The engineer is phenomenal at his job, but he’s dismissive, non collaborative and just mean to people. With our market today I can’t afford letting him go, but I don’t want him to ruin the good culture we have on the team. I keep assigning him work that he can do fairly independently but that’s not sustainable forever. There’s no career growth for him in my team/company if he continues like this, and I don’t see him changing. If you’ve faced such a situation, how did you handle it? #tech
I can’t ship my problem to another part of my company. And I can’t give him good reference either….
Been in this situation before, if they aren’t a good fit for your team, might not be the case for another team! Don’t assume it’s an also a problem for a different team until you tried and failed hard enough to find another role in the company for them.
Read the “No Asshole Rule” TL; DR - they should be fired after a stern warning if they don’t straighten up
Treat it as a coaching opportunity. Ask him if he wants to be a people leader some day. If yes, here are some things to work on. Alternatively (or maybe in addition), recognize that he’s a senior leader on the team and that some of the others are struggle with X. Get his perspective on how he would approach doing and teaching X. This will get him to change his perspective and recognize that he has the power to empathize and help
I liked your answer more than mine.
Wow never in my life have I expected this answer from Amazon. General rule of thumb suggested is “stay away from managers who transitioned to that role at Amazon”. Guess it’s not universal.
Start preparing his replacement and let him go when ready. Meanwhile also keep giving him feedback. Appreciate what's going well and share what's not going well. Doesn't matter if he changes himself or not. You keep giving formal feedback.
tell him straight up, why do you have to baby him? Don’t risk ruining your team culture and lose out all your nice members for one person.
Person who is not easy to work with will cause more damage than a less skillful person
THIS.
Is OP the mean one 🤔?
You are setting a really bad precedent that being an “intelligent asshole” is fine for the entire team if you continue with them. Have you shared any feedback with them around this ? If no, why not and if yes , what was their response and did you notice any effort from their side to make things better. If feedback was shared but they didn’t not act on it then I would fire them and try to find someone while exploring the possibility if the team can absorb some of his work. People are replaceable and no amount of individual brilliance can compensate for a bad team culture.
Put him on devplan, coach him to improve on Earn Trust. Anyway just PIP.
I don’t have any advice but I want to know, is it better to lose this 1 person or 2 person who can’t stand this person on your team? As u said yourself, the market is hard to hire. What’s stopping the other members from going elsewhere?
That’s a good point. That’s why I assign him work that doesn’t require him to work with people. Which I admit is unfair for him as well. And as I said it’s just not sustainable for anyone. If I let him go now, I’ll lose a good coder, if I delay letting him go, it feels im cheating him now by not telling him to truth.