> I will take someone nice and incompetent every day of the week over a competent jerk.
I won't. I had this dilemma before. And I chose to take incompetent people. My life became miserable. I don't care about people being rude. I feel uncomfortable with people who would like to be rude but can't because they think it's inappropriate or w/e other thing they tell themselves. Somehow, they are more disgusting than people who are open about what they think.
Plenty of posters on moderated Web user boards belong to that later category: they'd like to be rude, but try to formally obey the rules of the board and still be rude. Just enough for the moderator not to ban them.
Same kind of people who'd delete complaints about their crappy program on a public bug tracker claiming the ticket author violated their code of conduct.
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I don't like to teach. Some people get off on telling juniors what to do. Most those that I saw teaching did it to feel important in their own eyes, beside the eyes of the junior.
But when I made the mistake of agreeing to hire incompetent people, the amount of chores increased by a lot in my life. I'm also not the one to force my convictions on those I have to teach, but that led to the "students" making bad choices when it comes to the tools they decided to use. Before they've made their choice, I made it clear that if they chose tools different from those I use, it becomes their problem. Unfortunately, they wouldn't be able to deal with that problem. And so their productivity was in the negative. They would still be unable to accomplish even very basic tasks, but they would also drag me down by trying to make me solve their problems with the tools I advised against.
Instead of just being able to split the work somewhat evenly, I couldn't trust juniors to do things that required independent research -- they felt overwhelmed at such tasks and, if assigned one, would just waste my time by scheduling meetings with me to "discuss" their objectives, where, essentially, they'd expect me to do their work for them and dumb it down so that they could also understand what's being done.
I also had to report to my boss on the progress my assigned juniors were making. I felt guilty that they didn't do squat, but at the same time felt like I might become the reason for firing them, and I didn't want to be that person either. Yet, at the same time, I didn't want to do stuff like taking over their branch and finishing their task, both because I think that not even the worst programmer deserves that and because, on a personal level, I didn't want to upset them -- after all, they were nice. It's harder to be a jerk to nice people.
If the only constant in the equation is you, maybe you should re-evaluate your assumptions? I am unable to determine if this was a on-time event for you or if this is an ongoing problem, so this is a question not a judgement.
I never tried to generalize this. This was just a report of how I see the problem. In response to the comment that described their personal attitude. I wrote it to illustrate that there are concerns other than those voiced in the top comment. This would offer the author an insight into how others have dealt with the situation they found themselves.
I don't see why based on above I need to reevaluate something about myself? Which part?
I won't. I had this dilemma before. And I chose to take incompetent people. My life became miserable. I don't care about people being rude. I feel uncomfortable with people who would like to be rude but can't because they think it's inappropriate or w/e other thing they tell themselves. Somehow, they are more disgusting than people who are open about what they think.
Plenty of posters on moderated Web user boards belong to that later category: they'd like to be rude, but try to formally obey the rules of the board and still be rude. Just enough for the moderator not to ban them.
Same kind of people who'd delete complaints about their crappy program on a public bug tracker claiming the ticket author violated their code of conduct.
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I don't like to teach. Some people get off on telling juniors what to do. Most those that I saw teaching did it to feel important in their own eyes, beside the eyes of the junior.
But when I made the mistake of agreeing to hire incompetent people, the amount of chores increased by a lot in my life. I'm also not the one to force my convictions on those I have to teach, but that led to the "students" making bad choices when it comes to the tools they decided to use. Before they've made their choice, I made it clear that if they chose tools different from those I use, it becomes their problem. Unfortunately, they wouldn't be able to deal with that problem. And so their productivity was in the negative. They would still be unable to accomplish even very basic tasks, but they would also drag me down by trying to make me solve their problems with the tools I advised against.
Instead of just being able to split the work somewhat evenly, I couldn't trust juniors to do things that required independent research -- they felt overwhelmed at such tasks and, if assigned one, would just waste my time by scheduling meetings with me to "discuss" their objectives, where, essentially, they'd expect me to do their work for them and dumb it down so that they could also understand what's being done.
I also had to report to my boss on the progress my assigned juniors were making. I felt guilty that they didn't do squat, but at the same time felt like I might become the reason for firing them, and I didn't want to be that person either. Yet, at the same time, I didn't want to do stuff like taking over their branch and finishing their task, both because I think that not even the worst programmer deserves that and because, on a personal level, I didn't want to upset them -- after all, they were nice. It's harder to be a jerk to nice people.