Stubborn developers vs Egoistic developers; How their attitude can destroy your team
Attitude matters in team collaboration. The worst you can do is hire an egoistic or a stubborn person who will create a toxic environment for your team no matter how healthy the environment you had before.
From what i learned, these both attitudes are so toxic that the teammates can be in constant phase of fatigue, there will not be any growth for the team and most importantly the team will waste more time fighting rather than doing.
Stubborn developers are like zombies who take your energy away and when they suck all the energy out of you, you’ll feel very tired not to mention your productivity will go down the gutter. This is because most of the times they think they are right and its that attitude which makes them so stubborn. Now by no means i’m saying the person other than stubborn person will be right. But it's their behaviour which makes it worse on contrary, a person with open mind will take some advice or enhancement with open arms so they can grow.
The stubborn person will always try to defend as if you were attacking them and will think this is an insult to them. This constant back and forth communication sucks all of the energy and makes other person feel like shit.
For instance, consider that you are reviewing the code of a stubborn person and you made a comment about the readability of their code and how it could be made better. For instance
// Their code
const findObjById = (id, arr) {
for (let i; i < arr.length; i++) {
if (arr[i].id !== id) continue;
return arr[i];
} return undefined;
}// Your suggestion
const findObjById = (id, arr) {
return arr.filter(obj => obj.id === id)[0] || undefined;
}
Now some assumptions about this code is that the dataset arr will always be less than 50. When i made that comment that it could be made more readable and much more concise by using a filter function instead of a for loop. The other person out of their stubbornness replied that their code is more PERFORMANT than filter function. To which i repled that there is no performance concern here since the dataset is pretty small and its not even noticeable. And there goes that constant back and forth communication on just one comment…. After defending countless times and having no argument left only then they’ll go and make that change.
Till that point you’ll already have flown to Dubai and will be at the top of Burj Khalifa trying to end your life and make that jump and just before jumping you’ll receive an email that the comment you made has been addressed. LIKE WHAT THE FUCK! 🤷♂
Actually stubborn developers are on the way in becoming Egoistic developers.
Egoistic developers are at another level than stubborn developers and actually i personally feel like egoistic developers are the mentors of stubborn developers and help pave their way into their egoistic-ness.
If we could make a check-list on what qualities egoistic developers have and what they think it’ll be like:
- Stubbornness ✔️
- Attitude ✔️
- I know everything ✔️
- I’m superior than you ✔️
- I created sky-net & therefore you’re nothing ✔️
- The thing i developed is already at 100% it can’t be enhanced ✔️
- … 100 other things …
While stubborn developers can sometime understand what you meant, this species of developers don’t want to understand a thing because of their superior mindset. They think they’re above all and they can’t be touched. Its like banging your head against a wall. They’ll create so many terminologies on the fly just to make you feel that you know nothing and will spill so much tech jargon on your face just to ALWAYS BE RIGHT!
In their head, winning is always what matters. Because its possible that such developers always have been loners and work as one-man-army they don’t know much about collaboration or empathy or they just take pride in insulting someone.
Working in a team needs team mindset. The team needs not to be personal about matters and be open to constructive criticism. I believe this type of toxic environment is not good for the team and will make the team slowest than fast.
However this can be mitigated when hiring for your organization. One thing which can be done is to have some scenarios to ask them in interview which are based on team collaboration. Like what would you do in that case or pick the one which suits you best. These type of questions will surely depict the person’s collaboration skills other than technical skills.
Do you have any good story about a conversation with egoistic or stubborn developer which almost made you jump from Burj Khalifa? 😅 Please leave some comments below, I’d love to hear them!
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