Or maybe it's just that most people flourish when you tred gently on their egos.

My employees are software developers, and my customers are doctors. I am getting way too much experience dealing with ego.

A couple of my developers are super defensive

Yeah--my charge to the finish line meant I handled a couple fixes without her, and everything that broke afterwards was because of my fix, she said. Now, she'd still need to fix it, but I guess it made her feel better to point fingers and then wander away for a bit. But in discussing it with a more experienced developer, he likened it to blaming car problems on something you'd done to the microwave, just because you'd had the microwave in the car at some point. If you can't tell that a specific screen throwing a Java "value not found error" is *not* because IIS isn't installed on the server (it was only installed on it fora few hours last week, and everything has worked successfully since it was removed) and *is* because you mislaid a file the page needs to load...you look like an idiot.

Yeah, I did ask her if it was about that file, and she got pissy and said I'd uninstalled IIS, so maybe I'd broken it. Thanks, hon, that really changes everything, and by everything I mean nothing, since IT'S STILL YOUR JOB TO FIX IT and YOU'LL CLEARLY DISCOVER THESE THINGS AREN'T RELATED. She's really paranoid about looking wrong but apparently not about looking stupid. The Ca developers all laugh at her.

And I don't consider "Hey, can you look at this error message the business is getting? They're dead in the water" to be treading on egos in any way. What she needs to do is tread on someone else's in order to make herself seem less stupid, and she's yet to "win" that little game. I like to help by throwing out any changes I've made that align with problems, but apparently my ability to define "aligh" and hers, well, don't.

So I got semi-permanent color yesterday: a brown a shade or two lighter than my old color. It's still pretty jarring, though, by comparison with the grey. My stylist says the color will fade, letting the grey show through in flecks rather than growing out from the roots. In any event, I'm really only doing it while I'm on the market--as soon as I get another job, I'll stop coloring it again.

She's really paranoid about looking wrong but apparently not about looking stupid. The Ca developers all laugh at her.

I think that's the Dunning-Krueger effect in action, because she doesn't realize she's making herself look stupid.

If I thought I were seriously being cruel or hurtful, I'd feel worse about this. But, honestly, if she delivered, if her learning period wasn't a year and counting, if she didn't say things like "well, I don't know that, find another developer" when she knows it's not knowledge anyone has--she just doesn't want to learn...

You can be fucking sure I told him that stuff. Fuck "throwing her under the bus." It's funny that she's clearly been complaining about me, and one of the problems is that I stop communicating and either hand her the solution (from myself, or getting someone else to fix it), or do the work myself, instead of stopping at the analysis like a good little analyst.

Ugh, ita. That all is so reminiscient of my failing team member last year. The defensiveness, the refusal to really learn, or to own the fact that she didn't know or couldn't handle key parts of her job, the blaming things on not being communicated with or hand held enough. I was very lucky in that she reported to me, and my boss was behind me 100%.

Oh, but did I mention here that I got reported to the global ethics hotline because it was just so unfair to fire such a hard worker for no reason at all?

I got reported to the global ethics hotline

Dang, *global*? That's...actually kind of impressive. (And, of course, ridiculous.)

I got reported to the global ethics hotline

Umm, high five?

I notice the highly defensive people pretty quickly because it is a personal character flaw. I'm working on it, but it is my first reaction when stuff blows up.

Yeah, that was fun. But everything was documented (performance improvement plans, crappy annual review scores, stakeholder feedback) etc. so it wasn't anything to worry about. My boss laughed.

I also know some people who get defensive quickly, but then they chill out and get to work. It is like a momentary freak out. I wish you had more of those, Laura.

OK, back in the office. Only one comment on my hair. People here are weird.

I should keep a log of all the shit that comes in that my successor won't know how to deal with.

1. Question about solar panels at a site we transferred to NPS five years ago.

2. Question about justifying removing an obsolete piece of equipment worth $2M from a property we're giving to USAF.

3. Question about status of project in project-tracking software.

I like working with my boss. We both know that everybody makes mistakes, so we both have no problem admitting when we screwed up. While my boss has gotten mad at me for slacking off, he's never been mad at me for a mistake.