Senior colleagues are deriding my work

Question

Let me give you some context before. I'm working in a very well-known international company as a DevOps Engineer with 6 months of experience. I feel so grateful and lucky to develop my skills and contribute to such company.

But there is an issue becoming more serious day by day. Some of my colleagues decry/look down upon my job and intentionally trying to find my mistakes even though my mentor is reviewing and refactoring them.

Let me give you some examples.

Last week, I was looking at my personal website about how much it got attention(I love writing blog posts, it motivates me) after shift. I was on a page which I explained differences between Linux, Minix, Unix and Posix. One of my senior colleagues laughed like I peed myself and told me "In 2018, why are you still writing things like that? It has already expired." I tried to explain that I wrote it, because I find it a convenient way to not forgetting and sharing them in my way. Of course he didn't even care and wanted to look further at my page. He saw an Ansible snippet and told me "Hahaha, an Ansible code! Let me find your mistakes." before even looking at it. He couldn't find any and got angrier. I didn't even know what to say to get out of that situation... The situations are similar when he sees my work. It demotivates me.

Another example is not much about deriding actually. One of my not senior colleagues this time, tells me that I don't need to work this much in a bullying way when he sees me working. I would like to point that I'm not a anti-social guy but I would like to finish my job and then go socialize with people. I don't like leaving half-done work and take look afterwards. But these kind of conversations make me don't want to talk with them.

What should I do to prevent these from happening without damaging my image, relations and career?

Answer 1

One of my senior colleagues laughed like I peed myself and told me "In 2018, why are you still writing things like that? It has already expired."

There's two takes on this sort of behaviour - the "laugh along" reaction where you treat it as banter, or the "raised eyebrow" reaction where you treat it as though your colleague is just acting out of line & embarassing himself.

In your situation it sounds like the second would be most appropriate, since you don't enjoy that banter.

In that case, you can look at him, pause, raise an eyebrow, say something akin to "...right..." - and then move on. Most of the time with this reaction, in my experience, people either stop finding it fun, or get the hint and move on.

If it really persists after that, you can just be more direct and say "I'm sorry, I don't appreciate these sorts of comments - I don't find them funny. Can you stop?"

Answer 2

That's a ridiculous situation to be in, for sure.

They do that because you have expose some gap on your general behavior. They identify on you some possible target to do this kind of things. It's not your fault, but you need to be aware that you are triggering this on this kind of (bad) person.

The first step to do is ignore them. You can stop the social conversations (like tell about your blog) and don't tell anymore about you to them, because this is munition for attack you. If they use some thing on work to attack you (like your code), just ask for them to tell what's wrong without joking and thank them for the review. Be professional here.

On your tasks, be more cautious about your code. If you take some code decision that could be more polemic, be sure to have some reference about the decision (StackOverflow post, Martin Fowler article, some book, etc). I already enter on a company that any kind of decision that I made was questioned by some person and, after some weeks, he relax and stop it. The objective here is not give any excuse to bother you. It's harsh, but works.

The second step is take care about the image that you pass for the people. Maybe you are a very nice and agreeable person, but this can be interpreted as a weakness. Utilize some situation on work to demonstrate that you are not so weak: be more direct, disagree when necessary, etc. Be serious. Of course, always with respect.

Answer 3

For the first situation, that guy sounds like a jerk, and I'd be inclined to treat him like one. When he says something like "Let me try to find your mistakes", you should just say "go ahead", and then when he fails to find any, you should grin as big as you can and say something like "see, I told you so, next time I'll try to find yours". Whether to follow up on that is up to you (I would, but I'm also a more petty and vengeful person than most, so it's up to you).

As for the second issue, I don't really understand the problem. Saying you don't need to work so much, and in a bullying way, sounds contradictory to me. It sounds like your colleague wants you to join in on their social activities, but he sees you as being kind of antisocial. When he invites you to join him, you should make an effort to checkpoint your work ASAP (get to a point where you can stop working for a bit and come back and quickly context-switch back into what you were doing) and join him.