manager, he will have to take action on something he didn't want to.
Not sure why would your skills decay though since you're still doing your job.
As others have said this person has shown you the minimum requirement so do that information what you will. Enjoy the free time, do pet projects, get another job, heck get a second job.
SituationSoap@reddit
This is the correct response.
callmejay@reddit
I go with a mix of working around him and just being very straightforwardly honest with management whenever it comes up. Never over generalize or say things like "he doesn't want to work at all." Stick purely to the facts, and only say something when it naturally comes up, but don't cover for him either.
I've been on a couple things with people like that and the teammates who matter usually know - - and know that the others know - - and route smoothly around it without saying anything overt. Any halfway decent manager will pick up on it really fast too.
Underdome_Moxxi@reddit
I had to deal with a colleague like this. The guy would clock out early due to some random excuse. Even my fellow devs kept saying he does nothing….but watches Udemy videos.
My favorite response from him was telling the PM it would take him a week to pop an array 👀
bwainfweeze@reddit
I mean at least he’s not watching sports videos instead. Udemy is at least pretending to get better at the job.
UntestedMethod@reddit
I would tell him I'm too busy with my own tasks to do his work for him.
bwainfweeze@reddit
I will first try to see if there are things this person actually wants to work on. With a team of at least six, you can start to afford to have specializations. It’s better at eight to ten, but you can make lemonade with your lemons if you can carve out a niche for them that you can trust them to complete adequately.
Kjufka@reddit
Is the codebase pure shit filled with annotation metaprogramming? Because if it is, I understand him.
bwainfweeze@reddit
I helped a very messy friend move. I arrived at the point where they were despairing of being out by the deadline. There was stuff and trash everywhere. So I went to the office. I told them to move everything out they were planning to keep, which took five minutes. Then I used a broom (on carpet, mind you) to scoop all the trash into the garbage, and then we moved all of the boxes that they and other friends had already packed and repeated the same thing in the rest of the house. I meant to come for two hours, stayed for four, and we got about twice as much packed as the rest of the day and other friends had managed.
When a mess is bad enough there’s no point in trying to work around it. It’s soul sucking even for the person who made the mess. You have to stop and prep the working area instead. I’ll work on any ticket you want but I’m doing Campsite Rule first because damn this shit is wack.
bwainfweeze@reddit
My first job after moving away from college I had a coworker who was super nice, invited me to parties, taught me about ergo keyboards, but his code was terrible and 2 of the 4 of us on our team did almost all of the coding because of it. I learned to watch out for them.
There’s a bunch of people who want your friend’s job. Including me if you allow remote work. Tell him this is a terrible economy to be taking his job for granted in.
Current-Fig8840@reddit
If this doesn’t affect you then mind your damn business. Don’t listen to these “talk to your manager” people. You never know the relationships others have with each other. It’s clear that some of you in this sub are seniors but don’t have workplace wisdom.
jombois@reddit
the self awareness is admirable at least
isotopes_ftw@reddit
I had a similar situation in my early career. It was a really uphill battle to get people to take action. Some advice from my experience:
marx-was-right-@reddit
Sounds like every principal engineer at my company 😭
petiejoe83@reddit
I feel called out.
But you're totally right.
08148694@reddit
There’s helping others and there’s doing their work for them. Don’t do the latter
If you have peer reviews as part of your performance review process, make sure you are candid and honest with your feedback about them
liquidpele@reddit
If your managers don't care, why should you?
PickleSavings1626@reddit
I would cold shoulder him, I’ve been there. Any requests from help are the usual “well what have you tried so far? can you please provide specific steps to replicate?” they hate that. start leaving them off pull requests reviews, and document that the last 30 had no feedback so not sure why you would continue adding them. etc etc
BarfingOnMyFace@reddit
Sounds like the life… I’ve been thinking of doing a 180 lately.
BarrySix@reddit
Go to your manager. This isn't your problem to fix.
justUseAnSvm@reddit
Bring it to the team lead, and if they aren't a people manager, the first level manager responsible for the people on the team.
This situation is tough, because it's a problem impacting work, but you aren't exactly equipped to be able to solve the problem. Therefore, you need a partner in management.
bstaruk@reddit
I had someone like this on our team, once... took me a few months to figure out that he was an /r/overemployed member.
Check if your coworker has a LinkedIn page... if not, they might be duping you.
Fspz@reddit
Well shit lemme know if you need a different nice guy but who actually works if 'the pay is good' 😄
bravopapa99@reddit
Yes, tell him to sort his shit or get ready to be enrolled on what IBM used to call the "career transition programme". He sounds like a lazy fucker and nobody needs that on a team. If its technical, maybe see about get him training, but if that was the issue he'd have done it himself already out of hours?
Reddit_is_fascist69@reddit
Conversations:
If you're friends outside work:
"I'm not going to rat you out, but don't expect me to do any of your work."
If you're not friends outside work:
Don't see any point in a conversation. Make sure you're not picking up his slack and make sure management knows those responsibilities/tasks are not yours. If he tries to throw you under the bus, then you need to go talk to management.
Useful-Barnacle-4689@reddit
We are not colleagues, right?
popopopopopopopopoop@reddit
This is a problem for your management.
But I'd recommend you stay empathetic and try and consider what the reason might be for him acting that way, besides being pure lazy. I.e. has he been there for a whole and promised progression/higher impact work but is left to deal with low impact shitty work?
Though I'd reiterate that this shouldn't be your problem, and if it is genuinely affecting you then you should speak with management. But if you do and already went to them with somewhat of a theory as to what might be happening and maybe even suggestions to fix it it could be a great way to further eadnt their trust and maybe open up managerial path if that's what you're after.
Full disclosure I am not a manager myself yet (though have been pushed that way), just a lead IC so take this with a pinch of salt. But I am of the opinion that in situations like this the buck ends with management and bad management would just put blame or call It laziness whereas good leadership would have empathy and try and understand the root cause/motivation issue better.
mirodk45@reddit
Can you elaborate more on this? Does it impact your workflow because you're stopping what you're doing to help him, or do you depend on him to integrate something? If you're not his lead or manager, then I'd say don't get involved.
driftking428@reddit
If this is due to his limited skills can you teach him how to do some of his tasks?
It sounds like he might just be trying to avoid things he didn't understand while he learns?
Dymatizeee@reddit
What this gotta do wit u?
drnullpointer@reddit
It should be really easy to expose his incompetence and laziness.
> However, he is a really nice guy outside of work related things.
Do you like to pull the weight for the guy or do you want to have a friend? Nobody can make that choice for you.
silenceredirectshere@reddit
Just never do his work for him, that's the only thing you have control over. If others cave in, that's their issue. I've worked with several people like this, and I'm quite certain management knew each time but werent bothered enough to do anything about it (or there is an office politics reason to not act).
KaleRevolutionary795@reddit
have you tried UNO reversing? if the manager is so hands-off that they are unaware they problably have no problem with you taking initiative: ask them if it's ok to delegate some work to others during downtime so that the workload is more evenly distributed. Proceed to offload work to him. Then track what they didn't do. Inform manager.
redreddit83@reddit
VP material right there.
a_library_socialist@reddit
Don't do his work, and forget about it. It really isn't your problem.
kenflingnor@reddit
Talk to your manager
shadowdog293@reddit
Have you talked to your manager about this