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Comment by DoreenMichele | Hacker News Reader

In the context of trying of get things done at work, which this question is apparently framed as, where the issue is not sexual harassment, I have found it to be a very effective rule of thumb.

I think you are reading in meaning that isn't there. It is a rule of thumb for precisely this type of goal. It is not a rule of thumb for how to deal with situations where you are clearly being wronged and it is clearly someone else's responsibility to right it.

But it works really, really well for trying to insert your agenda where doing so may not be all that welcome and where you are potentially stepping on toes politically, toes that could potentially cost you your job if they find you offensive enough. If you have a better way rather than just a criticism, it tends to be much, much better received.

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I disagree even in that case. When my colleague complains that a certain software module is overly complex, say, that’s really useful feedback even if they don’t have time to itemize the specific reasons why or propose alternatives. In terms of delegating and scheduling, it might just fall on someone else to take the complaint and look into whether the code can be simplified.

Raising a complaint long before having a full alternative is really useful in matters of team conventions, design principles, adoption of different tooling, workflow policies, etc.

I would always want to foster an environment where teammates could feel free and empowered to speak up about a topic that doesn’t sit right with them, and never feel implicit pressure to be quiet or keep to themselves if they cannot already propose an alternative.

I like to say that it’s all about empathy, but people often think about empathy completely backwards, from their own point of view, just “not wanting to hear it” or getting annoyed with a particular colleague who is often vocal just because they irrationally wish the person would be quiet and not introduce extra work via some complaint that needs looking into.

This is backwards because you should be happy and welcoming for people to tell you all this stuff. Part of being a professional is increasing your capacity to absorb complaints to make other people happy by solving their problem when they alert you to it, and not getting upset or annoyed (or at least not letting it affect you), and thinking they should be holding back for your sake.

It’s a natural extension of a lot of the advice in, “How to win friends and influence people,” applied to the workplace.

I think you are seriously reading in a huge amount that isn't there. There is no edict here to keep silent or something.

There are lots of circumstances where it's fine to voice criticisms. But where you have a clear agenda to oppose specific things at work and you want to insist on change happening, how you bring that up matters and just loudly complaining and insisting it is someone else's job to fix it isn't a best practice.

I don’t agree. I was responding to the parent comment that said this:

> “Something I heard at my corporate job: "Bring solutions, not complaints." It's a great rule of thumb to follow.”

It’s clearly talking about a general office culture, and not restricted to long-running agendas or anything, but rather having good “corporate citizenship” by not complaining or something, an institutionalized mantra to equivocate complaining with whining— I don’t think it involves reading anything extra into it in order to see that in the parent comment.

Seeing as how I wrote the parent comment, I think I am the ultimate authority here on what I intended. Given the context in which I was making the comment, I didn't feel I needed to make a long list of provisos clearly delineating that it applies to x, y and z context and should not be assumed to be a written in stone commandment one should follow upon pain of death. "Rule of thumb" seemed to me to be adequate to convey such.

I have now delineated some of those previously unstated assumptions. If you want to continue to insist I have no idea what I myself think or intended, then I don't think there's any point in discussing it further.

But you specifically say to use it as a general rule of thumb (a general cultural norm in your workplace), and that’s precisely the point I was disagreeing with.

If you both literally said, “It's a great rule of thumb to follow.” but also did not mean it should be a general workplace norm, then I cannot see any consistent way to interpret your original comment.

If anything, the rule of thumb would be to charitably and patiently listen to complaints earnestly, and only delineate special cases when complaining would be discouraged.

No. I did not use the word general. I did say this as the lead in:

Something I heard at my corporate job:

Although I can see where that would be interpreted as indicative of a general cultural expectation, it was a saying of one specific manager in my department. It was not some kind of cultural edict. I intentionally chose to not say that as I felt that detail was a pointless derail. I was merely offering a pithy alternative saying for the point someone else made.

It is, in fact, a rule of thumb I find works well for many things. But, given the specific context in which my remark was made, you have seriously read in a lot of assumptions that are wholly unwarranted.

If this comment fails to clear up this misunderstanding, then let me suggest you just ignore the entire thing and stop trying to parse it. Far too many words have already been written about this silly misunderstanding.

I would always read “rule of thumb” as a general rule, something you would consult in your mind as potentially being applicable in any given circumstance (and hence is general, by definition, even if you did not use the word “general”).

I feel like I’m being chastized here for defending a reasonable, obvious interpretation of your comment, while you are doing mental gymnastics to try to add qualifications to it.

I’m fine to drop the issue from this point, sure. But it feels rude to me that I am being told to stop talking about it even though reading back through the comments after sleeping on it, it seems obvious that my original interpretation was right, that I described my counter point in a perfectly civil way, and that your replies don’t seem fair.

You aren't being told you can't talk about it, nor are you being chastised. You are being told -- repeatedly -- that what I meant is not what you heard and then you insist you are in the right and I am in the wrong when I know best what I intended and no one else seems to have some big issue with my wording, which suggests the misunderstanding is likely primarily on your end, not primarily rooted in terrible phrasing on my end.

You and I obviously see the meaning of rule of thumb differently. I'm not going to look it up and get into some pedantic argument here about which of us is "right."

I don't know why you feel some need to repeatedly inform me that what I think I meant is not what I meant. But this discussion is fundamentally a waste of everyone's time if you are going to simply insist that your interpretation of what I intended is correct and true and my attempts to explain what I intended are somehow bad behavior of some sort.

I don't know how more clearly to convey that. I think I have been extremely patient myself here with trying to find some means to communicate while you appear to be dead set on telling me I don't know what I meant, which just sounds like a rather crazy assertion on the face of it.

It's reasonable to state that it sounded to you like I meant X. It is not reasonable to insist I couldn't have possibly intended something else since X is not the meaning you personally got out of it.

I intend for this to be my last reply. You've taken more than enough of my time over this matter. If that upsets you again for some reason, so be it.

I'm only saying that after reading and reflecting on your follow-up comments, the thing that seems most likely to me is that your original comment was meant to offer general advice that I felt it was valuable to state a disagreement with. The follow-up comments don't provide evidence, discussion or any information that causes me to revise that belief. It seems more likely to me that you're retrofitting an explanation to your comment because you don't happen to like my line of disagreement with you or something like that. I am not even sure why it matters so much to you to repeatedly insist there was a different intended meaning to your comment. So what? In a LessWrong-style way, the meaning of your words is what gets induced in the mind of the reader, and not what you have in mind when you wrote them. It would be super easy for many other people to read your original comment the same why I did, and that alone makes the follow-up discussion about disagreeing with it a valuable thing, totally decoupled from what you meant or even what you personally believe. It's about how people will read and understand that particular comment, not about what you meant by it (although, I still think the most likely scenario is that you did mean something like a general rule to consult in a general corporate setting, and backtracked to qualify it later on).

> "You've taken more than enough of my time over this matter."

I don't necessarily agree, but I do agree that this meta-discussion about who meant what seems counter-productive. Extended discussion about why a rule of thumb that puts implicit pressure on people to not raise their complaints would actually be valuable, because it seems a lot of people don't think any further than the fact that they find complaints to be annoying, and support the idea of corporate mores rewarding "problem solvers" instead of "whiners."

Stop beating your wife with switches smaller than your thumbs. Both of you. /s

Also. Kind of going to back the complaint being reasonable side of things. In Quality Management, it is more important that the signal is raised, recorded, and put in a pipeline to be dealt with, than to encourage only raising the signal when a possible solution is in hand.

On the other hand, yes, in general, when expressing cross-departmental complaints, come with a suggestion or offer of help to solve the problem in hand. If nothing else, it builds bridges, goodwill, and shows you care about making their lives, not just your own, better.

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