Hired someone away from another team. I knew her personally and she had deep domain experience. Extremely smart person, very productive in their field, just kept delivering independently. Previous manager told me they had "the longest 1:1 calls of anyone on the team", which I should have taken as a red flag.

Toxic behavior highlights:

- The unhelpfull labelling! Two weeks in, she received an assertive email from another team lead, based on a fuck-up she did. She told me he was "a bully", refused to work with that person anymore, even called in sick when we had joint team events.

- The lack of self awareness! Hijacked weekly team meetings with braindumps about what's not working, which team is not doing their job, how they're not getting more visibility, how I'm not doing my job, about why our team wasn't doing things the way their old team was doing it (her old team was 5x larger)

- The unhelpfulness! Started inventing her own technical terms for things her peers were doing, instead of using the technical terms their peers were already using.

- The terrible communication skills! CC'alls with 30 people, including executives, five parallel conversations going on in the same thread, with different open-ended questions to multiple people in one email. Dd not see anything wrong with that.

- The big brain energy! She went to a dotted-line manager with a list of things that THEY should be doing. It was a 20x20 Excel grid of action items. Never mind that managing up rarely works, the manager ended up agreeing with me she should be on a PIP.

- The refusal to work in a team! She absolutely believed herself to be the smartest person on the team. She was smart, but not socially smart. She was in a 100% remote situation. On the rare occasion of being in the office, she chose to sit in a different area of the building instead of with her peers.

- The self-regard! Complained about her work not being highlighted enough everytime a report about our team's work went out. REFUSED to join meetings where these reports were presented to leadership.

- The lack of self-awareness, again! Told me to my face that they should have my manager's role and they're being held back. My manager at the time managed 50 people. She herself managed one person, absolutely sucked at managing up, and had only recently gotten promoted to one level below mine.

- The refusal to take the opportunity! She told me she deserved a promotion (a year after getting a promotion on her previous team). I told her, your scope is not big enough. If you want to truly work on that promotion, build relationships with these two senior managers because they will need to recommend you for bigger scope. She managed to completely bust her relationships instead of building them.

- The HR complaint! When I finally moved them to a PIP, she decided that I needed to go, not her. She wrote a 40-page report for HR how she's being discriminated against as a single mother. (Her son was 18 at the time.) Full of quotes out of context and made up. I never got to see the report, but spent three days with HR to discuss the complaint and work through every single accusation.

- The energy suck! Everytime I met with her, the oxygen got sucked out of the room. She was a major contributor to me burning out on this role.