Jane — or When Your Genius Developer has Behavioral Issues and is Bullied by the Team
Part two of a series about the real complexity in Software Development: People.
See part I: John — or Being Held Hostage by Your Early Days Tech Lead.
Software is complex — but people are a mystery. You can think you know a lot about building software, but you still need people, and where software issues can mostly be resolved rather easily, the same isn’t true for problems with people and teams.
In this second part of the series, I’ll first describe an open question I asked the LinkedIn community about a month ago, about ‘Jane’. Like John, Jane is a fictitious character that has traits of people I met during my career as a CTO, but by no means represents one single person.
Although this story is about very personal, and sometimes emotional, painful situations, it’s important we get stories like these out for all of us to learn, because all too often, companies sweep this stuff under the rug, making it impossible to ever take learnings from it.
Let’s go.
We’re looking at an ambitious B2B SaaS startup that recently got a good round of funding.
The startup was struggling to move away from their first ‘legacy’ software, which had been developed by a dev agency.
The agency had built quite the monolith, and since they’d had no technical oversight, and only functional requirements to work with, they had done so in a rather unsustainable way, as it happens, when non-technical founders engage with an agency to have their MVP built.
For the agency, your product is never more than their project. And as scope creeps, project extensions are taken on and functionalities delivered. Just never look under the hood — right?
The newly built up insourced team, being relatively inexperienced, overreacted in wanting to ditch the monolith, and overstretched in their efforts to create a full blown microservices architecture.
Aside: Microservices are almost never a good idea in startups.
Because of all the perceived (and actual) complexity of this microservices approach, and because of the near standstill management experienced since the insourcing efforts began, they were still expanding their teams with Senior Software Engineers.
It is during this limbo state that ‘Jane’ was spotted in the hiring funnel.
Jane looked exceptional in the stream of mediocre candidates. The hiring manager immediately got that, but sensed that she might not be the easiest fit in the team, due to her introverted, shy nature.
Jane got hired because of the potential people who interviewed her, saw, and within weeks, she started delivering.
She outperformed everyone in her team and provided the answers others had trouble in bringing to the table.
She would normally be called a Tech Lead, or a Senior Cloud Architect, but the startup decided not to have any hierarchy, and applied very democratic principles to everything development.
Jane simultaneously saw the architectural issues (and was able to fix them), and could reason about the right direction of travel for the company for the foreseeable future.
Jane singlehandedly got the startup out of its limbo state.
Trauma
But Jane was also a traumatized human being. She had issues with socializing, and her deep felt uncertainty caused her to sometimes be verbally aggressive and show a lack of empathy.
Although individual members of the team initially saw Jane’s genius, and could show respect when Jane came, saw, and victoriously showed the way, Jane’s lack of social skills and her temper soon unified the team in collectively moving into demonizing, ridiculing, and undermining practices.
Obviously, this escalated quickly to middle management, then up the chain.
Management, and the board, were divided.
Some, by now, had chosen the side of the team.
Others were trying to empathize with both sides to resolve the situation, without much success.
Everyone was biased.
The issue was addressed with both Jane and the team, and it had become clear that something needed to happen.
Jane did show some self-awareness and was willing to work on being a better team player, but this would not be easy for her, and resolving the actual issues would require much more.
Losing Jane would be disastrous for the company, since everyone could see what she brought to the table.
This was the end of my little story, and “What would you do?” — was my open question to the community…
The answers were as diverse as ever, and really showed how we all bring our own family- and cultural values into the workplace.
None of us are whole — we all carry our own little traumas or at least some unresolved issues, and we all turn to generalization when we need to — to cope. It’s just us being humans.
Many people suggested that Jane should be offered a path with a mentor, to make her conscious of where she needed to not let her personal trauma be projected onto the group. Some even suggested Jane should get a sort of a permanent ‘buddy’, someone in the company who she communicates well with…
Others claimed that personal trauma should never be allowed in the workplace, that losing Jane would not at all be disastrous, and that the company should get rid of her immediately, or at least after setting up some clear rules and have her ‘comply’.
A few ‘Jane’s recognized themselves and stood up for her, saying she should simply be allowed to work in more isolation, as an individual contributor. After all, not everyone fits into our social framework, and into a Scrum regime.
Some touched on the ‘autism’ topic, having detected what they thought were slightly autistic traits, and said the company should help her by accommodating for her special needs.
What strikes me in all the reactions, is that the vast majority of respondents never reflected on the “demonizing, ridiculing, and undermining practices” of many of Jane’s team members.
In my view, it’s really important to look at the whole group dynamics, even if Jane’s outbursts might have been first in the chronology of things (which we will never know).
Adults should never resort to group-bullying individuals. This is something young adolescents tend to do when they’re still developing their own identity.
If there’s one single point I’d like to make with the portraying of Jane, it’s the inability of us all to cope with people that don’t fit in.
So I’m calling out to the mediators, the high EQ people, the leaders who lead with empathy, who sense the patterns and are able to deescalate, to coach, to listen to individuals’ needs, and breathe inclusiveness.
The world of software engineering needs them — probably even more so than other working environments.
