The definition posted of an asshole casts a very wide net making discussion difficult.
Diversity is important and it isn't just about sex and skin color. People act differently, people have different priorities, confidence varies, life situations outside of work alters behavior as do medical conditions and treatments. Different cultures even in this country value vastly different behaviors.
Not everyone is perfect just how they are but everyone doesn't have to act the same way to be acceptable.
Labeling, setting up dichotomies, and othering people can be a much more toxic behavior than being an "asshole".
People with Asperger's or otherwise on the autism spectrum can be huge "assholes" by the definitions here. Does autism make you unemployable?
Behavior issues in the workplace and out are much more nuanced than this.
It is good to be pushed out of your comfort zone in both needing to develop thicker skin AND showing empathy to others' sensibilities but within bounds.
Sorting people into bins: assholes and victims, is problematic.
When it comes down to it, not everyone must work well together. Just like there is a wide diversity of people's dispositions there can be a wide variety of team dispositions. Not fitting into a particular group doesn't have to make a 'wrong' person, it can just mean the best fit is somewhere else. Become a big enough organization and it is something you will have to face.
> People with Asperger's or otherwise on the autism spectrum can be huge "assholes" by the definitions here. Does autism make you unemployable?
Those "smart assholes" with Asperger I know can be very nice people if being nice is rewarded. But it requires a conscious effort on their side (and fair feedback from those around them). If being an asshole is tolerated, they take the easy route of not caring.
> It is good to be pushed out of your comfort zone in both needing to develop thicker skin AND showing empathy to others' sensibilities but within bounds.
Maybe. But in my experience, most of the "victims" usually don't speak up. It is those with an already much thicker skin, the ones that don't shy away from a confrontation, who bring up the topic.
EDIT: I overall object to the label of "asshole". Insulting people with toxic behavior is toxic in itself.
Oh and the other thing I didn't see anyone address is teaching "victims" the right Ju-Jitsu for dealing with (intentional) assholes / bullying - the mindset of don't let anyone make you a victim.
I had the "good fortune" of having an internship years ago with a tyrant. This person loved publicly shaming the interns, among a whole bunch of other toxic behaviour, continual needling etc. etc. Their life was a mess, marriage falling apart and alcoholic but beating up the interns was this person's way of boosting their ego up again. They were also a master of ducking and deflecting any possible blame.
Being on the receiving end of this for a year, I was so upset and frustrated that I vowed never to let it happen to me again.
After trying various strategies I found the most effective solution is very simple: get a group of people laugh at the asshole, ideally as a direct response to bullying from them in a group setting. Typically you only need to pull that off once and they will leave you alone from that point on - most bullys are cowards in the face of real resistance. Actually you don't even need to be funny - you just need to do something that can't missed by the group or the bully and creates awkwardness, e.g. a loud, slow clap in response to their comment then if they quiz you on it, you just say "Just giving you a round of applause"
I could write a lot more on this, and much of it would be easy to misinterpret in today's PC culture so I won't but, in essence: don't fall into a victim mindset - stand up for yourself.
In 2010, Dieter Zapf and Claudia Gross took 149 victims of self-described bullying at work and taught them various conflict resolution techniques and studied the results. The effect? Victims tried various strategies and even altered their strategies several times before realizing nothing worked. Many resorted to frequently skipping work, but even more resorted to fighting back with the same kind of behaviors. Eventually, most victims left the company.
I guess the essence of what I got from it, was if someone is attacking you, you want to observe how they’re doing it and what you think is driving them to do it. The idea I got from the Book of Five Rings is that for any type of attack there is a response that can stop the attack in a single strike. That response varies depending on the attack. But that’s how I came to group laughter being the “strike” that will usually stop the intentional asshole / office bully type.
And yes that may sound like childish, school playground stuff but often the reason someone behaves badly in an office hs it’s roots in their childhood
> ...the most effective solution is very simple...
No, definitely not simple.
These people have intrinsic deep-seated personality defects.
Sure, personality changes do occur in life but they take A LONG TIME, and barring trauma, aren't precipitated by any single event, especially something as as simple as people creating humiliation in a workplace. In other words, you can't "change" an assh*le or force them to curb their personality to the point where it's not noticeable.
You either grow a thick skin, avoid them, force them out, or what most orgs do, nothing-- just wait for their behavior/value ratio to cross a line that precipitates expulsion from the group.
to be fair he said at least in this case(i could see it working in more cases and is very group psychology but a bit passive agressive)they left him alone not that they were not assholes anymore.
I like this. Recently, I semi-seriously recommended BJJ for a bullying situation. In adolescents, I see BJJ working to help kids calm down and for boys and girls to get along in a time fraught with drama. I followed my boys into BJJ and think it has something to teach adults too. When you are the victim it will make you less intimidated. When you are the asshole it gives a constructive outlet for aggression which when misdirected is a good definition of bullying. I think there are a .1% of us who are unredeemable assholoes. The rest of us are all potential assholes and we need to watch out for the conditions which make such behavior happen. And BJJ, we all need some BJJ...
I have been doing BJJ for a few years and while it's not the perfect "ego filter" that some people claim, I have found it extremely effective in teaching coping skills. It's almost been too effective, in the sense that workplace behavior (when directed at me) that is 100% unacceptable often doesn't bother me enough to say anything.
In my experience, once you've spent a few hundred hours having physically larger people literally choke you at full intensity and practicing how to stay calm and methodically turn the tables, very little in the workplace impacts your calm.
I found that doesn't always work. Telling certain types of asshole directly telling them to piss off directly results in something like "I have _no idea_ what you're talking about? You're being too sensitive. And I find your rude/aggressive/whatever manner offensive...", all the while grinning slightly. Some even feed on the fact that they got you annoyed enough to confront them. With that comes exploiting the notion of qualifies as acceptable, professional behaviour such as getting emotional in response to bullying or threatening someone with "piss off or else..."
You might need to resort to this kind of childish stuff in grade school, but in the workplace, HR/management needs to step in and take care of it. The professional way to handle it is to directly address the person's behavior once, and then if it continues complain to HR/management in writing.
That's very nice in theory but in many situations ineffective or problematic for the person involving HR, e.g. if the person you're dealing with is your boss, if they're deliberately exploiting the system, if you're working as an external contractor, if HR is incompetent and many more.
Also it places the burden of effort on the target of the abuse vs. addressing the problem at its source, swiftly and quickly.
But anyway what I'm saying is a nuanced argument and comment threads are bad places for that. You already judged it "childish stuff" and I'm sure others think the same so I'll leave it there.
The autism spectrum is wide and diagnosis isn't an exact science. ~1-3% or 1:30 to 1:100 rates are at the right scale.
Autism is easy to point at to make one think the response to "assholes" should be thought through more carefully. There are many others, not always as easy.
Yet, I am not ready to believe every asshole I met were undiagnosed people with autism or Asperger though.
It's way over 1:100 or even 1:30.
Also, I believe assholes have a different set of intentions than people with autism or Asperger but don't quote me on that.
I had a client who told me once he could head butt me without feeling bad about it, his doctor explained to him he was schizophrenic and that was why (yeah, right, I know). He was an asshole.
Also, I header years later he ended up shot in the head and his body was found in the forest.
Even so, one of my older bestie (whose mom was schizophrenic) told me schizophrenic people can be asshole too if they wish and play the game, beyond what could usually comes with the symptoms.
All of this is juste anecdotes though.
> Autism is easy to point at to make one think the response to "assholes" should be thought through more carefully. There are many others, not always as easy.
I believe that whether people are assholes because they are assholes or autism/asp. (and I don't believe every autistic person or asperger is automatically an asshole, quite the contrary) it's up the the other side to find the resilience/methods to deal with it in a respectful way (respect for oneself and the other). Don't put fire on it, whatever the origin.
> Sorting people into bins: assholes and victims, is problematic.
This is true of anything subjective. There are people (intentional assholes in this article) who absolutely _are_ assholes because it gives them pleasure - their ego or otherwise gains something from hurting others. Everyone in a company knows who they without needing to go through a labelling process. Ultimately it's a problem for leaders in a company, those that should be caring about the culture, to remove such people.
Excellent reply. I make the joke ot myself "you are always the last to know that you are the asshole". I think there are systemic problems which can cause folks to be 'assholes' against their best attempts to do otherwise. The original article hugely oversimplifies this. (Not a big fan of the Aspbergers exclusion, though - I see this used a lot)
"Hello, my name is Cole and I can be an asshole.
The definition posted of an asshole casts a very wide net making discussion difficult."
It sounds like you have made a decision to not examine the cases where you have been an asshole and make serious efforts to improve. And a smart organization might decide to get rid of someone like you.
> Not everyone is perfect just how they are but everyone doesn't have to act the same way to be acceptable.
This undermines the very concept of "law and order". There "must" be restrictions on behaviour if it is intrusive, offensive, inflamatory, indecent etc. I think it is okay to have an enforced "code of conduct" to prevent assholery.
1) Laws are supposed to be precise. If there was a law against "stirring shit and troublemaking" as the OP suggests, it would be applied mostly against those who are out of favor.
2) Laws presume that the accused person is innocent and give them a say in defense. Good luck with that if you're accused of a code of conduct violation.
Psychopath are by definition assholes. They account for 1%-3% of the population. Narcissists are another category of assholes that account for 1% of the population.
There is no ambiguity these people create toxic workplace.
This is why i really dislike the diversity-crowd (straw-man here...). The only result were some laws obligating people to explicitly name the minorities of the month. The only proponent of this is the HR department. Nah, not really, but they have to.
The diversity crowds achievement was to give corporations more power. If I were belong to a minority, I wouldn't dislike the diversity crowd, I would hate them with unrequited passion.
There is a difference between equality and equity. There is also a conflict between equity and freedom. But these are discussion that will never again surface in the next 10 years, because of the diversity crowd.
The straw-man I describe are giant assholes in my opinion. And I wouldn't want to have anything to do with them. Because they are also toxic.
edit: Further more, I think people defining an allegedly large and epidemic group of people as untenable, are probably assholes. Unbelievable...
> It's easy to "imagine" what you would do if you were a minority. Especially when you haven't lived it.
A better way to run the argument would be to address the substance of raxxorrax's argument here, for example by pointing out any specific problem with the way he imagines what minorities feel. Instead, you doubted his ability to imagine it, despite you don't know him at all.
From Wikipedia:
"Ad hominem (Latin for "to the person"), short for argumentum ad hominem, is a fallacious argumentative strategy whereby genuine discussion of the topic at hand is avoided by instead attacking the character, motive, or other attribute of the person making the argument"
I pointed out that he is complaining about the "diversity crowd" and at the time asking for us to embrace his diversity. I'm not sure how that's Ad Hominum? Furthermore, the parent comment states, "If I were belong to a minority", which implies he is not a minority. (leaving aside and grammatical issues)
I also wasn't sure about the exact meaning of ad hominem. But I found this definition (which is a bit more detailed than Wikipedia's) on Rational Wiki [1], and it seems to match our situation:
> Premise 1: Person A makes claim X
> Premise 2: There is something objectionable about person A
> Conclusion: Therefore, claim X is false
raxxorrax made a claim on what he would feel if he was a minority (probably implying that this is how some of the minorities might feel right now, I'm not sure if this was part of his point). My understanding is that you objected to his claim by saying that he can't imagine what minorities think because he isn't a minority.
A couple of times I had similar arguments with my friends, when I said something about how I think minorities should think or act, and my friend would say that I can't understand minorities, because I'm not one. My friends had a reason to think I'm not a minority, because I'm a white male living in a country where my ethnicity is prevalent (> 80% of the population).
The thing they didn't know is that I grew up in a different place, where my ethnicity was a minority, and I went to a high school where > 90% percent of kids were of different ethnicity and religion. And this all happened in a provincial town in Central Asia, where people don't care much about diversity and tolerance, especially if they are your teenager classmates in a boys-only high school. So I think in some points of my life I did experience certain stress and discomfort because of being a minority, although right now I don't feel myself being a victim or anything of that sort.
This is why I got triggered by your first comment, and made that remark about ad hominem. Because of its resemblance to a situation I was in a few times. And actually, for me it isn't such a big deal to start a new argument about whether it's an instance of ad hominem or not.
Thank you for responding. Many of these threads end up being shouts in the dark.
I truly felt like the "you're not a minority" part of my comment was incidental. My larger point was that in asking people to accept an opinion that is outside the mainstream, or to consider how different your upbringing was, you're asking people to respect a diversity of opinions.
I tried to point out the a big part of the diversity movement is recognizing these diversities, which often come with different genders or different ethnicity.
It is for anyone who has been an outsider in a social setting. This article describes methods to identify certain character traits and isolating them. This is pretty clear cut for anyone who actually has relevant experience.
This article is overly fixated on overt assholery. Much of the worst asshole behavior I've encountered has been done by people who are outwardly polite and high functioning and have often never had a cross word for anyone.
I would much rather get a tersely worded group email (ooo) than have to do someone else's job for them.
Let's be frank. The #1 asshole thing not mentioned here is (shouting and swearing alert) NOT DOING YOUR FUCKING JOB. This is an immense source of frustration for other people, whether because they have to do the person's job for them, or because the person's failure to do their job creates disasters.
In many of the situations I've seen (or, frankly, participated in) where someone is behaving somewhat like an asshole, the root of the situation is that (a) someone isn't doing their actual job in a remotely competent way, (b) that someone isn't doing anything to fix that situation and (c) management doesn't know or care.
> the root of the situation is that (a) someone isn't doing their actual job in a remotely competent way
Not really. I've worked with several assholes. They were all extremely assertive, and usually also very competent (but I've found also the utterly incompetent ones). The problem is that even if they're right 95% of the time, the 5% of the times they're wrong they force everybody along the wrong path, because their purpose as work is not to get stuff done right, but to assert their status. So talking them out of a bad idea is impossible, and they tend to favour solutions that serve more the purpose of demonstrating their skill than to get good results.
(As an aside, since assholery is widespread in software engineering, it is legitimate to wonder how much of the so called "best practices" floating around are just exercises in one-upping each other in a status game- "hey, you write your tests first, but you should really write them first in this obscure DSL that is being promoted by the creator of ... ")
How do you know if assholery is not also wide-spread in other industries. I often swop stories with my sister who works HR in tourism. Our experiences working with people are largely the same. I suspect it's a normal distribution of assholes in all industries.
> Much of the worst asshole behavior I've encountered has been done by people who are outwardly polite and high functioning and have often never had a cross word for anyone.
Indeed, there are many ways to hurt, belittle and generally make someone feel bad or unwelcome without being blamable for anything.
Eh at the very beginning of the article, the writer states that this article is exclusively about smart assholes, assholes who are good at their job. Someone who is not doing their job is not a smart asshole and is much more easily identified and removed.
You're not really addressing my point, which is that there's a big range of behaviors that are assholic and that some of them (as described in the article) are equally likely to be viewed as reactive to the behaviors of slack/lazy assholes (who are often smart and at least potentially good at their job).
If you think that it's always easy to identify and remove some asshole that's not doing their job, well, you're either not very experienced or you've had the good luck to only be in places with way more functional management than some of the places I've been in.
>I’m specifically addressing the epidemic of smart assholes that are actually good at their jobs, at least on paper.
There are plenty of smart arseholes, who can do their job well (if they wanted) but prefer to be an arsehole. I'm reminded of the Sociopath layer in the Gervais Principle.
This. I've been made to feel like the asshole in situations like this for "not helping" them figure out how to do their own job. Some people are beyond help (within the context of project) because they do not possess the requisite knowledge to qualify themselves for the position and we don't have the time to bring them up to competency. They were probably interviewed by an overseer of their craft rather than a practitioner or perhaps concessions were made in order to "save" money. I've seen this worsening throughout my career, but I believe that it's largely growing pains. When demand is high and supply is low, quality suffers.
"not doing your job" is incompetence, there might be many reasons for that ranging from being promoted too quickly without enough support, life-hardships that occlude performance, or just NOT UNDERSTANDING what one's job actually is (yes, it happens).
Sure, it sometimes happens that someone feels so entitled that they can justify loafing and pretend-work, that's definitely a-hole behavior, but those other explanations are far more common.
In my experience its entitlement not incompetence that's identified as asshole behavior. Oh this person did half the work and bypassed all code review and automated testing and merged their code using admin privileges. Now somethings not working, can you take a look? I'm sorry, are you not capable of handling this? Why are you being so uncooperative?
Never attribute to incompetence that which is obviously malice.
OK, what you're talking about in the example goes far beyond "not doing one's job", however, and definitely crosses into the personality defect zone of a-hole.
I've seen a few cases of that, and in those instances I resent my country's worker protection laws, OR a company's reluctance to cut off underperformers (which costs severance monies).
>Let's be frank. The #1 asshole thing not mentioned here is (shouting and swearing alert) NOT DOING YOUR FUCKING JOB. This is an immense source of frustration for other people, whether because they have to do the person's job for them, or because the person's failure to do their job creates disasters.
One additional problem that I have with this: I feel like the asshole in this situation.
I recall one instance where one of my coworkers was teaching the interns how to do things. When I was working on the code, unit tests failed totally. After spending hours figuring out what had happened, it turns out that the two interns hadn't run the unit tests locally before pushing. And then I had to round up the person teaching the interns as well as the interns and figure out what they had done and what had they had been taught about running tests.
Luckily people tend to learn from their mistakes, so hopefully the end result is that the interns remember the importance of testing with the expense that I look like an asshole.
The chain of events was really the combination of mistakes from the interns (since apparently one of them had been running tests, but with some misguided ideas), from the person training them and the management for thinking we should hire a bunch of interns at the same time and offload their training on couple of people. You can obviously form your opinions on how much of the blame is on which party.
Why would informing people about the importance of testing make you look like an asshole? You could do it in a polite and helpful way, instead of being an asshole about it.
> the article in question called it an asshole thing to do [publicly calling out and blaming others]
It's all about how it's done. In the case described above, an explanation of what happened, why it happened, how to avoid it in the future, and perhaps a little humor would be positively received by everyone involved.
On the other hand, someone could very well have the exact same situation and make it into a-hole incident by shaming the interns and making them reconsider even being there.
Automation takes this and a whole class of problems out of the interpersonal domain. Failed tests make the build fail. Who ever breaks the build buy donuts for the team. Easy, solved and no personal issues. Include a linter in the build, incorrect formatting fails the build. The team decided on the standard format (tabs vs spaces, 4/2 spaces, brace same line or next line etc). More donuts. No arguments because linting rules were decided by the team. New members adapt.
Setting and enforcing reasonable community standards, aka “this is how we do things around here”, is rarely experienced by the learner as an asshole action.
> Asshole behavior begets additional asshole behavior from others. Non-assholes are hardened into assholes over time to survive, and a spiral of incivility reigns.
I've been infected by this before. Never again. (I prefer to slap up so I ended up getting shown the door.)
Before we go through a hiring round with my team nowadays, I like us to review what I've seen approvingly referred to over on Metafilter as The Baboon Article:
> Dr. Sapolsky has no idea how long the good times will last. ''I confess I'm rooting for the troop to stay like this forever, but I worry about how vulnerable they may be,'' he said. ''All it would take is two or three jerky adolescent males entering at the same time to tilt the balance and destroy the culture.''
>''And if baboons can do it,'' he said, ''why not us? The bad news is that you might have to first knock out all the most aggressive males to get there.''
To me, the definition of an asshole is slightly different. An asshole is someone who acts out every social interaction on the principle of "dominate or be dominated". It's the lack of a middle ground that makes an asshole, so that people can't just go into an interaction being each other's peers, and also finish the interaction with being each other's peers, having been nice and respectful towards each other, preserved each other's individual freedoms, and exchanged some information.
I agree that assholery has a tendency to spread, and the mechanism in my observation is as follows: You can start out NOT being an asshole. When there is an asshole for you to deal with, you'll realize "All of my interactions with this person end up with this person dominating me." But you don't like being dominated because that's natural (psychological reactance), and bad for your career. So next time you interact with that person you know you have to act on the principle of "dominate or be dominated", i.e. the asshole-principle. Soon enough it becomes a habit, and you may inadvertently behave towards non-assholes as an asshole as well, making you an asshole.
Another interesting corollary of this definition of asshole is this: If you perceive a lot of assholes around you, maybe YOU are the asshole.
It also explains why you find more assholes as you go up the corporate ladder: Being higher up means you get more opportunity for exhibiting domineering behaviour without repercussions (namely towards your subordinates).
>To me, the definition of an asshole is slightly different. An asshole is someone who acts out every social interaction on the principle of "dominate or be dominated".
Your definition is complementary to the author's. You are talking about relational motivation, the author about the feelings that are evoked in the person being dominated.
> It may seem “unfair” to toy with the idea of losing the assholes, particularly the unintentional assholes. Since they “don’t know better” it seems almost cruel to let them go simply because they’re making everyone around them miserable, and it somehow feels like a smaller request to have 50 people tolerate one asshole’s behavior than to demand one asshole figure out how to not alienate everyone with whom they interact. Frankly, I think you’d be doing an asshole a favor by losing them, nothing is a better teacher than failure.
So…..
Once you have successfully labelled someone, you should actively fight any tendency towards empathy with them. Don’t bother worrying about whether their behaviour was intentional. Just kick them out. It’s for their own good.
At this point, I’m labelling the author an asshole.
>Once you have successfully labelled someone, you should actively fight any tendency towards empathy with them. Don’t bother worrying about whether their behaviour was intentional. Just kick them out. It’s for their own good.
That's not what the article said. It said that first you make clear to them their behavior is unacceptable, and if that doesn't work then get after them every time the exhibit asshole behavior, and only if that doesn't work after months of effort, then fire them.
I really love the euphemisms/double entendres/word play. It definitely makes it more fun to read.
One thing I realize as I read this is that, I’ve definitely engaged in certain ‘asshole behaviors’ at times. It’s been a long challenge to become more socially skilled and handle pressure/emotions better, but a lot of bad habits linger, I think.
The worst habit of which is definitely complaining about coworkers to other coworkers. Not in a hateful or personal way, but sometimes when I get frustrated by something someone does, I vent to someone unrelated instead of confronting the other person.
Another terrible habit that I had in the past was a tendency to respond while still fuming, which never ends well; usually it ends in both sides of an argument escalating while others grab the popcorn.
I hope I make enough effort to not be the kind of asshole that needs to be flushed out of an org, but similarly hopefully it’s not just me that is imperfect at the art of not being an asshole.
>Another terrible habit that I had in the past was a tendency to respond while still fuming, which never ends well; usually it ends in both sides of an argument escalating while others grab the popcorn.
Right there with you and I'm the asshole who wrote this post. I know I have a tendency to want to strike back when I feel struck and I also have a tendency to go way overboard, in that "don't throw the first punch but throw the last" kind of way. Honestly I think everyone has asshole behaviors every now and then, a true asshole doesn't know or doesn't care when they act like a prick. The fact that this is something you're consciously aware of and working on I think means you're fine.
One book I might recommend though is 'Nonviolent Communication' by Marshall Rosenberg. It definitely feels a little hippy dippy at times and the skeptical asshole in me occasionally rolls my eyes at it, but I think it's really helped me understand some of my own communication tendencies and given me a lot of tools to help curb my own shit.
Haven't come across Marshall Rosenberg, will have to look him up when I get a chance.
Have you come across Fred Kofman, he has this thing he calls Verbal Aikido, check it out here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O6N9nvk8bvE - he also has some books that fall loosely in to the hippy dippy category while still valuable in my opinion.
Rosenberg also narrates the audiobook version. His delivery is a big relief compared to the usual bravadoish and disconcertingly deranged manner of the self-help or ‘soft skills’ genre. Even though I'm still having trouble with the anecdotal nature of the argument, it's a lot better than e.g. “Don't Sweat The Small Stuff.”
At least 10 thousand years of civilization, and we are still trying to figure out each other and ourselves.
Why is "Don't be a dick" so hard to codify?
All these religions, ethics and philosophical systems, and all this technology, convenience and comforts.. and we still have so much friction in interacting with others of our own species.
The best solution we seem to have found is leaving each other alone.
I've come to believe that true maturity is the realization that everyone is capable of feeling the same things you feel.
But most of us – me included – seem to have "Single Player Syndrome" where we feel that we are the only person capable of feeling what we feel, and everyone else is an NPC with diluted senses and processing capabilities.
The major problem is we die, so if we didn’t die then yes those 10,000 years of civilization would help because of the life experiences of the survivors,
So:
1.) Not everyone reads history books
2.) We die
3.) Social stats reset at birth, pray you have parents who treat you and other people well
The only permanent solution is an evolution of our species where the asshole gene is gone or a collective hive mind
Multiple hypothesis I can quickly think of, I wouldn't know which ones are correct or not :
- "Don't be a dick" doesn't offer any advantage for one's genome transmission, meaning any genetic base to being a dick will get transmitted no problem.
- Being a dick propagates, while not being one doesn't, meaning the society has a whole becomes "dick-ish by default" (much like entropy, with dick-iness) unless this is actively acted on.
- Religions, culture, nations, companies... actively encourage people to being dicks to everybody not in their group, to preserve and expand the group, meaning we're actively trained to being dicks by our social environment
- Our brains default to "everyone is an enemy unless proven otherwise" , meaning people will tend to be dicks by default.
- Not being a dick makes one socially vulnerable, so it's only achievable in very safe contexts and not by default
Excellent article. I hope managers read it. The toughest problem I've had w.r.t. assholes was convincing managers that certain people were in fact assholes and they were not essential to the company's survival. Assholes are extremely good at kissing up and shitting down. And managers don't like to hear they've been manipulated.
The a--hole royalty that I've encountered defeat every measure offered in this article precisely because of the effectiveness of their kissing up and sh---ing down strategy. Actively sabotaging literally every decent person they encounter (because the other people don't share their 'culture'), turning every item in their punchlist into a tool of political conquest where the rules are: make your victims look bad by any means possible, and then the kicker-- when they choose to turn on their social skills, expressing a highly superior feeling of confidence and ability to persuasively blame all the other a--holes for their own tyrranical behavior.
No, when you get a royal a--hole into a large organization, I really don't have much hope for average managers with typical business training to do anything but watch.
Not sure exactly how but I’ve mostly avoided places where being an asshole is acceptable. This could be to do with actively avoiding bro-fest type places, looking for high-impact rather than high-pay kind of work, but I can’t really take credit.
Separately, I’m quite shocked reading this HN thread seeing people defending the behaviour the article describes. I suddenly feel like I don’t really know the tech industry at all!
What's ironic is...the only people I can think of that I've worked with over the years who exhibit the signs called out in this piece were VP level or higher.
The signs listed of an asshole are pretty easy to spot but try sniffing out the 'hidden', highly-skilled two-faced exec. asshole. They are readily promoted and treat execs. one way and low-level employees another.
It makes sense, in a way. Sociopaths are willing to do things normies aren’t, therefore they have more options, therefore they have more paths to success.
Slang for "asshole" in Spanish is "capullo" or "gilipollas". Originally, these words described a dumb,candid,innocent person, but nowadays they are used to refer to "smart assholes".
"listillo" is another word for "smart asshole" that I like. Literally, it means "little smart person". Diminutive of the word "listo" (smart)
"enterao" is yet another word for "smart asshole". It is a contraction of "enterado", a person that knows about everything.
1. Benign lack of social skills (terse emails etc.). These people are not a major problem in my experience, and are sometimes even under-appreciated because they don't (successfully at least) sell themselves or play politics. They don't really have bad intentions and can often improve their behavior.
2. Narcissism (belittling others, must always be right, etc.) This is a _huge_ problem that in severe cases can destroy an organization. Such people are basically incurable because this is a deep seated psychological problem (really a personality disorder) and nothing a manager can fix. You must get rid of such people at all costs.
Unfortunately, we have plenty of examples of successful companies where toxic behavior is rampant.
I agree that firing assholes improves a company's morale and environment, but sadly there is little evidence that it actually help a company's business.
I linked to as much hard evidence as I could but I'll agree that it's a little light. My hunch, just based on my own observation doing this for 20 years, is that an asshole is like a black hole of productivity, draining it from everyone else to such an extent that they're simply not worth having around, and that no matter how Brilliant they are, the rest of the team can figure out their areas of expertise with the morale boost they get after leaving (or drastically changing their behavior, though sometimes the bridges are burned too much for recovery).
Again this is mostly anecdotal, from what I've seen teams do when the Resident Jerk was fired or left. I've never in my 20 years as a professional software developer seen a single person leave a team and then see the team immediately fall to pieces because that person really was the critical lynchpin that people thought. I've seen lots of people stick around far, far too long because folks (management usually) were WORRIED that's what was going to happen, but it never actually seems to.
I have seen that a couple times, mostly in startups: a highly functioning brilliant jerk was doing a pretty good job leading teams, but they had no patience towards poor performers and that caused morale issues.
Eventually the person got managed out (not fired, just isolated from the teams) and upper management thought the team would just eventually thrive after some short loss of productivity, but that never happened: the poor performers were put in front of the customer who commissioned the project (role that was usually handled by the jerk, who was highly competent at that due to their technical brilliance and assertive personality even with the customer), and after a few round trips the customer smelled the incompetency and literally said “we’re going to quit this project, we feel like there’s no technical direction lately”. Massive loss for the company, in the 7 figures. It almost caused the company to fail due to that being the largest customer at that phase.
In those cases, the jerk did an amazing job at keeping a very productive technical communication with the customer, and keep the high performers on track towards what really needed to be done in those projects.
Part of the problem is an a--hole is surrounded by a zone of disaster and chaos of their own creation, which makes them all the more indispensable. A--holes do not groom successors, they burn competitors (which everyone else is).
Disclaimer: I am an independent contractor mostly because I fled what I consider structural defects of the corporate world, so a bit biased.
Isn't it a matter of management though? Assholes can be productive to a company if you have a good manager doing damage control and sinking time into firewalling the asshole.
Given the prevalence of this disease and the abundance of managers, it seems like a good way to increase the hiring pool of a company.
As a manager, you want to contain an asshole just enough so that coworkers do not leave, also enough so that the asshole feels they have to make up for their social behavior with additional skill and hard work (which is not hard, they are often competitive).
I believe (and that's the reason why I don't want to employ people) that the optimal point for a business is when you maintain your employees on the edge of quitting. Assholes create stress and competition, an environment where projects often strive and individuals wither.
All the ethical managers or business starters I have known have been replaced by more assholish versions. This could be anecdotal evidence of course, but I think that assholes are better suited for a corporate world of greed and competition.
Why do you believe that the optimal point for a business is maintaining the employees on the edge of quitting? What are the pros and cons of doing this?
It seems to be a very simple way of looking at it: squeeze out as much as possible from the employee without losing the employee - hence on the edge of quitting.
However, I think it is way too simple to be useful. People who are happy and relatively less stressed are way more productive on average. (Yerkes - Dodson Law applies here)
I have no proof, by my gut feeling is that success in business is generally a concept assholes are better adapted for.
The reason I say this is that most companies that we consider "successful" are in my experience mostly being assholes to their customers. Since a company doesn't have an independent personality of its own, I imagine that such behavior must come from the people at the top of the food chain at those places, or at least the people very high in that chain.
I wonder if that is instead due to successful companies being unable to properly vet applicants when there is pressure to find applicants for fast-growing businesses.
> I agree that firing assholes improves a company's morale and environment, but sadly there is little evidence that it actually help a company's business.
Maybe the root issue lies with our societies putting business above ethics. "As long as you're making money, everything's fine, until you piss off someone with more money than you."
I think it's often about people's needs and goals. Assholes maybe could help your company's success short-term, but would infect the culture long-term. And it seems to me that most people want quick success.
Around these parts the term 'attitude disability' gets floated once in a while. It doesn't translate very well... but the translation doesn't need the negative connotation it has over here.
Nullifying a circle of tit-for-tat takes a lot of energy, and stable blood sugar. Too much short carbs in prefab food is causing all of us all kinds of damage.
I honestly think this kind of hits the nail on the head. The industry (in my opinion) is far too tolerant of asshole behavior for many reasons, and it's basically just created a safe place to be a jerk without any repercussion. I largely wrote up what I did because I'd like to see this change, we should treat rude and annoying behavior the way that most other industries do by making it something we culturally don't accept. The same folks who realized they could be jerks and it wouldn't hurt their careers will simply figure out that now it will and knock it off.
I always get the impression that it's "technical assholes" vs. "wise managers who should be brave enough to fire the assholes."
In practice: I see lots of assholes in management up to the director level, and the CEO doesn't do anything because they just hired their friends. Then, people just leave. Nobody cares because the issue of "tech assholes" is trendy these days.
I’ve been struggling a little bit with this myself, and while I don’t think it’s been a massive problem for me (yet), I am aware of it.
I have a very assertive personality, which has done wonders for my career despite my average technical competency. Managers love to hear from me because I have (and have been told so) good communication skills, specifically the ability to quickly summarize pros and cons of solutions, while keeping extreme fairness in my technical judgements. On top of this, my “fearless” (asshole?) personality makes me treat everyone in the hierarchy (including VPs and upper management) as peers, and I have no problem arguing with them if I feel I have a reasonable technical issue I care about and diverging opinions from theirs.
Most of my brilliant coworkers, much more technically talented than me, tend to be more introvert and never “pick an argument with management”, which also means they never get the visibility I get, which results in public praises, financial incentives, and interesting work. I wonder if they perceive me as asshole.
I can find myself in your description. One thing I conscientiously do in the hope of not being an asshole is using my assertiveness to publicly praise those brilliant introvert coworkers that I feel deserve more recognition than they get.
I've dealt with my share through the years... the most problematic asshole I encountered was definitely in the 'unintentional' mold: friendly, outgoing, always willing to help others... So what made this person an asshole?
They WOULD NOT LET GO their solution to a problem. If the team agreed on another approach, every planning meeting or conversation for the next month got derailed to rehash why this persons' idea was the best, and why we should change our decision. If we held to the original decision, this person would call team meetings with PO and PM 'to help resolve the issue'.
This person didn't badger juniors. On the contrary, this person would have side conversations with the most junior devs to get them 'onside', then come to the senior devs with "the rest of us have been talking and we think the way forward is X".
Caused a lot of divisiveness on our team before getting fired.
Yes, this is a better point than the one the OP was making: while everyone can agree assholes are bad it's not always easy to spot them.
Similar to your experience: I had a colleague who was extremely negative. Everything was horrible, every manager was stupid. Nothing was done right, ever. We never worked on the right project and if we did we never did it the right way, according to him.
I think he just valued his role as a contrarian: if everyone else was wrong all the time it meant he was always right, that he knew better and more than the rest of us.
I used to tell him if he hated things that he should suggest better ways of doing things to management or, if all else fails, find a new role or new company that would make him happier.
But he never did, he just liked complaining and/or making others miserable. But he didn't walk around with a sign that said "asshole" -- he could be polite and friendly and well-adjusted during the normal course of a work day.
Then what do you do? Do you engage the person and argue with them? Ignore them and hope the problem goes away? We all know toxic coworkers exist, the question is how to change their behavior or deal with them effectively.
This article builds on the premise that a few employees are assholes and none of the managers are. In my experience, the reality is the exact opposite, where all managers (especially those at the higher level) are assholes. In that case, none of the considerations of the article seem to be useful. Yet, it is a fun read, especially the "unrelated" pictures and the colorful language.
I am surprised by this sentence:
> Formalizing social skills as part of the job description can help with this.
This kind of thing leads to a subtle but most damaging form of management assholery, whereby employees are "invited" to participate in social gatherings at expensive places, and are frowned upon if they don't participate.
If a job description "formalizes social skills" I expect very distressing interviews in which HR idiots are going to judge my personality and my values and an oppressive environment in which, for instance, managers are going to draw a line between disagreeing and having a bad attitude.
I think it's hard to unasshole someone who doesn't want to be unassholed, or who simply doesn't value it. But I think if you really call out every single behavior that's assholey (in private, so they aren't embarrassed and defensive) then eventually people do start to get it and, if they want to change, can.
It could be one of those fake it 'til you make it deals. Someone is an asshole internally still but puts on a veneer of nonassholeishness because they are operating in an environment where it's not tolerated, and over time kind of mellow out. At the time of writing this comment, there's only one comment on my post and it's from someone who says s/he indeed was an asshole and it took this kind of incessant badgering to figure it out.
Someone in authority has to tell them specifically what they're doing wrong and that they have to stop.
I've seen people fired when they didn't listen. The improvement to the rest of the company greatly exceeded the loss from that individual. It is a big factor in psychological safety.
And you can set up processes to limit harm from untrained or malicious people. For some reason this doesn't seem to be widely done when it comes to internal "asshole" behavior.
Lots of companies require code reviews before software gets deployed or require two signatures on a company check. But they'll have freeform meetings where anyone can speak next if they manage to grab the "floor" and won't maintain records to prevent someone from claiming undue credit for an accomplishment.
I dunno, seems easy enough to give a set of rules to follow in the workplace but as someone who's worked as a college tutor, it can be hard to impossible to get some people up to speed technically.
True, you can't train anyone, but whether someone is trainable and eager to learn is usually apparent very quickly. It's not always something that comes across in an interview, but usually.
The article rang true for me in that I am the asshole to some people but I don't start out an asshole. I just get impatient after explaining or documenting something 10 times and people ignoring it.
I still want to minimize that bad karma but just letting people be bad at their job with no consequences doesn't seem good either.
I deal with rather...prickly folks on a daily basis. Nothing like dealing with folks that have multiple violent felonies on their record (and, to be fair, many of them are now extremely decent people) to help develop your "people skills."
I try not to be an asshole, myself, and do try to avoid contact with them, where possible; but we don't always have the luxury of being able to pick those with whom we must interact.
In my experience, I have found that I have a great deal more control over the nature of my interactions than you would expect. If I am dealing with an asshole, I can rather quickly figure out what kinds of things are likely to exacerbate their issues, and avoid those behaviors. Doesn't let them off the hook, but helps me to exert a bit of control over our relationship.
I work for a company where the CEO has specifically implemented a "no-asshole strategy" from the start.
He too talked about the "asshole effect" that causes companies to fall apart. Hire one asshole, and everybody eventually turns into an asshole. Results: the company is only nice guys, and it feels so good. Sure we occasionally hire the asshole. But they're rooted out fairly quickly.
How to keep assholes at bay:
1. Stay small: Bringing the right people in is more important that shipping that project faster. Fast growing companies all get the asshole disease and then have to cut their arms off.
2. Have a lot of people interview: I had 18 interviews for my job. The company had 25 people.
Interesting bit about the 18 interviews. While your company sounds like something really cool, I'd probably not go through all those interviews unless a) they're brief and we move through them quickly (like, in <2 months tops), b) I know about the process in advance so I can prepare and c) I'm paid for my time, starting from after the screening interview.
Regarding c) - 18 interviews, each taking at least 30 minutes (screening would be 15 on average but other would make up for it), that's roughly 9 full hours of my very own time, if not more.
sounds like your boss builds a company on the assumption that people can never change. From my experience if you have a strong team with good core values it's easy to absorb and change / condition the behavior of the odd outlier. In fact that outlier will realize that they need to adapt to the new environment (and when they do you have changed that person's outlook and maybe even their mental health and insecurities).
The sooner we realize people's character isn't a binary good or bad and that we are all the victims of our own insecurities, the better we'll be off. Alternatively we can like your employer create policies which keeps us in our own bubble thinking that we're the good guys (this is when we're also runny risk of actually becoming what we set out to destroy).
> Would you hire someone who you know is an open racist,
ofc not, I think some people are just terrible and no amount of good will is going to integrate them anywhere. But my point is that a strong team can absorb some people that don't seem 100% fitting on the first impression. From my personal experience many people I got on fine with initially afterward turned out to be terrible team players and turned out to be wolf in sheep clothing (and no amount of screening could have prevented that). Others were questionable but given a chance ended up holding everything together when it mattered.
IMO there is no silver bullet against weeding out toxic individuals and there is likewise no guarantee that with a binary approach by putting people into the good/bad camp some won't be thrown under the bus.
Also the most creative teams I worked with were often totally crazy mix where it's natural egos rub against another. Reading the post all my alarm bells ring. The author would be labeled under my definition of toxic, yet I'd still give him an interview knowing that he'd be surrounded by people more mature than him and potentially 15-20 years older. He wouldn't stand a chance in a group where he was the most senior from a knowledge or age pov.
Firstly, what's the opposite of asshole. Is there a name for that?
Secondly, this:
>Really, you can’t afford to keep assholes around - it’s better to have a hole in your team than an asshole.
That may not always be true. It may actually be better to have an asshole than a teamhole, particularly if project delivery is dependent on the asshole. It may be unpleasant but unavoidable - at least temporarily. It may also be a financial issue and financial issues affect shareholders, and shareholders can be assholes. You win some, you lose some.
The closing section made it all worth while. Probably the best 3 paragraphs I've read all year.
The article's advice on making positivity an official part of a company's culture is great! As is the mentorship/management strategy described for fostering positive behavior in problem cases.
But firing an "unintentional asshole" over their lack of social skills seems like an easy way to be on the receiving end of lawsuit, particularly if terminated employee has a medical condition that explains the behavior in whole or in part. Firing someone with autism over their lack of social skills could land you in deep shit.
i strongly believe in a diverse workforce, especially in large companies, diverse workforces often times mean better results especially since problems today are even more complicated. having said that, i totally understand and have seen some of the bad behaviors you mentioned like putting people down, insulting others, this can be quite toxic. i'm not saying i condone any of those types of behaviors because i certainly don't, but i think asshole labeling can be quite arbitrary, e.g. someone that's terse and seemingly abrasive may just be more direct/candid, is he/she an asshole? what i'm saying is that bad behaviors should not be condoned, but these individuals definitely have value to companies and can create beautiful work, and we shouldn't reject them based on certain labeling because the labeling is quite frankly discrimination and should equally not be tolerated. one person that particularly stands out in my mind is linus torvalds. asshole? for sure, by almost all counts of your definition of an asshole. given that he's improved lately and has admitted his issues, but he's still an asshole by my books :) would you want anyone else working on linux kernel which requires having a lot of different contributors working in large teams, probably not.
My problem with this is that it assumes there's only a single isolated asshole in the company and he exists in a social vacuum. It's much more common for multiple assholes of varying degrees to exist somewhere, and being assholes there's a very good chance they are not working together and instead are engaged with each other in GoT-tier power struggles. If a firable asshole is suppressing a worse unfirable asshole, do you still try to get rid of the former?
Asshole: people who you don't like. Every interaction with others should make you feel good about yourself otherwise the other person is an asshole. You are never an asshole by definition, of course. Maybe a victim, but asshole -- never. Diversity means having people around who think and behave the same way as you do but have different hairdo or different thing between their legs. Introverted or depressed people are assholes, needless to say. Again, the most important thing for you to prioritize is your own good feelings about yourself because everything that's non-assholey in the world is designed to make you feel good.
There is a straightforward list of specific behaviors early in the article. None of it is defined by how anyone else feels; that's just the effect of someone who engages in that asshole behavior on a regular basis. The next comment down and probably half of the readers are trying to figure out if they're the asshole themselves, so I don't know where you got the idea that "you" are never the asshole.
(Sure is great how HN shows me this wonderful comment on top because it happened to be posted 9 minutes before I loaded the comments)
"Here’s a simple test: if someone walks away from another person feeling bad about themselves, they were probably interacting with an asshole."
I'll tell you that eg as manager there is no way that some of your conversations won't end with the other person feeling somewhat bad about themselves. You have to fire people. You have to explain that some behavior was clearly wrong. Sometimes you need to explain that despite best efforts the person is just simply not developing quickly enough professionally. That hurts, however you put it (you can do it carefully, sure). Hey, you will need to explain assholes that they're doing the wrong thing. Are you sure you can do this without making them feel bad about themselves?
Just be very careful with labeling people. It's usually not a great strategy, especially if you use terms like asshole. Try to be emphatic, understanding. Labeling people is one way of being an asshole.
Most conversations are (hopefully) not about firing the other person, unless the company is rapidly imploding. I think this is an implicit precondition of the test – it's about unnecessarily making someone feel bad, on the assumption that most conversations are not of the sort where the message to be communicated is inherently and necessarily bad news.
I agree with sz4kerto, these rules are too vague. For example, the rule against "starting shit and troublemaking" can end up being mostly used by assholes against non-assholes.
I can't help but regard some on the list with suspicion as being far more own fragile ego driven than any actual assholishness. More "you made the sociopath angry by not going along with his bullshit" ones which I see in the anti smart "jerks" one.
Some of them are unconditionally valid of course but the list includes questionable ones.
* Publicly calling out and blaming others
What if they actually are to blame or deserve to be called out? Putting it on the never list is a bad idea but it should probably be a last or N to last resort.
* Stirring shit and troublemaking
That is dangerously ambiguous as terms to include both in terms of what qualifies as stirring shit. If it is actually trying to rile people up fine but that exact phrase could be used for anyone who goes against the grain. Trying to stop bad practices which /will/ lead to literal disaster because "we have always done it that way" or reporting misconduct can also be called the exact same thing.
Related cluster
* Ignoring people trying to contribute
* Dismissing the opinions and ideas of others without discussion
* Undermining someone’s confidence for asking questions
There is one major problem with this sub-block. It never stops to ask if the "victim" is themselves massively wrong and doesn't get the hint that they are themselves negative in productivity and not even getting any learning out of it. To be frank the case where they aren't ignorant or even inept but an outright idiot who doesn't take a hint.
Like saying insisting the company should make their next car run on water and doesn't listen to why that is thermodynamically impossible (it would actually run on whatever substance it reacts with). While there are values to considering alternative approaches and departure from conventional wisdom willful ignorance isn't equal to actual expertise no matter how "polite" it may be to treat as such.
This may be where the you are never the asshole perception really creeps in - despite all of the talk about two way communications and feelings of others that the other party may be in the wrong and not "the asshole". It can look like every reference to the others is really just obfuscated grammar for myself to make the writer sound less self centered and like they have more support than theh really do.
Yours is one of multiple comments defending "Publicly calling out and blaming others" as a valid occasional behaviour.
In my experience, this has never produced any positive result for the companies I worked for.
I don't mean people don't make mistakes, I mean that the punishment strategy of blaming them don't seem to me to have any positive effect when used. Then again, I'm not very experienced, so have you (or anyone else defending this) had any positive experience with that ? (on either end of the interaction)
I had a similar reaction. Haven't we all run into the opinionated junior who dominates a 10 person meeting and won't shut up, take advice, or focus on executing their job competently before chasing some "prestige project"?
There are better and worse ways to deal with that person, but after a while, most merely human people will do things on this list rather than (for the nth time) gently explain that said junior needs to "pull their head in".
No. Your response is the reasoning that every non-asshole makes as they get converted into an asshole because of their interactions with assholes. The response to someone being an asshole to you shouldn't be to be an asshole back to them. That is how assholes spread. It is possible to disagree without being an asshole. Just watch some videos of Obama responding to republican talking points for some examples.
>The next comment down and probably half of the readers are trying to figure out if they're the asshole themselves
Well, you see, most of the readers aren't the management. The management will read this article thinking they're saints and half of their subordinates are assholes. And most of them are, under the author's definition. So you can see how regular employees might be put off by an article like this.
> Eyerolling, sighing, or otherwise negative body language... Tersely worded group e-mails that make people feel uncomfortable... Interrupting people who aren’t done talking...
I need a dash of these, but I will hate anybody using it all the time.
There are assholes who are "constraints" (in the "Goal" or "Phoenix Project" meaning of this word). The newer incarnation of the BOFH. How do you get around this? This is a problem at the core of devops (as an idea not as the pseudo position). Management should look at constraints to see where the likely conditions for assholery are.
Is assholish-ness a sign of a good founder? Do incubators use this as a secret criterion for admission? Ultimately can we write a word2vec implementation that produces an ‘asshole score’ based on a personal essay or job description as?
I have one RIGHT NOW that I'm working on trying to dismiss. SHE is such a PITA. The way we're doing this to put it on paper is to do a "performance improvement plan."
I'm an asshole. If you work form me, work come first, as is the most important thing to me, after (and outside the office) your life, lifestyle and everything that is important for you.
Naive. The author has no concept of how psychologically damaging these ideas can be in the hands of a passive aggressive HR team. Put the genie back in the bottle.
Values are good; they can rally a team. Feedback is good. What's missing is that feedback is never a two way street; there is always part of the company which is effectively immune from critique, by virtue of their position and rank. And this is where the psychopaths gather.
Bullshit happens. Senior executives frequently re-write the corporate narrative to justify developments. Sometimes this is for the greater good, other times it merely pads their own situation. Nobody is incorruptible - when you have people, you have bad actors.
Now lets look at how this is communicated.
As a society, we're pretty good at dealing with getting screwed over by assholes. The interactions are mercifully short - most assholes have learned to give the bad news and get offstage as quickly as possible. Some beer is consumed, some words are said, and life goes on.
Most importantly: the recipient of the "dick move" is able to process and recognize it for what it is, a self centered pile of shit inflicted by their superiors.
There is minimal lasting damage.
Now these fuckers.... would use values to rationalize all significant events. From the bully pulpit of their role in HR and senior leadership. With licence to lie, omit, and otherwise distort facts to support their narrative. While the employee was bound by an "integrity policy" and a "code of conduct" that required "professionalism". Not that these are bad things, but when one side can lie - and the other cannot call them on it... you're going to have a bad day.
So basically - all of these "discussions" devolve into a fucked up version of a therapy session where the other person really doesn't have your best interests at heart. Where you are directly questioned and attacked on your values and the degree to which they align with whatever your inquisitor currently wants. And all of this deranged feedback is carefully calibrated to operate at a very personal level - there's nothing wrong with us, all of this is a function of your personal deficiencies.
I survived. Got a great job offer from an ex-boss. And left.
My kids and wife commented a month later: "Wow, Dad finally started smiling again". Yeah. That bad. Literally fucked with my own perceptions of my self-worth.
A lesser person would have been driven into therapy.
You seem to have taken this to mean that only weak or 'lesser' people go into therapy, but I think it's pretty clear what the OP meant: That this sort of institutional treatment is a sort of gaslighting. They convince you that because of a simple personality difference that there must be something deeply wrong with you and that you need therapy. The thing that makes someone 'lesser' in this instance is that they fail to recognize the gaslighting and stand up for their own rights.
I'm pretty sure one or both of Elon Musk or Donald Trump (both exceptionally successful individuals admired by many) would be judged as massive assholes by almost any person. So I'm not sure "being an asshole" is really a good reason to disqualify someone...
I checked how this test fares in Academia my country (I won't mention its name) and there seems to be a surprising number of assholes here. I'm even suspecting that I might be one.
> Insulting or degrading individuals or groups
Every boss in my country does this from time to time. -1
> Joking and teasing to belittle others
My British colleagues do that, but otherwise it's rare. +1
> Tersely worded group e-mails that make people feel uncomfortable
I do that. -1
> Slapping down people of lower status in the company hierarchy
Everybody in my country seems to do that, I rarely found any exceptions. (I'm a foreigner and where I come from this is frowned upon.) -1
> Eyerolling, sighing, or otherwise negative body language while others are speaking
Every boss in my country does that, even the nice ones! -1
> Ignoring people trying to contribute
Every boss does that if they don't want contributions at a time. -1
> Interrupting people who aren’t done talking
Extremely common. -1
> Touching or invading personal space
Normal for all people in my country. It's in Southern Europe. -1
> Threatening or intimidating confrontations
Many bosses do that where I live. I only dream of beating up annoying colleagues. -1
> Publicly calling out and blaming others
Habitually done in my country of residence, unless by "others" you mean a boss, then it's not done at all. -1
> Undermining someone’s confidence for asking questions
That one is rare. Especially the psychopathic narcissist are always happy to answer questions. +1
> Gossiping about coworkers to other coworkers
Everybody I've ever met in Academia has done that. -1
> Cliquey behavior and exclusion
Everybody does that in every country and on every conference I've ever been. -1
> Taking credit for the ideas or work of others
Our bosses love to do that. Some of them want their name to appear on books they never even read, let alone written. -1
> Stirring shit and troublemaking
Sounds what I do when somebody really annoys me or is totally incompetent or just a plain asshole. -1
> Singling people out for uncommon traits they have
Yep, everybody does that. We had a guy using unreadable powerpoint colors all the time, wearing bizarre ties in an environment where nobody wears ties, and generally suffering from Asperger so much that he sat down on the farthest table from everyone else to have lunch at international conferences. I liked him, but he was singled out for his behaviour. -1
> Dismissing the opinions and ideas of others without discussion
Everybody does that in our institute. X is dismissive of Y's work, Y is dismissive of Z's work, and so on, until the full circle is reached. -1
Thinking about it, we could be a whole institute of assholes according to these criteria.
That being said, I personally prefer to work together with a competent asshole rather than with an incompetent nice guy. I'm fine with an arrogant colleague if he has a reason for being arrogant, if there is something behind it. (Admittedly, these people tend to be the least arrogant, but there are exceptions.)
Nice incompetent fools in higher positions, on the other hand, infuriate me more than anything else.
Once I had to call a Spanish academic about a payment to a software he wrote; we needed that software badly so instead of exchanging email, we called the 'professor' and had a conversation. Never in my life did I ever experienced a person who was so full of smugness and self-rightouness. So, I guess that southern european country is Spain because I have heard stories from people who worked there that Spanish can be quite a bunch of a@@holes. Is that right?
Portugal, so you're very close. IMHO, the cultures differ vastly between those countries, but in that respect they might be the same. Social hierarchies are a big thing here, one of the biggest downsides of an otherwise beautiful country. (As a tourist, you'd never notice any of this.)
It’s actually not hard to sniff out assholes. You just ask them about how they resolved a recent conflict and picture yourself on the other side of the story. We had a great net eng candidate who zero of the interview team said they’d want to work with. Otherwise smart and capable, we gave him s hard pass.
I mention a question really similar to that in the article itself and yeah, I think that question and similar ones are probably the first tools we reach for... but while I think those might suss out some obvious assholes, or unintentional assholes, I think it's too easy for self-aware or intentional assholes to answer "what they want to hear" and pass the question. I'm definitely glad you sidestepped this for-sure asshole in your interview process but I think the fact that everyone on your team wanted to avoid him or her kind of supports my "only the world's biggest assholes get weeded out this way" theory.
That's why what I advocate for instead is to genuinely build a culture where asshole behavior isn't tolerated, and then warn candidates that you've successfully done this and take it seriously. Self-aware assholes will just bullshit through these kinds of questions, but if you can truly impart how seriously you take this sort of thing to them, they'll weed themselves out of your process.
As one grows and evolves, one learns to better themselves. A fairly significant number of smart and capable people have been guilty of acting in not so ideal manner when dealing with incompetent or otherwise incompatible people but the answer to questions like "give me an example of an encounter or interaction that did not go as well as it could" is not to sugarcoat or misrepresent, I think part of growing up is to own one's mistakes honestly, recognize them as such and learn from them and if an interviewer believes they can really ferret out liars that are in reality asshole but have ready answers for such question in order to take a hard pass on folks that disclose past mistakes honestly, well, I am not sure I consider it to be the best strategy, but I am still learning things.
The definition posted of an asshole casts a very wide net making discussion difficult.
Diversity is important and it isn't just about sex and skin color. People act differently, people have different priorities, confidence varies, life situations outside of work alters behavior as do medical conditions and treatments. Different cultures even in this country value vastly different behaviors.
Not everyone is perfect just how they are but everyone doesn't have to act the same way to be acceptable.
Labeling, setting up dichotomies, and othering people can be a much more toxic behavior than being an "asshole".
People with Asperger's or otherwise on the autism spectrum can be huge "assholes" by the definitions here. Does autism make you unemployable?
Behavior issues in the workplace and out are much more nuanced than this.
It is good to be pushed out of your comfort zone in both needing to develop thicker skin AND showing empathy to others' sensibilities but within bounds.
Sorting people into bins: assholes and victims, is problematic.
When it comes down to it, not everyone must work well together. Just like there is a wide diversity of people's dispositions there can be a wide variety of team dispositions. Not fitting into a particular group doesn't have to make a 'wrong' person, it can just mean the best fit is somewhere else. Become a big enough organization and it is something you will have to face.