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Comment by ChrisMarshallNY | Hacker News Reader

I worked at a Japanese corporation for most of my career.

They are not a “warm and fuzzy” bunch.

But they respect apologies. If I screwed up, I quickly learned to cop to it. The absolute worst thing I could do was cover it up.

Their attitude was not a punishing one, but we were expected to fix our mistakes, and ensure they did not happen again.

If we said we did not know something, it was assumed we would learn, or find someone who did.

Lot of “personal responsibility” stuff.

Americans, on the other hand, tend to pounce on admissions of failure or ignorance, and engage in shaming and humiliation of the person that admits an issue.

I am constantly encountering people that Absolutely. Will. Not. Admit. Ignorance. Or. Fault. Even when it’s quite clear.

It’s crazy.

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My biggest win, mentoring: a new guy put in charge of 'Engineering data' e.g. putting ad-hoc document solutions under one umbrella. He was worried, not an Engineer, thought he'd make a fool of himself. I said "Here's the trick. If you don't know something, say out loud "I don't know what that means. Can you explain it to me?" And because Engineers usually are happy to explain their shit, they'll not think badly of you but instead become helpful. Never bluff or fake it.

Fast forward 2 years. Everybody now respects him. He's the most generally knowledgeable guy in the company, the CEO consults him. Moved to manage the new products. He's on the road to Director now. Still the same helpful guy with the reassuring voice and the insistence everybody in the room understand before moving on.

I always give this advice to juniors and stakeholders. If you bullshit an engineer they can smell it from a mile away and they'll never respect your opinion again. If you tell them you don't know, you'll get an hour of expert level education on a subject for free.

Something I say to every new employee on their day one is: "I expect questions. I will come looking for you if you don't have any and ask you why you don't."

Because even if you know all the tech stacks we're using inside and out, which I don't believe, you still won't know our own local quirks. Everyone knows you don't know; don't be the last to that party.

In my first job, I discovered my boss had an encyclopedic knowledge of chip pinouts. So when I needed to know a pinout, I asked him.

One day he blew up at me and said I had a TTL data book on the shelf and to quit wasting his time because I was lazy.

He was absolutely right! It's good to ask questions, but not before RTFM.

I wouldn't describe that as being "absolutely" right. A team is more productive when its individuals' strengths are pooled together, and there's no sense in refusing to make use of a specialist's skills (within reason).

Yes, you want people to learn and become more self-sufficient over time, but not at the cost of finishing projects in double the time.

Constantly interrupting a specialist when you could instead pick up the data book is abusing him.

Depends. It was “the boss.” If they are a critical-path engineer (which, in my experience, is a very bad idea for managers), then they shouldn’t be used as a StackOverflow board.

However, if they are a true manager, then they work on “interrupt,” anyway, and their quick answers may improve the performance of the team, which is really Job One for any manager.

I say this, having been a manager for many years.

It sucked. I hated it, which is why I am pivoting back into engineering.

I was a damn good manager, though. If you go to my LinkedIn profile, you’ll see lots of testimonials from former employees.

One reason I was good, was because I kept myself out of the critical path.

I generally agree with you here, but there is still a limit to what extent and over what it is reasonable to interrupt a manager - given enough interruptions, they won't have any capacity left over at all!

> Engineers usually are happy to explain their shit

Ain't that the truth. Get us going and you'll have to beg us to stop.

This, and I hate putting someone in a situation that they don't know up from down... Even with the "highly opinionated framework" thing you still get lots of variation on how things are built, and my products are no different.

I find people are much more immediately capable if I can get a 1-2 hour "nuts-to-bolts" meeting to cover the bases. Also gets the mojo going for good questions as well.

On one hand, I really emphatically agree with this sentiment.

On the other hand, this post comes off as almost a parody of self-improvement advice.

I'll let Cliff know. For him, it seemed to work out ok.

The advice is fine, but it comes off as disingenuous to extrapolate a single anecdotal example so confidently without articulating the basis for your confidence.

Love that story. Thanks for sharing it.

You'd like this related discussion from way back when on https://42floors.com/blog/startups/i-dont-know: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7334671

> Americans, on the other hand, tend to pounce on admissions of failure or ignorance, and engage in shaming and humiliation of the person that admits an issue.

It's specific to company cultures, not Americans in general.

My first job out of college was at a dysfunctional company with a lot of internal competition. Making a mistake or taking responsibility for a failure was something that would be remembered for years and brought up at every opportunity. I remember my manager coaching me through covering up a simple mistake because he knew another team was eagerly waiting for me to slip up so they could attempt to take over our almost-finished project.

My second job was the polar opposite. When someone made a mistake, other teams jumped in to help fix the problem and kindly educate the person about how to avoid the problem in the future. Mistakes were a learning opportunity, admitting fault was a show of leadership, and the only real way to fail was to be chronically careless or to lie.

The biggest difference between the two companies was that the first company felt like a zero-sum game. We always felt like we were competing against other teams for bigger slices of the company budget, limited attention from executives, or just to keep our jobs through the next round of layoffs. It was every team for themselves, and other teams' mistakes were an opportunity to take them down a notch.

Meanwhile, the better company operated like everyone was on the same team. We all succeeded or failed together. Mutual respect an taking responsibility for your actions were not only encouraged by management, it was a requirement if you wanted to work there. I've tried to model my management style after this.

> It's specific to company cultures, not Americans in general.

I mean as someone who's worked in a corp that has one foot in the US and one foot in Japan, I see where OP is coming from.

Japan's business culture is no-frills "get it done" which rewards performance + optimization all the way down to the factory worker/janitors. In the US we have a culture of middle-management bloat where performance is usually transitive up the chain in some weird hierarchy; ie: my accomplishments are actually my manager's. This is all done with the "teamwork" mechanic - I didn't accomplish something... the team did.

What this leaves is a whole buncha people who know their failures will blow back on them 10X vs. any successes, giving the company an excuse to withhold incentives (raises, bonuses, etc). You're incentivized to cover stuff up because you know it's going to come up in your reviews, and with your accomplishments being diluted into the "team" it ends up being a major point of contention.

This is all anecdata but... I really understand/see where OP is coming from with his comparison as someone with a similar situation!!

Having one foot in Japanese culture and the other in American, I think there's a lot of saving face in Japan too (as with Asian and Western cultures in general), just it doesn't take the form of cover-ups in the business world as much.

It's not foreign in American culture, either. My understanding is in the us Navy for junior officers and enlisteds anyways covering up is the worst thing you can do; you can cause catastrophic accidents that if they don't kill anyone will result in no punishment besides a "what did we learn here?" lecture.

Not as true in the upper, more political ranks so I understand.

> Navy

“Were you told to not do that? Yes.”

“Did it work? Also, yes.”

“Now clean up this goddamn mess.”

> Japan's business culture is no-frills "get it done" which rewards performance + optimization

Uhhhhh what? Japanese IT companies run decades old practices, are hugely inefficient and if anyone suggests they change its the famous "the nail that sticks up gets hammered down"

Also they are not known for rewarding performance what-so-ever, they're known for rewarding seniority and butt-in-seat time. They're famous for both of those.

Yeah - it's an over-generalization for sure... my anecdotal experience may not apply across the board.

Things moved fast and people were pushed to innovate/iterate within their roles. The Japanese mothership was quick to get things done without much BS and always seemed interested in optimization/solving problems efficiently (on time, on budget).

> It's specific to company cultures, not Americans in general.

I think some cultures have an ingrained mistrust of the idea that some people are so far above others. Perhaps that attitude forces a false humility onto geniuses, but it works as a cultural inoculation against blowhards and pretend superheros. In the U.S., I think we have a complicated melange of different influences ranging from the New England protestant stereotype who would never tolerate such people to the South which I think cultivates an unfortunate craving for Great Man saviors (which can manifest on the small scale, like one engineer gathering a cabal of awed worshipers in an engineering organization, or on the national scale with politicians.) These are broad stereotypes, and I think cultural and geographic mixing in the U.S. makes accurate generalization impossible, but different people have different gut reactions to people who make implicit or explicit claims to greatness, and I think these gut reactions are culturally ingrained in childhood. Companies can cultivate a culture, but I don't think that will override whether a person responds to grandiose self-presentation with aversion or craving.

I’m in a really strange place.

The last couple of years, I’ve been “refactoring” myself, to pivot from being a manager (I ran a C++ image processing shop for a long time), to being an engineer (specializing in native Apple device programming in Swift).

For years, I never needed to self-promote. The people that mattered knew all about me; warts and all. It wasn’t important for anyone else to be impressed.

I am now working towards hanging a shingle as a contract engineer, and I need to let folks know why they should pay me for my work and experience.

It’s really difficult to talk about myself and what I can do, without it sounding like boasting; yet that’s what I’m expected to do.

I am really, really honest, which is, apparently, absolutely worthless in today’s business environment. The Japanese really liked it, but no one else seems to find it at all appealing. I’m not one of those “brutally honest” people that ends up making a pariah of themselves, but I have a very stringent code of personal ethics that I follow.

All that is to say that I’m not good at the “humblebrag.” If I’m good at something, I simply say that I’m good at it. I don’t claim expertise at anything I don’t know, and I don’t make promises I don’t plan to keep.

You don’t last long at a Japanese company, if you are full of hot air.

I’m way past the Dunning-Kruger Peak, and the Jon Snow Trough.

If I say I can do something, I mean it. I won’t say I can do something that I can’t do.

It’s that simple.

I once interviewed a guy who was technically adequate but who was a complete snake oil salesman in the coding interview. He couldn't solve one particularly difficult problem, which was totally fine (most people we hired couldn't solve it) but he blustered a lot trying to verbally convince us that his solution was correct even after we pointed out a case it failed on. Then he tried to Jedi mind trick us into thinking we had agreed that his solution was correct, and when that didn't work, he spent the rest of his time drawing complicated diagrams that had no apparent bearing on the problem and muttering random theoretical terms under his breath while waving away our attempts to help him make progress. Finally, when we told him our time was up, he said, "Well, it looks like I've encountered a problem I can't solve" ...dramatic pause... "WHICH RARELY HAPPENS."

When we discussed this behavior afterwards, my boss's response was, "Don't worry about it. He's been working as a consultant for the last couple of years, and consultants have to act like that. It's a survival thing."

So... yeah. I think you are going to have to think very hard about what you CAN say that will produce the same effect as the things you won't say. I suspect there are a lot of things that aren't literally true or false that you could say to communicate to people that they will be in good hands with you.

If you decide to give it up in the end, I think people will be very sympathetic to you applying for a permanent position as a developer and saying that you tried contracting and decided you weren't cut out for it. I think most people working permanent jobs in software engineering can't imagine themselves succeeding as contractors and will admire that you even tried it.

I’ve already figured out that it’s worthless to even try looking at permanent positions.

No one wants to hire anyone over 40 as an engineer. After a series of insults and attempts at humiliation, I realized the deal. It’s a very different world from the one I left, when I joined that Japanese company.

I won’t lie, and I won’t compromise my personal integrity. If that means that no one will want to hire me to develop their critical must-not-fail products, then so be it. It's surprising to learn that people actively seek out folks with compromised ethics for these types of gigs, but it's a funny old world.

I’ve already reconciled myself to the fact that this means that I may never work for anyone other than myself; which is acceptable, but not ideal.

I just find it rather personally offensive to encounter this kind of willful self-destructiveness.

I have the skills and experience to make a lot of money for people. I’m quite willing to take risks with startups, and have a truly vast array of experience in many, many disciplines (which is usually fairly valuable for things like startups). I have tremendous self-discipline and integrity (You get that, when your boss is 7,000 miles away, and doesn't speak English), clean up pretty well, and am used to selling complex ideas to powerful, skeptical, conservative managers. I'm a top-shelf writer, having been writing since I was a child. I'm a very good architect, having developed infrastructure-level systems that have lasted decades (If you order the current SDK for DSLRs from my alma mater, you will find a module in there that I designed in 1994, and I've also developed a really big open-source infrastructure for NPOs, that is becoming the worldwide standard after more than ten years). My GitHub ID Activity Log is solid green.

My entire career has been delivering software (as opposed to just “writing” software), I don’t have a need for ego-gratification, I’m fine with a very reasonable compensation, and am mostly doing this because I simply love software development.

If I say all that in an interview, though, it's assumed that I'm lying, even though I have a vast open-source portfolio of hundreds of thousands of lines of hand-crafted, ultra-high-quality, single-origin, small-batch (and also really big-batch), artisanal code, over a decade of commit history, in dozens of repos and gists, hundreds of pages of documentation, reams of articles, blog posts, and other examples of top-quality writing that describe, in detail, how I work, think, design, assess risk, test and deliver.

It's all up-to-date, too. My last checkins will probably happen later today. I'm working on delivering a new Bluetooth explorer app to the App Store. It looks like today is Submit Day.

It's my experience that no one will even glance at that. I think it's kind of crazy. I would have killed for that kind of data on prospective hires.

I’m actually perfectly fine, doing my own thing, but I find that I miss being on a team.

> I’ve already figured out that it’s worthless to even try looking at permanent positions. > > No one wants to hire anyone over 40 as an engineer.

Maybe you're shooting too low. People hire a lot of engineers over forty, but mostly into high-level positions where they are expected to mentor junior developers, guide decisions about technology, work closely with people outside of engineering, and otherwise help set standards and direction for the team. It's still technically an individual contributor role, but you're judged by your influence on the performance of everyone around you. The emphasis you place on your individual technical achievements indicates that you aren't aware of that aspect of the role that companies expect someone with your level of experience to fill.

On one hand, I think it's unfortunate, because if you want to concentrate on producing excellent individual work, there should be the same place for you at 40 or 50 as there is for somebody doing that at 30. On the other hand, they're demanding more of you because they expect that somebody with your level of experience should be able to deliver it, and they're probably right. You probably are capable of doing that stuff if you are aware of the expectations and aware of your influence on the organization around you.

And it can be kind of demoralizing for a team when leadership is required (as it always is) and someone with your chops and experience fails to step up and provide it because they're focused on the amazing quality of their individual work.

Again, I think you can probably do everything these higher positions require, but you'll have to rebalance the way you pitch yourself (add some stuff about your ability to mentor, guide technology decisions, etc.) to show that you accept those expectations and will do your best to live up to them.

You have a good point. I've assumed that it's the opposite. People see that I've been a manager, and don't want me on their team because I'll try to take it over (one of the reasons that I'm leaning towards a consultant role, as that's less of a threat).

Well...it will all come out in the wash or the rinse. I'll be giving online courses in Swift and Bluetooth soon. I have to set up the presentations and curricula for them. I've been mentoring and training for decades; almost entirely for the open-source work I've done. I suspect that it may be a direction worth exploring.

I have been absolutely stunned at the virulence of the ageism. I guess that it's maybe a by-product of all the polarization that's going on.

> People see that I've been a manager, and don't want me on their team because I'll try to take it over

Oh yeah, this has changed 180º in the last ten years. My experience in startups since, say, 2013, is that development teams are expected to be 90% self-managing. Managers spend their time doing recruiting and high-level meetings and spend maybe an hour or two a day trying to stay in touch with what their team is doing.

Confusion with the product team? Quality issue with a junior developer? Something gets postponed and you need to decide what to do next? Developers are expected to take care of this stuff amongst themselves. Managers get informed and maybe consulted, and of course have authority to intervene, but the traditional day-to-day responsibilities of management now belong to the senior members of the team. My recent managers have attended planning meetings with devs so they have an idea what their team is doing and are available to answer questions about priorities and help with tough calls, but they're happiest if the team handles everything without them so they can concentrate on big-picture work.

For someone like me who entered the industry twenty years ago, it feels like we're doing our manager's job for them, but it's the new normal.

The old saw about colleges: The infighting is so fierce, because the stakes are so small.

One of my colleagues used to love referencing Sayre's Law when we found ourselves bikeshedding https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sayre%27s_law.

That makes a kind of sense. The smaller the difference between two viewpoints, the harder it is to distinguish the difference. Its possible to argue forever and never see which is better/right.

Or as my undergraduate advisor joked: the reason academics fight so much is that they have so little to fight about.

No, they don't! They fight for something which everybody wants and few can attain: a secure and prestigious job with little responsibility.

Do they stop fighting after getting tenure? I'm far from an expert in the matter, but that doesn't really fit my experience.

They don't stop because they are so used to fighting that they forget what they were fighting for.

If you think this is the only reason academics feud about, reality will set you straight.

It's not, but it's enough to counter the point that they fight about nothing.

It’s a balance between competition between each other and solidarity against the outside world.

Out of curiosity, what size were the two companies, respectively?

> I am constantly encountering people that Absolutely. Will. Not. Admit. Ignorance. Or. Fault. Even when it’s quite clear.

IMO this is one of the fringe benefits of a good math education. Almost everybody who does math for long enough, especially if you work in small groups with your peers, will have a moment of "oh, I see, I am totally wrong and you are totally right" and find out that being wrong does not make someone a bad person. And you will see your peers do the same.

It's one underrated side effect of clear and unambiguous reasoning. Yes, many things are grey areas, but there's value in a place where you can't throw up a muddle of goalpost-shifting and rhetorical tricks to run away from your own errors.

Also in math, you spend a majority of your time not understanding things. As soon as you understand something in math, you immediately move on to the next thing you don't understand. As opposed to say engineering where you tend to get good at a particular process and applying it. In math confusion is the default state.

> In math confusion is the default state.

I love that!

I find that in engineering, too. I write about that here:

https://medium.com/chrismarshallny/thats-not-what-ships-are-...

I agree (I think Andrew Wiles said something like this but I can't find it now).

When I was younger and my dream was to become a programmer, I imagined (probably rightfully so) my default state in life would be feeling very secure in the fact that I am an expert in my job and know advanced stuff and so on. Now that I became a mathematician instead, I miss that sort of self-assurance.

I think programming also humbles you in that sense.

After thinking a few times "it must be the compilers fault", you get more humble and figure out that you're too stupid to find your own fault ;).

I have a rule of thumb: "If it's the tool's fault, then it's my fault."

That's a big reason I don't like to use prerelease compilers and toolsets.

I spent half this week on a bug that I was sure was the compiler's fault.

It was my fault.

I've been through that one enough times to realize it's always my fault. The more convinced I am that it's a compiler bug, the harder I look for my mistake.

Not really, because you find the bug soon enough and that reinforces your self-importance.

When you write software you write bugs, because nobody is perfect. You cannot even try to deny the bugs that you wrote, because it's all in source contol. Your fix might even brake something else, every senior knows this.

So I still feel the more experienced you get, the more you have to aknowledge your own shortcomings.

Or someone looks over your shoulder for 2 minutes and finds it..

It’s a standard high school debate tactic to throw someone an argument that shows poor taste to counter, but most people take the bait.

This only convinces me more that high school debate has negative utility and should be abolished.

Could you give an example?

Must forbid encryption to save the children from the pedo...les.

But these are grown up people though, using those arguments, not high schoolers.

> Americans, on the other hand, tend to pounce on admissions of failure or ignorance, and engage in shaming and humiliation of the person that admits an issue.

So true. And people wonder why others don't apologize - we teach them to not apologize, because an apology is an admission of guilt and then we destroy them.

I have a friend in healthcare management.

They have a manual of corporate philosophy.

In there they explicitly advise, "never admit fault".

Which makes sense from a business, legalistic warfare perspective. $>truth after all.

Maybe our corporate philosophy is leaking into our common philosophy.

> They have a manual of corporate philosophy.

> In there they explicitly advise, "never admit fault".

It's interesting to compare that advice with the advice to healthcare professionals and healthcare organisations in the UK. Telling the truth when things go wrong, even if that means admitting fault, is the law. They must do it. They have to say what went wrong, how it went wrong, what they're going to do to fix it for you, and how they're going to prevent it happening to other people in future.

Here's some information from the CQC (the regulator of organisations) about Duty of Candour: https://www.cqc.org.uk/sites/default/files/Duty-of-Candour-2...

The GMC (doctors), NMC (nurses and midwives), and HCPC (allied health professionals) have similar advice aimed at healthcare staff.

This came about after the Mid Staffordshire scandal.

I put together a short list last year: https://medium.com/@dan.bealecocks/advice-to-doctors-about-s...

That's an interesting contrast. Black and white even. No doubt blame tends to run in a single direction, in that business.

Doctors are human beings. They make mistakes like every other person. The healthcare system makes them work extremely long hours, so mistakes become even more likely. Doctors aren't supposed to be mere humans, though. They're supposed to be infallible godlike beings who know everything and do everything right every single time.

They have to look like they know everything otherwise they'll lose the respect of their colleagues and even their patients. Even something simple like a procedure checklist improves patient safety but people are resistant because it could be viewed as a sign of weakness. I know one professor who was openly mocked by patients in front of her staff because she brought reference books with her to the hospital. Since they usually make a lot of money, they are attractive targets for litigation. If they make a mistake, they could be personally sued for tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Is it any wonder concepts like defensive medicine exist?

I once heard that doctors are trained to yell "there!" instead of "oops" or something similar. The idea is to always project confidence even when you know you made a mistake.

Don't know if there's any truth to it, but it sounds plausible.

>Americans, on the other hand, tend to pounce on admissions of failure or ignorance, and engage in shaming and humiliation of the person that admits an issue.

Shoutout to all the foreigners working in the US that don't say that know everything, are quiet in meetings when everyone is yelling out stupid ideas, regularly give up their design when a competing one gets promoted loudly, then never get promoted. Eventually you'll learn never to admit failure or ignorance and eventually start demanding who made the error.

I have seen people do that kind of thing in the US (shame for not knowing) but it's not universal and plenty of people (including me in leadership positions) see that it's important and valuable to be able to admit I don't know, ask for help, etc.

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