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Comment by xiaoma | Hacker News Reader

It's interesting how different this advice is from what some of the greatest engineering cultures have done.

At Microsoft during its heyday in the 90s, it was common for people to say things like, "That's the dumbest fucking idea I've ever heard" and the behavior came straight from the top. Similarly, Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos are well known for humiliating engineers in front of an entire room after a presentation.

http://www.businessinsider.com/things-amazons-jeff-bezos-tel...

There's no way to prove the issue definitively either way, but I suspect this blog post suffers from the cognitive bias of confusing how the world should be with how it is. At the very least, a "no shaming" rule isn't a requirement for building a world-class engineering organization and attracting top talent.

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Looking at Microsoft (or Ggole, Apple, Facebook, etc) is a distraction. They have the resources to keep great engineers from leaving toxic environments - not just by paying a lot, but by having the most challenging and huge scale projects, and by having other great engineers. Those things don't apply to Acme Software Inc. Most businesses aren't building world-class teams or making cutting edge products. In that environment cultivating a team where someone speaking up might be shot down and made to feel ashamed will lead to developers refusing to share ideas, which is potentially bad for the business, and worse, refusing to share experience, which is definitely bad for the business.

If an engineer feels they can admit a mistake early then the rest of the team can help to fix the issue before it escalates to the point where you lose a client. If an engineer hides their mistakes because they're afraid of how their boss might react, things are left lingering, and they don't get fixed. That's how really big problems happen.

This is definitely true today. It wasn't true when MS was a startup and Bill Gates was particularly harsh and it certainly wasn't true when Steve Jobs returned to Apple. At that point they were only a few months away from bankruptcy.

Another data point is the vastly greater acceptance of giving workers a tongue-lashing in China vs the US. In that case as well, the harsher culture has certainly been growing faster in terms of engineering-driven companies. In fact, I've never seen a US company of comparable size that can move as fast as a Chinese tech company. Part of this is due to differences in IP and compliance laws but I believe culture also plays a role.

To be clear, I don't like that employers treat their staff harshly. That doesn't necessarily mean the practice is less effective, though.

I've worked for real jerks before. I don't think the economics of it work out. This being said, you learn a certain stoicism in the face of it. If you catch a real rant, a stone cold "You finished?" at the end might be in order.

Don't get me wrong, I've raised my voice at people but only after they've persisted in a particular error for months, after receiving many many external reference to why it's an error.

I've no interest in working for a Bezos-type because I see that as a "cult of personality". It's something people have to work around.

If people are risk averse to sharing ideas, then you'll get fewer of them. Perhaps that's a good thing. But it costs very little to learn to provide feedback in a non-confrontational manner.

> “Do I need to go down and get the certificate that says I’m CEO of the company to get you to stop challenging me on this?”

In my experience at Amazon, there's a lot of free discussion and invitations for criticism of management ideas, but once a decision has been made, everyone is expected to get behind it for at least the next 6-12 months.

I don't think most teams at Amazon engage in "shaming" behavior, as much as they set a standard. Ie, if we agreed that all new modules are going to have 100% or near 100% test coverage and someone turns in a commit that doesn't have any tests at all, they're going to get some shit from the rest of the team.

There's a difference between an implementation that doesn't work as well as hoped that needs to be refactored, and intentionally adding technical debt and going against best practices to save yourself time. Quirky implementations are treated pretty indulgently at Amazon as long as you fix them once it's clear they're a problem, while laziness and causing harm to other developers who have to maintain the codebase is clamped down on pretty hard.

Most people would be in favor of "shaming" an airplane mechanic who doesn't follow the safety checklist after they've been taught how to, but not so if it was their first day.

I imagine how well people tolerate what they shouldn't has something to do with being Authoritarian Followers. And something maybe connected with those who glory in hazing culture. And we must grow past that kind of idiocy.

If I worked for someone who treated me like that and then, decades later, I heard that they'd finally died, I'd say IT'S ABOUT FUCKING TIME! and have a little party.

I think I know what you're talking about when you mention Authoritarian Followers---something like abused kids who only know how to deal with situations in which they are abused, even when they grow up.

The worse part is they want to have "followers" themselves as well, subconsciously, repeating the cycle.

I still have many properties of Authoritarian Followerism in myself, but I'm making progress.

One of the difficult parts is many people around me show blatant signs of that followerism and it's easy to get sucked back down with them.

E.g., a coworker protested my protestations against our company stack ranking employees based on "quantitative" metrics, and then many months later backpedaled on his words when someone who had a more important title said the same concerns.

Something I found interesting on the topic is http://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~altemey/

I think that might be focusing on the smoke instead of the fire. The sort of people who make amazing things happen are driven by rage.

They take the success of some area of the world so personally, and hold themselves to such a high standard, that everything they themselves do is insufficient, everything anybody else does is woefully insufficient, and everything the rest of the world does is evil. When the closest anyone, including the person assigning grades, can get to "good" is merely "doesn't obviously suck right now" it makes sense there would be a lot of shouting.

> Similarly, Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos are well known for humiliating engineers in front of an entire room after a presentation.

Michael Jordan had a reputation for being a jerk too, but it's cargo culting to think that's how you get world class performance.

Jordan could do it and be idolized for it because he was the best on the court usually. Microsoft in the 90s was the powerhouse. Working for Apple has (had?) carried a certain panache, and Amazon is a similar powerhouse.

Not sure Microsoft in it's heyday was a great engineering culture. The were a monopoly, which allows bad engineering to occur without ill effect for a long time. I think many of their problems today are due to being tied to code written in those days.

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