Is it time to shreds?
Friends, you need your brain. I have a good friend who, I think, needs the help of a shrinkle. But he will never agree to this. He does not think at all that something is wrong with him. This is his position: “I think that everything is in order with me.”
However, sometimes in his words or messages slip implicit doubts in his own position. Especially in the last couple of years - I do not know what is connected with it. Perhaps with age (he is 34 years old).
He works simultaneously as a team leader, a department manager and a programmer. A kind of playing coach. He is the best employee in the company. The best leader, the best team leader, the best programmer. Literally so - he code the code most and better than anyone, while he manages to train and lead the best team of the company forward, and I don’t know how, but he leads the department that includes this team and two others. In short, the guy in his board.
')
I will now describe to you his symptoms, which I managed to see (I have known him for 15 years). Perhaps one of you will give me good advice. It is to me, not to him - he knows nothing about this publication, and there will be nothing to do with himself. And I may somehow be able to influence him. For convenience, I will call him Sasha.
Sasha can accept any opinion, and defend, as his own. It is any opinion, not any side - it is not about the dashes from camp to camp in a dispute. Although it happens.
What is important: he does it consciously, openly, as if he is playing some kind of game. It was from him that I learned that this method is called Devil's Advocate. By the way, he said a couple of times that he would like to be a lawyer, but the devil pulled to learn from the programmer.
In any dispute, a conflict in which he is involved, he chooses a party, not based on his own opinion about the subject of the dispute. It seems to me that he chooses the side with the weaker position - so, it seems, it will be more interesting to win. He once said that he looks about the same way at the World Cup, which the Russian team is not playing - includes a match, pretends who is weaker, and is a fan of them.
Especially enrages everyone when he begins to change his position to the opposite, when he begins to win. Chose the weak, helped with the argument, sees that flooded, and change shoes. He says - so stop. I changed my mind. And he begins to prove the opposite point of view.
It seems to me that these are either symptoms or harbingers of schizophrenia. It is impossible not to value your own opinion so as not to have it at all. Or, alternatively, he is so confident in his own opinion that he does not even consider it necessary to pronounce it. If I myself find myself on one side of the dispute, then I get the feeling that Sasha is playing with us, as a teacher with children in kindergarten. If I didn’t know him so long ago, I wouldn’t have been able to work with him - this is the uniform mockery of adults.
There is, however, an obvious advantage - he, as they say, has nothing to catch. How to catch what is not? At work, sometimes it happens that a person is convicted for his opinion. I personally saw how an opinion was dismissed, especially if the person insists on it. And Sasha get fucked - just not for that.
Here, it seems to me, everything is obvious, but suddenly I misread the symptoms. As far as I know, the feeling of guilt is when a person blames himself on behalf of others. Those. There may not be any real guilt at all, and people do not even think about Sasha, but he feels guilty.
He always has guilt feelings on the same topic: “I work poorly, I can do better.” I remind you that he is the best employee of the company. This is confirmed by figures, and the opinion of subordinates, and the opinion of colleagues, and the opinion of management. But he is constantly dissatisfied with himself.
If it happens that he had a bad day, for example, he was dragged through meetings, and he did not have time to make planned targets for the tasks (which he set himself), then he is terribly worried. He sits at the computer, and unless the sparks do not fly. The keys are knocking furiously, the coffee goes off a mug after a mug, gnaws a few pens a day (recently switched to toothpicks), smokes cigarettes without even noticing. And angry. By myself.
If at such a moment to address him, he will speak in a guilty tone. Although, I have nothing to do with it - for sure there is no guilt before me. But it seems to him that everyone around him is blamed for something. And he fulfills this duty, inhaling like a horse. True, he never lingers at work - he has such a fad, he takes the child from kindergarten.
Sasha is terribly intolerant. But at the same time - never swears. It shows that he came out of himself, but he didn’t scream, wouldn’t hiss through his teeth, smoke better or pour another batch of coffee.
His intolerance is very easy to cause. For example, to demonstrate that you do not care something related to work. Not all the work at all - if you don’t care for a corporate party, then Sasha will shake your hand.
But if you do not care for the quality of the code, reuse, performance, the achievement of the objective of the task, the delay, the control of the life cycle, the drop in performance, then Sasha goes into intolerance mode.
But the easiest way to piss off Sasha is to demonstrate a lack of professional interest. Moreover, strictly within your specialty and position.
If you are a programmer, then Sasha will not be able to endure when you are not interested in finding out something. When you throw and say that did not work out, and you have to stop. Sasha generally believes that the main character trait of a real programmer is an inquiring mind. Probably because he himself is.
Sasha always strives to become the best in the environment in which he finds himself. Actually, therefore, he is the best in the company. Wherever he turns out, the scenario is always the same - Sasha determines the criteria by which people are compared here, and begins to creep up in the formal and informal rankings.
He was the best student in his first class. Then, when the class in the fifth teacher noticed that he was frankly boring, his external student was transferred to the sixth, and he finished two classes in a year. In his second class, he also became the best. The last two years he spent in the best lyceum of the city, and there he became the best. Moreover, since it was the best, the most difficult class of the school (with the letter “A”, mathematics and computer science), then we can say that it was the best in all parallels.
Then there was an institute where Sasha was again the best. Then there was work, and everywhere he behaved in the same way - crawling and crawling upstairs. But in his work, as more flexible than the school and the university, the environment, he came up with a new feature - creating your own coordinate systems.
He came to a new company - at first he became the best on the generally accepted scale. Then he comes up with his own - he starts some projects, development, efficiency increase, new goals and metrics, and he crawls on them.
Between these competitions, he literally rests a couple of days. He sat, smoked, reflected, and crawled again. He always, at any moment in time, competes with someone, although no one except Sasha is concerned with these competitions.
It seems, an inferiority complex in its pure form. Just as in the case of guilt, the reason for its appearance was thought up by Sasha himself. After all, it is deeply indifferent whether it is the best or not. And he behaves as if everyone around him only does that they value him and watch him.
Sasha very often seems inadequate. Manifested in the fact that he is fanatically, stubbornly trying to achieve the goals that set.
Any adequate person, after one or several unsuccessful attempts, the goal throws. And Sasha - no. Even if the realization of the goal takes years, he will persevere with his head against the wall.
What is important is that he is not just trying to do the same thing, in the hope that this time he will work. No, he constantly changes approaches, searches for new solutions, sometimes pauses “to think about”, but then invariably returns to work on the goal.
Unfortunately, his inadequacy is fueled by statistics - he manages to achieve goals. There are a couple of long-term construction projects that last for many years, but they do not relate to work - for example, it cannot stop smoking. Everything else, one way or another, sooner or later, is realized.
It would seem, well, what for it is necessary, then? Nobody needs a goal anymore - they all abandoned, forgot, and do not even remind. No, Sasha will crawl on. Silently, stubbornly, driven, apparently, by his sense of guilt. And when it turns out, he will come and say - they say, remember, was such a goal? Everything, I did. People are very surprised, especially if Sasha is recently known.
Sasha is like a tumor - it gets bigger and bigger all the time. Not weight is growing, but influence. Not by itself, but purposefully.
Sasha is always a little range, which he occupies, in all reasonable senses. He hates the boundaries and the rules that are imposed on him. If he was given a command to control, he will try to capture another one. Then more and more. If he was told to keep records of work in one system, and that does not suit him, he will knock out for himself the right to make changes to the system. If the rights are not given, he will still get out (see his inadequacy) and find a way out of the constraint - as a rule, he creates his own system, secretly keeps double counting, and then rolls out his version and convincingly proves that it is better. And the whole company goes to the proposed scheme.
If he got into a company that loves bureaucracy, then for Sasha it is like a red rag for a bull. All bureaucracy that affects him, he will mercilessly destroy. Not just walking and whining that is engaged in nonsense - he will come up with a plan, some cleverly thought out, on leveling up bureaucratic procedures. He will show in practice, with numbers and experiments, that the bureaucracy seriously reduces efficiency, and he, as a rule, is believed. And if they do not believe, inadequacy will not allow Sasha to stop - he will come up with some other way.
The trait is rather unpleasant. Let me briefly remind you who John Silver is a character in the book “Treasure Island” by Robert Louis Stevenson, a one-legged pirate. He communicated with people in a special way - one by one. Comes to one, and tete-a-tete will say - dude, you are my best friend, I can trust you alone. Then - to another guy, with the same approach. As a result, everyone considers John Silver to be their friend.
Sasha, of course, is not so polar, but there is a certain similarity. Sasha loves to establish personal contact with a simple goal - so that a particular person would treat him well. He finds an approach to everyone. One will talk about alcohol, the other will talk about cross-stitching, the third will talk about motorcycles, and the fourth will talk about raising children. Let me remind you - Sasha is not a seller, for whom such behavior, in general, should be the norm.
As a result, Sasha has many friends in any company. Of course, these are not true friends - Sasha does not even meet with them outside of work. He has enough of the 8-hour day for everyone to think that Sasha is a great guy.
And then Sasha uses it to achieve his goals. First of all - for changes. When Sasha proposes a new project at a general meeting, he already has a personal agreement with each of those present. For everyone, he has already found a profit from achieving this goal. And each person stands and thinks that only he has an agreement with Sasha, only Sasha agreed with him, and they almost winkly sneak at this John Silver.
This feature is somewhat out of line - the previous ones probably formed an opinion about Sasha, as an introvert with a bunch of complexes. But, unfortunately, Sasha is a compound subject.
Sasha is angry, as a rule, at tasks that are not amenable to solution. He does this consciously - this is his tool of self-motivation. Sasha often undertakes the most difficult and risky tasks in any project. From which, alas, it follows that Sasha is almost always angry. Like the Hulk.
He told me a couple of times that he was taught to be angry at the task in training - in childhood he was engaged in weightlifting. When a young athlete can not take weight, or perform the required number of repetitions, he was told - got angry at the barbell. Imagine that she is your number one. And tear her up!
So he is angry at the task. He does not just solve them, as most do - calmly, confidently, measuredly, in steps. He throws himself at a task, like a berserker at an enemy, and does not retreat until the task falls. After a victory, he becomes completely happy for a while - it can be seen with the naked eye, because Sasha smiles in his mouth and can not stop doing it.
He sometimes even takes away tasks from programmers when he sees that they have “swam” - they are ready to surrender, lose, retreat from the task. Sasha says - let me tear it up! It’s quite fun to watch this process, so programmers happily agree. Sasha grabs the task, like a dog abandoned bone, and tears it.
Sasha is a terrible, but kind troll. He knows how to troll very subtly, but, at the same time, without offending or humiliating a person.
He said that he did not always know how to troll subtly. Previously, Per, as a bulldozer, regardless of the position, age, social status and gender. Because of this, he experienced constant career difficulties - very few people were willing to tolerate such things even from an intelligent specialist.
Then I learned to use trolling for the good (well, it seems to him so). Basically, he uses it to “wake up” a person — to show flaws, mistakes, directions that a person does not pay attention to, being too carried away by a single topic.
Sasha himself considers trolling a necessity. He says that if a person simply indicates a flaw, he will resist. And trolling, with inappropriate humor, does not cause resistance. I don’t agree with him, however - when he trolls me, he hits me in the most painful place. I try to pretend that I am not offended, and then I worry about myself for a couple of days and get angry - Sasha defines my problem so accurately.
As you understand, for companies Sasha is a fairly valuable employee, because he motivates himself. Personally, it seems to me that he does it wrong - through guilt and an inferiority complex. But employers are only happy.
He, of course, set goals, and he, like a mad dog, rushes to reach them. But most of the goals he sets himself, and the management simply informs them.
But the further, the more Sasha worries me. I thought for a long time that it would burn at work. But Sasha is an interesting guy, and all the time he is interested in some esoteric practices raising his spirits, and when he comes to work in the morning, he is always “reloaded” - as if the load of excess obligations that Sasha himself has taken on himself does not hang.
The portrait, as you can see, turned out to be quite complex, heterogeneous. It would be easier if Sasha was just an uprooted geek-introvert who was too passionate about his work. Or, if he was only John Silver, I would not bother you - who knows how to build relationships with colleagues?
It is the mixture of qualities that bothers me, quite strange, in my opinion. One person cannot get along with such a cocktail. Something is wrong with him, but I do not have enough knowledge to understand whether it is necessary to worry or not.
What do you think?
However, sometimes in his words or messages slip implicit doubts in his own position. Especially in the last couple of years - I do not know what is connected with it. Perhaps with age (he is 34 years old).
He works simultaneously as a team leader, a department manager and a programmer. A kind of playing coach. He is the best employee in the company. The best leader, the best team leader, the best programmer. Literally so - he code the code most and better than anyone, while he manages to train and lead the best team of the company forward, and I don’t know how, but he leads the department that includes this team and two others. In short, the guy in his board.
')
I will now describe to you his symptoms, which I managed to see (I have known him for 15 years). Perhaps one of you will give me good advice. It is to me, not to him - he knows nothing about this publication, and there will be nothing to do with himself. And I may somehow be able to influence him. For convenience, I will call him Sasha.
Schizophrenia
Sasha can accept any opinion, and defend, as his own. It is any opinion, not any side - it is not about the dashes from camp to camp in a dispute. Although it happens.
What is important: he does it consciously, openly, as if he is playing some kind of game. It was from him that I learned that this method is called Devil's Advocate. By the way, he said a couple of times that he would like to be a lawyer, but the devil pulled to learn from the programmer.
In any dispute, a conflict in which he is involved, he chooses a party, not based on his own opinion about the subject of the dispute. It seems to me that he chooses the side with the weaker position - so, it seems, it will be more interesting to win. He once said that he looks about the same way at the World Cup, which the Russian team is not playing - includes a match, pretends who is weaker, and is a fan of them.
Especially enrages everyone when he begins to change his position to the opposite, when he begins to win. Chose the weak, helped with the argument, sees that flooded, and change shoes. He says - so stop. I changed my mind. And he begins to prove the opposite point of view.
It seems to me that these are either symptoms or harbingers of schizophrenia. It is impossible not to value your own opinion so as not to have it at all. Or, alternatively, he is so confident in his own opinion that he does not even consider it necessary to pronounce it. If I myself find myself on one side of the dispute, then I get the feeling that Sasha is playing with us, as a teacher with children in kindergarten. If I didn’t know him so long ago, I wouldn’t have been able to work with him - this is the uniform mockery of adults.
There is, however, an obvious advantage - he, as they say, has nothing to catch. How to catch what is not? At work, sometimes it happens that a person is convicted for his opinion. I personally saw how an opinion was dismissed, especially if the person insists on it. And Sasha get fucked - just not for that.
Guilt
Here, it seems to me, everything is obvious, but suddenly I misread the symptoms. As far as I know, the feeling of guilt is when a person blames himself on behalf of others. Those. There may not be any real guilt at all, and people do not even think about Sasha, but he feels guilty.
He always has guilt feelings on the same topic: “I work poorly, I can do better.” I remind you that he is the best employee of the company. This is confirmed by figures, and the opinion of subordinates, and the opinion of colleagues, and the opinion of management. But he is constantly dissatisfied with himself.
If it happens that he had a bad day, for example, he was dragged through meetings, and he did not have time to make planned targets for the tasks (which he set himself), then he is terribly worried. He sits at the computer, and unless the sparks do not fly. The keys are knocking furiously, the coffee goes off a mug after a mug, gnaws a few pens a day (recently switched to toothpicks), smokes cigarettes without even noticing. And angry. By myself.
If at such a moment to address him, he will speak in a guilty tone. Although, I have nothing to do with it - for sure there is no guilt before me. But it seems to him that everyone around him is blamed for something. And he fulfills this duty, inhaling like a horse. True, he never lingers at work - he has such a fad, he takes the child from kindergarten.
Intolerance
Sasha is terribly intolerant. But at the same time - never swears. It shows that he came out of himself, but he didn’t scream, wouldn’t hiss through his teeth, smoke better or pour another batch of coffee.
His intolerance is very easy to cause. For example, to demonstrate that you do not care something related to work. Not all the work at all - if you don’t care for a corporate party, then Sasha will shake your hand.
But if you do not care for the quality of the code, reuse, performance, the achievement of the objective of the task, the delay, the control of the life cycle, the drop in performance, then Sasha goes into intolerance mode.
But the easiest way to piss off Sasha is to demonstrate a lack of professional interest. Moreover, strictly within your specialty and position.
If you are a programmer, then Sasha will not be able to endure when you are not interested in finding out something. When you throw and say that did not work out, and you have to stop. Sasha generally believes that the main character trait of a real programmer is an inquiring mind. Probably because he himself is.
Inferiority complex
Sasha always strives to become the best in the environment in which he finds himself. Actually, therefore, he is the best in the company. Wherever he turns out, the scenario is always the same - Sasha determines the criteria by which people are compared here, and begins to creep up in the formal and informal rankings.
He was the best student in his first class. Then, when the class in the fifth teacher noticed that he was frankly boring, his external student was transferred to the sixth, and he finished two classes in a year. In his second class, he also became the best. The last two years he spent in the best lyceum of the city, and there he became the best. Moreover, since it was the best, the most difficult class of the school (with the letter “A”, mathematics and computer science), then we can say that it was the best in all parallels.
Then there was an institute where Sasha was again the best. Then there was work, and everywhere he behaved in the same way - crawling and crawling upstairs. But in his work, as more flexible than the school and the university, the environment, he came up with a new feature - creating your own coordinate systems.
He came to a new company - at first he became the best on the generally accepted scale. Then he comes up with his own - he starts some projects, development, efficiency increase, new goals and metrics, and he crawls on them.
Between these competitions, he literally rests a couple of days. He sat, smoked, reflected, and crawled again. He always, at any moment in time, competes with someone, although no one except Sasha is concerned with these competitions.
It seems, an inferiority complex in its pure form. Just as in the case of guilt, the reason for its appearance was thought up by Sasha himself. After all, it is deeply indifferent whether it is the best or not. And he behaves as if everyone around him only does that they value him and watch him.
Inadequacy
Sasha very often seems inadequate. Manifested in the fact that he is fanatically, stubbornly trying to achieve the goals that set.
Any adequate person, after one or several unsuccessful attempts, the goal throws. And Sasha - no. Even if the realization of the goal takes years, he will persevere with his head against the wall.
What is important is that he is not just trying to do the same thing, in the hope that this time he will work. No, he constantly changes approaches, searches for new solutions, sometimes pauses “to think about”, but then invariably returns to work on the goal.
Unfortunately, his inadequacy is fueled by statistics - he manages to achieve goals. There are a couple of long-term construction projects that last for many years, but they do not relate to work - for example, it cannot stop smoking. Everything else, one way or another, sooner or later, is realized.
It would seem, well, what for it is necessary, then? Nobody needs a goal anymore - they all abandoned, forgot, and do not even remind. No, Sasha will crawl on. Silently, stubbornly, driven, apparently, by his sense of guilt. And when it turns out, he will come and say - they say, remember, was such a goal? Everything, I did. People are very surprised, especially if Sasha is recently known.
Tumor
Sasha is like a tumor - it gets bigger and bigger all the time. Not weight is growing, but influence. Not by itself, but purposefully.
Sasha is always a little range, which he occupies, in all reasonable senses. He hates the boundaries and the rules that are imposed on him. If he was given a command to control, he will try to capture another one. Then more and more. If he was told to keep records of work in one system, and that does not suit him, he will knock out for himself the right to make changes to the system. If the rights are not given, he will still get out (see his inadequacy) and find a way out of the constraint - as a rule, he creates his own system, secretly keeps double counting, and then rolls out his version and convincingly proves that it is better. And the whole company goes to the proposed scheme.
If he got into a company that loves bureaucracy, then for Sasha it is like a red rag for a bull. All bureaucracy that affects him, he will mercilessly destroy. Not just walking and whining that is engaged in nonsense - he will come up with a plan, some cleverly thought out, on leveling up bureaucratic procedures. He will show in practice, with numbers and experiments, that the bureaucracy seriously reduces efficiency, and he, as a rule, is believed. And if they do not believe, inadequacy will not allow Sasha to stop - he will come up with some other way.
John silver
The trait is rather unpleasant. Let me briefly remind you who John Silver is a character in the book “Treasure Island” by Robert Louis Stevenson, a one-legged pirate. He communicated with people in a special way - one by one. Comes to one, and tete-a-tete will say - dude, you are my best friend, I can trust you alone. Then - to another guy, with the same approach. As a result, everyone considers John Silver to be their friend.
Sasha, of course, is not so polar, but there is a certain similarity. Sasha loves to establish personal contact with a simple goal - so that a particular person would treat him well. He finds an approach to everyone. One will talk about alcohol, the other will talk about cross-stitching, the third will talk about motorcycles, and the fourth will talk about raising children. Let me remind you - Sasha is not a seller, for whom such behavior, in general, should be the norm.
As a result, Sasha has many friends in any company. Of course, these are not true friends - Sasha does not even meet with them outside of work. He has enough of the 8-hour day for everyone to think that Sasha is a great guy.
And then Sasha uses it to achieve his goals. First of all - for changes. When Sasha proposes a new project at a general meeting, he already has a personal agreement with each of those present. For everyone, he has already found a profit from achieving this goal. And each person stands and thinks that only he has an agreement with Sasha, only Sasha agreed with him, and they almost winkly sneak at this John Silver.
This feature is somewhat out of line - the previous ones probably formed an opinion about Sasha, as an introvert with a bunch of complexes. But, unfortunately, Sasha is a compound subject.
Anger
Sasha is angry, as a rule, at tasks that are not amenable to solution. He does this consciously - this is his tool of self-motivation. Sasha often undertakes the most difficult and risky tasks in any project. From which, alas, it follows that Sasha is almost always angry. Like the Hulk.
He told me a couple of times that he was taught to be angry at the task in training - in childhood he was engaged in weightlifting. When a young athlete can not take weight, or perform the required number of repetitions, he was told - got angry at the barbell. Imagine that she is your number one. And tear her up!
So he is angry at the task. He does not just solve them, as most do - calmly, confidently, measuredly, in steps. He throws himself at a task, like a berserker at an enemy, and does not retreat until the task falls. After a victory, he becomes completely happy for a while - it can be seen with the naked eye, because Sasha smiles in his mouth and can not stop doing it.
He sometimes even takes away tasks from programmers when he sees that they have “swam” - they are ready to surrender, lose, retreat from the task. Sasha says - let me tear it up! It’s quite fun to watch this process, so programmers happily agree. Sasha grabs the task, like a dog abandoned bone, and tears it.
Troll
Sasha is a terrible, but kind troll. He knows how to troll very subtly, but, at the same time, without offending or humiliating a person.
He said that he did not always know how to troll subtly. Previously, Per, as a bulldozer, regardless of the position, age, social status and gender. Because of this, he experienced constant career difficulties - very few people were willing to tolerate such things even from an intelligent specialist.
Then I learned to use trolling for the good (well, it seems to him so). Basically, he uses it to “wake up” a person — to show flaws, mistakes, directions that a person does not pay attention to, being too carried away by a single topic.
Sasha himself considers trolling a necessity. He says that if a person simply indicates a flaw, he will resist. And trolling, with inappropriate humor, does not cause resistance. I don’t agree with him, however - when he trolls me, he hits me in the most painful place. I try to pretend that I am not offended, and then I worry about myself for a couple of days and get angry - Sasha defines my problem so accurately.
Total
As you understand, for companies Sasha is a fairly valuable employee, because he motivates himself. Personally, it seems to me that he does it wrong - through guilt and an inferiority complex. But employers are only happy.
He, of course, set goals, and he, like a mad dog, rushes to reach them. But most of the goals he sets himself, and the management simply informs them.
But the further, the more Sasha worries me. I thought for a long time that it would burn at work. But Sasha is an interesting guy, and all the time he is interested in some esoteric practices raising his spirits, and when he comes to work in the morning, he is always “reloaded” - as if the load of excess obligations that Sasha himself has taken on himself does not hang.
The portrait, as you can see, turned out to be quite complex, heterogeneous. It would be easier if Sasha was just an uprooted geek-introvert who was too passionate about his work. Or, if he was only John Silver, I would not bother you - who knows how to build relationships with colleagues?
It is the mixture of qualities that bothers me, quite strange, in my opinion. One person cannot get along with such a cocktail. Something is wrong with him, but I do not have enough knowledge to understand whether it is necessary to worry or not.
What do you think?
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/458256/
All Articles