--- title: "Anti Patterns: articles" url: "https://www.5whys.com/articles/category/Anti%2BPatterns.md" canonical: "https://www.5whys.com/articles/category/Anti+Patterns" tags: [] author: "Roy Osherove" description: "Roy Osherove's posts on software team leader anti-patterns, from yelling and excluding people to the bus factor, chaos addiction and broken team promises." usage: "Licensed under CC BY 4.0 — reuse, quote and adapt with attribution (Roy Osherove, link to the original page)." license: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/" --- # Anti Patterns: articles Roy Osherove's posts on software team leader anti-patterns, from yelling and excluding people to the bus factor, chaos addiction and broken team promises. HTML: https://www.5whys.com/articles/category/Anti+Patterns · 23 linked entries (each is plain Markdown) · Site index: [llms.txt](https://www.5whys.com/llms.txt) - [A Realistic HackerRank Developer Interview Question List](https://www.5whys.com/articles/a-realistic-hackerrank-developer-interview-question-list.md) (2015-07-09): A parody HackerRank-style quiz with realistic questions for tech leads on cross training, code quality, aggressive developers, priorities and creativity. - [Assume you are wrong](https://www.5whys.com/articles/assume-you-are-wrong.md) (2012-06-21): A tense chat log shows how people tell themselves stories about each other, and how describing facts and assuming good intentions defuses the conflict. - [You Can't Fire Everyone](https://www.5whys.com/articles/you-cant-fire-everyone.md) (2011-12-09): Why a software team leader who keeps wishing for better developers is doing it wrong, and why growing the team beats getting people out of it. - [Don't be afraid to become management](https://www.5whys.com/articles/dont-be-afraid-to-become-management.md) (2011-12-08): A short late-night video on YouTube in which Roy Osherove argues that fears about moving into management mostly come true only if you do it wrong. - [Three reasons not to have your own private office](https://www.5whys.com/articles/three-reasons-not-to-have-your-own-private-office.md) (2011-10-02): Why a team leader should sit with the team rather than in a private office, to stay in the loop, lead by example and handle problems early. - [Technical Anti Patterns Arising from Social Inadequacy](https://www.5whys.com/articles/technical-anti-patterns-arising-from-social-inadequacy.md) (2011-09-19): On Jerry Weinberg's Roundtable on Technical Leadership, listing its chapter five anti-patterns, like not asking for help, that stem from social gaps. - [Distributed Team Evasion Tactic - Away or Offline](https://www.5whys.com/articles/distributed-team-evasion-tactic-away-or-offline.md) (2011-08-30): Why a distributed team leader who stays set to away or offline on Skype erodes trust, how the team reacts, and how known working hours fix it. - [Spread your workload](https://www.5whys.com/articles/spread-your-workload.md) (2011-08-27): Guest post by John Hill on why team leads who give boring tasks to their reliable people burn them out, and why rotating such work keeps things fair. - [The Chaos Addiction](https://www.5whys.com/articles/the-chaos-addiction.md) (2011-08-07): How survival mode becomes a self-reinforcing addiction that cuts quality and learning time, and why a team leader must take a risk to break the cycle. - [Video: Ten Mistakes Software Team Leaders Make](https://www.5whys.com/articles/video-ten-mistakes-software-team-leaders-make.md) (2011-07-20): Video and slides of a SkillsMatter talk on ten mistakes software team leaders make, from ignoring team maturity to fear of delegation and placating. - [Video: Team Leadership in the Age of Agile](https://www.5whys.com/articles/video-team-leadership-in-the-age-of-agile.md) (2011-07-08): A link to the InfoQ video of Roy Osherove's QCon London 2011 talk on what team leaders need for agile to succeed and how leadership fits team maturity. - [The Fear Of Failure And What To Do About It](https://www.5whys.com/articles/the-fear-of-failure-and-what-to-do-about-it.md) (2011-06-30): Using a Milton Glaser video on the fear of failure, a look at why team leaders must take personal risks and how timed experiments can lower them. - [Yelling at team members](https://www.5whys.com/articles/yelling-at-team-members.md) (2011-06-17): Why yelling at team members destroys trust and solves nothing, and the steps a team leader should take right after losing their temper. - [A good leader won't need to ask](https://www.5whys.com/articles/a-good-leader-wont-need-to-ask.md) (2011-06-06): Why a team leader who has to ask people what they did well this year has not been paying attention, and a quick way to compile and fix that. - [12 Behavior Anti Patterns You Will Face As a Software Team Leader](https://www.5whys.com/articles/12-behavior-anti-patterns-you-will-face-as-a-software-team-l.md) (2011-04-11): Twelve team member behavior anti-patterns and three outside disruptions a software team leader faces in survival mode, with how to respond to each one. - [How to annoy your customer with usability problems](https://www.5whys.com/articles/how-to-annoy-your-customer-with-usability-problems.md) (2010-07-03): A short rant listing the usability problems of an unnamed software product, from CD-only installs to updates that reinstall and keys you cannot paste. - [Exclude a team member – and you’re an idiot](https://www.5whys.com/articles/exclude-a-team-member-and-youre-an-idiot.md) (2010-05-25): Why a team leader must never exclude a difficult team member from meetings or lunch, and why firing should come only after months of trying to grow them. - [The Bus Factor - Why your ‘best’ developer is your biggest problem](https://www.5whys.com/articles/the-bus-factor-why-your-best-developer-is-your-biggest-probl.md) (2010-05-17): How to spot a bus factor of one in your team and reduce it with standups, pairing, code reviews and knowledge sharing, including the team leader as one. - [My team keeps breaking their promises. What can I do?](https://www.5whys.com/articles/my-team-keeps-breaking-their-promises-what-can-i-do.md) (2010-05-09): How a team leader can teach a team the language of commitment, spotting words like I'll try, setting end dates and flagging slips before deadlines pass. - [my worst team leaders](https://www.5whys.com/articles/my-worst-team-leaders.md) (2010-02-14): A short list of traits shared by the worst team leaders Roy Osherove worked for, from never coaching or challenging him to ignoring impediments. - [The Five Dysfunctions of a Team](https://www.5whys.com/articles/the-five-dysfunctions-of-a-team.md) (2009-12-08): A summary of Lencioni's five dysfunctions of a team, from absence of trust and fear of conflict to inattention to results, a must-read for team leaders. - [How to deal with bad decisions made by the team](https://www.5whys.com/articles/how-to-deal-with-bad-decisions-made-by-the-team.md) (2009-11-16): How a team lead can steer a self-directing team away from bad technical decisions by asking hard questions, based on Mike Cohn's Succeeding with Agile. - [Dev Anti Pattern: Unworkable Machine](https://www.5whys.com/articles/dev-anti-pattern-unworkable-machine.md) (2009-10-24): The developer whose machine is always broken: common phrases, causes such as boredom or bug recreation, and fixes like using a virtual machine. --- ## About the author **Roy Osherove**: Senior Solutions Architect at AWS working on AI for production and AI-driven development; author of The Art of Unit Testing and Elastic Leadership, with about 20 years of consulting and training on unit testing, TDD, team leadership and continuous delivery. ### Sites - [RobotPaper](https://robotpaper.ai/): This blog: AI patterns and anti-patterns, AI and coding agents, and engineering leadership. - [osherove.com](https://osherove.com): Roy's personal site. Author of The Art of Unit Testing and Elastic Leadership; consulting and training on unit testing, TDD, team leadership and continuous delivery, plus about 20 years of blog posts. - [The Art of Unit Testing](https://www.artofunittesting.com): The Art of Unit Testing, 3rd Edition (Manning): readable, maintainable, trustworthy unit tests, plus TDD workshops in C#, JavaScript, Java and Kotlin. - [5whys.com](https://www.5whys.com): Roy's writing on software team leadership: self-organizing teams, surviving chaos, learning mode and the Elastic Leadership model. - [Pipeline Driven](https://pipelinedriven.org): Continuous delivery and DevOps practices: build patterns, pipeline-friendly testing, DevOps metrics and enterprise DevOps. - [Elastic Leadership](https://www.elasticleadership.com): Elastic Leadership, Roy's framework for software team leaders (survival, learning and self-organizing modes). ### Social - X: https://x.com/royosherove - LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/osherove/ ### Contact - Contact form: https://forms.gle/jQSx5KoXvrVA1JCK7 ### License Licensed under CC BY 4.0 — reuse, quote and adapt with attribution (Roy Osherove, link to the original page). License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/