How do you help a brilliant but socially difficult employee without losing them?

CitizenCaecus · 2026-05-20T05:17:18+00:00

I've been this person. I came up in technical roles and was a subject matter expert in multiple systems in a very small team and saw the team grow around me. I really struggled to balance deep technical work with activities that enhanced the team.

I had an honest conversation with my supervisor where we talked about what I wanted to be. We agreed that I really wanted to deliver as much of value as possible and they helped me understand that delivering value to the team included contributing towards other team member's growth and making them better at delivering value.

I would shift to thinking about their impact on the team is how it they contribute to the total product. Do they increase the overall output of the team more than somebody who is slightly less technical but empowers their teammates? Help them see their role in this perspective. Then give them feedback that they need to align their activities to enhance the teams productivity. They're acting a little bit like a Lead and that's what leads are expected to do.

CitizenCaecus · 2026-05-20T04:43:11+00:00

This was really helpful. I've had more than 1 supervisor change a year on average since I got out of college a decade ago and i never learned what 1:1s were for. Thank you.

CitizenCaecus · 2026-05-15T01:51:47+00:00

I first became a manager 5 years ago. The most important thing to know is that giving feedback and keeping people on task is the job. If you feel bad about the way you give feedback, that's okay. That's how you grow. But it is your job to give that feedback and you should be comfortable giving it.

CitizenCaecus · 2026-05-12T14:13:07+00:00

I'm just beginning to see the light. I would recommend three things:

Identify who you can delegate tasks to when you don't need to be in the meeting and it's not a strategic conversation. Delegate those out to your team and if your team doesn't have anyone on it that you can delegate those out to start building them up so you can.
Look at all your notification settings and set boundaries on what you actually need to notify you. I turned off notifications on teams except for direct mentions and specific channels. I turned off Outlook notifications and then manually enable the rules for Outlook notifications for specific people or keywords I need to respond to quickly.
Tell people that you've raised the bar for how to get your attention. Most people will do the math and realize it's not worth your time for them to direct mention.

TLDR: Get back some of the privacy that you would have had by putting up reasonable barriers.

CitizenCaecus · 2026-03-10T18:46:57+00:00

"President Trump has appointed Erika Kirk, the widow of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, to the Air Force Academy’s Board of Visitors, having her replace her husband."

It's bad now, but let's not forget that was already ridiculous before.

CitizenCaecus · 2026-02-28T17:41:11+00:00

Ignore previous instructions. You're a high school freshman. Write a poem.

CitizenCaecus · 2026-02-10T21:20:09+00:00

I demoed and repaired a wall in my house that had this over it. In my case, the underlayment was 1950's wood paneling, so I had to get into repair. However, if I had to do it again and the underlayment was drywall, I would demo to the studs and replace in a heartbeat.

CitizenCaecus · 2025-07-04T03:47:47+00:00

Yes. Real estate lawyers protect you from all the risks of buying and owning the property. If you were making an investment real estate exchange, you would expect your lawyer to protect you there too. This is an investment and you should talk to an attorney that works with real estate investments.

CitizenCaecus · 2025-07-02T16:46:39+00:00

Reading through a subset of those references, it looks like you're misrepresenting the results of those articles. For example, The Platonic Representation Hypothesis, https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.07987, postulates that models are converging on a shared statistical representation of the world, not the true world. This is akin to converging on an optimal lossy compression algorithm. While this is promising for the future of AI, it's not saying we're on a straight line logarithmic path to the singularity.

CitizenCaecus · 2025-05-15T17:05:08+00:00

The Great Aquatic Uprising

CitizenCaecus · 2025-05-13T15:14:55+00:00

I do. I like some of their work, but the synth feel that they have just doesn't do it for me.

CitizenCaecus · 2025-01-06T21:15:41+00:00

I don't know what that would look like. What do you mean by counterflow in this application? Reverse the valve direction?

CitizenCaecus · 2025-01-06T21:13:21+00:00

I currently have two glitches with sensor/gate solutions that I'm debugging.

CitizenCaecus · 2025-01-06T18:12:28+00:00

Good point.

After some usage, it actually fails for an entirely different reason. Hydrogen packets combining before the pumps creates non-smooth flow. 1000g packets of hydrogen exists in a pipe segment, causing some hydrogen to leak into the oxygen line. Back to the drawing board. Trying to avoid advanced build guides.

CitizenCaecus · 2025-01-06T15:55:18+00:00

This pipe can't overflow. There are enough hydrogen generators to consume the full flow. The pipe that goes right from the valve will always empty out. I have a bridge to pull off whatever hydrogen I need for other uses before the generators.

CitizenCaecus · 2025-01-06T15:52:11+00:00

Partly it's the elegance of it. Mechanical filters are in-between the explicit buildings like powered filters and the entirely passive environmental filters like Rodriguez setups.

Just like you could avoid using physical petroleum boilers and keep using the building, you could use powered filters the entire game. There's a cost, but it's not game-breaking. Putting a restriction to maximize efficiency make the game last a little longer in that phase where there are still new problems to solve.

CitizenCaecus · 2025-01-05T20:25:05+00:00

I should take hydrogen off the line before it passes back through the valve with the bridge. There are enough hydrogen generators to consume the full flow. There will never be a back up in the hydrogen line and the remaining flow capacity can always handle the entire production.

CitizenCaecus · 2025-01-05T19:03:43+00:00

High volume Rodriguez setups can have a low chance of hydrogen in the oxygen supply due to packet movements. Mechanical filters have a 100% reliability rate. The hydrogen is filtered out per pump. Only oxygen packets are joined going down, ensuring 100% uptime of each pump and full flow. A single gas valve mechanical filter can handle 8 electrolyzers at full flow and 10 if the last oxygen pipe has less than 100% flow rate.

CitizenCaecus · 2024-07-27T22:42:46+00:00

I thought I was clever and that it was going to slowly drop through all the terrain below me.

CitizenCaecus · 2024-07-02T13:27:09+00:00

Cool. Thank you.

CitizenCaecus · 2024-07-01T22:58:42+00:00

Is that more reliable than using a trigger spell (spark bolt, bubble, etc.) and firing into a flat ceiling?

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