I work with a competent jerk: https://www.pickardlaws.com/myleadership/myfiles/rtdocs/hbr/...

Backstory -- I joined my current team a year ago. It was falling apart. The team members hated each other and were trying to get each other fired. The team lead who’d joined a quarter before had quit to join another team largely due to conflict with one difficult coworker.

Then I joined as the lead. I helped to stabilize the team over the last year. It’s grown from four to ten engineers. Three engineers joined specifically to work with me.

Yet the entire time I’ve been on that team, that one difficult coworker has been criticizing and fighting almost everything I’ve done. That coworker was relatively inexperienced, yet was told by a previous director that he was meant to be the lead of this platform. Hence the fighting with the other lead from a year ago. And with me over the past year. It’s burning me out bad.

It mostly comes across in passive-aggressive comments, and in trying to argue and prove he is right about trivial things, with every bit of disagreement. It used to come up in terms of aggression towards his peers. That stopped when me and my manager intervened. Yet continues with me. It's clear he doesn't respect me as lead, and makes that clear in team meetings.

It makes everything harder. Even in an incident that caused a global outage for three hours, and where we didn't have alerts and had to get told by our users we were down, I get pushback on calling for a post-mortem since his work was involved. Now I have to back-channel to my manager (who wasn't in the room), and still face the . Just the friction alone that he adds in getting anything done makes doing the right thing often not worth it.

I'm at a loss. My other teammates love working with me. I was promoted last year. I'm two levels above this guy which means my company trusts me. I'm frankly wishing I could leave the team but it's difficult to transfer since I'm in something of a specialty and there aren't other positions at my level in the company.

My manager's been resistant to doing much of anything. I think he's tired of me bringing it up. He says that the engineer "gets along with [junior engineer who never disagrees with him]". He says the difficult engineer is improving and sees him trying. His feedback to me is not to let it bother me so much. He asks me what he should do to change his behavior (he's the manager, not me...).

I really just want to be able to come in to work and do my job without dealing with an asshole trying to one-up me or "score points" against me all day and without expecting conflict every time we're in the same meeting. I'm tired of the status and perception games and his overall impact on the team vibe and culture.

user:	boncester
created:	October 25, 2025
karma:	4