I had a junior engineer once, a few years back, who could not take criticism.
He would get flustered, angry, sarcastic. His work wasn’t good. I did my best to help him — and even though I was polite, he always seemed to take a kind of deep, personal offense at whatever criticism I had for him.
There were many problems I had with his work — he wasn’t great at testing his code (at a surface level, sure, but rarely thought deeply about the implications of his changes. E.g., once he got a ticket to clean up some code throwing lots of warnings, and solved it by making the code not work at all. He tested that it wasn’t throwing warnings, but didn’t realize that it had an early escape condition that was being triggered inappropriately every time.)
He surprised me with his lack of basic knowledge that I would’ve expected from a CS graduate who’d also made an app or two outside of school. He didn’t know what a database index was, for example, among other issues.
He was also not great at communicating. When talking about his work, he’d use technical jargon incorrectly. His emails to outside vendors were meandering and difficult to parse. I coached him on these points extensively.
In the end, after 6 months or so of trying to help him, I asked our CEO to fire him. We gave him a month’s severance.
A couple months later, his lawyer got in touch with his, alleging racial discrimination. The allegation was that we fired him because of his accent. He interpreted my problems with his communication as being a problem with his (slight, barely noticeable) accent.
Our CEO told me to work on how I levy criticism of others. I mean, he’s right I’m sure. I thought I was being precise and polite, but perhaps I did give the wrong idea.
Or, maybe this hire just wasn’t used to criticism. He didn’t understand how to take advice. He didn’t know how to internalize it and act on those suggestions. When fired, he blamed an immutable quality about himself rather than something he could change.
I mean, this is story of management incompetence basically. This has much less to do with person nit accepting criticism or being outright sociopath/psychopath. This has to do with management not knowing how to fire people, keep paperwork and getting scared when the word layer is used.
It is hard to prove racism or sexist discrimination. It is just not easy at all and you need more then assertion.
I left out a great deal of detail. We had documentation. We closely work with an HR lawyer, and consulted with her extensively about this individual long before firing him.
We didn’t get “scared” of his lawyer. Lawsuits are distracting and expensive for both sides even if the allegations are baseless, and we avoided one in this case by just offering a bit of a larger severance than we originally offered.
I had a junior engineer once, a few years back, who could not take criticism.
He would get flustered, angry, sarcastic. His work wasn’t good. I did my best to help him — and even though I was polite, he always seemed to take a kind of deep, personal offense at whatever criticism I had for him.
There were many problems I had with his work — he wasn’t great at testing his code (at a surface level, sure, but rarely thought deeply about the implications of his changes. E.g., once he got a ticket to clean up some code throwing lots of warnings, and solved it by making the code not work at all. He tested that it wasn’t throwing warnings, but didn’t realize that it had an early escape condition that was being triggered inappropriately every time.)
He surprised me with his lack of basic knowledge that I would’ve expected from a CS graduate who’d also made an app or two outside of school. He didn’t know what a database index was, for example, among other issues.
He was also not great at communicating. When talking about his work, he’d use technical jargon incorrectly. His emails to outside vendors were meandering and difficult to parse. I coached him on these points extensively.
In the end, after 6 months or so of trying to help him, I asked our CEO to fire him. We gave him a month’s severance.
A couple months later, his lawyer got in touch with his, alleging racial discrimination. The allegation was that we fired him because of his accent. He interpreted my problems with his communication as being a problem with his (slight, barely noticeable) accent.
Our CEO told me to work on how I levy criticism of others. I mean, he’s right I’m sure. I thought I was being precise and polite, but perhaps I did give the wrong idea.
Or, maybe this hire just wasn’t used to criticism. He didn’t understand how to take advice. He didn’t know how to internalize it and act on those suggestions. When fired, he blamed an immutable quality about himself rather than something he could change.