Ask HN: What lessons did you learn from your best or worst colleagues?
To change anything you have to be responsible, empowered, and knowledgeable about it. If you only have one or two of them, seek out the others. If you can&#x27;t attain all three, stop worrying about it; you can&#x27;t change it.<p>Transparency leads to trust, but also can be abused. Be transparent in incremental steps, so that you still build trust with those that are trustworthy, and so you aren&#x27;t hurt too badly by those that aren&#x27;t.<p>Failures of people are as often due to the environment they&#x27;re in as they are the people. That can be useful to not judge colleagues too harshly, and also to remind yourself you are good and capable when you find yourself in a job&#x2F;role where you&#x27;re unable to function.<p>The way to build successful products is to care about them. Stakeholders that seek to explain problems they&#x27;re trying to solve and why the matter will get results; stakeholders that try to dictate solutions to dev will not. Seek out places that recognize the devs job is the &#x27;how&#x27;, and the rest of the business&#x27; job is the &quot;what&quot;.<p>People who say &quot;we&#x27;re one team&quot; and &quot;it&#x27;s not us vs them&quot; are to be avoided. If the groups they&#x27;re talking about were truly one team, such statements would not need to be made; making them is trying to band-aid over issues and misalignments rather than address them.<p>Be kind. Even useless assholes can become allies if they see you going out of your way to be kind to them.