I work for a big corporate in the software industry in the UK, so we have hierarchies and everything. About a year ago I was promoted and moved to a different team. In this new team (which I already used to interact with) there's a team mate who essentially is a pain to work with. I'll give few examples to give the picture but without going too much into details.
Example 1. The project leaders are usually the ones dealing with our client when we receive requirements. When they share information so we can discuss the technical details more often than not the conversations rails towards how the project leaders handled the agreed work, and in a constructive but with an excessively negative attitude (almost bullying). My line manager himself raised the issue once with me in confidence, but I don't understand why apart from giving him bad scores two years in a row he doesn't actually take more drastic measures.
Example 2. Like everyone we do code reviews, I'm quite a pedantic engineer. I look whenever I can through all the lines of the relevant code, I ask questions because I want to understand, I give what I believe are some good suggestions and I test it. We usually require two approvals in order to merge a patch, and as a rule unless the code doesn't work I never block anything and he's free to ignore my comments or suggestions. The attitude in this case by him is very hostile, he takes any review very personally like someone is insulting him. I remember code reviews where comments/discussions really looked like a chat and I had to walk away from the conversation. More than once I had to ask my PL whether or not my reviews are harsh and if I should limit my comments per review, I was never told off and actually told my reviews are reasonable with valid points in general.
Example 3. His technical knowledge is very limited (like to very single and specific technologies that actually aren't very re-usable for the kind of projects we work on). He's been encouraged suggested many times to be "open minded" towards more tools and libraries, he refuses to do so as he's of the belief we should develop everything from scratch and more often we have to shape our projects/tasks by taking into account his technical knowledge (he's been working for our company for two years and I personally have never seen him growing skill wise. My understanding he has a very specific interest and I'm personally fine with it but what I'm not particularly happy about is him forcing his own ways in our work.
Example 4. Very aggressive, when he has a point he wants to raise he doesn't just raise it... he becomes obsessed with it to the point that people within my team (including my manager) have defined him as "bully". He also patronizes everyone which personally irritates me, but I'm learning slowly how to let it go which I confess is very difficult (and not just for me).
In my opinion, and not just mine, we should let him go. He clearly is not happy at this workplace for whatever reason. The only thing I'm aware of is that he's been given bad scores for the last couple of years.
He's being very toxic and very difficult to work with. What I want to suggest, but not sure this is appropriate, is either:
- We simply let him go
- He needs some sort of formal training to manage his attitude and build on this to improve himself.
I can't see any other way around this and I want to push to sort this out ASAP. What can I do? should I raise this with HR? what sort of information/proof should I provide?
The way I see this is simple... if he doesn't like the way the company works he simply should leave and not make everyone miserable... or if he wishes to stay (and so far he's been given such opportunity) he needs to learn how to professional interact with people.
Any advice or useful information?