I honestly tend to get much better along with cynic people (and find them much more pleasant). In other words: tastes differ.

In my experience most companies work with a wide distribution of people. This "we avoid hiring people who have defects" reads as disconnected from reality. Nobody is perfect, and most companies are average and have average people.

Conversely, when upper management fucks up, and refuses to take responsibility (for example: admit to making the wrong decision, or even reverse the decision), that's when cynicism runs rampant among the rank and file. And gee, what a surprise, VPs and CEOs try to avoid underlings that speak up about the screw-ups of the brass.

Honestly, I get much better along with malcontents than with these "annoyingly positive" people. So, tastes differ.

> An interviewer can assume that most quality candidates are also aware of this dynamic and will wisely choose to represent the positive aspects of their job history.

Many highly qualified candidates are bad actors and/or bad self-promoters.

Otherwise you will be forced to reject him because there might be a possibility that the problem was him.

Seems like you are hiring the best liars. Or at least the best at playing an arbitrary game of saying and not saying the correct things that won't trigger a rejection.

At this point, are you even needed? Maybe we could replace the interview process with a lottery system. Same result, less expensive.

LOL, are you kidding? The human condition is mostly shitty.

in many polite circumstances people don't want to hear a truth, they want things to go smoothly and easily.

Rather than giving in to it, I've taken it as a signal that something needs to change -- I'm surrounded by the wrong people, in a business with bad market fit (a root cause of this kind of toxic culture that isn't talked about enough IMO), etc. Sometimes a good place has just rotted. Like entropy, I don't think this sort of thing can be reversed once it's set in.

I recently interviewed with a great company full of great folks, and I was given the chance to frankly but firmly (and slightly humorously in a gallows humor sort of way) state precisely why I was leaving my last company; in fact, I used it as part of the interview where I interview them. This section of the interview went well, because as far as I could tell, these people are smart, down-to-earth, no bullshit, and appreciate living in the truth. They're a small company, so people can't hide behind bullshit as easily. I much prefer that.

The cognitive dissonance displayed all over this thread and tendency to hand-wave it away by painting anything that isn't playing along as not understanding social cues, lacking tact, etc, makes me sick. The whole culture is childish, literally -- it reeks of the particular brand of lack of accountability, tendency to gaslight, and so on that is displayed by children. When coming out of a 4-year-old's mouth, it's easy to disarm and work around and excuse, almost cute in its ineffectiveness; when coming out of a company, as a matter of policy, it's authoritarian and frightening.

I really, really can't stand it. The good people are out there, however.

And bosses who read between my lines? Terrible.

Read some communications book. Reading between the lines and using tact are the (literal) textbook cases of poor communicators.

In my case, this happened a few times. My solution to that is: whenever I get the impression that I'm becoming a critical path for someone else's day-to-day work, I start to wean them off the direct advice and start pointing them to where else they can find the answer instead. If they ask how to do X, I'll say, "Sorry, I'm a little busy with something else but here is the documentation for it. You might start by looking at Y or Z first. I'll check in later if I get a chance, let me know if you have any questions at that point."

One team member had a TBI. My manager gave him a custom track so he could succeed. That sounds kind, but it meant the rest of us had to constantly check in, fix problems, and slow down for him.

Another person had lots of field experience but couldn’t handle problems without getting emotional. He built walls around every challenge and pulled people into his frustrations. He had the title of senior consultant, but he couldn’t do the work without a junior staffer helping him every step.

Then there was a junior person who had already underperformed in another team. Instead of addressing it, leadership moved her to my team, where she had even less experience. If I gave her 10 basic tasks, she would typically only complete 7. Not challenging tasks, just needed follow-through. My boss told me to keep setting clear expectations and checking in more. But she just kept pulling time and attention away from the actual work.

She was also split 50/50 between her old team and my team. I kept telling my boss and the other SVP that this made no sense. If someone is underperforming, the worst thing you can do is give them two sets of responsibilities. There’s no way to hold them accountable. Any time she didn’t deliver, we’d say, “Well, maybe it’s because of her other team.”

And here’s what really got me. My boss admitted he wanted these people off the team while enabling them. I ultimately pushed the field guy to deliver actual work until he quit. I kept pushing for the junior staffer to be placed on one team that could pin down her underperformance until the other team took her back. Leadership talked about fixing things, but they wouldn’t act. And it put me in a role that I wasn’t supposed to fill, applying pressure on my teammates rather than support.

This is an organizational deficiency with promoting engineers to manager roles as a matter of course. My boss was a fine engineer, but he was a horrible manager and no one held him accountable for his bullshit. I saw people go around him to complain to his superiors, but it wasn’t well received or productive.

Shame on the organization.

Pre-emptively, I'm not saying anything below applies in your case :-).

A mismatch in the threshold of "they should already both know and have internalized" is where much of the friction in high-stress organisations comes from.

I see a lot of people expecting, as the parent post put it, "a clear set of steps that can be burned down [to get to a good result]", but entirely oblivious to the fact that the people they expect it from:

1. Don't have the organisational authority to organise it -- they can do "their part" but they can't tell people on whose work they depend what to do.

2. Don't have access to the same task-specific information as the person who expects it of them, and don't know who to ask because teams are heavily compartmentalised and/or hierarchical.

3. Don't have access to the same kind of organisational information as the person who expects it of them.

Much like responsibility, deflecting blame comes from above. In my experience, what the parent poster says is true: people who are bad at what they do and try to make it someone else's problem is probably the most common source of stress. But it is also my experience that the middle leadership layers of companies where this is a chronic problem is almost entirely populated by managers who try to make everything other people's problem, and whose teams end up having to deflect everything by proxy whether they want it or not.

I think this is part of the nuance that's lacking in the parent post. It's very hard for someone to work significantly above their organisation's level.

But it's always an uphill climb because there is an internally-consistent manager-brain line of thinking for the workspace they've created, and it's really good at Uno-reversing any criticism of workplace norms as a problem with criticizer.

"Oh, you don't like working with people that are bad at their jobs? Sounds like someone's just not senior-ing hard enough."

So where you work everyone works on the same things every day and the same patterns?

Sounds pretty circular if everyone just lives by the subset of understanding you prefer.

This is what smacks truest from my experience; companies stagnant because of workers like you focus on memorized maintenance routines. Internal evolution comes to a stand still as attention is put on memorization of existing process not evolution.

Again just anecdotally coworkers like you describe could be put to evolving process they seem to not connect well to. But patronizing seniors who just know codified routine, hold orgs backs.

> The prevailing method of estimating the length of a border (or coastline) was to lay out n equal straight-line segments of length l with dividers on a map or aerial photograph.

> the sum of the segments monotonically increases when the common length of the segments decreases. In effect, the shorter the ruler, the longer the measured border

> The result most astounding to Richardson is that, under certain circumstances, as l approaches zero, the length of the coastline approaches infinity.

I know very well what working with non-10x engineers is.

I also know ver well that performance is a management and HR issue, not an engineering issue.

Your job as a competent engineer is to make your team work. Your responsibility is to help out fellow team members whenever they need to be unblocked, and create a healthy, accepting, tolerant work environment. Your job is to be trustable, not make others hate their job, and not be the toxic asshole who makes everyone miserable and drives others away from your team. Because otherwise it is you who create high-stress work environments, and burn out people.

For my part, I choose to have a good attitude about work. I am grateful for the opportunity to work. I do the best I can so that I can be proud of how I have spent my life. But I would never expect any job or any work to provide me fulfillment or happiness.

That implies not only a value judgement dichotomy but also an added heap of shame of the morality on those on the wrong side of that value judgement.

Those are not the same things as being okay doing the work you're paid for and not reaching higher - people who do that may have a much better sense of the business value they are providing, and may be trying to avoid an experience of being exploited, or prioritizing their health and well being for the long term rather than the short term needs of the organization that pays them. There's often not a good way to know who is who.

Most of the time when enticed with a reward, people will work harder. When they aren't enticed enough, they tend not to, and that level is different for everyone. Companies seek those who have internal reward structures so they don't have to offer very much to entice people.

They don’t care about reality. They care about accountability. As long as the numbers are right, everybody’s happy. And if you’re out of budget. Hooray, one difficult meeting and everybody, the consulting agency, the champion inside, a few manager, get a nice increase in their budget and team size.

Unfortunately it’s not about the product, impact, quality, etc.. it’s just a game, and everybody’s just taking from the corporation/their customers (ultimately consumers).