Shoot me and put me out of my misery

I cannot offer advice, Free, cos I don't work in a Boyzownzone - but I am listening with great sympathy and concern...

Yes, me too, Freeduck! LOTS of sympathy! Creepy little Upstart!

Thanks for the encouragement, folks. I'm feeling much better this morning.

Hey, did you smack the **** out of that little smartass bastard yet?

Hee hee. Hi kicky. I noticed something really interesting in our big design meeting. When the project lead is around, he's on his best behavior and very respectful. But as soon as he left, bing, back to asshole-mode. I wonder what's up with that?

Anyhow, I go on vacation in a few weeks so I just have to keep from killing him for a little while longer.

May you wear your new shoes on peaceful paths.

Hold your dominion.

Thank you, Noddy. I do walk a bit taller in them...

Next time he interrupts you, just keep talking. Don't raise your voice, just keep talking normally, especially if you were talking to someone else.

Drives these types nuts to be ignored.

Never back down to a bully; they see it as weakness and think you're someone they can pick on.

I agree. Stay unruffled, but don't back down. (Hard, I know.)

I'll ask E.G. for his advice.

I'd love to hear his take on it. I talked to the project lead today and he sees some of what I'm complaining about. I never complained to him and he's the one that brought it up. He is of the opinion that he's always going to be an "academic" but that with time he'll settle down.

I did also notice today that his arguments run the circuit. He starts with me, thinks he's right so floats it by others. He gets the same answer, more or less, from everybody and gives it up. Maybe this will happen enough and, like the project lead said, he'll settle down. Overall, I just feel a lot less agitated.

Hey Freeduck,

You said a big part of your job is to be able to work well on a team. Isn't that a big part of his job as well? It sounds like the project lead is noticing the discord or he wouldn't have brought it up.

Most employers have a probationary period where the make sure they've got a good fit for the job. Does your company have anything like that? If it does, don't wait too long to get the point across that this guy bears watching. He can't be a team player if he alienates most of the team.

I don't know if they have a probationary period -- I don't think they do. But what I do think is that, if he doesn't adjust well, nobody will want to work with him and he'll end up on the crappy projects.

I agree he will probably settle down. Judging by your description, I have seen a few people like him, fortunately not on projects I was personally working on. (Knock on wood.) Going by the experience of my hard-tested colleagues, here are a few things that might help him settle down: First, within your projects, try to have tasks assigned to him that require much common sense, and very little scholarship in the theology of things like object-oriented programming, design patterns, and the ideosyncrasies of your programming language. The surest way to moderate his overconfidence in such theology is to confront it with the harsh reality of hardware bugs to catch, clumsy legacy code to program around, user-hostile libraries, and other engineering obstacles unworthy of a computer scientist's attention. There's a good chance that he will either put up or shut up, both of which helps you.

Also, if your project's time budget permits and you disagree on something reasonably small, have him program it his way, you program it your way, and run both implementations through a profiler. He seems to be very competitive, so let him compete. If he's really right half the time, wrong half the time, then hard, objective test results may inspire some rethinking and some modesty on his part.

Finally, it seems to me that you and he are trying to resolve a lot of your disputes by talking. I'm not sure that's such a good idea in this case. If he is fresh out of college and proficient in the kind of knowledge that impresses computer science professors, he may well be better at talking about programming than you are, even if you are better at actually programming. So maybe it would help if you placed less emphasis on debating and more emphasis on testing as a way to settle your disagreements.

In the meantime, good luck trying to stay sane while Mr.Genius is settling down.

This is very true and an excellent observation. I've gotten better over time at talking about programming out of necessity -- it's hard to get a job if you can't express yourself in an interview -- but he's still better at it than me. Not to mention, my strengths have always been on the debugging, problem-solving, and modeling side and never really on the static knowledge about computers side. So I think you're right. And there's also the problem that, even if I were as good at talking about it as he is, we don't understand each other most of the time. Or at least, I don't understand him so I assume that he is equally perplexed by me. I do try to avoid the debates, but I often get sucked in because I take his attitude too personally. I think, after Friday, that I can get over this.

Unfortunately, he was given the part of the application to develop that requires the most creativity. I think the reasoning was that he was well suited to do that part because he is an academic, but it seems the project lead is regretting that decision.

Really excellent take, Thomas. Thanks for the good advice.

<vent> My god, when the going gets tough, some people turn into absolute pricks. It seems like there's a 15 minute time limit on all conversations with this guy, and after that it's all him arguing about something he's misunderstood and me looking perplexed.</vent>

Ok. I feel better now. It's going better overall, but there's still some moments where I'd like to grab him by his neck and twist away.

Book mark.

Have you tried waiting until he's in the middle of a really good rant, and then......yawning......?

LOL!

That would be perfect.