Unconscious Bias

There was a time where a group of people were hyping up “woke” topics, and the latest topic was “Unconscious bias” which is supposed to cause a certain degree of racism/sexism during the hiring or promotion process. Or maybe even leading to some microaggressions in meetings.

We were encouraged to watch a few courses on LinkedIn Learning, but it was not mandatory. Some of it was actually quite interesting.

There was one cringy moment where the presenter gave a trigger warning of sorts:

“if you feel an emotion, pause the video and deal with it. If you still feel the emotions, contact me and discuss it“

In my opinion, I think if you get overwhelmed with a simple LinkedIn Learning video, then you have bigger problems.

In my notes, I had written this claim but not sure what it means – because how do you even measure the bias:

“Research has shown that even a 1% bias in favor of promoting men changes the outcome.”

The following sounds like a decent philosophy though. If bias does exist then we do need to take it into account:

“By understanding that we’re all biased, we can make the decision to work together to be more conscious of our thoughts and actions when relating to others. Not only can we fix the current situation, we can then resolve not to do it again. Over time, it’s possible to learn to think and behave differently.”

She then makes the claim that even if you look at different aesthetics within a particular gender, you can notice trends which would suggest there is an unconscious bias at play:

“Blonde women earn 7% more than brunettes. Slim women make more money than obese.”

Some of the categories of bias are quite interesting. Halo bias probably does make a huge difference. You can say it’s like when you work with a Senior who you respect; whatever they claim in the next project you are tempted to back them and agree.

  • Halo bias – “admiring all of a person’s actions because of their praiseworthy actions in the past” 
  • Perception Bias – “the tendency to form stereotypes and assumptions about certain groups that makes it difficult to make an objective judgment about individual members of those groups.” 
  • Therefore it is difficult for women to be hired in gender perceived roles. E.g. software developer 
  • Confirmation bias –  “Seeking out evidence that confirms our initial perceptions, ignoring contrary information.” “We double-down and seek out information to justify our position.” 
  • GroupThink – When the desire for harmony or conformity in the group results in incorrect decision-making.
  • Performance Bias – Underestimate women’s performance but overestimate men’s. Men are often hired on future potential, women hired on past performance. 
  • Attribution bias – Less likely to credit women for success, but more blame for failure. Women’s contribution is less valuable. Women are more likely to be interrupted when speaking. 
  • Likability Bias – Expect men to be assertive so like them more when they are assertive, but have a negative response to women. Agreeable and nice is perceived as less competent so need to assert themselves to be effective, but then are less liked. 
  • Maternal bias – motherhood is perceived as less committed and less competent. Strongest kind of gender bias. Lower performance ratings, and lower pay in future. 
  • Affinity bias – gravitate to people like ourselves, dislike those that are different. More likely to give positive performance ratings to those that are similar. White men’s prominence means women and those of colour are negatively affected. 
  • Double discrimination (intersectionality): Women, and of colour is double discrimination. 3+ minority attributes make people feel like they don’t fit anywhere. 

“Woke” people seem to suggest that men are the problem when it comes to bias. However, I have seen claims that if you have an all-female panel they are often shown to be biassed towards hiring men. The claim was women don’t want to hire someone they perceive as a threat, or someone who is more attractive than them.

There was another LinkedIn course I watched that stressed the point that both genders show bias, sometimes in different ways.

There was a test where participants were shown pictures of men and women and they had to state (purely by stereotyping) if they associate them with “family” or “career”. Regardless of the participant’s gender, 76% of people associate women from the images with “family” rather than “career”.

There was also a claim which I would like to see what results back it up:

“Diverse teams tend to be more committed and work harder, and companies with more women in leadership tend to produce better business results.” 

During the hiring process, there is some scope to anonymise it somewhat to try and remove any bias against gender or race, in an attempt to judge purely on merit.

New Comms Process

I’ve made many blogs about communication. It seems that over time, there can be a new tool that managers start using which then becomes the cool thing to communicate with. Email was always a popular way of sending the information to all. When messaging apps like Microsoft Teams or Slack were available, then these became the cool way, but it involves people subscribing to the channel in the first place. Then we had Social Media style apps, initially “Facebook for Work” and then Yammer which was recently renamed to Viva Engage. Then there’s documentation style websites like Confluence, Sharepoint.

There was one post that made me laugh where a manager highlights the problem of having too many apps which then people have their favourites and have different frequencies checking them. So he points out the absurdity of cross-posting, and wants to fix the problem by carrying on cross-posting, but mainly causing you to divert from one platform to another.

As one colleague hilariously pointed out: 

“I’ve just followed a link posted to Teams to a Yammer post that contains a link to Confluence…”

Here is what the manager announced:

Hey everyone,
You might have noticed, during this quarter, that I have been trying out various different ways to get a message out to the whole department. I've put content on Confluence and Teams, and sent messages by Teams, Slack and Email cascade. The bottom line is, there is no one-size-fits-all solution to getting important info out smoothly.

But this is a problem we can solve. And it's a problem that we must solve: with this many people in the team, it is critical to have a way to announcements and updates out to everyone. So this is how it will work from now on:
You are reading this on Viva Engage. This is a new community set up specifically for long-form comms across the train. If you Follow this community you will get updates of new announcements. But I won't rely on just that - I will also send out notifications on Teams and Slack, with a link to new posts. I will also use Teams and Slack to post short-form updates that do not need a post on Viva Engage. So here is the call to action:
• I will commit that the leadership will use both Teams and Slack to send out department-wide notifications. As long as you look out on one or other of these channels, you will not miss out.
• I ask everyone to do this right now: whichever tool you prefer (Teams or Slack), make sure you have access to the right channel (see screenshot), pin it or star it, and make sure notifications are turned on.
For this first post, I will also send out an email cascade but in future I will drop this step. It's vulnerable to delays and with the other channels set up, we don't need this as well.

For the Viva Engage posts - please "like, share and subscribe"!! Let's make this a conversation
Thanks

Managing The Message

We released a much anticipated feature to our users, and it was going through our roll out process. This means only a group of users got the update, then next month it would go out to more, and so on.

So the initial users were excited to use it, and other users were eager to hear their opinion. As part of the release, there were other changes that went out, and some users were encountering issues with Feature A which had some bug fixes and improvements, and this was unrelated to our Feature B which went out in the same release version. Since both features involved some processing in the background, some users were falsely attributing a problem with Feature A to a problem with Feature B.

They took to Facebook to complain, and even suggested some workarounds that were complete nonsense. It’s basically a placebo effect of making a change and the crash goes away so you falsely conclude it helped when it was mere coincidence.

We are told that we must never respond to users on social media. All posts have to go through official channels that Marketing and Support use.

A developer raised the issue with a group of managers and a liaison from Marketing.

“Are we doing anything to combat this line of thinking that Feature B is causing crashes? This is one of those really fun Facebook threads that has popped up because our company has remained silent on the cause of an issue with Feature A, and the users have clutched at straws to come up with ideas for a fix and pooled them all in one place. One of their suggestions is quite harmful to us because it involves clearing the cache which then requests a large download to our servers. We now have a fix for the main crash they are reporting, so we should make it clear a fix is coming, there is no workaround, and it has no relevance to Feature B.

Concerned developer

I agree that as we’re quite clear on what the cause is (and isn’t) it feels like we should explicitly clarify this and address the incorrect speculation.

Product Owner

As I’m sure you can expect, we have been very close to this for the past four weeks and are working with relevant senior people to agree what messaging we can send out to the market.

Marketing Manager

“close to this for the past four weeks”! Yet have stayed pretty much silent the entire time. Then that resulted in Feature B getting a bad reputation which puts people off using it, and it’s generally damaging to the company that we responded so slowly to address what the users consider a big issue with our software. Marketing have been really bad in recent years, and is a reason why we have lost market share because the opinion from our users has declined.

Innovation shambles

Recently, managers decided that every few months we should have an Innovation Week. The idea is that you can work on ideas that can improve our work processes or even add a new feature to our products. However, the time limit of one week is a bit limited to actually get something complete in my opinion.

To be efficient, we really need to come up with a great list of ideas before the innovation starts, otherwise it cuts into the week. Some people did submit ideas before, and others on the day.

The initial meeting quickly became a bit of a shambles. Paul had created a Miro board under a different account that the attendees didn’t have write permissions for. Even when we clicked the link to request access, and Paul claimed he approved it; it still didn’t work.

He then tried creating a different board, but that didn’t work. To not waste further time, we just posted ideas into the Microsoft Teams chat which then he transferred onto Miro.

Since the ideas were essentially just titles on the board, people were supposed to explain their ideas but I don’t think many explained too well. We probably needed some kind of formal process to:

  1. describe the problem, 
  2. ideas on how to solve,
  3. pros and cons, 
  4. any possible costs like software licences,
  5. prerequisites to be able to investigate or implement the idea.

Another thing was missed is that you have to have accounts to use many of the AI tools, and that was a focus of this month’s innovation. With a lot of software, it often needs a special licence for commercial use and we weren’t advised how to acquire licences. We had Github Copilot and Office Copilot but what about other AI tools?

One guy apologised for misunderstanding that the ideas should be process improvements and he had come up with an idea for our software that our users would use. Paul said he hadn’t misunderstood at all and we could suggest either process improvements or new features… but that’s not what the Miro board said. It was only for process improvements and so all but one idea was for process.

We needed to assign our names to them, so initially Paul tried to create a spreadsheet but couldn’t work out how to share it so we could all edit at the same time. He ended up pasting the ideas into a Microsoft Teams “Whiteboard” which I had never used before but it looked like the Miro boards.

There were loads of ideas, but many were of debatable value. However, like I stated, we never discussed them effectively. Without knowing the pros and cons or prioritised the business value; there were loads of ideas that definitely weren’t strong enough. So with a large list, it was hard to pick something to work on. Some of them would need more than one person, but what guarantee is there that the team will be full? Less likely when the list is so big.

So I asked the question if we should only put our name against 1 item, or vote for several so we can see which teams are full, then the full teams get approved. Paul said to only vote once otherwise it will look like teams are full, but you’d end up dropping out if another one of your votes were successful. I suppose that’s a good point, but only voting once will mean you could be the only person to vote on a team project, so would then have to choose something else anyway, or gamble and go by yourself.

With most people finally assigned (and many just disappearing, presumably to slack off), with many going solo, and some probably having more team members than required; we got told to communicate with our team members.

I was in a team of 3 but I thought the ideal team would just be a pair. I waited for 30 mins or so but the guy that came up with the idea hadn’t contacted me, and you would assume he would take the team leader position.

I then took initiative and added a group chat with my 2 team members, and after another 1.5 hours, I finally got a response from one person who asked how we should begin to plan. I responded with my notes I had created to set the scene. He suggested one extra point to my notes, then didn’t hear from him for the rest of the day. The other team member didn’t respond at all.

The next day, my manager contacted me and said I was assigned to help finish a project that was behind schedule so my “innovating” had come to an end.

Absolute shambles really.

Manger Advice

I had some notes that I think were originally from a Twitter thread.

I think the question was from someone who had been a developer for several years and had just got a new role as a manager, so asked for advice.

One point someone made was that as a developer, you can gain a lot of success via individual contributions. Fixing a bug, delivering a feature, fixing a test environment etc, but as a manager, you are only really successful if your team is. Therefore, the focus is no longer on yourself. It’s about enabling people to work by dealing with impediments, and motivating them.

Another point was to value the 1-on-1 meetings. This builds relationships and trust, and you can learn about emerging problems and concerns. It gives you new perspectives and reminds you of how people are progressing when it comes to performance reviews.

Management goes in 3 directions, and all these directions have their own traits and challenges. Down – take care of your people and ensure they are cared for. Talk to them; lead them. Sideways – be aligned with another manager. Understand what is happening in other teams and how that will affect your team. Collaborate with them. Expand or adopt practices that they are adopting.

Up – you must sell your team’s success and communicate potential problems/challenges… Ensure the boss knows and understands the right things at the right time. Embrace the fact that you must balance these three directions well to make it work.

Although some managers could keep programming, a proper transition means you should be using your expertise to guide.

You are managing people, not Kubernetes pods. People have good days, bad days, birthdays, divorce, death… it’s all part of the “people deal”. You have to have a healthy distance/relationship as, at the end of the day, you must hire/fire/manipulate/lead/promote/demote them. Be humane, but be professional.

Invest in culture and lead by example. Don’t do things that you wouldn’t want to be done to you, and show a positive attitude towards whatever comes. Negative emotions and scepticism can ruin so many beautiful things.

See yourself as the conductor of an orchestra: Realise that, on the night, the instrumentalists can do this without you ONLY if they’ve worked well with you in rehearsals That your place is not to make the best sound from one instrument, but to bring the best out of all the players cohesively.

Communication Breakdown

Here’s a collection of moments where there was some kind of misunderstanding with communication.

Duplicate work

This scenario has happened a few times in various forms. I don’t get how it can happen when work ultimately comes from the Project Managers.

“we have been pressured to give estimates on the API improvements, but it turns out another team has done 80% of the work”.

Lead tester

Another manager said there was another team involved as well, but didn’t specify in what capacity. So it sounded like a simple project which should have been assigned to 1 team was assigned to 3. Then there was more drama when it seemed the team had been working on it for over 6 months but it shouldn’t have taken that long.

New PC

“It’s over 4 years old (nearly 5). Is it still performing ok or do you  want a replacement?”

I was asked if I wanted a new PC, but although I knew others had a better PC, it always seemed a bit of a waste to get rid of a working PC if it wasn’t a significant upgrade. I didn’t know if they had changed the model they were getting in either so I wasn’t sure what was considered “fast performance”. So I was a bit “on the fence” in my reply. I didn’t want to be dishonest and would rather someone decide what the policy was.

It can take a long time to get up and running if I’ve turned it off, and I think building our software can take a few extra minutes compared to some people, but other than that I believe it is fine.

My PC wasn’t new when I started and other people got faster and new PC’s. So maybe I deserve a treat; I don’t want to get left behind if everyone else is getting shiny new PC’s!

But I was surprised that I just got a simple message of acceptance. I suppose it makes his job easier to not order me one. 

“I will make a note to ask you again in 6 months.”

Team meetings when you are all at your desks

When we were in the office, we had face to face meetings. As time went on, we seemed more accepting of people that wanted to occasionally work at home. However, when they did, then you needed to dial them in, which wasn’t too bad if you had a meeting room. When we were at our desks, we couldn’t just gather round, we then all had to go on a call.

Me 14:11:
what do you think of Skype meetings when you are all at your desks

Dan 14:11:
they're shit

Me 14:11:
I guess it can be a bit cramped if there's 4 people gathering around 1 monitor
but it still looks a bit inefficient/awkward to me

Dan 14:12:
yeah I don't think people concentrate when they're on skype/teams/whatever

Me 14:13:
I like the one the testers are having
Rob "Alex, can you share your screen"
Alex "what am I showing you?"
Rob "regression testing"
Alex "I never did regression testing"
sounds organised

The Module handover

There was a time where the new idea was that we would hand over most of our domains to the developers in India, and then we move onto newer, exciting projects. I think most of the handovers happened but then we canceled the idea because they decided it was treating the Indians as “second class”.

We have been on this call for 30 minutes for our handover. Someone just asked what the domain is.

Meeting with entire Team but without Vinitha

Although I implied it was a bad idea to assign Indians to a project that was considered inferior, assigning an Indian or two to every team to make them seem integrated also doesn’t really work. When we worked in the office, we had everyone except Vinitha there, so she missed all the ad-hoc meetings we had at our desks, and also all the office banter. The timezone difference doesn’t help either because there’s large parts of the day where she has gone home and we are in the office. There was the occasion where we booked a meeting but then forgot to dial her in. She eventually requested to leave the team. The key thing is to assign projects to co-located teams and not force them to be distributed. But assign the quality projects evenly between the locations.

Online Communications

One day we received an email to our group Development email account.

Someone has logged a comment on the Support Centre "How to activate a portal in local developer’s system or in any of the test environments" and given us this email address to respond to.
This isn't a question we'd be able to answer, we presume someone in Development would be able to answer this/set this up.
Thanks.
Online Communications

Why would someone think the support centre was the correct place to ask that? Even if it was a new starter, surely they would ask a colleague first rather than contacting support.

Everyone to the breakout room!

When we worked in the office, occasionally something exciting/dramatic would happen and we’d be called into a meeting.

To: Group Development
Subject: Please go to the break out room now
 
Hi all, 
Please can everyone go to the break out room now.
Thanks!
Isobel

So with much panic, we all ran in. It was actually for a colleague’s leaving presentation but wasn’t planned in advance. To avoid people panicking further when they see the email, Isobel had to send a clarifying email. On the plus side, there was food:

Apologies for the email sent earlier. It was a leaving presentation for Elliot - nothing to panic about.
There is some food that Maria made for Elliot and colleagues in the upstairs kitchen. 
Isobel

Poor communication

When we started working with the Indian developers, we noticed that it seems a cultural thing that they would message you a greeting, then wait until you respond before asking their actual question.

I think a lot of English developers would see a message like “Hi”, then go back to their work until they get the actual message/question… but it never comes. You might just get another “Hi” or “are you free?”, sometimes having to wait until the next morning for the follow-up message.

I made a joke about that scenario:

Previously on Teams:
"Hi"
<episode starts>
"need one help"
<credits roll>
tune in tomorrow to find out what the problem is

It’s incredibly irritating to know that someone needs your help, but you don’t know if you can help, or how long they will need you for. So then it just becomes a distraction.

How about you ask me the questions, and I answer them when I am free?

I could say that I am free, then suddenly not be free if I get a call. So it doesn’t really make sense to delay until there’s a time where you think messages can be sent quickly back and forth. Messaging is asynchronous in nature, just send it and wait. 

It seems a common problem, and someone made a website about it:

http://www.nohello.com/

There was one more frustrating scenario where we had both Slack and Teams. Vignesh asked me a question on Slack. I took a while to answer so he then messaged on Teams. Although it was the distracting statement which gives you no context:

“I need some clarification..when you are free please ping me”

Security Training with 2 days to sign up

I’d imagine organising external training takes a while since they always drag out processes. However, we had 2 days notice to choose a live online session to attend. I think the problem is that the CTO sent an email to his direct reports, then they forwarded it onto theirs and so on. It had to go down 4 levels of hierarchy before it actually got to the software developers who needed to attend. Why doesn’t the CTO just send it to the Group Development mail group?

Some people then didn’t attend so it was probably a waste of money.

Further confusion was that there was a Fundamental Session and an Advanced Session. Were you supposed to attend one then the other? Could you skip one if you think you know the basics?

A shambles as always.

Auto Captions

Autocaptions on videos are a useful feature, but have traditionally struggled with different accents, or poor microphone quality. Over the years, software and hardware technology has improved, and I’ve seen dramatic improvements recently as “AI” becomes more prominent.

I had a few examples in some old notes, some from Microsoft Teams, and some from the learning platform Pluralsight.

I didn’t write down the actual transcript, but Luis was talking about Unit Tests in Software development. One of his key points was that Luis’ Mum is desperate for unit test coverage.

“Uhm, that as the code base grows, New York women should come only as soon as they hit.

 So it’s about the violence is not about professional shears alone.

if you don’t have a you know for unit tests even when you tested manually, you cannot really be sure that the that the code is working at any given point in time. Because my mom will desperately.”

Then there was this nonsense:

“Check the output of this divide the 2nd 5th Norman Vietnam. Do something else, or if it’s not then go ahead and continue with my with my low right, but this can easily be come on notice so I never can happen here.

 Media versus colon. And even when eyes usually refer to in Texas, we can just type ideas for index and and that should also help our our cognitive ability to process the words.

So this story is fetuses.”

On one call, I said “perhaps I put it in About?” and the captions read “pops up in a bowl“. There was a part where I didn’t even say anything, yet it reckoned I said “Got the trick here”.

On another call, we were talking about websites that are helpful for Juniors. One person mentioned the site “Geek For Geeks” but the subtitles humorously stated:

“Dig for *****”

When I was watching Pluralsight, the presenter was talking about CDNs: Content Delivery Networks. Instead of “most CDN’s“, the subtitles say “seedy inns“. For “CloudFront” it then stated “But with Claude Friends“, then “customisations” was “customers. Asians“.

I saw a Twitter post that said that “Jira” was a problematic product name which had a funny and numerous interpretations:

 The various ways Google Meet transcribes "JIRAs"
- Euros
- Yours
 - Cheers
- Jurors
- Juris
- Gyros
 - Gears
- Jails
- Chairs
- Cheetahs
- Jesus
- Judah
- Judas
- Jeera
 -Jealous
- Jeres
- Deers

Legacy testers

We used to have two Development Departments but merged them together. The original one was for what we then called “Legacy” software since it was our older product, and emphasis was moving over to our new flagship product which I was working on. The “Legacy” Testers seemed a much older group, and even the younger ones were less technical, yet maybe more socially quirky than our group.

We also noticed different behaviors and preferences. They seemed to have much more stationary so didn’t just have a small notebook and a single pen like we did, but would have a more impressive collection of post-it notes, hole puncher, stapler, and assortment of coloured pens or highlighters. They would often want an ergonomic keyboard and mouse, with a fancy chair. They seemed to love using the printer as well.

No idea if their work actually called for any of these items, because our job certainly didn’t require it.

There’s that meme template “X starter pack” so a colleague liked making ones for the likes of the Legacy Testers. So he included an ergonomic keyboard, fancy chair, excessive amount of stationary and stack of printed paper.

He made a different one which I think had walking boots, wrist support, a programming book used as a monitor stand, and Lego.

With our group, there was a subgroup that loved multiplayer computer gaming, and loved Marvel merchandise, often having figures like Funko Pops or even Lego on their desk; so maybe they were the most alike.

“when there’s a lack of people in the office, it’s either because there’s a new game out, or it’s the Testing Conference”

Towel Chronicles

One thing that I miss about office working is the emergent stories you get from people interacting with people. It can be fairly innocuous scenarios that escalate or become inside-jokes. A classic example is when the cleaner Pauline wasn’t allowed to let us use her towels in the kitchen anymore. One day, a colleague emails to declare that Pauline was taking home the towels for the final time.

Pauline used to take home and wash all the tea towels, but after some office politics with her employers she doesn't do it anymore, hence no more tea towels.

Cheers, 
Isobel Johnson
Nick has offered to buy tea-towels for the kitchens if we volunteer to take them home at the weekend to wash them (there are no facilities to wash them here).
 
I don’t mind doing this once a month (for the upstairs kitchen I use). If you currently use the paper towel and prefer to use tea towels and don’t mind washing them now and again then let me know. (Or if you use the downstairs kitchen and want tea towels and are happy to wash them, also let me know.)
 
Cheers, 
Isobel Johnson
I’ve bought some fresh new tea towels for the upstairs kitchen.
 
Please consider others who might want to use them. Please don’t use them to dry your hands or wipe coffee stains from the inside of your mug. There are blue paper towels for that stuff.
 
Cheers, 
Isobel Johnson
One of the tea-towels is missing from the upstairs kitchen. Please can you return it if you have it so that I can take them both home to wash.

Cheers, 
Isobel Johnson
There are fresh clean tea towels in the upstairs kitchen – I’ve replaced the missing one. 
I’ve bought these and wash them weekly so please look after them.
 
Thanks! 
Isobel Johnson

So a thing that you take for granted; having a tea towel in the kitchen – has lots of “office politics” and requires organisation. Isobel initially managed to get the development manager to buy the replacement towels, but soon became stained then one went missing. Absolute disrespect for those towels.

The Chop

I was once contacted by my manager to review a particular code change, but with the instructions to actually select the Reject option if there was anything wrong with it.

Things seemed a little odd, so I was suspicious about the request. Usually you would only use the Reject option if it was completely the wrong approach, not just if one thing could be improved.

The change was an SQL data fix, but seemed for a bug that would rarely occur, so my instinct is that it should be run manually on the afflicted sites rather than sent out as part of the normal patching process. 

The normal process would mean the script would be run on all servers, and be subject to the usual slow “roll out” process; therefore delay its application to the affected site.

Looking at the comment from Support, it sounded like it was possibly just on one site.

There were 3 cases linked to it; 2 from the same site, 1 with a title of a completely different error number. Then the workaround is stated as “Re-add the Default Location to the Template” so they probably fixed it already. So maybe we didn’t even need to do anything.

Looking at the dates that it was logged, it seemed like it was classed as a minor bug so had a long time period to fix as per the Service Level agreement so I was sceptical it was still an issue after 2 years.

So my initial instinct says it should be applied as a manual patch, then reading the details from Support, it sounds like it was just on one site and they had already manually fixed it, presumably via the UI.

So I asked my manager if the site has been contacted to see if it is still a problem? Then we can just close it.

And that’s when my manager said

“His skills are currently being assessed so he’s been left to figure it out and told to ask for help if/when he needs it.”

Manager

So it seems like they have given him a bug to investigate then fix/close. Since he has struggled to resolve items before and been reluctant to ask for help, they have chosen this one to test if he is collaborating with the correct people. He didn’t, so they sacked him.

I haven’t encountered many sackings; everyone seems to imply it’s a lot of hassle, but certain managers are more willing to do it. Another approach is to declare that a “new opportunity” has come up and they will be placed in a new team to see if that causes an improvement.