Brittle, angry, defensive people

While good leadership can win over argumentative, sensitive people, the effort can be exhausting, so always ask yourself if it is worth it

I have dealt with some people who strike me as brittle, sensitive, defensive. Given enough empathy, and enough conversations, it is often possible to win these people over to your cause, and to get them to focus on your mission. However, the effort can be exhausting, so you need to ask yourself if the long-term benefit outweighs the short-term cost.

The following happened in 2019. Marie was a data scientist, from Russia. She was a friend of a friend, and someone brought her to one of my once-a-month parties that I host for the New York City startup scene. I spoke with her for awhile, she seemed intelligent, well educated, and desperate for work. She complained that women were discriminated against in the tech industry and I agreed with her. During 2019 she had a few freelance gigs, but apparently not enough to pay her bills. As it happened, my clients Cree and Sarah needed data analysis for the problems their customers had, so I thought I could bring in Marie to help, but we had problems dealing with her from the start. During our first meeting she became angry and complained, with some bitterness, that our data was poorly organized. The next Monday, at our second meeting, she was also difficult.

That evening, after the meeting, I sent her this email:

Marie,

We are grateful for everything you are doing but please, in meetings, try to stay calm. Just let me know what you need and I will get it for you, or rearrange any data however you like.

---- lawrence krubner

She responded the next day:

Lawrence,

I explained everything to Cree yesterday and she and Sarah should get the data I need today and then send it to me. Yesterday, I spent 3 hours explaining it to her and to you drawing the table and so on. Cree knows what I need.

If you truly concern about the discrimination of females in your society, I would highly recommend to read the studies and articles bellow. Unfortunately, I have not met yet an American male who is not guilty of the form of gender discrimination described in those articles. It is extremely sad. That's why eventually, I would love to go back to Russia.

I think the articles below are extremely important for you to read if you are genuinely concern about women's position in tech.

https://www.activia.co.uk/blog/why-women-are-seen-as-abrasive-when-being-assertive-at-work

http://fortune.com/2014/08/26/performance-review-gender-bias/

https://hbr.org/2018/05/the-different-words-we-use-to-describe-male-and-female-leaders

https://www.fastcompany.com/3031101/the-new-subtle-sexism-toward-women-in-the-workplace

Now, I love team work but when it comes to my area expertise I prefer my clients to trust it. I have a PhD (and it is not earned for nothing) and I have been working with data for the last 10 years. I know what to do with data once Cree emails it to me, and I will get for you and Cree the output you both need with the code. You and Juan are taking different approach, and it is, frankly, not how we data scientists do that. So I appologize I cannot really help you with your work because I am not sure what you both are doing.

I will probably stay home tomorrow and work from home. Unfortunately, it takes me an hour to get to the office (2 hours total) and plus I tend to wait for you very often when I come by the front desk. I do not bill for those hours but those are precious hours for me.

Because I have not taken any rest for two months, today is my day off and I appologize if I am not able to attend to all your emails.

Kind regards,

Marie

In the email, she refers to my friend Juan Gomez, who had gone back to school to study machine learning. Nowadays, in 2025, both Juan and I are helping to launch Gruntled. At that point, in 2019, Juan and I were taking a simple approach, pushing data together and looking for cosine similarity on two variables. We had been hoping that Marie could offer a more sophisticated analysis.

I responded to her:

This is not good enough. I’m trying to avoid a repeat of what happened yesterday. That meeting did not go well. You made the claim that you were unable to get work done and so you left early. That is not good.

I am responsible for the team. We must make progress tomorrow. If you show up tomorrow and tell us that you are still unable to make progress, I will be upset.

Whatever you need, you need to put in writing today. You just wrote me a fairly long email, you could have used the same time to write a specification for what you need. It should only take you 10 minutes to write down what you need. Why won’t you do this?

When I look at your LinkedIn profile I notice you were mostly successful in an academic setting. Perhaps you are having trouble adapting to the private sector?

About this:

“Now, I love team work but when it comes to my area expertise I prefer my clients to trust it”

I am demonstrating my respect for you by asking “What do you need?” I am puzzled why you feel this is disrespectful?

Yesterday Cree and I were puzzled by your behavior. When we arrived, you said the data was in the wrong format. I then asked you “What do you need?” You responded by saying “I don’t need anything.” But clearly you wanted the data in some format. We wasted three hours before we finally found out what you needed: you wanted questions separated from their answers. You should have figured this out before the meeting. I could have resolved the problem before the meeting began.

About this:

“Unfortunately, I have not met yet an American male who is not guilty of the form of gender discrimination”

I work with an all-female team and they love working with me. My clients Sarah and Cree are both female and they love working with me. Rather than accuse me of something, perhaps you should consider how badly you managed yesterday’s meeting? You did not make a good impression on Cree or Sarah. Tomorrow’s meeting needs to go well. That is why I’m asking that you put all of your requests into an email. Tell me now what you will need tomorrow.

—Lawrence

To the extent that she had a criticism that I found actionable, she had requested, during our meeting, that I clean up the data before she works with, so I wrote some Python code that would parse the data into manageable blocks, with labels, and I sent her that, assuming my code would be a good starting point for her. In particular, Sarah and Cree sold survey tools and we needed to separate the questions from the answers before the data got sent to Marie. I wrote code that did this. I sent all of this to her, but the next day she complained that my approach put the data in a format that she still found to be unworkable.

We met again the day after and she had not made much progress. I tried to emphasize that she needed to enunciate what was holding her back. If she needed the data in a particular format, then I could reformat the data, but she had to specify exactly what she needed. She felt that I was putting too much pressure on her, but I explained that she had, by now, had more than a week to figure out what she needed, and so she should be able to describe what the problem was. But she felt I was rushing the project to an unreasonable degree.

She responded with another email:

Lawrence,

Last week, I witnessed you screaming at Juan and he was screaming back at you. It was not big deal for you then.

We had an argument yesterday but nobody was yelling at each other. I was asserting my point of view. You hated it because you felt I undermined your authority in front of Cree but it is not what I did. You made a huge deal out it and today you went overboard even though I apologized in front of you and Cree yesterday and said 'understood' to you over email. You could not stop, you continued scolding me today as a little girl. I am not a girl, I am a grown female and I don't allow people to speak to me like that unless they pay me at least $60 an hour. I have enough of this stress in industry and I did not join your team to add more stress to my stress.

It is unfortunate, that you did not read the articles I sent you before sending me the last email. I was making a point. You have double standards because you allow yourself to scream at your team members in front of anyone, but you are troubled by having an argument with a women. Apparently, according to you, Cree was troubled by it too. The articles I sent you can explain her behavior as well. In general, I think it was a very bad idea to involve her. Knowing how she feels, I don't know if I can help her now.

You are bossing me around, but I am not your slave. I am a consultant. I consult you and it is up to you whether you need my expertise or not. I do not let my clients to tell me how I should do my work. You show me final output, you give me the right data, and I deliver the final output with codes. That's how I work. If it has met your expectations then there is nothing I can do. I sent an email to everyone this morning asserting what I need to do my work. You did not like it because I did not send it to you personally. You continued dominating me and scolding me like a little girl.

There is also some kind of confusion. I did not join the team to learn data science. I joined your team to offer my expertise in data science, improve my coding skills, and help a start-up. I had no idea I was joining your team either because you originally told me that you need someone with knowledge of NLP to help a start-up. Because we had a good conversation about females in tech, I wanted to help. With my busy schedule, I am actually doing you a favor. My rate in industry is at least $55 an hour. I wanted to help the team for $35 an hour, but I will not take any abuse for $35 an hour.

I would never argue with you when it comes to coding or software engineering but I know data science and I know it well. I have done it in industry as well. I have interviews for Senior Data roles in industry. I will soon be making a very generous 6 figure salary. Plus, over 80% of data science projects in industry fail so industry is not a good example.

I would have to discontinue my services with the startup and wish you and Cree good luck. No need to pay for the time I've spent on the project. I only take money when I deliver and my clients are happy.

Thank you for everything and good luck.

Marie

I responded:

Marie,

I am trying to help you. As one of your customers, I’m trying to give you some honest feedback about how you came across. Here are some facts about yesterday’s meeting:

1. You were not prepared for the meeting. You didn’t know what you needed, and you needed our help to figure out what your real request was. You forced us all to waste 3 hours.

2. You took multiple personal calls during the meeting. That’s easy to forgive so long as you get good work done the rest of the time, but you did not get good work done.

3. You had multiple misunderstandings about the code I’d written for you. Every time I tried to correct you, you cut me off and told me I was wrong. I was trying to tell you that you were dealing with a list of maps and you told me I was wrong. Why don’t you simply listen? I have 20 years experience writing software. You must be aware that you can learn some things from me? The fact that I had to write the code for you suggests that you still have a lot to learn. Again, I’m simply trying to help you. But you were fighting me the whole time. You often cut me off and you would not let me finish my sentences.

4. You didn’t ask enough questions. When software developers join a complex project they typically don’t get much work done during the first few weeks. They just ask a lot of questions and learn as much as possible. You have not done that. You don’t understand what the startup is trying to do.

5. You told us what we already knew. We kept trying to warn you about this and yet you refused to listen to us. One of your points was that accuracy would be low. We already knew that. Another point you made is that some sentences would not have our target keywords. We already knew that. We’ve been working on this for several months, we’ve already discussed all of these issues. Why don’t you listen to us?

-Lawrence Krubner

She responded:

Lawrence,

I took this project when I practically have no time. I did you a favor. I am getting full-time job with a 6 figure salary for which I don't need any additional money. I took calls during the meeting because: 1) I had no idea we were having a formal meeting, 2) I thought we had a discussion, 3) I have other priorities and it was an official presentation.

You cannot stop scolding me. Do you realize how abusive is this? You think by scolding me you are going to get me back? Please stop this blame game. I respect what you wrote but I will not let anyone to treat me like that.

Lawrence, I am really tired. I think it was a bad idea for me to take the project considering my time limitation. I will finish the final output and then I will stop working on this project. I have to concentrate on the full-time opportunity. It looks like i have 2 full-time job instead of me having one full-time job and one part-time consulting job. Data science is an extremely stressful job and I cannot have so much stress in my life as it is will be affecting my health. I did not expect to be on the call here. And I do not have time for that.

I think you are making a big deal out of Tuesday and the more you are talking about that the less I want to work with you. You will never ever achieve anything from people by scolding them or raising your voice at them. It is bad leadership skills.

Thank you for everything and good luck.

Marie

After that week I decided that working with Marie was too much effort.

She came to a few of my parties in late 2019.

In 2020 the pandemic began. I was taking care of my mom, and I lost touch with some people over the next few years.

Just last month, I was scrolling through my contact list on LinkedIn, and I saw Marie’s name. We had not spoken since 2019. I engaged her in conversation. She had moved to Kentucky and bought some land, but things were not going well:

I told her a bit about current hiring at startups.

I told her that I thought things would get difficult for those who want jobs that are 100% remote.

I wished her luck.

So, if I had made an effort, could I have won over Marie? Could I have gotten her to focus on the mission, on the terms we needed, and hit the deadlines we needed? Maybe. But I think it would have taken some effort. My impression of Marie is that she is either suffering burnout, or she is, simply because of her personality, a bit sensitive and defensive. I have the impression that it would take more effort than can be justified, to get her to focus on the mission. So I think I made the right call when I decided not work with her any more.

Why did I write this essay? In previous essays I have argued for a direct, confrontational style of leadership. Some readers have complained that I demonstrate bad leadership, because a good leader is empathetic and tries to accommodate employees. But that only sees leadership from the side of the employees. Good leadership in business actually needs to strike a balance: you need to be empathetic to the real difficulties that employees are facing, but you also need to remember that time costs money, and time is finite, so if someone is wasting too much of your time, then the best option is often to end the relationship and find someone who is a better fit for your organization.