I have a SDE2 colleague that I like as a person, but I do not enjoy having him as a teammate. When given a task, he is often unable to progress with the task on his own, unless the details of the task are broken down to an extreme detail (almost to the point of telling him what code to write). So he often requires help from fellow SDE2s to get work done. He is quite old and a lot tenured than I am. But his technical competency seems to not be up to par. It is like working with a junior engineer thats almost old enough to be my father. Working with him on a project is starting to get painful, as he often slows down the project. He generally never finishes all the tasks assigned to him, and whats left ends up getting passed over to me. Should I provide feedback on this kind of teammate? Please share your thoughts or similar experiences.
Move to a better team and leave the poor guy alone. You need a high paced environment - instead of messing with a mediocre performer’s livelihood - go to a better team. He maybe dyslexic, autistic or just slow brained and he can’t help it. Unless you’re the manager it’s not your prerogative to interfere with his employment.
Isn’t that how most of the swe2 work? They need lots of hand holding and low level details. If he is old and still recruited as swe2 that means interviewers were already aware of his skills/age mismatch. Try setting expectations with them that you prefer them figuring out low level implementation details. Let them own the outcome and leave rest to them.
If you cannot work as a team, you are fired.
Be kind and let the old guy keeps his job. It would be hard for him to land a new job…
Yeah, I like the guy so I don't want him to lose his job. I was wondering whether providing feedback would help him improve. I guess I'd rather not take the risk.
Agreed. Don’t give this feedback to anyone, unless you want to talk to him directly and really help him improve. See it as a learning opportunity for yourself: maybe you can find some things this guy is good at (could be documenting things, could be running tests) and try to split the work to make him end up the stuff he’s better at (if you can). One day you might be a manager and the skill of finding and encouraging everyone’s talent is important. I’m sure that guy has some talent.
You will do this team mate and rest of the team a favor to provide feedback to your manager. In the long run this teammate will benefit from getting feedback on improving performance and do something about it.
This is not how amazon works. He will be piped
How did he pass the interview?
Our team basically takes anybody with a pulse due to operational load
Seriously? Can you refer me please?
Put em out to pasture
Also, how do we draw a line between age related discrimination or pure competency issue. Just curious
Why don't you give this feedback to them directly before writing it down somewhere
If he is new , give him some time . Usually in a new environment , some people can get overly cautious as they don’t want to make unintended mistakes , and if he is very experienced he might be thinking on those lines . Give him 3-6 months to understand the tech stack and then give feedback
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Uh oh