Discretion still matters – don’t hurt your career by sharing too much

Part of that is quoted in this article, including this passage:

> Most of my new colleagues are at least 10 years my senior. Several of them have children, spouses, and mortgages. They are adults. Comparatively, I am a child.

This really hits home, because I'm on the flip side of this now. In my current role I'm a lead on a team and am one of the oldest team members (late 30s). Most of my coworkers are 10 years my junior, so it's weird structuring conversations that don't involve in-depth discussion of kids and spouses and homes and school, etc. Not that it's all I want to talk about, but it is a pretty common place to go to when you're talking over lunch in the cafeteria. Now more of my conversations are back in the beer, sports, and video games realm, which I also enjoy, but it's just different.

> Authenticity is rare, but people performing authenticity is common, and being good at that performance can build a fortune. Not just authenticity, of course. Being able to pretend that you are furious is a trick that all great sales people use. And being able to create the illusion of a sincere vulnerability can trick people into trusting you, which is invaluable

The crux of the issue is as follows: is it possible to exercise discretion, but still be authentic and empathetic? I believe the answer to that is "yes".

I also don't believe this is just about your career - it's about your life. In some circles, amongst _some_ people, in _certain_ circumstances, sharing details is beneficial. But not always. You should not overshare with every person you meet. It's simply not to your benefit.

The difficulty is determining when, where, and to whom you share. Sometimes, you just know. And sometimes, you just have to express yourself. That doesn't always mean you say exactly what's on your mind. Simply a facial expression can communicate what you're feeling in a certain moment, but still with respect and dignity.

Authenticity is extremely powerful. Even with a client, being authentic (without oversharing) will garner you a lot of respect.

Understanding is very much contextual. There isn't enough time in the day for you to have a deep, meaningful, close relationship to every passing acquaintance.

I don't need to feel people are up to no good to decide that certain kinds of information are not appropriate in certain contexts. It is a waste of everyone's time and a poor communication practice to introduce personal elements that aren't pertinent.

Discretion is certainly an element of that. But I think of it more in terms of effective communication.

If someone has just met you and knows almost nothing about you, leading with talking about how scared you are is going to get interpreted very differently from saying that to people who know you well. If the entirety of their knowledge of you is "I'm scared I can't handle this job," well don't be surprised if the conclusion is that you are simply in over your head.

So I'm having lunch with some of the engineers, and one of them shares out of the blue that she regrets getting a computer science degree at her (good) college, and thinks she should've gone into business instead. And my immediate thought is, "For god's sake, don't SAY that shit around me, I'm someone who has a big say in your career prospects."

I like having a casual, informal work experience. But it's a thin layer. Ultimately, this is still a hierarchy, and ultimately, you have to think about who you're talking to.

(Separately: Don't get an undergraduate degree in business. What a worthless degree.)

People who act 'professional' all the time aren't trustworthy to me. It's impossible to have a frank discussion since they're always hiding behind the veneer of professionalism. They overrate their own ability to fool an audience, and it erodes everyone's ability to trust them.

I'm not saying everyone needs to blurt out their feelings 100% of the time. I'm saying honesty isn't only reserved for touchy-feely millenials. If you cultivate a culture of honesty rather than dog-eat-dog deception, you'll get better feedback from your employees, you'll be able to give feedback easier, and teams will be more comfortable speaking up instead of sweeping the garbage under the table.

The problem with the woman in the interview wasn't that she was being honest, it's that she was framing her honesty in an unproductive way.

An example is when someone is confident enough to say "Hey, I don't know about [X], can you explain it?". That confidence is good; but for it to work, it must be common knowledge that, since no-one understands everything the question displays keenness to learn (i.e. strength) and not ignorance (i.e. weakness).

[Pro tip: one of the most valuable, and easiest, life skills I learned as a young man was to say "I don't know" in a confident tone of voice.]

It is bad if vulnerability-talk teaches young people to display their weakness, since of course that will lead people to lose confidence in them. What else could it do? But it is good if they learn to turn problems into opportunities to strengthen themselves, and to do it openly so that their colleauges can help.

[1]: https://work.qz.com/1155475/im-a-millennial-and-i-cant-get-m...

[2]: https://www.fastcompany.com/3001319/why-doing-awesome-work-m...

I like the rest of the article, but this seems almost like the definition of confirmation bias.

Women among women are in the opposite boat. Expressing vulnerability is always safe because it can always be read as a performance of femininity, but expressing confidence invites scrutiny as to whether it is well-founded or arrogant.

Both of those scenarios have a safe fall-back based on gender expectations. When you mix genders, the fall-backs disappear. In tech, this is virtually always a problem faced by a woman in a male-dominated workplace. If she's ever momentarily in doubt, there's no safe direction to err. She can't take the masculine safe route and project bravado, because that behavior only reads correctly from a man. Nor can she afford to fall back on traditional expectations of women, because traditional expectations of women would suggest she isn't competent at a technical job. So she has to hit the correct balance of confidence and vulnerability every time. There's no safe fallback.

And even when she hits the correct, situationally appropriate balance of confidence, the men around her might still be confused about how they're supposed to interpret it coming from a woman. Unless they analyze her confidence in a rational, point-by-point manner — and how often do you do that in a workday? — they're relying on instincts that are conditioned by cultural processes largely outside their control to 1) expect confidence from coworkers and 2) not expect confidence from women.

Anyway, it's pretty disheartening to see an incident that is heavily colored by gender expectations related and acknowledged as such but then interpreted as a story about a one-dimensional spectrum from expressiveness to guardedness. A man in the same situation would have been allowed a generous expression of confidence and self-regard, even if it reflected less technical insight than the woman's fears did. Women and men both routinely filter the emotions they share with other people, sharing some and repressing others. Showing vulnerability isn't about being unguarded or guarded, or about naive "authenticity" versus Machiavellian "performing authenticity." It's about filtering differently for a different set of expectations. Nor is it about women not understanding that personal knowledge can be used against them. Witness teenage girls feeling forced to suicide when other girls use their secrets against them. Women are not (and cannot afford to be) less socially careful than men, or less aware of the dangers of sharing.

Nor is it true that "if you are ambitious, all of the top jobs are reserved for people who are closed and guarded." Successful male leaders are rarely cold fish and are often very personally charismatic. They have to be mindful of the effect their expressions of emotion have on the people around them, and of the necessity of using that power to inspire loyalty and sacrifice. You can't make it to the top without inspiring trust in people. In case that sounds overly touchy-feely, let me add that it's especially important if your ambition requires other people to fail. It's easier to knife someone in the back than take them head-on. The "closed and guarded" person is never going to enjoy someone's loyalty or take a rival by surprise, because everyone is going to treat him like a snake. (That's one path to power, but judging by the people you see in high positions, it isn't a common one. Even Donald Trump projects a lot of interior qualities such as confidence, defiance, and self-regard and inspires loyalty in people who feel that he is gifting those emotions to people who need them.)

On a final note, I suspect the author understands 90% of this but is stranded on the wrong side of the enormous dichotomous wall he has erected between authentic emotional expression and manipulative emotional performance. People always filter and selectively amplify the emotions they express. That filtering is not inherently false, malicious, or untrustworthy. It's an inevitable part of being human, another complication when understanding another human being. A person's filter can be a positive or negative aspect of them, something they use in constructive or destructive ways. That's a better way to evaluate this question of vulnerability in the workplace. What kind of filter do I want my employees or coworkers to have at work? Should we systematically favor bravado over vulnerability? My gut feeling is that we should not.

So, being honest paid off for her?

Most successful CEOs are very open about everything, and don't keep secrets. Secrets and opacity are what destroy companies and relationships, not the reverse.

> Leah Fessler doesn’t seem to get that she is being forced to do this to serve the interests of capital. She is not doing this with a group of friends. A late night session in a dorm room rewards this kind of openness, but an exploitive economic system seeks this information to gain power over the workers.

I'll just say a couple things... First editorial stuff... The structure and flow of this article does not work. Much of it is unnecessary, there are entire groups of paragraphs that, more or less, repeat themselves, and there are anecdotes that are basically nonsensical. Also, "discretion" is too poorly defined, it is used far too loosely (an unfortunate tweet or a youthful blunder is pretty much incomparable to being vulnerable with your coworkers - it's honestly laughable to put them in the same category).

Second... The culture/gender thing... It's pretty much summed up in your final full paragraph. Just keep doing stuff the way we (i.e. I) have been until you inevitably shouldn't anymore because the culture expectations have changed? That's terrible advice, in absolutely any context, but especially this one. I'd be fairly confident in saying that any piece of advice that ends in that kind of qualifier should be thrown out immediately.

Third... The point... Honestly, I don't need to know anything else about your "2 years" with Lisa to know that you were better off for her willingness to be vulnerable (a huge plus when looking at a new hire, by the way). Would you have preferred her to be dishonestly confident (that would have been easy), or at least noncommittally vague (easy, but comes off as unsurprisingly insincere)? No. You don't want that in an employee. Knowing the limitations and concerns (actual concerns) is always better. Sorry, it is. The rest of your anecdotes aren't strong enough to make me even consider questioning that she did anything wrong. She did something that was hard, yes. She did something that could have cost her that job, yes. But she did something that improved her (and your) ability to do the job, and you were better off for it.

To be perfectly honest, it probably is a generational thing. And, to be perfectly honest again, I welcome the cultural changes (they are already getting here) that will come as the working generations shift. We, and our businesses, will be (i.e. are) better off for them.

P.S. You should take some time for a hard think about what "professionalism" means. Too often it is used as a crutch to support some archaic, and frankly harmful (across all possible meanings of the word), business practices.