from Hacker News

Ask HN: How do you handle working with difficult colleagues?

by spicyusername on 2/25/25, 12:39 PM with 1 comments

What are problematic situations you have found yourself in? With peers, with managers, with clients.

How did you handle them?

I have found myself in some professional interpersonal conflict and I'm curious how others approach these situations.

  • by hbs18 on 2/25/25, 12:57 PM

    One of the senior devs at the company I work at is really arrogant and brash while being basically unfireable due to being a knowledge silo. Things like opening tickets in the ops board, not having full admin access to the entire infra etc. have been a source of verbal conflict in the past on multiple occasions. He also once threw a tantrum because he considered tasks assigned to him annoying and wanting to work on things "he actually cares about", which was rewarded by letting him work from home for a couple of weeks.

    I've stopped taking things like that personally. It took effort to do so and to not return fire in equal measure, but the negatives of doing so far outweigh the outcome of keeping a cool head and keeping the discussion rational.