A few years back I stood up a new Experience Engineering team. Two seniors were carrying a rising demand for high-fidelity prototypes built in code for mobile, so I hired three junior UX engineers out of a strong interview round to support them. One had slightly more experience than the other two. Probation went well. All three settled in.
Approaching the end of the first year, the seniors and their manager began to sense something was off. One of the three was showing early signs of burnout while the other two were coping fine. In his one-to-ones he started to say the other two could not keep up with his workflow and his standards, that they did not have the experience to work at his pace. This was strange. They were juniors. The standards they were meant to follow were the ones the seniors had already set.
He grew more anxious, sometimes agitated, and began attributing slipped tasks to his inability to bring the other two up to his standard. When it started to look serious, I sat down with him and asked what this standard actually was. He described his own habits: how he structured his code and repositories, how he organised a project. He showed me his files, and they were genuinely well kept. Nothing about his way of working was wrong.
So I asked whether he had ever told the other two what he expected of them. He said no. He assumed they already knew, because to him it was simply how the work is done.
14.1 — Team H3 Audit reading your ensemble before hiring · H3