---
title: "Technical Anti Patterns Arising from Social Inadequacy"
url: "https://www.5whys.com/articles/technical-anti-patterns-arising-from-social-inadequacy.md"
canonical: "https://www.5whys.com/articles/technical-anti-patterns-arising-from-social-inadequacy.html"
published: "2011-09-19T17:50:27.094000+00:00"
updated: "2011-09-19T19:07:54.087000+00:00"
tags: ["Anti Patterns"]
author: "Roy Osherove"
description: "On Jerry Weinberg's Roundtable on Technical Leadership, listing its chapter five anti-patterns, like not asking for help, that stem from social gaps."
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/"
---

# Technical Anti Patterns Arising from Social Inadequacy

The book [Roundtable on Technical Leadership (SHAPE Forum Dialogues)](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/093263351X/ref=as_li_ss_il?ie=UTF8&tag=iserializable-20&linkCode=as2&camp=217145&creative=399369&creativeASIN=093263351X) by Jerry Weinberg is a treasure trove of interesting things that give words to feelings I've had during my work as a team leader and with other team leaders (and as a team member..).

The book appeals most to developers \*not\* acting as team leaders (how to influence without influence, in a way).

To whet your appetite, here's just a simpe list detailing the subjects covered in chapter five (Tricks arising from social inadequacy):

- Career Development Through Co-Dependency
- Using Technical Tricks to Avoid Social Situations
- Not Documenting Your Assumptions
- Not Asking for Help
- Preventing Others from Learning, by Being Impatient
- Failing to Notice Your Fault Feedback Ratio and to Do Something About It
- Not Documenting Why Choices Were Made
- Lack of Feedback Doesn't Necessarily Mean the Code Was Good
- Let Your Tools Do Their Work
- Keeping in the Stuff That's Corrected by Other Stuff
- Replacing One Big Mess with an Unending Series of Small Messes
- Give a Fresh Start When Needed
- Failing to Use Your Own Product

## Read next

- [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.html): 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 deal with bad decisions made by the team](https://www.5whys.com/articles/how-to-deal-with-bad-decisions-made-by-the-team.html): 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.
- [You Can't Fire Everyone](https://www.5whys.com/articles/you-cant-fire-everyone.html): 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.


---

## 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/