Unhealthy competition between two engineers

Problem

"When I took over a new team, I inherited a situation in which two freelance engineers were working on the same part of a code. Both had their tech strengths. One was a senior engineer with a lot of experience and an old-school approach. The other one was very young, had a lot of energy, and was a new technologies advocate. From day one, they disagreed with one another and this created tension in the team. We offered both of them a full-time job on the same day. However, even after that, the tension kept increasing, and they were having conflicts on every pull request. Their ego conflicts were really making things complicated, but I didn't have the time to hire or fire them because we had to deliver a large project in the coming months."

Actions taken

"As a manager, I tried to solve the problem as soon as possible. I immediately cleared my calendar for the day, and saw each of them one-on-one in order to understand the problem better. I then brought them together in the same room to discuss the problem. It alleviated the issues but there was a lot of bad blood between them. I learned several lessons from this story. First of all, by hiring two people on the same day, we created part of the problem, as we created competition between them both from day one without setting clear expectations. Second, we didn't take the time to invest in onboarding them to our culture or define their areas of responsibility early enough or clearly enough. They both had the impression that the other was encroaching on their territory. Finally, we could have done a better job with reminding them that their priority was working for the company and not debating about their personal performance."