my coworker ignores the parts of his job he doesn’t like — could I do that too?

A reader writes: I have a coworker, Fred, who once told me the best work advice an older coworker gave him was “don’t be good at a job you don’t want.” In our three years working together, Fred has really shown he’s taken this advice to heart — unfortunately, at the expense of his team […] The post my coworker ignores the parts of his job he doesn’t like — could I do that too? appeared first on Ask a Manager.

May 20, 2025 - 19:40

my coworker ignores the parts of his job he doesn’t like — could I do that too?

A reader writes:

I have a coworker, Fred, who once told me the best work advice an older coworker gave him was “don’t be good at a job you don’t want.” In our three years working together, Fred has really shown he’s taken this advice to heart — unfortunately, at the expense of his team and myself. He often avoids doing entire parts of his job, leaving the rest of us to pick up the slack.
Fred and I report to the same boss and work in a small R&D team at a larger company that makes widgets. The job generally entails designing, optimizing, and testing new widget designs and widget-making processes. Each team member, assigned by my boss, owns one part of the widget-making flow: one person focuses on metal cutting, another on polishing, etc. Fred often abandons his metal-cutting processing duties and sticks to analyzing widget test data only. My boss loves the graphs he makes of this data and often gushes about them, which I guess causes him to forget or ignore that Fred hasn’t addressed excursions in the metal-cutting process. The team then has to scramble to do Fred’s process analysis job since it ultimately affects the entire team’s work product.
The team and I have expressed these concerns to my boss, and they’re met with meek promises to talk to Fred. My boss continues to heap praise on Fred and his graphs, though, and metal-cutting process data remains unanalyzed unless someone else does it. So does Fred have it all figured out? Can I ignore parts of my job I don’t like to focus on the parts I do, and do them really well? Do jobs usually work like this?

Apparently it works like that for Fred.

Does that mean it could work like that for you too if you were willing to be as audacious as Fred? Maybe. But sometimes Freds get away with it because of particular characteristics — like that they’ve been there forever, or the manager is intimidated by them, or they’re good enough at X (or believed to be good enough at X) that they’ve given slack everywhere else, or they’re a huge jerk if confronted and the manager is too weak to do anything about that, or the manager really likes them personally, or they remind the manager of themselves (which is not infrequently tied up with things like age/race/gender/religion).

Other times, it’s the sort of thing that is allowed as long as only one person is doing it, but once other people start doing it too, the situation becomes untenable and finally gets addressed. But unfairly, sometimes it’s the person who starts the behavior most recently who ends up the biggest target of that — and so while it might be a good strategy to finally get some attention on Fred, it’s not without a potential risk to you.

The advice “don’t be good at a job you don’t want” does have a more ethical application, which is not to be good at things that aren’t part of your job but which you’re getting asked to do anyway and don’t like. For example, it’s often smart for women to be strategically not good at the gendered “housekeeping” parts of work that tend to get assigned to women more than men regardless of their respective jobs (like taking notes or cleaning up after meetings, even if it has nothing to do with your job). But that’s a whole different thing than declining to do core parts of your job description just because you don’t like them.

To your question, though: could you ignore parts of your job like Fred does? Maybe. You could try it and see what happens. It carries some risk, though, because whatever unconscious protections that are in place for Fred might not be in place for you.

I’d rather see you and your coworkers continue to push your manager to deal with Fred instead. If the issue is that your boss is too meek/passive to act, sometimes the trick with that sort of manager is to make it more uncomfortable for them to do nothing than to just do their job and deal with Fred. That might mean continually pushing as a group to get your boss to tell Fred to do his job. (I’m stressing “as a group” so that you personally don’t become the aggravation in your boss’s eyes.)

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