The Yariverse

There are few universal truths in adulthood: espresso will betray you when you least expect it (personally, it makes me highly nauseous), NYC rent only moves in one direction (upward), and at some point in your life, you will have a bad teammate. Sometimes they’re passive passengers, saboteurs, or simply people who’ve convinced themselves that showing up is the same thing as contributing (it’s not).

But the real story isn’t about them, it’s about you in the aftermath.

Having a bad teammate isn’t just an inconvenience. It’s feels like a microaggression, a disruption is the force, where trust, expectations, emotional labor, and resource allocation are suddenly at the decline. Misaligned incentives brake systems faster than incompetence ever could. 

Finance & tech teaches us something profound: every system fails at its weakest point, not its strongest, and in teams, the weakest point is almost never lack of talent, it’s lack of accountability.

Teams don’t collapse from lack of skill, they collapse from the principal agent problem, when one member benefits from the group while contributing less. Accountability is the ultimate market correction.

If you zoom out for bit (in case you’re reading this up close), a dysfunctional teammate looks eerily similar to a toxic asset in a portfolio. 

At first, they appear fine… maybe even promising. But slowly, you notice the volatility. Missed deadlines, blurred responsibility, disappearing acts wrapped in excuses. 

At one point, the emotional P&L (profit & loss) becomes clearer than any spreadsheet on excel ever could. A good investor needs to learn when to cut losses early since the cost of holding onto a failing player is often higher than the cost of replacement. 

And yet with all this info, people don’t always act accordingly. Why? Well, we’re emotional creatures living inside rational systems. Bad teammates will exploit the gap between the two, faster than you can say “They definitely read 48 Rules of Power, but I read Machiavelli’s The Prince.”

Girl code: You have to learn when to let go, the love bombing has ended.

Using code is how can we build something from nothingness. Coding can illuminate patterns in the following areas:

• Do your teammates overpromise and underdeliver? Lack of accountability & need for risk management.
• Do they show up with big ideas and zero follow through? Execution deficit.
• Do they bounce from one crisis to another, dragging the team into chaos? Volatility clustering.

These aren’t cute personality quirks, they’re measurable behaviors. 

In finance, if an asset behaved like with these wild swings, no upward trend, unpredictable noise, failure to detect noise reduction, you’d immediately divest.

In teams, we often don’t, often too afraid of confronting conflict with accountability, fear of being disliked and being too much. But here’s the truth:
It is not too much to expect competence, nor it is aggressive to want clarity, or dramatic to ask someone to do the thing they’ve agreed to do.

Your Kolb learning cycle in real time should ideally function as the following:
Experience → reflect → conceptualize → experiment → reset.

Unfortunately, in the AI era, the pace of work is so fast that one weak link can slow down the entire chain. Especially in analytics, strategy, finance and tech, fields where precision is revenue and sloppiness is loss.

Well, like my lovely aunt who guided me through the infamous terrible team: bad teammates violate psychological contracts. A team isn’t just a workgroup, it’s an informal economy of trust.
You exchange time for reliability, ideas for respect, and effort for alignment. When someone defaults on that agreement, it’s a small scale version of financial fraud.

Management research calls this a psychological contract breach, and it often predicts burnout, reduced performance, and team distrust faster than any missed KPI can detect.

You feel it, deeply. Your distrust in that economy falters, the meaning attached to the work has lost value. You care yet they don’t and you’re stuck paying the debt.

That asymmetry creates emotional inflation, suddenly, everything feels heavier.

There’s a concept in finance called risk adjusted return, the principle that profitability means nothing if the volatility is unbearable. Basically, it’s the idea that profitability must be considered alongside volatility. A stock that skyrockets one quarter and crashes the next is not a win; it’s a gamble dressed like daydream.

In finance, we’d call this volatility clustering, chaos doesn’t appear randomly, it repeats, it cycles. 

People are no different, especially when accountability is missing.

A brilliant teammate who is chaotic, unpredictable, or self-serving might look like a high growth asset, they might have flashy results, big potential but the drawbacks will drain you. That’s a bad investment.

A consistent teammate who delivers, even quietly, without drama or ego? That’s a blue chip asset (gold standard). Stable, trusted, and compounding value over time.

This isn’t about evaluating people as commodities. It’s about evaluating reliability, character, and shared standards. You are building an index fund of collaborators (peers, friends, & partners) who’ll shape your career, your projects, and ultimately your sanity. A part of that maturity will be recognizing when someone doesn’t belong in your portfolio anymore.

Here’s what textbooks don’t say:

1. You cannot hedge against someone else’s lack of integrity
2. You cannot diversify against someone else’s refusal to grow.
3. You cannot rebalance a partnership where only one side invests.

In finance, the smartest move isn’t always to hold, sometimes the only winning strategy is exit and reinvestment elsewhere. Not out of spite, but out of self-preservation and future upside.

Risk analysts use these exact models to detect threats before the loss hits the balance sheet. This code applies it to teamwork.

Here’s a tiny model Wall Street Code for teamwork, it tracks the three main currencies of collaboration :

1. Timeliness 
2. Quality
3. Communication 

Track missed deadlines, analyze sloppy work as performance risk and dissect disappearing acts as operational chaos. Apply it when:

1. When it goes to high risk, cut losses and reallocate. 
2. When it goes to moderate risk, document like a CFO before an earnings call. 
3. When it goes to low risk, hold (like Kenny Roger’s The Gambler) and compound that value.

Below is the code:

import pandas as pd
#Ex teammate behavior log
behavior = pd.DataFrame({
    "task": ["A","B","C","D","E","F"],
    "on_time": [0,1,0,0,1,0],     # 1=on time, 0=late
    "quality": [2,4,1,1,3,2],    # subjective scoring
    "communication": [1,3,1,0,2,1] # quality of communication
})
#weighted scores
weights = {
    "on_time": 0.4,
    "quality": 0.4,
    "communication": 0.2
}
behavior["score"] = (
    behavior["on_time"]*weights["on_time"] +
    behavior["quality"]*weights["quality"]/5 +
    behavior["communication"]*weights["communication"]/3
)
avg_score = behavior["score"].mean()
if avg_score < 0.4:
    risk = "High Risk - Reallocate immediately"
elif avg_score < 0.6:
    risk = "Moderate Risk - Document and monitor closely"
else:
    risk = "Low Risk - Reliable teammate"
print("Average Score:", avg_score)
print("Teammate Risk Level:", risk)