How to deal with jerks

“Everyone you meet is fighting a battle you know nothing about. Be kind. Always.” — Robin Williams.

The following are a set of experiences where I had to deal with different personalities in different environments and I was unable to have a good relationship. Sometimes these individuals might not have been aware of this, but they were jerks to me. I hope that you can learn something from my experiences.

Experience 1

I’m a software engineer with a background in research in computer architecture working for a North American office of a multinational company. During most summers, I try to hire interns to share the experience of working in the industry. It helps them grow while I enjoy teaching.

In this first story, I will share what happened in one of these summers.

At the end of the summer, one of my interns was writing a scientific paper and added a citation around a formula that someone else designed a couple of years before. We detected that we couldn’t add that claim when the paper was still a draft. We rephrased it saying we were using this formula and checked who the author was of such formulation. We emailed them and asked for their opinion about publishing it and offered them to be a co-author.

However, the person responded negatively to adding her as a co-author, so we removed the idea from the paper. All seems fine until here, we removed the contribution and the paper would have a different focus. The paper got submitted with no mention of the formulation or their idea.

A month later. I was having a career conversation with one of the top engineers in my area. At that point, he mentioned people in the org were talking about me taking credit for others’ ideas. Several managers now thought I was not a person to trust. At this point, I felt bad, I felt my ethics were questioned, and this is a serious thing for me. This is one of those things that I can get extremely embarrassed about because that’s not me. So, the first idea was confrontation and anger.

What did I do? I thought “let’s email this person and their manager plus directors with all the facts — -no, even better, let’s get everybody in a room and confront the person and understand what the problem is”.

Some weeks passed, and the idea dropped out of my mind. They are a jerk, I’m not. They do not know better. Threw my anger down the toilet and moved on. Oh boy, that felt good. However, this person is still in my org and her bad blood is with me in every project. Welcome to my life dealing with a jerk.

All my future encounters with this person have been full of battles and behind my back complaints. Instead of approaching me, this person always goes to upper management. Nevertheless, the lesson I learned is to document everything I do. It might not be good in terms of productivity but it’s a more scientific approach to all that I do. Everything is publicly documented so that I can not be taken off-guard. The result is that several times this person has been called out for making noise for nothing. So, in the long term, whose credibility is at risk?

One insight that it took me a while to figure out from this experience is my age. In my 20s I would have screamed and confronted them, in my 30s I would have emailed them and called a meeting. In my 40s, I thought about all the above and decided to move on and learn the most I can about it.

Experience 2

Setting expectations is a key takeaway for the next story. To introduce what happened, you can think about this metaphor: a new professional sports player arrives in a team and the press starts generating expectations. Those expectations can be extremely harmful — -not only for the new player but also for the team and the team fans. The same thing happens at companies and teams.

Just after completing my Ph.D., I joined a lab in another country to work as a postdoc. I was a good friend of the lab’s professor, who also seemed to like my research. His research lab was made by a group of the brightest students I had ever met, and also unusually, they were a bunch of very intelligent and kind human beings. This was basically due to the recruiting abilities of the professor, always getting very sharp students and good people.

However, there were two conditions that triggered my disastrous arrival. First, the professor asked the students to help me find a place to live (as if I could not figure that out myself) and secondly, I was the first postdoc to work there and the first person who would get into that lab without suffering the graduate school hassles of being a teacher assistant, and having to do the initial research assistant duties. They saw me as a threat, as someone who wanted to arrive and succeed without any of the adversity they had suffered. They are now very good friends, but for the very first months, they still don’t know how some of them were big jerks to me.

This experience now moves from expectations to credibility. No matter if you’re a solid rock star (not that I claim I am) in the field, if you join a new working group, you need to build up that credibility again. And this will happen to you wherever you go. Credibility in a new group of people is something you need to continuously build. Funny, this might also be the reason why many senior people fear change.

In this lab, I had to: demonstrate every result I brought into any presentation with all the details; my ideas had to be implemented with their coding tools; and… the list goes on. Additionally, my broken English sometimes seemed to be a problem: other students in the lab were thinking: “If this person cannot speak properly why am I going to take his ideas seriously?’’ And lastly, they could not understand or accept my help for free. They would always have the mindset that I wanted something in return. I don’t think this was specific to this lab; it’s just human nature.

The take away from this experience was: work as hard as other people and set yourself to the same standards and level. I worked as hard as any of them, I invited them to my place for dinners to show my honesty and proximity, and I never asked for anything in return. I just added myself to the team at the same level (work and friendship). And it worked.

This experience also tells us about setting the wrong expectations. The expectations that the postdoc title and my professor’s comments made were terrible for me, so make sure you’re able to manage expectations or understand other people’s expectations in advance to a project, a career start, or a relationship. (The book ‘The first 90 days’ is a best seller on this specific topic).

Experience 3

This happened during my first position at a software company and it’s about feedback. Just as I joined the company, I was assigned a colleague in my team to work with on a project. They would review my code. Code reviews are one of the marvelous things at large organizations, as code quality is significantly increased and it can be a rich learning opportunity. However, on some occasions, you will find someone that does not review your code, but instead, they tell you how to write the code. That’s not the intended way of doing code reviews at all: code reviews are a mechanism to detect bugs, to make code better, but never to force one to write code as one would.

This was my first experience with code reviews. I had over 100 comments in my small code changes (250 lines), and I got very frustrated. Until one day, I discovered that most of the comments were added in my code so that I could end up writing the code as my reviewer wanted. This drove me crazy for three months until I decided to use other reviewers and not take it personally.

With time, I got to understand that person, I realized they were more concerned with the purity of code (note to reader: one could think their concern was teaching, but I did not feel that way) than with finishing any project. He was being a jerk, he was unable to understand how this was affecting me and he was unaware of his actions. I talked to several other team members and they agreed with me that this person was overreacting and probably taking advantage of me being a new team member.

The feedback from my code reviews was biased; it was essential for me to reach other people for help. I was able to get more feedback that drove me in a direction to solve this issue.

But it taught me the biggest lesson. No matter the push back, never take it personally. 1) It does not add anything to the table to consider that it’s personal even if it were, 2) Removing emotions from any argument makes your thoughts more specific and more technical. 3) and finally, ask for other people’s opinions. This won’t only help you to see the other side better (increasing your empathy) but it will also teach you which mistakes you made along the way. Indeed, sharing with other people is always a way to increase your creativity.

Lessons for me, or takeaways for anyone interested

It’s a natural feeling to get frustrated when someone else behaves against us or our ideas, or when they show less compassion and communicate in a way that’s not what we would expect. Miscommunication is the most common mistake in human conflicts. For this reason, I’ve come to bring with me the following tips:

1. Don’t take comments personally. Assume miscommunication, don’t judge, and try to move on. Unnecessary or out-of-place personal comments are a strong indication that you’re dealing with a jerk.
2. Don’t rathole. If you’ve tried to solve a miscommunication and the other person is not collaborating, they might never collaborate, however, you can move on.
3. If there was a misunderstanding, take responsibility. As a listener or as a speaker, you’ve missed something, you did not express it in a way that it was clear to everyone or you did not ask for clarification. This is not a problem, it’s a great opportunity for you as a listener or speaker. Change a problem into a learning experience.
4. Understand the expectations and manage them. Remember it’s much better to lower the expectations in advance that generate frustration later. Under promise and over deliver.
5. No matter how much credibility you had in the past, you need to maintain it continuously.
6. Experience is good. It gives us insights into conflict resolution.

Do you deal with jerks and have other ideas? Please share them with me so that we can all make this list available to others.