Hacker News Reader

Comment by irq-1 | Hacker News Reader

Empathy is addressed as a negative:

> ...the overfamiliarity problem. That one founder will become too comfortable, start taking liberties with the others that they would never dare to do in any other context, by virtue of the fact that ‘they’re all friends’.

Dealing with our own and others immaturity, or lack of professionalism, in a caring and sympathetic way seems like a fundamental difference between the military and private life. The military kicks you out or keeps you down, and non-military groups try to help everyone grow while tolerating problems. I wonder what the military attitude would be to the common business idea of growing into the job, or learning on the job? (Or the Dilbert principle.)

View on HN

I feel like we should separate professionalism (i.e. the spectrum of familiarity to over-familiarity) from empathy.

To me, how I want to see empathy applied in a military context, is nothing to do with familiarity or chumminess, and everything to do with the idea that, if you are my commander and you order me to battle, to fight and to die, that you do so carrying the full weight of that responsibility, that you understand my life and my worth as a human being, and that you empathize with the gravity and danger of what you are asking me to undertake, and that you won't spend my life in vain.

That is the real root of empathy, in the military, for leaders to really truly understand the both mundane and yet impossible weight of what they are asking their soliders to do. If you cannot empathize with the human condition at that level, then you should not be fit for military leadership (naive of me, I know).

Not naive at all. This is an accurate picture of how we were taught to approach decisions - that every soldier was someone's child, someone's sibling, someone's loved one. As leaders, our decisions didn't carry just the burden of their lives, but the lives of everyone else who would be affected.

> If you cannot empathize with the human condition at that level, then you should not be fit for military leadership (naive of me, I know).

And you are absolutely right. I knew officers who didn't care about their soldiers and saw them solely as underlings. If I had my way, they would have never seen the privilege of command.

this comment is getting down voted, but I think it's correct. The author later states:

> "professionalism means being able to knuckle down and shift your mindset into one focused on working, one aimed at achieving an objective or mission success"

Which explicitly removes dealing with "the whole person" from the definition of professionalism. If a co-worker's spouse died last night, the professional thing to do is compartmentalize. This is the opposite of empathy

That was not my experience in the military.

Sure, in tough (particularly time sensitive) situations you’re taught to compartmentalize to get the job done. You don’t want someone lost in thought about a cheating spouse when bullets are flying. But in general, people were treated as complex individuals.

From the OP: >The military kicks you out or keeps you down, and non-military groups try to help everyone grow while tolerating problems.

The military puts a premium on training and accountability. Are you physically unfit? Your fire team or squad leader will take time away from their own family to train you. Have a substance abuse problem? The military will often try multiple times to help you overcome it. If your spouse dies, I can all but guarantee you your military unit will be checking on you regularly and helping to make sure you have the resources to deal with it. I’ve never seen that type of effort in the private sector from the organization level. I wonder if people are confusing a “tough” or “accountable” culture with an uncaring one.

Oops. My brain parsed that last part as an email signature and I didn't read it. I meant to support the claim that the author describes empathy as a negative.

I wasn't in a military, but just a "basic training" is far more than I ever got at work, so I've always assumed cultural emphasis on training was much higher in military orgs

This is a much more accurate reflection of how the military handles empathy. Empathy is in no means antithetical to professionalism.

If anything, empathy is a key trait for effective leadership because it engenders trust between leaders and subordinates. Soldiers are neither robots nor imperial stormtroopers. We don't shun basic expressions of humanity for the sake of it, and certainly not as a general rule.

> I wonder if people are confusing a “tough” or “accountable” culture with an uncaring one.

And this is EXACTLY what I meant in my article when I said people frequently misunderstand the concept of professionalism.

You seem to be conflating abuse with empathy, perhaps by misunderstanding "overfamiliarity".

Reply on news.ycombinator.com