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Comment by 6gvONxR4sf7o | Hacker News Reader

I’ve learned that when I have a positive thought about someone, it’s generally worth communicating it. If I think a coworker saved me on some project, I tell them. If my partner is making me feel warm and fuzzy, I tell her. If someone impresses me, I say so. I don’t think people express these things nearly as often as they feel them, and I expect that many of the positive things that do end up communicated have another motive behind them. Simple earnest positive comments are very much worthwhile.

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"I’ve learned that when I have a positive thought about someone, it’s generally worth communicating it."

I've started to do this on a regular, almost daily basis.

If I come across something that sparks joy or interest - usually something I find here, on HN - I reach out to the author and let them know with a personal email.

I also sometimes offer a free-forever-no-strings-attached rsync.net account on the off chance that they would find that useful.

In reality, the Venn diagram of "people who write things that spark joy to the founder of rsync.net" and "people who aren't already self-hosting their own solution " is small.

But once in a while it really makes someones day ...

I've been using rsync for months now to backup my files onto Google Drive, but that's hardly ideal. Ideally, I'd want to self-host or use a storage service other than Google Drive, but as a student I've got barely any money to spend on subscriptions.

If you don't regularly download these files, Backlaze B2 seems to be the cheapest way to store backups.

> I don’t think people express these things nearly as often as they feel them, and I expect that many of the positive things that do end up communicated have another motive behind them.

I have the displeasure of working with a team member who does the exact opposite: at every chance he gets, he expressed his displeasure regarding other team members to management. Once I confronted him about that behavior and he stated that those who fix problems get promoted while those who create them get passed over, and he believed that by pointing other people's flaws he would improve his chances of moving upward.

I firmly believe that's the main reason most people don't praise anyone else. If they do, they are calling out their competitor's positive contributions, while no one reciprocates in kind.

I can confirm that some people think like this ( not me).

I delegated some areas during a big event and I took one of those persons asside because he was too rude.

He said that he pointed out mistakes ( which was correct, but they were new) and that they would remember it better if he was this direct. I just mentioned that he should not be this rude and just explain them what they did wrong and he adjusted. It was literally his mindset ( he adjusted that evening, not his mindset)

Bad things and behaviours should be called out in order to actively fix them instead of just waiting on that they are magically fixed. But this must be done in a constructive way.

Pointing that something is wrong won't fix it, and if in the meantime you manage to ruin relationships within your team you have actively made things worse just to pretend being a good leader, but just proving you are an awful person to work with (and at this point you might still be wrong about your claim on what's wrong).

Even if you don't accidentally ruin relationships, you might ruin the good behavior alongside the bad. I'm a big fan of a feedback system I've heard called "stop start continue." Stopping these bad behaviors, and starting these good behaviors are in the same vein of fixing bad things.

But continuing these existing good behaviors is really important too. If you tell people what not to change, then they won't accidentally change the good stuff in their efforts to fix orthogonal things.

I hear you. But having once worked with team-members who take critique at anything, personally, I feel there is more to this.

I always try to praise a person. But I also want to "reserve all rights" to say that a codebase is crap or a choice made in the past was evidently a bad choice.

Finding the balance to critique work that a person contributed to, without criticising that person itself, is hard. A true challenge, I found.

It becomes even harder if a project is Open Source and you truly feel you have to "warn" people against using a solution in certain cases. It then becomes really hard not to sound like a grumpy old neckbeard or someone with a grudge. I lately decided it is best to just shut up, and let people find out themselves; to let them fail, fall or possibly succeed and prove me wrong instead. I do see the arrogance of that too, though.

> if a project is Open Source and you truly feel you have to "warn" people against using [it]

How did you go about doing that? (How did you warn others about an oss project, ... Maybe one/some project at GitHub?)

I don't do that in public.

Maybe when someone somewhere asks why I don't want to include X-lib or Y-dependency, I'll explain why for this case its not a good choice.

Generally, I keep this to the consultancy-reports and on-premise discussions though.

Thanks for explaining

I would have appreciated working with you/people who gave some critical thoughts to third party dependencies.

I hope that each time you go to a new employer, you try again and see if they're happy with getting such warnings

Edit: now i noticed you've founded your own company

I've found that if part of a codebase is truly shoddy or just plain badly written, the developer who wrote it generally knows how bad it is, or at least that it's not up to snuff.

Criticizing the code itself (with useful feedback), and not the person who wrote it, gives them a chance to own up to it if they're comfortable with doing that. And if not, you're still able to improve the codebase without directly calling them out.

If they get pissy about it, that's on them.

For someone to see your criticism as objective, the objective standard should be established ahead of time. For design/code reviews this means having coding standards/guidelines and training everyone to stick to them – rules of the game are known ahead of time to all participants. Then it is much easier to convince someone that it is objective feedback.

A critical skill for a senior engineer in a team is to define and establish such standards for the team. Rather than reacting to each design/code review, taking the time to setup these process mechanisms is a lot more productive and healthy for everyone involved.

This requires strategic thinking (a skill that comes with practice) towards how you choose to spend your time at work to accomplish anything.

> as objective, the objective standard should be established ahead of time.

A lot of projects lack that "objective standards". I've been helping to solve exactly this. But code can be messy without having a clear defined "clean code" standard. And a project can perform horrible, without having minimum response times docutented.

Often my job was to define all those. And often those definitions already hit a nerve. When suddenly your code is marked as "far too tightly coupled" or "too complex: AB above 34" when you thought it was neat and smart code, that is confronting and, I've seen, is often felt as personal critique.

This is a terrible mindset to have. When I was a manager I took every opportunity to praise my employees (with meaningful compliments and feedback) and discouraged negativity. During a management team meeting I even stood against the others on promoting someone because he was always negative and I pointed out how inefficient his coworkers were around him and that he would only continue that, it didn't matter how good he was himself at the job, he needed to be encouraged to change for the better. After working with him for a while and helping him see how he was hurting others and himself, he changed his mindset, and was later promoted, I continued to coach him even after I left that location.

My basic point is this, even those with the wrong mindset can be swayed with the right mindset, as long as it is sincere.

I've had peers like that too. I'm sad at the proliferation of zero-sum thinking. It's like a prisoner's dilemma. The equilibrium state is competition, but collaboration gets us all ahead in a non-zero-sum way. Or, if you really do see it all as zero sum, there's still an analytical way out. Just take the long view. Collaboration will get our group ahead of the group who competes for the smallest things. Hyperbolically, we'd all rather be a low level IC at early my-shares-will-be-worth-infinity Google than be a VP at an imploding firm.

The pro-social way out of the prisoner's dilemma's shitty equilibrium requires deliberate effort to foster the sort of personal trust and collaboration-by-default attitude that makes the 8+ work hours of every weekday of most of our lives not suck.

And it makes people feel good, which is personally enough for me (while recognizing the privilege that lets me say I have enough).

This reflects just as badly on the org's leadership, as it does on the individual. Managers and other leaders need to give people a talking to, when they engage in toxic behavior. And they need to set a good example by promoting people who are good teammates. Do this consistently, and people will change their behavior for the better.

It’s possible this individual has a personal experience or upbringing where reciprocal behaviors were not respected. It’s possible he’s correct in certain workplaces.

I’d hate to work with such an individual; I’d avoid them like the plague.

To me “good culture” is the de-emphasis of these kinds of mindsets (and emphasis of the opposite). To the point where it’s justification for hire/fire.

He's doing you a favor. Now you know that if he gets promoted faster than you or your co-workers, it's probably time to find a better company (or a better team, if that's an option).

I wonder if the review system is stack ranked?

Great idea. People can usually sense when a compliment is genuine or forced. So sharing your positive thoughts ensures that most things you say are genuine.

I realized that I am biased toward communicating things like feedback or suggestions.

Yet I do have many positive thoughts about others that I keep to myself. I don't know why I do this.

To an extent. As I become more generous with my compliments, I find that even a genuine compliment might be too much sometimes. That being said, I never miss a chance to praise people's work. As long as you don't make a big scene out of it, it's always appreciated.

Completely agree. I prefer private praise both as a recipient and as a giver. Often I’ll send a quick note to the person’s manager as well. Occasionally, if it’s really spectacular work, I’ll cc our org’s upper management as well.

Personal thanks are just as important as monetary compensation. You build your surroundings and support your life with money, but you build your self esteem and support your motivation with gratitude.

Having self esteem dependent on others seems like a risky strategy.

Most people's self esteem is dependent on others. That's the pay-off for being a social animal.

If you're highly self confident without any feedback from other people, chances are you're mistaken. Not guaranteed, but highly likely.

In my last job (currently unemployed) I made a conscious effort to:

1. Always publicly thank contributors for each unit of work I encountered, no matter how mundane, and especially when I recognized the value where it wouldn’t necessarily be visible/“hot” otherwise.

2. To make regular time for specific recognition of work that stood out to me, both public and direct, again especially highlighting important work that wouldn’t otherwise get a lot of light. (By now it should be obvious that I tend to work in libraries/infrastructure where good work tends to be mostly invisible.)

3. To try to continuously add visibility where work tended to be more foundational/less visible, so others would be encouraged to add to that recognition.

4. To make sure positive feedback was included wherever general or even critical feedback was warranted.

I’m not perfect and never perfected execution on those goals, but it was always an underlying part of how I interacted with my team. It improved my relationship with every team member who I most butted heads with (save one who was reflexively adversarial and invented conflict for even the tiniest work items; some people are just jerks!). And it also made a lot of people just generally more comfortable with their own contributions and better able to see their own value.

On every retrospective session we do, every other week, there is an additional column called “stars” or “heros” and we add a note each there giving praises to someone else for something they did those two weeks. We then read them all out followed by a round of applause for each one of them. It brings great positivity to the team.

> We then read them all out followed by a round of applause for each one of them

That may be good for team building and make some people feel better but, personally, I would find that situation very uncomfortable.

I imagine it might also cause adverse effects if someone happens to be missed.

I have personally experienced this. My otherwise really good manager had a monthly vote for the best worker in our small team where each vote was publicly announced. I, and another coworker, never got a vote while others got several. Really great way to make some of your workers feel really left out!

If they handed out the award to everyone it would be meaningless

On the contrary: If you have a team member who no one sees fit to find praise for, it’s probably a bad fit. Praise doesn’t need to be superlative to be sincere. Not everyone has to be a “rockstar” to deserve positive validation.

The OP was talking about genuine, honest communication. I think these rituals in work teams have the correct idea. Their hearts are in the right place, so to speak, but it doesn't really work perfectly. As you've said some can feel left out. Others might just feel uncomfortable.

The idea is good: share the love, highlight good work. But it probably better just to let people know more naturally.

Absolutely. My current workplace is very good at the organic thankyou. I try my best to show gratitude where I can.

What could have caused you and the other one to not get any votes, at the previous workplace? I'm guessing it was not work performance or anything like that

(The votes were publicly announced -- and also who had voted?)

It can be something simple like having work with more visible impact

_Perceived_ impact, if I might add?

Me and the other worker were much less willing to work free overtime. The company also had a really dishonest culture and I chafed under that system. I was a bad fit for the job really, so I could have just been what they perceived as bad.

This is precisely why leaderboards suck. Instead of picking the single best contributor, do as the OP did and acknowledge all good contributors.

Gratitude is a skill anyone can learn. Accepting compliments is also a skill that anyone can learn. But, both of them take practice. It's okay to feel uncomfortable with something, that doesn't necessarily mean that it's wrong. Sometimes we're just uncomfortable with something because it's not something we've had a lot of experience with.

Expressing gratitude and accepting compliments are nice skills to have, but making of it a public show is just bad taste, IMO.

Of course you are entitled to your opinion, but "praise in public, punish in private" is a saying for a reason. Praise is more effective in public, and praising one person on the team publicly benefits the entire team, not just that person.

This is more "praise in public, when the boss says so, because the boss says so", though?

Nothing's stopping you from praising people at other times, is it?

Nobody is arguing that. The debate is around whether manufactured public praise is tasteless

> Nobody is arguing that. The debate is around whether manufactured public praise is tasteless

I suppose it can feel that way, but on the other hand forcing oneself to find and appreciate others efforts and good qualities—even if there are perceptibly few of them—can be a good exercise, especially for those of us who are naturally quite critical. While I'd argue that it's a good virtue and intrinsically valuable, the habit is also practically beneficial: people perform better when they're appreciated and recognized; one's ability to form and work with teams is noticeably easier; it's easier to adjust performance and expectations; et c.

People often put the cart before the horse when talking about stuff like this. Manufacturing gratitude is doesn't make it less genuine or fundamentally less good.

One can praise without the boss having us do so.

Really, it’s about noticing and acknowledging good work or behaviour.

> Expressing gratitude and accepting compliments are nice skills to have, but making of it a public show is just bad taste, IMO.

I wonder if this is a culture or generational difference. I've found my employer's incentives / gestures a bit lackluster compared to simple gratitude. I like working on a team where the members are publicly thankful for their teammates' efforts. Shrute Bucks stink.

Gratitude is great, but forced gratitude is worthless. At what point do things become a circlejerk?

Formal doesn’t mean forced. Milestone events and traditions that involve greater than ordinary recognition is a part of most of humanity. Holidays, birthdays, anniversaries, seasonal celebrations. Putting it on the calendar doesn’t mean you’re obligated, it means it’s reserved and valued enough to make formal space for it.

I agree with this to some extent. My issue with the public forum and ritual applause is that it becomes mechanical. In my experience, people are often left out or events are forgotten. I was sometimes baffled at the items that were being expressed, it felt a bit political even. Not saying a public forum like this can't work, just that it seems easy for it to go awry.

I've been publicly recognized and appreciated it, I've also received quiet thank you notes. I know I like the latter more.

That sounds horrible to me. I’d much rather be in the background rather than getting effusive, mandatory public praise. Maybe I’m weird, but I’m not motivated by cupcakes, gold stars and clapping. If I do a good job, that’s just the minimum standard. If I do something worthy of clapping, then just remember that when it’s time to award annual RSUs and bonuses or when a special project comes up that needs leadership.

To me it’s embarrassing to be recognized publicly for literally doing what I am being paid to do. Instead, perhaps recognize each week the people that didn’t meet the standard:

“Wanted to recognize Bob this week for being a bit of a douche as well as letting all of us down when he messed up the build system and delayed our build delivery to QA and the Loc team thus having the rest of us having to scramble over the weekend to clean up the mess. Thanks Bob!”

This.

I don’t want claps from my peers. I’ve already figured out if they like my work or not from day-to-day interaction.

If you want to recognize my contribution, give me money - that’s why I’m here. This is a business relationship. I work, you pay. Pay up.

> "when a special project comes up that needs leadership."

You think complimenting people is horrible, people should be publicly shamed, insulted and blamed for the failure of the team, and fancy yourself for a leadership role? Grief.

Instead, perhaps take the "if you're on time, you're late, being early is the minimum" self-satisfied chip off your shoulder and realise that blaming Bob for you being a doormat and working on the weekend is you being "a bit of a douche".

> Instead, perhaps recognize each week the people that didn’t meet the standard

My goodness. This is horrifying.

I'd hate that.

I'm cringing just thinking of a team doing that.

Lots of folks seem to dislike the star / hero approach, but my team has a simple “thanks” column in our retros and it works really well to set the tone for the rest of the conversation - and it’s a great reminder to say thanks. Even if it’s just “thanks for being you.” It’s a great way to express gratitude without it having to be some “best of the best” style moment.

That sounds reasonable and way different than like going around the circle and peer-pressuring everyone into delivering a compliment and then clapping as a group.

Mandatory clap time sounds horrible haha. I guess it's nowhere as near as robotic as it sounds in reality

You’re not showing enough flair

For me it evokes similar groupthink revulsion to the Walmart cheer or IBM's "Ever Onward". It's more on the 'Happy Birthday to You' side of the scale than a North Korean ode to dear leader, but still not edifying or pleasant.

Nothing about it sounds mandatory to me. It sounds like their team/company culture values recognition and openly & sincerely engages it as part of their schedule.

Aye I mentioned somewhere how I doubt it's as bad as I read into it

IMHO:

It’s appropriate for a manager or team lead to do this. It’s not appropriate to make it the norm (even if it’s “optional”) for the whole team.

Much better for a leader to model the desired behavior, and, create space for those on the team, of their own volition and without peer pressure, follow suit.

It will also be much more authentic, real, and meaningful.

I think you've missed the point. The article was about genuine emotions.

Sounds like a psychological conditioning (behavior modification) regimen. Beware, it has a very sharp slippery slope towards unethical conditions.

In theory that is great. I stopped praising colleagues after I found out that several people behaved as if they owned me afterwards.

Also, I had a manager who would move everyone I praised off the team. He was paranoid about cliques.

You might need to adjust how you're praising people. A simple earnest slack DM of "thanks for the hand with that thing! i really appreciate you taking the time to do that" will still make people feel great.

You don't need to stop complementing, you need to work someplace else

That sounds awful

We've got a `gratitude` channel in Slack for this exact thing! Its only purpose is to call out great work and nice gestures coworkers have done. Provides a nice little pick-me-up throughout the week.

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