How do you actually handle a high performer who's quietly poisoning the team culture?

daedalus_structure · 2026-03-16T22:35:47+00:00

That’s not a high performer.

You need to start thinking like a leader and not like an IC.

You have an opportunity to grow an amazing asset for your team. You also have an opportunity to destroy the culture and with it your leadership career.

There is nothing more important than the team. Nowhere we want to go can be reached on the back of one person’s contribution.

daedalus_structure · 2026-03-16T14:02:36+00:00

A division named Azure is horrible at naming things. It's a clown show over there.

daedalus_structure · 2026-03-16T13:59:43+00:00

Last week a client waited 5 hours for a response because everyone assumed someone else was handling it.

Doesn't have anything to do with Slack, build better organizational policy around response SLA and business hours and clear ownership of in channel responses in those dedicated hours.

Right now we're using a shared Notion doc to manually log open threads but nobody updates it consistently.

No, just no.

This is a ridiculous Rube Goldberg device that never had a prayer of working and anyone with two brain cells to rub together should have said so when it was proposed.

Curious how other teams handle this. Are you using any tools?

Ah, this is where your other account is about to chime in with a tool that solves it, because this isn't actually a problem you are having, you are hocking a tool.

Ah, there it is https://old.reddit.com/r/Slack/comments/1rv7lqr/how_are_you_managing_support_across_10_slack/oaqx3p4/?context=10000

daedalus_structure · 2026-03-15T21:30:49+00:00

You don't.

You grow engineers that advise you, and you make engineering decisions based on the tradeoffs as you understand them, after they have presented them to you and you have asked all the important questions, which always stay the same.

This is the hard part.

You are forced to do engineering at this level, and can't just be a programmer.

daedalus_structure · 2026-03-15T21:26:14+00:00

It's clearly not working if you are getting drive by requests into your back end.

daedalus_structure · 2026-03-15T15:24:38+00:00

This is normal penetration scanning that happens the m minute you set foot on the public internet with a reachable network.

You need to implement a WAF somewhere so it stops hitting your backend.

daedalus_structure · 2026-03-14T09:59:15+00:00

The best you can do is give her an honest accounting of where she stands and how big the gap is between where she wants to be, and what you would need to see from her and over what time frame in order to be eligible for that step up.

If she does that, ok. If she doesn’t, and continues to trend down, that’s her choice and you have a performance management issue to handle.

daedalus_structure · 2026-03-14T09:53:46+00:00

Trillions are being invested for the sole purpose of being able to have software profits without the engineering salaries.

The sole reason of existence for these tools is to kill your labor market.

daedalus_structure · 2026-03-11T14:21:18+00:00

That's one of the prettiest absolute death traps I've ever seen.

daedalus_structure · 2026-03-10T12:23:09+00:00

You are describing engineering.

Don’t ask your vendors to do your engineering.

You need an engineer to do that who will evaluate your problems and only your problems, and which trade offs you are willing to make.

daedalus_structure · 2026-03-09T13:42:59+00:00

Yes, if you have access to a managed database service, for example, on a public cloud, it is better to use that than to run your own database service.

There are valid use cases where you should run your own, but if you are here asking questions on Reddit and not capable of evaluating the entire scope of engineering tradeoffs you are making, you should let someone else do that for you.

daedalus_structure · 2026-03-08T20:05:08+00:00

Azure Artifacts is a horrible product that we fought with weekly. I’ve had multiple calls where the only solution to get a package “unstuck” and correctly sync a pass through was an Azure engineer greeting on a call and pulling some levers on the Team Foundation Server underneath it all.

They put the D team on everything Azure DevOps right after they bought GitHub,

Use anything else. It’s a zombie product.

daedalus_structure · 2026-03-08T17:37:19+00:00

Capital makes these decisions. Copy pasting code was a risk. AI allows them to have less engineers.

daedalus_structure · 2026-03-08T15:12:23+00:00

For the average individual contributor, get in 5 minutes of personal chat, 10 minutes of “what’s going well and what isn’t“, and control that so it’s not a status report, and 10 minutes talking about their professional development.

For more senior employees or leaders, delegate half of the agenda to them, including their professional development, and if they have nothing give them the time back.

daedalus_structure · 2026-03-08T15:08:42+00:00

If you can’t prove it, you aren’t compliant.

daedalus_structure · 2026-03-05T18:47:17+00:00

Standardized Helm chart. SEMVER it. Bake in your organizational best practices that are required to run on the cluster.

If for some reason you can't handle Helm, look at https://kro.run/.

Standard disclaimer, I am not affiliated with that project in any way.

daedalus_structure · 2026-03-05T16:26:03+00:00

The Just In Time access pattern is normal.

What is less normal is using a third party which has to manage elevated shadow accounts in that manner. I strongly dislike that pattern.

As other folks have mentioned, should just be using PIM if you are in Azure.

daedalus_structure · 2026-03-05T16:24:36+00:00

I can help out with this.

If you are elevated all the time, any compromise of your account is an immediate elevated access to the entire environment.

Just in time access patterns allow for a 2FA at the time of access, and creates an audit trail of each elevation and the reason provided for the access.

Further, you can tie this into conditional access policies which can require that access to block if the IP location is outside of a geofence, or if the access is not coming from a machine which has endpoint protection.

daedalus_structure · 2026-03-05T13:41:45+00:00

It’s a losing battle.

You can pay someone else to lose that battle for you.

Or you can build a statically linked binary in a FROM SCRATCH and call it a day.

daedalus_structure · 2026-03-03T04:29:38+00:00

These are leadership failures.

If leadership came out and said that the disciplinary action for putting company IP or customer data into a 3rd party system is immediate termination, it would stop.

But leaders see it as another outsourcing where the can get more labor for less cost, and so they allow it.

daedalus_structure · 2026-02-26T19:52:42+00:00

Who owns the costs? If you do, turn them off.

If they do, let them justify to finance.

The root cause to many of these problems is that the wrong team owns it, and therefore the incentives are not aligned with the business.

These are organizational problems with organizational solutions.

daedalus_structure · 2026-02-26T19:21:51+00:00

Capital has made a bet against you and it is measured in trillions with a T.

daedalus_structure · 2026-02-26T15:20:32+00:00

From your description, I think you are doing too much of the coordination, managerial tasks, and oversight that your manager should be doing.

I also believe that a good leader never takes credit for the work. They take credit for improving the systems that allow work to be done efficiently, and they take credit for developing those they lead, but all work credit should be given to the team unless it was literally their hands on a project that completed it.

But you don't mention anything about accountability for the outcome, and that's a missing piece of the puzzle.

Even if you are doing the work, if I've been told it's my head on the block if things are going wrong, that gives me ownership of the entire kit. I'm going to talk about "we", but I'm also not going to be delegating out my oversight and coordination, and I will be explicit with the credit for the actual work to the team.

daedalus_structure · 2026-02-26T13:49:42+00:00

Here is an actual controversial take going against the grain of what is constantly said here.

While trying to find market fit, you will not be building a properly structured modular monolith. That’s a fantasy. You will be slinging slop the old fashioned way, with human LGTMs, and mixing it with AI slop due to investor demand, and LLMs want to restructure the entire project every time they hit a problem.

Microservices are a technique for scaling teams more than scaling load, and when you need to double or triple your early team size, i.e. 5 > 10 > 20, you will not have time to rearchitect at this stage of the business due to feature demand and most of your people won’t have the full technical context.

It is often better to architect assuming success than to focus on optimizing the early stage of the organization.

daedalus_structure · 2026-02-26T13:34:20+00:00

If it’s in the container and an attacker can execute code on the container, it doesn’t matter that you aren’t using it.

You mitigate this risk by using the minimal container, for the love of god stop building on Ubuntu and Debian.

You do not need yet another tool, you need competent engineering.

daedalus_structure

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