Objectivability

I'm ambivalent about the unhelpful guy's fight with his critic. Obviously, picking on someone because English isn't his first language is unfair. And for the record, the unhelpful guy speaks with an accent but his command of the language seems fine. I can always understand what he says and vice versa as far as I can tell. His typos are within the range of normal English speakers. His formatting is a mess, but that's not a native-speaker-versus-non-native-speaker thing. There's basically no good reason to complain about his language. On the other hand, if the criticism of his language was meant as just good-natured ribbing, then him blowing up wasn't really fair either. Understandable, maybe, at the end of a tiring meeting especially if it's something he's sensitive about, but still, not exactly fair.

However, I have plenty of other problems with him. In this morning's post, and the previous posts I link to, I point some of them out.

It's hard to get a straight answer from him about anything. Someone asks him a yes or no question, choose right or left, one option or the other, but instead of saying yes or no he gives an example or explanation that seems to imply "sometimes", and it's only apparent that he really meant "yes" after five minutes of talking about it.

Version control problems seem to mysteriously follow him around. In addition to the usual basic unnecessary work, I also don't like it because it's confusing when he asks me to fix for something that has already been fixed and he just didn't realize it because he doesn't work in the same document as everyone else. Worse yet, version A was a month ago, the team has since decided on version B, and then the unhelpful guy asks me to do C. It's up to me to figure out whether he disagrees with the team about B or just thinks we're still on A, and it's usually the latter.

More generally, he seems pretty technically inept. Admittedly, sometimes in an absent-mindedly innocent "what's the shortcut to copy and paste again?" way, but also sometimes in a "can't be bothered" way. When a spreadsheet has a column for peoples' names and another column for inputs and he fills in his input in the name column, for example, that's just plain carelessness. Trivial, sure, but annoying.

He's often out of the office, gives us little notice of it, and is apparently the only expert we have on certain things so we just have to wait for him to get back.

Every two weeks or so I get an e-mail from him asking for apparently random changes in the document. This is a mix of him catching unambiguous errors by me, him catching errors by me that I'd say were caused by miscommunication (see above) so it's sometimes technically my mistake but I can't make myself feel guilty about it, and him asking for new substantive changes. As for the first type, fair enough, but it's still hardly fun. As for the second, obviously no one would appreciate being in my position. And as for the third, it's his right and his job, but why is he doing it now, and in a way that makes more work for me and other people? Everyone else manages to do their job without adding that extra step of more work for me, but he can't, apparently.

And this part isn't my business, but I have the sense that a lot of what he's doing in the doomed project is outside its mandate. As I've said, one problem with the project is people putting in a lot of things that aren't strictly required by the mandate. It's a gray area, a continuum - some stuff even a layman can tell is a good idea, some stuff the experts can make good arguments about why it's necessary, and some stuff still doesn't seem like that good an idea even after I've heard the arguments. And it seems like a lot of the unhelpful guy's work falls on the far side of that gray area. Like I said, this isn't my business, but whenever someone brings up deadlines I wonder how much better we would be doing without the parts that really just don't look justified... many of which belong to the unhelpful guy.

So I feel completely incapable of being objective about whether the unhelpful guy is being mistreated due to his language, when I have a whole bunch of other reasons to dislike him.