I've seen two people fired for being difficult to work with before.
One was very critical of other peoples' work, and would not take criticism well herself. She would make everything very personal. Despite being a junior engineer with limited experience or seniority, she would criticize more senior peoples' work in highly personal ways. Think "how could you be so stupid as to write this garbage" instead of "this is bad code". One day she received constructive criticism from her team lead (one of the nicest guys I've ever met) and instead of accepting it, she dug in and insulted him. He stood his ground and refused to +1 the PR without her change. He escalated it to his manager. She was given a formal warning. A week later she made another personal attack-as-criticism and was fired later that day.
The other was an obsessive perfectionist. He would withhold +1s from PRs until they were perfect. Given that these were PRs on existing systems, this meant in practice that if you modified code in a poorly-written existing file, he would refuse to +1 it until the entire file was rewritten, ground-up, to be high quality. One day, his dragging his heels turned a four hour ticket into a week-long tar pit. This caused an important deadline to slip. The next day he was let go.
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In both cases they were cool people who I really liked. The first person was one of my closest friends in the office at the time. She was really cool, and while she was kind of abrasive, for the most part it was just like RMS-lite style assholitry. Nothing that out of the ordinary. The second guy, he may have been an obsessive perfectionist but his code was _perfect_. The stuff he wrote was by far the best anybody on our teams did.
But teams are more than the sum of their parts. These people might have been good individually, but their being hard to work with caused the whole team to suffer. So they got fired.
Maybe it's not super fair to them. Maybe they have their baggage or there's a culture shock (She was recent immigrant from China, he from Austria). But at the end of the day we are paid lots and lots of money to do important work, and if people are causing significant obstacles to us getting our jobs done, they're going to lose theirs. That's life
One was very critical of other peoples' work, and would not take criticism well herself. She would make everything very personal. Despite being a junior engineer with limited experience or seniority, she would criticize more senior peoples' work in highly personal ways. Think "how could you be so stupid as to write this garbage" instead of "this is bad code". One day she received constructive criticism from her team lead (one of the nicest guys I've ever met) and instead of accepting it, she dug in and insulted him. He stood his ground and refused to +1 the PR without her change. He escalated it to his manager. She was given a formal warning. A week later she made another personal attack-as-criticism and was fired later that day.
The other was an obsessive perfectionist. He would withhold +1s from PRs until they were perfect. Given that these were PRs on existing systems, this meant in practice that if you modified code in a poorly-written existing file, he would refuse to +1 it until the entire file was rewritten, ground-up, to be high quality. One day, his dragging his heels turned a four hour ticket into a week-long tar pit. This caused an important deadline to slip. The next day he was let go.
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In both cases they were cool people who I really liked. The first person was one of my closest friends in the office at the time. She was really cool, and while she was kind of abrasive, for the most part it was just like RMS-lite style assholitry. Nothing that out of the ordinary. The second guy, he may have been an obsessive perfectionist but his code was _perfect_. The stuff he wrote was by far the best anybody on our teams did.
But teams are more than the sum of their parts. These people might have been good individually, but their being hard to work with caused the whole team to suffer. So they got fired.
Maybe it's not super fair to them. Maybe they have their baggage or there's a culture shock (She was recent immigrant from China, he from Austria). But at the end of the day we are paid lots and lots of money to do important work, and if people are causing significant obstacles to us getting our jobs done, they're going to lose theirs. That's life