Hello, users! 👋
Today I wanted to share one of the worst experiences I had teaching a coworker, I was his 'mentor' when he joined the team. I was so excited but... It turned out so badly.
Presentations
I'll call this guy Davos. Davos joined our team with an evident lack of english knowledge and conversation. (We were all spanish so we could communicate with him, but our entire work and documentation was writen in english).
Our team leader decided that I could teach him about the technologies we were using, the structure of the project and our team's philosophy.
I collected our team progress, wrote some guides, documentation, exercises and step-by-step guides for him (all in spanish of course)... Which he totally ignored.
The smelly Davos behaviour
Davos did anything.
I noticed he opened the guides/exercises when I was around but closed all up when I walked away.
In our progression meetings I saw he was doing nothing, still he didn't had "any doubts to ask". He started saying "that the techs we were using in our project sucked, that the techs he knew worked better". He tried to do some tasks with those "better techs of him" and failed, but still kept on using what he wanted.
My team leader told me to sit with him and actually make him do something. I tried, he totally ignored me, so I just gave him a simple task and opened a tab with the step-by-step doing of the task, then left. He closed the tab and then asked another male colleague how to do the task... This collegue opened the same tab I opened and explained the same thing I did. Davos told him: "WOW man, thank you! You rock!". I was speechless.
This happened twice. And a third time. And a fourth time. And so on. He was constantly avoiding and ignoring my explanations, closing the Chrome tabs of documentation that I opened for him when I was away, and asking the same thing to male colleagues... Which explained him the same things and opened the same docs.
As far as I saw I was loosing my time, because he only listened to male colleagues. So I told my team leader that I wouldn't deal with him anymore.
What finally happened
After 2 months, Davos mentorship finished. He pushed a corrupted version of our project with +100 errors and destroying our 6-months-work.
I'm thankful to god that the commits were reversible and we got back all our efforts.
Davos was finally fired because of so many reasons plus some of the mentioned above.
In conclusion
This was by far the worst experience I had while teaching someone at work.
After that I had all good experiences, but I always remember Davos and I feel his behaviour in many aspects was totally out of any sense.
What about you? Did you had a really bad experiencie while teaching/mentoring someone?
Top comments (16)
Crap... what an individual...
I guess sexism is still a thing in the Tech industry... although I haven't had any experiences in all my work experience 🤷
Could be sexism, or could have just been he didn't like the OP?
Haven't seen this comment before!
I thought since the first minute he had probably some trouble with having a woman giving him mentorship, I was the only one in the whole office he avoided and ignored in purpose (in work matters only, for any other 'social' thing it was totally okay to ask me...).
Weird.
Well I'm glad you don't have to deal with the bugger any more! 🥳
Yea, yea, definitely! It does not seem like it though
sexism will always be a thing with random shitty individuals, doesn't matter the industry
True!
I was working helpdesk and was mentoring a new hire.
Meta-professionally it went wrong almost immediately. We were inbound yet phone notification sounds were on, chronically late, messy inbox, paperwork disaster. Technical-wise, said she understood yet once asked to take a case flunked it. Always had an excuse. In the end she was let go when someone else from the team had to mentor her and backed my statements to the manager. Apparently the mentee had been complaining that I was the reason for her lack of progress.
What this taught me more than anything is that occasional defensiveness happens to the best of us, but I'll give a wide berth to people who are defensive as a rule and don't seem to want to learn. Tech requires constant improvement and if you are unable or unwilling to be taught by others, it's a bad sign.
Sorry you had such an experience!
Indeed the worst part of mentoring is noticing the unwillingness to learn of the other person...
I would rather take this experience as a lesson learned.
Good team leader would gather a meeting with HR and discuss the possible improvements of recruitment process to avoid cases like these in the future.
So ultimately it's a win in your side, anyways.
Moral.. be like Desiré.. not davos....😅😅😅
There seem to be a few different cultures within tech workers; some tech workers are very comfortable asking questions and being humble and knowing that they don't know. Other tech workers have a sort of bravado or a deep fear of being found out that they know nothing, something like imposter syndrome.
Usually that doesn't work out so well, not even if you're a great programmer who rewrites an entire system in Smalltalk.
A senior tech's son was hired for my team once. No qualifications and didn't enjoy the field. He worked but he was not cut out for the needs of that team. Nepotism is real in the industry.
Totally, and it was such a really bad attitude, trust me...
Que hombre mas bruto por Dios!!!! 🤔
¡Y maleducado!
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