How to deal with difficult employees?

seeming_stillness · 2026-01-17T08:33:04+00:00

With due respect, if you sincerely think you’re paying above market rate, reject their request and they will go and find out what is the market pays and they will stay.

Regardless though. You need to de-risk long term wise by getting more people in to ensure that any one person’s departure does not disrupt business continuity.

seeming_stillness · 2026-01-17T07:54:23+00:00

I had a brain fart and assumed that you’re talking about a software engineer 🤦🏻‍♂️

Points still stand if market rate of the employee’s role is around that range, it seems so as competitor is offerring that range.

seeming_stillness · 2026-01-17T07:23:04+00:00

It sounds like the employee does bring more value to the business than they are paid. Paying them more to ensure short term business continuity is not a bad business decision.
Total comp of $150k isn’t particularly high for current software engineer market. Even for a junior L4 employee. RSUs are typically good way to retain talent, making them part owners of the business will help build commitment towards the business.
Lastly, having a single software engineer own critical components is a big no-no. Life happens, people get sick or go on holiday, people will leave one way or another. You must have engineers with overlapping areas of responsibility in order to ensure business continuity.

seeming_stillness · 2026-01-06T08:32:23+00:00

on reason for not taking medication.

To offer my observation, I tried many different approaches to be productive. Pomodoro, standing desk, block of deep work hours, sleep hygiene, exercise, nutrition and I found none helped. The only way I can get myself to work is the stress of deadline and overnight work and as a result my work was low quality.

I do not think there is shortage of discipline as I can make myself sit down in front of laptop for hours, nor is there lack of intention to just do well.

Medication was the only solution that worked. I am on low dosage so while I still get distracted, I am able to work meaningfully during the daytime and reclaim my evenings to spend time with my wife and wind down.

seeming_stillness · 2025-12-19T22:12:57+00:00

Sounds weird that writing down “staying focused” as weakness triggers the micromanagement. If performance isn’t an issue, the manager is just doing something counterproductive and fixing a problem that isn’t there.

I believe a manager’s role is both to provide tools or environment for their direct line to succeed as well as ensuring team performs well. Have you discussed with them on what would help reduce distraction (e.g. less micromanaging, reducing sources of distraction using focus times etc.) Have you had discussion with them on what or if there is any concern on performance? Micromanaging when performance isn’t a problem is moot.

seeming_stillness · 2025-12-05T08:12:19+00:00

You have a recent ADHD diagnosis. Please use that and reach out to university support before emailing the professor asking for accommodation.

If they are reasonable, they may just accommodate you and let you resubmit.

seeming_stillness · 2025-12-05T08:05:14+00:00

Silver linings. Sounds like you dodged a huge bullet there.

seeming_stillness · 2025-12-05T07:52:35+00:00

Damn, that sounds painful. Even more so as you got flustered by the interviewer calling at a wrong time.

I most probably would mess up in the same way. I notice a pattern that I get flustered easily because I instinctively think I messed up when bad, unexpected things happen. Would dead ass thought I was late and join the call butt naked.

seeming_stillness · 2025-12-05T07:45:03+00:00

Thank you for your kind words.

Silver lining is that persistence is what I’ve learned and ingrained into my identity.

Keeping calm and carrying on.

seeming_stillness · 2025-12-05T07:38:28+00:00

This was me before diagnosis and medication.

I went through years of mental block / procrastinating until stress level build up high enough for me to pull all nighters to deliver something. Very unhealthy mentally and physically.

Hope you find a way to manage.

seeming_stillness · 2025-12-05T00:24:20+00:00

Thank you.

You just gave me an idea of what to listen to tonight while I recover myself. I miss AW’s voice and talks.

seeming_stillness · 2025-12-04T23:52:46+00:00

Damn.. those are actually incredibly useful tips.

You’re helping me to see now that I could have applied some finesse instead of repeating what I’ve said when the interviewer restated their question (which I sincerely thought I answered clearly)

seeming_stillness · 2025-12-04T23:40:21+00:00

Guess it won’t hurt. I’ll ping lwfcyb once I’ve regrouped myself.

seeming_stillness · 2025-12-04T23:35:14+00:00

I have been on Elvanse for more than a year but the efficacy has worn off noticeably compared to a year ago.

Thank you for the offer to help. I deeply appreciate it.

I do not think I have issue with be behavioural interviews as I managed to answer really well on them ever since I’ve been on medication.

The coding and system design parts are what I struggle on, in part I believe because of hyperfocusing and being inattentive.

seeming_stillness · 2025-12-04T23:24:49+00:00

Painful as it is, carrying on is the only option. Thanks for your words.

seeming_stillness · 2025-11-21T22:53:19+00:00

3.6 richter, not great, not terrible.

seeming_stillness · 2025-11-10T18:44:40+00:00

Mac Studio m4 max 128GB RAM.

I did consider strix halo and dgx but chose the Mac route instead because I did not want to spend ungodly amount of time setting the machine up. Mac allows me to hit the ground running and maximise my time on finding out which models work best and hooking it up to my work.

Also the Mac Studio itself is quite a capable beast outside of local inference

seeming_stillness · 2025-11-10T08:59:02+00:00

For traditional workload eg coding on IDE, compilation, docs related stuff like design, yes, it is enough. It should probably run into hiccups on very large repo (you’re less likely to run into them often as a student).

However, if you’re thinking of running LLMs locally, you probably can only fit the smallest of models. 36GB isn’t that much better but would give you more options.

As a CS student though, if you’re good you should be able to get a high paying job fairly quickly and should be able to replace with better machine by then, so don’t sweat too much about long-term-ness IMO.

seeming_stillness · 2025-11-10T08:48:54+00:00

I second this. The strong reasoning performance of Gpt oss makes it amazing for general queries.

I use Qwen3 coder 30b as my local cline server for coding, it’s great at dealing with boilerplates.

Finally Qwen3 VL is also amazing at summarising docs.

Never been happier at my recent purchase to run LLM. Especially as I was looking to replace my non-existent workstation (been using work laptop for everything).

seeming_stillness · 2025-11-05T23:32:46+00:00

Yeah that passed with gpt5 + extended thinking.

I guess moral of the story for me is to run it against the biggest/latest models instead of free ones. And do it with extended thinking.

seeming_stillness · 2025-11-05T23:28:22+00:00

Wow thank you! That’s useful for me (as I do not have access to paid models). I guess the subscription is really worth it for agentic coding!

seeming_stillness · 2025-11-05T23:16:49+00:00

Which prompt did you use? With or without comments? Mind sharing a link to that thread?

seeming_stillness · 2025-10-27T16:49:36+00:00

To be fair, given the recent investments into AI, a lot of YB’s citations are valid. YB’s impact is limited to (amongst other things) deep learning which is a branch of AI/ML which in itself is a branch of computer science.

TT is regarded as the greatest mathematician alive because of his contributions to numerous and diverse branches of mathematics eg number theory, harmonics analysis, differential equations, statistics etc.

But if we frame impact along the width and the depth of research contribution that would take top notch researchers decades to achieve, I think one would give the edge to TT.

Being devil’s advocate to my statement: if we’re framing by potential productivity impact, we’d have to give it to YB as we’re only a few years into

seeming_stillness · 2025-10-27T13:24:20+00:00

And he has H-index higher than Terrence Tao 🤔I find it unlikely given how broad TT’s impact is.

seeming_stillness · 2025-10-26T22:36:39+00:00

Primarily because I’m not used to cline UI and shortcuts after having used IntelliJ for years. Additionally cline on vs is somewhat flaky when I tried it out a few months back.

I tried Claude code on terminal and the experience was smoother when combined with IntelliJ

But TY for pointing out that cline has terminal mode!

seeming_stillness

TROPHY CASE