How to adopt an “openness” mindset at work | Hacker News Reader

How to adopt an “openness” mindset at work

spin.atomicobject.com

112 pointsphilk1052 comments

While I agree fundamentally, I think the blog post is focusing too narrowly which gives me a bad taste in the mouth, and I read it as an attempt to pass blame to employees.

For example, one suggestion is to point out the problem and discuss it openly.

>schedule a meeting with the project stakeholders and product owners ... talk about the pattern of incomplete requirements and make recommendations ...

This is great, and from my experience happens all the time. People speak up to managers all the time, every day. Rarely have I seen someone with a problem not bring it up to their manager.

It's the lack of action from managers following the feedback that's often the cause for developers adopting the "victim-oriented mindset". The direct result of manager inaction is for the developer to think the issues we have are real and are not being addressed, so my manager is indirectly telling me not to bring issues up next time which causes the "victim-oriented mindset".

Mindsets are situational, a developer's mindset reflects the environment they find themselves in. Poor leadership is the number one cause for burnout (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17849489). Poor leadership causes poor mindsets.

The main advice is to focus on solutions instead of throwing up your hands. That doesn't mean every attempt will be met with success. Sometimes there won't be much you can do but most of the time there is.

Usually, the best solution to a dysfunctional workplace is to find a job somewhere else. If managers do not act on feedback from the people they manage, that is what they are implicitly telling them to do.

I adopted a very similar perspective after years of having a lot of manager churn. I used to get so frustrated that my job was unnecessarily difficult because of them. Now it's become, "this is an opportunity to learn new ways to communicate with a manager who thinks it's 1985." So instead of being frustrated at the statement that my TypeScript and the other team's C needs to use the same headers, I focused on how to communicate, in an economy of words, why this API deviation may be a process problem, not a technical one. And in the years since that, I've slowly gotten better (and regressed at times) focusing on what I can control.

>instead of being frustrated at the statement that my TypeScript and the other team's C needs to use the same headers, I focused on how to communicate, in an economy of words, why this API deviation may be a process problem, not a technical one.

The statement actually makes a lot of sense if you don't take it literally. If you programmatically generate both C and TS part from the same common definition (protobuf?) as a part of the build process, API deviation will become an easy-to-see compile-time error instead of a runtime surprise.

Totally. That's why I got into talking about a common API schema that could be used to generate the required symbols. That got met with discussion of not using TypeScript instead.

This only works with certain type of manager.

If you have a sociopath and manipulative superior with a lot of power, talking won't do much.

You will have to rally others around you and demand either the board or their supervisors for change.

I have worked with two kinds of managers with outdated ideas or skill set:

1. The first kind is humble, respectful, friendly and likes to learn the modern stuff. These managers are nice to work with even if their skills are outdated. When you help managers like this by bringing them up to speed, you feel happy, the manager feels happy and it is a win-win situation. Relationships become stronger.

2. The second kind is egoistic and likes to assert their power. They are not in the game to learn the technology stuff but instead to advance their career further in the management ladder. I have found that interacting with these managers drains my energy and creates unnecessary stress even if I have to say the exact same thing I would have said to the first kind of managers. I don't exactly know why it creates more stress though. I guess the additional stress is due to lack of trust and lack of a good relationship with this kind of managers. It always seems like the manager is not on my side but always exclusively on their own side. And indeed the only way to get out of this situation is to rally others around myself and have the manager replaced with someone of the first kind.

I would say it's because you feel empathy for them and for others for being such hopeless and desperate people and for others for having to deal with it.

Maybe because there’s no reciprocity?

There's only so much you can do yourself, take into your own hands, look at from the other perspective, mingle around a problem until at long last you'll end up where you started again: Forces out of your control.

And it's (or should be) OK to blame them, you've done your homework.

But then someone comes along and says "You've been going at this the wrong way! Think positive! Think like a 'player'!". And as you roll your eyes, people label you passive-aggressive.

People like that are probably a minority, but they most certainly exist, too.

So there's a difference between blame, and discussing failure.

"The project was not delivered on time because requirements gathering took so long. Here's how we think we can help Product define them more efficiently in the future" is different than "It's Product's fault".

Both are laying blame on Product. One is suggesting a solution and sharing ownership of it; the other is only seeking to point fingers.

I would argue at no place should blame be okay. Because that creates a toxic culture; people begin to be less open and transparent about failure, are less likely to take responsibility, more likely to pre-emptively finger point to try to shift blame, etc, and it becomes political. The fact that you feel you are blameless is irrelevant if they can spin it so that it sounds like you are to blame (and trust me, speaking as a dev, the other departments are going to have way more time and experience in playing politics).

I agree with you on most counts, but you're viewing it from my position of not yet having (attempted) to see it from different angles and tackling issues (i.e. yet to do homework).

One should definitely do what you suggest and attempt to be constructive and productive (i.e. do the homework).

But if management shoots everything down and they expect you to build a house out of match-sticks and that thing falls apart at the slightest gust of wind, are you to blame or management for not giving you better building materials? (i.e. homework done, nothing left to do)

I'm advocating for a realistic view of things: Sometimes, oneself is to blame, sometimes it's something else, and sometimes it's forces out of our control, but there is always something at fault, if something goes wrong, hence there is always something to blame in failure.

But seeing oneself to be blamed at all times leads to burn-out.

EDIT: I'm aware you could also take a bunch of match-sticks, grind them to a pulp, and create some type of wood-like cement from it, and then build a house from that, and that might work. So let's say, they just give you five boxes with 20 matches each and it has to be at least 25 square-meters. Some might now argue, that you could go and start trading this until you end up with a house, there's the story of a guy who started trading a pen for something else on eBay, and ended up with a house. So management now insists this has to be done by the day-after-tomorrow. Etc. The question is: When and where do you stop telling yourself you haven't thought of the right solution and instead insist that management is absurd?

I would argue that that's a different issue. That's not about blame; that's about management refusing to alter their expectations to meet reality, despite you being open, transparent, and respectful about the state of it on the ground. If they are unable to do so, and respond accordingly, it's a good sign you should quit.

That's different than blame though. Yes, when things go wrong they go wrong due to a reason, but I'm simply highlighting the difference between highlighting what went wrong with a "here are some suggestions on how to solve it", and highlighting it just to place blame.

If the culture is focused on placing blame, to where you feel the need to do it, too, just defensively, GTFO ASAP. There is no way to win. I've seen once technical people who gained a majority of their experience in that kind of organization, and they were a liability everywhere they went.

You can not take it on yourself to fix a company especially from a position with no authority. You will end up having negative feelings about yourself and your failures to steer the ship in the right direction. People will hate you for what they see as constant interfering with their decisions. This a recipe for ever increasing stress and eventual burnout.

Please remember this: it is not your company. Not your responsibility. You didn't build it this way. Even if you could fix it - and I assure you that you can't - you would be doing the world a disservice. You would keep sociopaths who only care about short term numbers on spreadsheets in business when they rightfully deserve to fail.

If you find yourself with "negative feelings like unfairness, lack of control, or frustration" especially in the IT sector please remember the job market is booming right now and give a chance to another leadership to make the world a better place.

This seems a lot like the concept of "Locus of Control": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locus_of_control

This is excellent advice.

Since lots of comments had an adverse reaction to this use of the word "player", we replaced it above with "openness", which is the word the article uses to describe a "player".

Hopefully that will help the thread focus on the article now.

Perhaps a better option would be: "How to avoid a 'Victim' Mindset at Work?"

"Openness" totally confused me—I thought the article would be about being open to other people's viewpoints, or something like that.

That's a good suggestion, but I think the word "victim" is still likely to trigger people into reacting to that word rather than the underlying content.

The article title is actually “Refusing to be the Victim”.

I thought the same thing.

Now replace “victim” too

You're either at the table or you're on the menu.

Good lord, here is a CEO micromanaging people's feelings. This is incredibly insulting and creepy. It would be more honest if he told people to just shut up and do their jobs.

When I first read the article, I thought "Wow, this is perfect for a boss to handout to their employees and shift the blame!".

Realizing now, that this was indeed written by a CEO, does add a bit of flavor, but maybe he doesn't have any employees, and it's just a motivational piece he uses for himself. To be honest, I really don't want to know.

To be fair, AO is an agency. This is clearly a post intended to provide guidance when working with a client.

It is a bit funny to see in a public blog post from a CEO, though.

When reading I didn’t realize it was from the CEO. For some reason, that does make it seem kind of sleazy (not sure why).

On the other hand, it’s still damn good advice. It’s exactly how I would expect high-performing people to act. Victim mindset is (probably) never the right mindset.

If you're going to invent an arbitrary term for workplace assertiveness, maybe don't make it homonymous with a term for an aggressively flirtatious man.

It's not an invention or arbitrary term. The more traditional usage of the word player for much of the 20th century was to mean someone with agency and control over their own life and surroundings. The usage evolved (narrowed) with the popularity of rap in the 90s.

In my mind they’re the same. A player makes plays and rises in the social and economic hierarchies to the point that multiple women are courting him, thus giving rises to the guy “playing games” complaints, “being a player.” Pick-up artistry mocks what players do around women to get women (poor motivator) and get seen as “players,” kinda like crackers get called hackers. I think rappers still meant it in the histiric sense but mass sales means more simps who don’t even know a player to misuse it more with an emphasis on women and pickup artists. In our world, leadership at top companies are the players (and ads are the drug, kinda joking).

Leadership at top companies is disproportionately sociopathic compared to the population at large, as well. How admirable.

The word 'player' doesn't fit well and has bad connotations [1].

[1] https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Player

Reading the article makes it very clear that they are not using the word in that sense.

Even in just the title, I thought of this as "player" as in the context of "team player" rather than that particular slang.

Edit: I've linked this to a few friends and all of them thought of the slang! Go figure. :)

It has more than one meaning. see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Player_(film)

I wouldn't expect anyone to read "player" in the blog title and read it as the meaning in your link!

Seducing your coworkers to your way of thinking is part of the job in my mind.

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