Issue #355 (Why Top Firms Fire Good Workers) 12/01/25
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A Hacker News reader recently asked how to deal with a colleague who's not treating you respectfully and making an otherwise 'dream job' into a terrible experience. As the user explains, this sort of thing can lead to burnout. In this case, the colleague is constantly opposing his leadership at meetings, mostly in a passive aggressive way, though it started out worse than that.
As you can see by the responses, this sort of thing isn't rare. Many have experienced working with difficult coworkers and there's varying bits of advice on different ways to handle this.
Some of the suggestions include:
- You can't fix the person, so get help to correct the problem or get out
- Explain to the person in writing how their behaviour affects the team, not just you
- Ask the person if they want to go for a coffee, and explain to them in a casual setting that they're being difficult
- Discuss it with HR
One of the facts in the original story that kind of gets buried is the fact that this difficult person seems to be acting this way because they were overlooked for the lead role, so, as someone else points out, the person could be " operating from a place of 'status injury'."
Do you know how you would handle such a situation? Have you faced this yourself? You might benefit from the thread.
Now on to this week's hand-picked productivity links!
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Twake Drive — An open source, encrypted Google Drive alternative with an elegant interface that enables teams to store and share files and folders securely in the cloud or on your server.
Lunch Flow — A platform that allows you to save hours of manual data entry by automatically syncing transactions from thousands of banks in the US, Canada, Brazil, EU, UK, and Asia to your favorite budgeting tools, spreadsheets, and other destinations.
Check Out These Tech Newsletters — I know, your inbox is already full. But if you have room, these newsletters on tech, startups, AI, careers, and more, might be worth checking out. sponsor
Corcava — An all-in-one CRM, project management, time tracking, and invoicing app so all your teams can manage and customize their business processes and view analytics and reporting.
Antinote — A beautiful scratchpad for Mac that's like having sticky notes with superpowers, allowing you to shrink URLs, do contextual math, convert units, use timers, screenshot to text, and lots more.
Raycast — The popular Mac app launcher is now available for Windows, enabling you to interact with you favourite apps via search, clipboard history, snippets, hotkeys, symbol search, and more.
Shutter Declutter — An iOS app that enables you to view old photos and 'swipe away' the ones you don't want, so you can quickly declutter and remove unwanted pictures from your camera roll, saving you device and iCloud space.
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Why Top Firms Paradoxically Fire Good Workers — Based on a recent study in the American Economic Review, the basic idea here is that their 'revolving door' culture is not a flaw but a sign that the system is working.
How I’ve Run Major Projects — A comprehensive article from someone working at Anthropic on how the team plans, communicates, and organizes different elements of a project to ensure efficiency and success.
Smartphones and Being Present — "I care about living an intentional and meaningful life, nurturing relationships, having nuanced conversations, and enjoying the world around me. I don't want to spend this limited time I have on earth watching short form video and getting into arguments on Twitter."
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The Math of Why You Can't Focus at Work — A different spin on analyzing productivity, using visuals and math to define a typical work day with all of its interruptions and recovery times, and ultimately what a good day should look like.
Comparing Interviews at 8 Large Tech Companies — An article about a LinkedIn post with some further info on one engineer's comparison of the interview processes of some big tech companies.
Pay Yourself First — Bit of a misleading title, but the author is encouraging 'payment' in the form of doing stuff that means something to you (research, learning, etc.), rather than obsessing over project check-ins, replies, and so on.
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