How Far Would You Go to Accommodate non-Verbal Colleague?

at some point someone has to draw a line

You don't get to draw the line, his management chain do. And they have drawn a public line (whatever might be going on in private) which says that they find his work acceptable, support him and it's up to you to find ways to work with him in order to progress. Trying to sidestep the appointed gatekeeper would not be appreciated in any scenario, and more so if the only reason for that sidestepping was that you can't accommodate his disability when everyone else can.

You say that you can converse on Slack - why is that not a workable solution for conversations with multiple participants? Have you asked or observed how other employees adapt in order to work with him? The simplest answer is to do what they do.

I would fire you. You aren't communicating to the deaf/mute person with Slack, which takes 5 minutes to learn how to use. and doesn't know that you are a speaking individual (if you are communicating via chats).

Additionally, you have spent a lot of time trying to work around a gatekeeper instead of working with them like your boss told you to do.

He can communicate via Slack chats (we have a flexible-hybrid working environment, with 3 days in office) but cannot take calls

You are an engineer, this means in theory you should know how to type words onto your computer. I mean you posted a question on Stack Exchange and everything, clearly you know how to type... Why can't you just communicate with this individual using Slack? They appear to be your company's standard line of communication.

Even when face to face, we have to communicate by typing on our respective keyboards and looking at each other's screen.

Or you could communicate to him via Slack. Which is how everyone else on your team probably does. Sounds like deaf mute guy (DMG) is being extremely patient/accommodating with you. If I were him, I would have asked my boss to retrain the new guy on how to use Slack to communicate with people, because the new engineer clearly doesn't know how to use it, and is typing messages on their own screen to share them with me instead of messaging me on Slack.

And I cannot talk to him and a third person at the same time obviously, as he cannot hear or respond to any verbal message.

So there is this app called Slack that allows you to communicate with multiple people at the same time using a chat, which is one of its many cool features. Maybe you should use it? Just a thought.

Or do you think I am in the wrong to think that it affects the team's productivity?

It certainly is affecting your productivity... But you are the new person on the block, still on probation, it shouldn't be that hard for them to replace you with someone who can spend the 5 minutes it takes to learn how to use a communication app.

Finally, this colleague is not a DEI hire. They are the company's sole DevOPs engineer, trusted by your boss (and their superiors) to moderate / approve production deployment which is a sign that this individual is trusted, and their judgement is respected.

TLDR:

DMG has been at the company longer than you have, you have been there 6 weeks?. And DMG's performance/hard work has led them to being the sole DevOps guy in charge of the CI/CD pipeline. It’s likely that DMG stood up the CI/CD pipeline/Kubernetes clusters.

While about all you have managed to do is refuse to use a communication app that you can learn how to use in 5 minutes. And have wasted a lot of time working around the deaf mute guy, instead of with him like your boss told you to.

As a side note, deafness/muteness isn't catching, communicating with this individual won't make you go deaf/mute.

He can communicate via Slack chats (we have a flexible-hybrid working environment, with 3 days in office) but cannot take calls. Even when face to face, we have to communicate by typing on our respective keyboards and looking at each other's screen.

It sounds like you have an effective way of communicating with this individual. This individual obviously has proven they are capable of doing their job. It’s actually you who has to prove that you are capable of working with this individual, and given their role, it likely is essentially a job requirement to do so.

There is a very good chance, the individual can actually read lips, you might want to ask if they have this skill.

Needless to say, it has been quite challenging, and slow, and now a days (after about six weeks), I am trying my best to go around him as much as possible, trying not to consult him even when deploying ETL or inference pipelines to production. But my boss keeps insisting he has to be sort of the gatekeeper/approver of production deployments etc.

If you are trying to actively avoid working with this individual, you are absolutely in the wrong, if they can communicate through Slack you should use that medium.

How would you approach it? I am not against DEI (diversity, inclusion or whatever), but do you think at some point someone has to draw a line? Or do you think I am in the wrong to think that it affects the team's productivity?

What you describe has absolutely nothing to do with DEI. The individual is deaf, presumably since they are also mute, this was a disability they were born with or is something they dealt with their entire life.

You could always learn sign language or ask the company to purchase tools that will help communicate with this individual. Of course the individual should also be requesting those tools in my opinion.

I have not spoken explicitly about it to my other colleagues, as I do not want to appear like I am ganging up/teaming up against him, although I suspect at least some would agree with my sentiment here.

You shouldn’t share your feelings about this individual with anyone at work. What you are doing, avoiding interaction with this individual, is definitely wrong.

What do you think is the best way forward? Should I just suck it up, and learn sign language (in my own time) to be inclusive?

There are tools that exist which will transcribe your verbal communication to text in real time. I think you should try harder to communicate with this individual and make sure they feels welcome to the team. After all you are actually the new guy not this individual you describe.

What do you think is the best way forward? Should I just suck it up, and learn sign language (in my own time) to be inclusive?

What's wrong with just corresponding in writing (in English/your local language)?

It's rare for anyone involved in any kind of computer "engineering" to spend much of their time talking, relative to the amount of time spent on cognitive work interacting with machinery or materials.

Most talking occurs in writing if possible, for a number of important reasons, and being deaf-mute would be considered a very small impediment.

I think you'll just have to get with it and converse by text.

"Drawing the line" already indicates you probably have the wrong mindset here.

It's clear that your colleague is perfectly capable of performing his work and undermining his productivity and morale in seeking ways to bypass him seems (at least to me) to be wrong.

The simplest and most effective solution is to work with him as a remote worker, so that work related requests are conducted via Slack/e-mail/whatever. This should really be the case as you'd want an audit trail anyway.

Additionally, you might want to look at positive ways in which you can interact - you don't have to learn sign language, a few simple changes would go a long way toward including your colleague and letting him feel as though he's a part of the team.

YouTube has a ton of resources. Also watch other people in your team (and talk to them) and learn how they interact.

I would like to point out that, in many places, the behavior you're describing is against company policy at a minimum and possibly even illegal.

How would you approach it? I am not against DEI (diversity, inclusion or whatever), but do you think at some point someone has to draw a line? Or do you think I am in the wrong to think that it affects the team's productivity?

This isn't DEI. You don't indicate your jurisdiction, but many jurisdictions require companies to make reasonable accommodations for people's disabilities (assuming that the reasonable accommodations enable them to perform the essential job duties). See, for example, the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) in the United States.

Based on what you wrote here, it sounds like he's perfectly capable of doing DevOps if people communicate with him on Slack or other written form, which sure sounds like him being able to perform the essential job duties with reasonable accommodation.

I would like to emphasize that compliance with these regulations is not optional. You must comply with these laws whether you like it or not. You can't simply decide to ignore them because you find them inconvenient.

I am trying my best to go around him as much as possible

Deliberately bypassing him because of his disability is arguably creating a hostile work environment for him and potentially puts the company out of compliance with mandatory regulations. Don't do that.

But my boss keeps insisting he has to be sort of the gatekeeper/approver of production deployments etc.

So, your boss explicitly told you multiple times work with him and you're deliberately not doing it? That's not a great look, especially for someone who's only been there for 6 weeks.

What do you think is the best way forward? Should I just suck it up, and learn sign language (in my own time) to be inclusive?

Those aren't the only two choices. You could, for example, use Slack.

Also, is there some specific reason you can't learn at least basic sign language? I'm learning German in my own time because many people at my company speak it. While I'm hardly fluent, I can at least hold a basic conversation, and many people appreciate that I'm at least making an effort.

If you feel that it would help you in your job, you could potentially even ask your boss to send you to training for this.

Your communication skills need work

I'm going to attempt to answer this in as neutral a tone as possible. From the original post, it is unclear how much professional experience you have. You've listed a bevy of different acronyms, but I'm not in your industry so they don't really mean anything to me and I'm not sure they're even relevant to the question.

But what is relevant is your years of experience working as a professional. One of my default rules for any junior coming into my field out of college is that they do not communicate via e-mail with anyone outside of the office for their first year. They can communicate internally via e-mail, they may be copied on e-mails to people outside of the office, but they themselves don't communicate outside the office directly.

The reason for this is because more often than not, they have not developed the necessary soft skills to know how to compose an e-mail with consideration for tone and context. For that first year, part of my job is to ensure they get to see examples of how to communicate effectively so that when I take the training wheels off they aren't starting from nothing.

College doesn't ever seem to teach this, so it becomes part of my job. Even if they did, I don't know that most young people could fully appreciate it since there's almost never going to be appreciable consequences in that venue (you're not going to be risking jeopardizing your boss' reputation on a $2 million job because you asked a question about something in a 10-person e-mail chain that he doesn't want to draw attention to).

Developing the necessary soft skills to effectively communicate is essential to becoming successful in a lot of industries. Juniors who refuse to learn and grow their soft skills in my field (which is a lot of hard science, tech, and engineering) will absolutely washout. Not being able to communicate in my field means that nobody can understand what you're talking about. At which point, you may as well be deaf and mute to us, but no amount of Slack or other accommodations will help bridge the communication barrier.

tl;dr: skill issue, git gud

You don’t accommodate your colleague at all. You communicate with him, as best as you can. If you refuse to do that, you are not doing your job and should be sent packing. You do not do anything to stop him from doing his job. If you do that, you are not doing your job and should be sent packing. And it seems you try doing that already.

And realise that this person is a long term valued employee of the company. This means he knows how to do his job, better than you (a newbie), and if there is a problem between you two, it will be you who leaves, not him.

Does that sound harsh? That’s intentional. You are showing total disrespect for a valued team member. If you don’t understand that, then it is you who is dumb, not him.

Update: I read your update. So instead of using the situation to achieve some personal growth, you took the easy way out.

There are (at time of writing) two excellent Answers - which I wholly support.

What this question does raise is an interesting philosophical question.

In this answer, I want to make clear I am not picking one side or another in this hypothetical Debate.

At the heart of the question is whether or not a person's disability impacts their ability to do their job.

If we start at one end - someone who does not have full use of their legs is unlikely to have a career as say an All Black or a Soldier. Here we can accept that physical mobility is a core component to the job.

To give balance and go to the other end, someone who has bad vision in one eye is not going to face any issues with a job of say an Exotic Dancer.

As we move away from the two extremes we get to areas where there is much more nuance.

Managing a Kubernetes cluster, running pipelines etc. are all job functions that at their core do not require Listening or Talking.

From that perspective, there's no impediment to their ability to do their job...

But what if we now say that Collaborating with the team is a key job function?

And this is the core of the issue - Collaborating on a project is important.

The next question is where the disability has an impact on a core function - are there ways of mitigating it? Speech to Text tools and Text to speech tools (for example)

Finally, if - even with the help of tools - the impact of the disability is a significant enough hinderance to the core job requirements - then it is up to Management to weight the pros and cons of whether or not they can continue to be in the role.

This is a delicate question as it is politicaly sensitive.

I will try to generalize the core problematic, so a scientifical discussion can be held.

To me your post reads as the following generalized question:

What is the tolerable burden of an individual‘s fate on another individual or social group?

I am afraid the answer to this question can only be given by the respective affected individual or social group. And the answer will vary per individual, per social group and per zeitgeist. This is due to the nature of qualitative research.

Insofar only you yourself can answer, whether you are able to work with this other individual or not. It is your subjective opinion.

On a question like this the answer is not representative worldwide. There are likely different answers per cultural clusters.