Calling someone a complainer is corporate-speak for “they noticed the fire before leadership did.” The people who raise flags get sidelined, the cheerleaders get promoted, and then everyone wonders why the product sucks.

A good manager doesn’t suppress complaints. They treat them as free QA. But that requires humility, which is in even shorter supply than good engineers.

I'm not a manager and have no aspirations at all to be one, but I have worked with plenty of "complainers".

Usually what complainers complain about has nothing to do with why they are unhappy. Way too often frustration with people is pointed at circumstance rather than trying to productively sort out the conflicts between the individuals.

And here is where management usually fails. A person complains about unrealistic time plans or how crappy a product will be, so management jumps into action and invent over elaborate processes around securing deadlines and quality, rather than splitting up the dysfunctional team that can't / refuses to cooperate and therefore is always late and produces sub-par quality. And the team will still be late and produce bad quality, and the complainers will still complain.

Spoken like from someone who never managed teams. There may be valid complaints but there may be also just difficult characters.

To answer the original question: It's a bit like in romantic relationships. Trying to change personalities of others is a tough game (usually not worth it).

This is true in some cases…but there are other people who just complain because they want attention.

Good managers listen and try to understand the difference between a person complaining because they’re closer to the problem and a person complaining because they are the problem.

This is the hardest part of dealing with a chronic complainer: they think they are the only one "noticing a fire" and "getting sidelined" for raising flags.

Often there isn't actually a fire, they're complaining about trivialities. Everybody already knows about the fire because they've complaining about at every meeting for three months. Or the thing they are complaining about can't be changed. They're actually getting sidelined because they interrupt company allhands to ask the CEO irrelevant questions, wasting the time of 50 people and no one likes them anymore.

I view dealing with chronic complainers as mentoring them to stop self-sabotaging themselves.

From the article:

> Complaining is not a character flaw; it is a response shaped by context, past experiences, and unmet needs such as recognition, belonging, or agency. When leaders interpret complaint only as negativity, they risk silencing the very signals that reveal what people care about. By seeing complaints as expressions of care in disguise, leaders can move beyond irritation and instead use inquiry to uncover underlying concerns, redirect energy, and invite ownership. In this way, what begins as frustration can become the raw material for contribution and engagement.

Not a manager, I'm an IC.

I strongly disagree. Noticing the fires is often trivial. Complaining... It depends. Complaining constructively is fine. Complaining for the sake of complaining gets annoying very fast.

Also... People that spend a lot of time complaining are usually that aren't capable of making things happen anyway. They can only see the limitations.

I avoid those people I noticed they just bring down my mental focus.

There are plenty of people who complain because its baked into their personality. Those people can also work at a bad place and have a target rich environment so to speak.

The only sure fire way to avoid this label being applied unjustly is always bring solutions, not complaints. Document your solutions and let it rest if leadership doesn't agree.

This is typically what I see. There ARE chronically negative people, but more often “complainers” are the smart people who don’t rely on passive voice and jargon to get ahead or, having been ignored for years by the passive voice jargon cheerleaders while their concerns came true, are bitter and punching the clock.