How faking your feelings at work can be damaging | Hacker News Reader

How faking your feelings at work can be damaging

bbc.com

70 pointsNoB4Mouth71 comments

The classic book Moral Mazes talks at length about emotional labor in organizational management.

One of its primary claims is that HR and marketing function essentially purely as emotional labor (the book would treat legal compliance as a distinct category), and has a whole chapter called, "Dexterity with Symbols" that is a breakdown of how management and executives need to communicate with vague, symbolic language that can never been pinned down to specific claims or specific requirements, so as to allow virtually anything that is said to be reinterpreted as-needed to retrospectively imply whatever is expedient for the executives, particularly from an emotional labor point of view.

I think this is a huge component of why software companies use open-plan offices, and in fact sometimes pay higher prices just to have an open-plan office (not even talking about any of the arguments about lost productivity or reduced communication in open-plan spaces, just purely the real estate costs).

It's a form of emotional labor. The company gets to see who will express outward fealty to the management, like a dog rolling over to expose its tummy. Who will drink the Kool-Aid about "collaboration" and "entrepreneurial spirit" and give emotional labor outwardly praising the open plan office designs, despite inwardly knowing they are miserable, anti-productive and anti-ergonomic spaces.

HR I get, but Marketing is emotional labor? Not following that at all. All departments have their element of emotional labor, but in my mind it's something that will mostly be absorbed by management in a healthy organization.

Maybe I just don't understand the term though.

It is not referring to the external artifacts of a marketing strategy, like ad purchases or the design of packaging or something.

It's talking about the internal "PR" role that marketing plays in its interface between management and the employees. Think about the huge product launch events that big tech companies produce. It's as much about creating external publicity or buzz as it is about generating conformity among the staff in terms of what the company line is going to be. As a result, it also boils down to a lot of emotional labor on behalf of PR staff "selling" the vision of the management to the rest of the staff, despite the fact that management's "vision" will be represented with vague, imprecise symbols that allow management to later on morph things around in whatever way suits them.

Incidentally, I think it's also the biggest reason why internal prediction markets are not adopted. Despite evidence that they improve product delivery metrics and tangible financial metrics of project success, it makes the evaluation of project success so quantitative that managers lose their ability to manipulate, tell stories, argue for bonuses, argue that they were stopped by internal politics, etc. etc. Telling those stories is so valuable to middle and upper management that it is worth more than increased raw success of the company overall. Essentially, they want the company overall to be slightly worse off if it gives them manipulable tactics for entrenching their personal job security or bonus or whatever.

"This classic study of ethics in business presents an eye-opening account of how corporate managers think the world works, and how big organizations shape moral consciousness. Robert Jackall takes the reader inside a topsy-turvy world where hard work does not necessarily lead to success, but sharp talk, self-promotion, powerful patrons, and sheer luck might. What sort of everyday rules-in-use do people play by when there are no fixed standards to explain why some succeed and others fail? In the words of one corporate manager, those rules boil down to this maxim: "What is right in the corporation is what the guy above you wants from you. That's what morality is in the corporation." This brilliant, disturbing, funny look at the ethos of the corporate world presents compelling real life stories of the men and women charged with running the businesses of America."

Wow thanks for the book rec. This is exactly my experience.

Not what the article is getting at, but I have seen displays of righteous anger cause positive changes. Sometimes you need to communicate that you aren't just griping and this is a red line.

Doesn't work if people already think your a hot head though.

I've never seen showing anger works. In American society, being Black and angry, conjures up the stereotype and gets you labeled as an "Angry Black Man". Also, if you are a female showing anger, gets you labelled negatively.

Yes, Americans don't understand disagreement, even legitimate disagreement. You are wondering if this is because they fear incurring liability if they admit there is a problem or due to the almost prison-like environment of high school in their formative years, or what. It's a great problem for foreigners.

Can confirm. Was recently informed I was "not a team player" for pointing out obvious facts that happened to be inconvenient. A German friend of mine told me that when she was immigrating here, she took a class that was supposed to help with integrating into American culture, she was told to always wrap any sort of criticism in a complement sandwich.

praise-criticism-praise

That's called the "shit sandwich".

Being disagreeable is okay but being disrespectful is not. Sometimes people conflate the former with the latter though so you have to be careful.

>but being disrespectful is not

Nah. It’s fine. You might find it advantageous to navigate the world by humoring the people too full of themselves to realize they don’t deserve an ounce of respect. But they don’t, and it’s fine if you don’t want to give it.

imho it's baked into anglo individualist enlightenment philosophy - if there is no dogmatic truth, and individuals are allowed to make their own decision, you are being an overarching papist to insist that there is a right way, and further more that we should listen to it.

so instead, 'be nice', because 'respecting others opinions' (even if delusional) is the true virtue

besides, insisting on a 'correct way' for the group means that individualism itself is flawed, and so is therefore heretical..

That's not QUITE it.

The issue is that everyone is insisting that there is a DIFFERENT "right" way. So of the 30 or 40 "right" ways in a group of 30 or 40 people, there has to be some system for settling on 1 "right" way. So what ensues, without anyone consciously realizing it, is almost an election. Where the group settles on one "right" way. And any holdouts are said to be difficult intransigent people.

It's a bit like a court jury. All 12 jurors actually have their own opinion. But over time, they select one opinion as the consensus opinion. The reason for selecting that opinion can be different for each juror, but any juror not accepting the consensus opinion would be considered a hold out. I'd even wager that the other jurors would just as soon not be on a jury with the hold outs in the future.

Having mentioned all that, the material point here is that every initial opinion in the group can be "wrong". The consensus opinion is only the opinion that the group promotes as its own. Being the consensus opinion doesn't mean that it's correct, anymore than being a dissenting opinion means that the dissenting opinion is correct. It's entirely possible, in fact oftentimes likely, that both opinions are "wrong".

It isn't quite like that. Any decisionmaking process in a group has to be anchored in observable reality, you can't make it a popularity context. You recognize the trouble when you teach at university, students don't know how to reason and make cogent arguments.

This is correct. Consensus opinion might not be the very best of all the possibilities, but is rarely a very bad choice. The other side of this is buy-in. On a great team, it's important to have everyone feel free to put forth an opinion, with backup. And then this process happens. And then it's just as important for everyone to "murder the un-chosen alternative" - in other words, even if a team member very strongly believes their posited solution was correct, and very strongly believes the chosen solution is incorrect - they must murder their solution, and wed the chosen solution. A team, committed as a team, to the team-chosen alternatives over time, is a very powerful team. Likely more powerful than one that only chooses the objectively best solution without full buy-in from the rest of the team. It takes hard and nuanced work from the team leader to cultivate this.

Being white and angry gets you labeled “Angry White Man”.

Come to think of it, the issue of our culture’s ballooning expectations of positive public expression seems to persist at a fairly continuous rate regardless of race/gender. And, while race/gender discrimination exacerbates all social inequalities, inherent systematic inequalities like cultural expectations and capital inherently elude acknowledgement in an inspection of identity lines.

> Being white and angry gets you labeled “Angry White Man”.

The angry label gets applied far earlier to women and black people.

I'd like to see the evidence upon which you make assertions like this.

I've observed it, the threshold is currently lower for a white male, especially an educated white male that presents themselves well and is law abiding and free of debt and addictions. The good citizen in general is rewarded, as it should be I suppose. You can't fight city hall.

The closest I can find is this:

https://www.vox.com/identities/2017/3/17/14945576/black-whit...

Now imagine if the Black person shows signs of anger.

On the other hand. I once had a really tall (White) manager who you could tell would go out of his way to stand further back from a crowd so we wouldn’t have to look up at him. I’ve had to tell my tall and big stepson to be mindful of his size. He still thinks of himself as this little kid (not in a bad way)

Maybe so! I personally theorize you are correct, but more importantly, we should agree the effects are both significant and problematic well beyond the limits of such a scope.

Let’s consider the causes, potentials, and limits associated with addressing the given concerns.

If critical theory has it’s way, the explosion of positivity is part of a built-in feature of commercial capitalism which incentivizes avoiding the problems itself creates. The ceiling on mitigating socially implemented racism is dependent on mitigating the economically implemented racism which associates identity with class, which defines our experiences and therefore our stereotypes.

Given the economic incentive to avoid economic explanations, the cost of disproportionate blame deserves strategic consideration.

The movie "Falling Down" notwithstanding, "angry white man" isn't a pernicious stereotype, and "angry black man" is. I'm neighbors with more than one professional black man who has told me they have to be extra careful in the workplace, because any frustration they express will be amplified by the perception of their (overwhelmingly white) coworkers. The first time I heard this, I didn't understand and had to have it explained to me. It's a thing.

The first time I saw this articulated was in the article https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/09/fear-of...

I am generally very calm and measured but I sometimes deliberately get angry and it seems to make me heard. I do this maybe once or twice a year and only in situations where I am 100% sure that my point is correct.

I have had colleagues a bit like this. You spend two years working with this calm, intelligent, sensible person, so when they finally do get angry, you stop and pay attention.

I think it also works in relationships. A lot of people let things fester for a long time. I think a good blow up from time to time clears the air often. That is if you let it go afterwards.

The best manager I've had as a dev is a first-generation Nigerian-American, and in the year I worked for I saw him get legit fired up once, and it was incredibly effective. At least for me and I think the team as a whole.

Though to support your point, from what I could tell he had that rep with some in the office. But that was probably inevitable given the environment (very white collar) and his personality (certainly not angry but not at all passive either).

Can't speak to race issues, however there is a difference between anger at a specific situation and anger at the straw that broke the camels back. It has to be an issue everyone can immediately understand without needing a back story for it to be effective. Otherwise to observers without context it just looks like an over reaction.

The problem is most often anger comes from a series of injustices at the office. Not one singular event.

I got burned out by trying to be the code hero. Then I realized there really isn't any point to this line of work. It is the epitome of "progress only for the sake of progress".

There is no right answer. I fake being happy for fear of being fired. I tried to contribute and help and was told to focus on my work, which is meaningless engineering with no purpose. I have resigned myself to get in on time and sit and stare at the screen. I try to get things done but it is a moving target. The people who thrive here engage in side channel communications, I am mostly unwilling to do that because I believe in public communication. I wish I did not believe in a free and open society as we are tending towards some form human/machine authoritarianism and my views are going to be punished. Keep your heads down and accumulate resources seems to be the best advice.

> Keep your heads down and accumulate resources seems to be the best advice.

This is the problem with society at large IMO.

Sounds like a toxic or at the very least an incompatible workplace. You should look for a different place to work, and possibly a different line of work entirely, since you don't seem to enjoy the "meaningless engineering". Money isn't everything.

Sounds exactly like my experience at Useless Fintech aka Charles Schwab sorry to hear this.

“Your ideas are stupid and your goals are meaningless” https://medium.com/@megamindbrian/your-ideas-are-stupid-and-...

There is a shred of hope left. I have a friend that has not offered me work personally but he says he loves the "Google reject engineers". Meaning he loves to hire the people that are phenomenal and confident enough to compete in the big league but are defeated by some small technicality such as checking the wrong box on a web based job application or in your case failing at "side channel" communication. That's probably more of a good quality for you rather than a failure.

Haven't read the article, but I know that faking your feelings is a great way to subtract from team morale, particularly in situations most susceptible to tension. Sure you may keep your job, but great workplaces don't get to be great workplaces by instilling fear in people so they don't speak up about issues or bother to understand the personalities of their colleagues. If all of your colleagues are sociopaths, you're going to have a bad time.

Edit: That's not to say that you shouldn't necessarily be principled about these things.

I was with you until the sociopath part. Faking emotions and sociopathy are two different things

You're right. Upon reconsideration, I think what I meant those as two independent examples of unhealthy company compositions in which lack of authentic emotion could lead to negative outcomes. Though I suppose it depends on the place.

When you bottle things up for months and months you eventually get your own Wikipedia page:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JetBlue_flight_attendant_incid...

When people are forced to keep up that fake smile, the people they interact with start taking advantage. Then eventually the person behind the smile cracks, grabs "two beers and exited the plane by deploying the evacuation slide".

Note that this article uses a somewhat older and more specific definition of emotional labor, casting it as something done in the course of paid work. These days, it is also commonly recognized to occur in unpaid contexts. (Maybe it was in the 1960s as well, but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotional_labor doesn't seem to cover that.)

Having a friend lean on you during a breakup, and helping them process their feelings -- that's unpaid emotional labor. Which is fine! It's just good to recognize it, especially because there's a gender imbalance. Women are commonly expected to provide unpaid emotional labor in the domestic and social spheres, and in traditional labor contexts, women are commonly expected to provide emotional labor on top of their other job duties in ways that men are not.

> having feelings at work

i go to work to complete an objective and get paid. feelings are personal and not something i care to share with workplace associates or strangers. of course, this means that i'm totally unsuited for any kind of non-technical, customer-facing work. except maybe a bar or restaurant that wants bitchy/sarcastic staff.

i'm sort of lucky that i work it tech, but i'd be pretty happy doing construction or anything that involves doing stuff other than talking to customers.

What makes you think that talking to customers involves feelings? It can also be completely professional and objective based - the only difference is that you certainly need good skills in showing appropriate affect in a wide range of situations.

Being bitchy/sarcastic at a bar sounds ... well very emotional to me.

Then you get a scolding from your supervisor that X customer thought you were "disrespectful" and "insensitive of their needs". Customers don't want objectivity, they want you to do the thing they want right now, and what are we paying you for anyway?

I think you got it other way round. The customer service is supposed to keep feelings for themselves and smile nicely, no matter how much they find customer unsympathetic. Yes, they are supposed to deliver. The programmer can went his frustration over requirements pretty much at will.

I don't know what exact objectivity would waiter deliver. Besides, you can be objective without being disrespectful, unless you are one of those people who use "objectivity" as euphemism for angry ranting.

Sorry. I was thinking "customer" in the context of drawing up requirements for a project. Often with the PM over your shoulder insisting that yes, you can do everything the customer is asking for, no problem.

That is lying. I know we habitually call it by various euphemisms, but in fact, it is lying. There is also lying about estimates later in process (because usually requirement themselves would not be problem, if price and estimations were higher).

"objective-based" != "objectivity". The objective is to please the customer (for example): do what they want in a timely fashion and send them a bill. There's quite little need for feelings in that. Call them up and ask them how they're doing. Are you sincere? Maybe, maybe not. That is your own personal affair.

> other than talking to customers

You're so incredibly fortunate to be in a position where you get to decide you want to interact with customers or not, because the vast majority of workers don't. So many customer service jobs require you to keep cool even when customers are treating you like terrorists, and it can be soul-crushing.

Getting shit on constantly for two years as a call center CSR motivated me to get out of that world and into writing software, but not everyone can make that change successfully.

Those who are successful at interacting with the public basically treat the interactions as if it was an API. A lot of APIs are incomplete, or poorly thought out, but you can still at least do your best with them. Same with interacting with difficult customers, or putting on a smile and being witty with small talk for most other customers. You end up developing a series of canned responses, and don't take anything personally (just like you don't take a "404 not found" personally, or "503 service unavailable").

I understand the attempt to compare a successful salesperson 's thought process to an API, but it's essentially what this piece argues is wrong with our work culture. And man it makes me cringe.

More specifically though, how can you compare a 404 response to a random stranger telling you what a failure you are at life that you're stuck responding to their complaint instead having an "improtant" job like they do? How does a normal person who's struggling to earn a living (call centers don't pay well usually) while having to respond to ruthless, horrible people, not be damaged in the long run by those interactions? They can't even be compared because computers don't communicate with emotion.

That's like saying bullying could easily be solved if kids just talked more like APIs did. What?

You are probably right in that I most likely lost a big part of my soul while adopting this philosophy. But every since I've started treating non-personal interactions in the same way I would treat compiler errors, I've stopped having a strong urge to drink after work, and overall can focus on what is important to me outside of the 9-5.

The only thing that really can get under my skin at work anymore is if a situation starts to threaten my job (i.e., backstabbing, gaslighting, setting up for failure, etc). But with this newer approach, I'm able to recognize this a lot sooner and do something about it.

Another way to approach this if you don't like the cold impersonal "API" approach, is to convince yourself that you are playing the part of a character in an improv style play. That the people being "mean" to you aren't really mean, they are just acting. Of course the danger with this mindset is that you could end up inflicting emotional harm on someone else without intending or realizing it.

> feelings are personal and not something i care to share with workplace associates or strangers

"xj9 you don't seem to share the enthusiasm for our exciting journey. We're a family here at SaaS.com and you seem to be treating it like just a job. You're fired. Please clear your desk"

Yeah, I used to think like xj9 in collage. But I have no idea how it's possible to survive as completely non-social programmer, now that I've seen what work life actually consists of.

You can be social and build professional relationships without sharing your feelings.

Not for long. People feel like they're really getting to know you if you're that caged off.

You can be genuine without being emotional

Most of the successful people I've seen in my career had a demeanor that ranged between "happy and pleasant" and "serious and stoic". Founders and top executives can get away with being passionate (e.g. Steve Jobs) but serious, reserved stoicism seems to be the norm (e.g. Tim Cook).

But not as good for motivating staff.

i'm not sure how "not sharing my emotions" and "being non-social" are connected. i socialize with co-workers, but we are acquaintances for the most part. i reserve sharing my emotions for intimate friends and significant others.

There is a world of software outside of useless saas/web shit-ware where you don't have to deal with overzealous SV enthusiasm.

i've spent most of my career contracting. my attitude is: i care exactly as much as i'm contractually obligated to. i don't accept contracts with these kinds of conditions.

i have a permanent position atm and my no-nonsense professional attitude works fine. its not like i'm anti-social, but i prefer to keep things light with people i don't have intimate relationships with.

Doesn't this assume that you'll never be emotionally overwhelmed while having to work?

Or that it's something you have complete control over?

Some people have low affect.

My ex was once moderating a forum and someone praised his ability to remain calm, cool and collected in forum discussions, at which point my ex said something along the lines of "You don't matter enough to me to get a rise out of me." (So much for diplomacy.)

The only person I ever saw him get so mad at that he turned red in the face and raised his voice was... me. I was the woman he was sleeping with and with whom he had two kids. No one else could get that much of a reaction out of him.

Some people just aren't super emotional. The feelings they do have they tend to guard. Those are a private matter and the world can butt out.

> "You don't matter enough to me to get a rise out of me."

I once pulled over to make a quick emergency stop to fix a broken wiper blade in pouring rain. The pullout I used happened to be a bus stop. As I was watching for the bus, a guy waiting there just started unloading at me from 15 feet away.

I gave him a glance, then just finished the 60 seconds of work fixing the blade, pulled out, and moved on. But I did not for one second give a shit about him or what he thought. As much as he wanted his concerns to be my problem, they really weren't. They would have been had a bus showed up while I was fixing my stuff, but that didn't happen.

How did you get hired for your current position, did they ask you why you want to work for the company?

> of course, this means that i'm totally unsuited for any kind of non-technical, customer-facing work.

I would say it is exactly the opposite -- you have got the pre-requisite #1. Source: am doing customer-facing work myself.

It probably helps to think about customer service jobs not as "faking your emotions" or "being inauthentic" but as acting. If you're an actor in a play, your genuine feelings towards the other actor don't really matter: if you're supposed to yell and scream at them or have a sword fight, you do that, and if you're supposed to kiss them, you do that.

There are huge incentives to denying that that is what most socially capable adults do (and spend so so much time thinking about and mastering), so you admitting this is a huge service to all of us for whom it took longer than normal to realize. Thanks!

Why giving generalized advice without conditioning on context-dependence is bad.

Edit: Sorry, I now see that the real article has all the proper "can"'s, instead of "is"'s, I was missing.

I mean, the whole enterprise is damaging. Workplaces are not humane, they're hostile (in a blithe, disavowed way of course) and overtly not designed for the interests of the people occupying them. Including whether it's considered appropriate to show your feelings (usually no).

How do you find work where this is not true? (assuming that you are working)

I don’t know. (I am working and include my job in the above, as well as any other job I’ve had)

I've never worked customer service, but I know that some managers will 100% stand by their employees against abuse from customers, and don't demand smiles. I've heard of this specifically w.r.t. some coffee shops.

(Now I wonder if this has anything to do with France's reputation for surly customer service -- are the employees simply not expected to give "service with a smile", and Americans are horrified by the contrast?)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com