People prefer friendliness, trustworthiness in teammates over skill competency

I don't think they miss the point completely when many hiring processes don't test for team cohesion at all beyond a manager pointing a finger in the air and guessing what the fit will be based on a 15 minute talk. Given these people would in the same breath claim diversity in personalities is great and covering each other's weaknesses is essential. That's exactly how we end up with teams where not a single person has the spine to go up against clearly ridiculous requirements (that is assuming any perspective, not just technical), while claiming critical thinking is great.

The sad part is that many of us struggle with social interactions and end up being unliked despite our best efforts. No one cares about what you achieve, unless it's useful for them, or if they just like you because you "have it".

One of my friends has a joke series of posts titled the "32x engineer"[1], one of which is about niceness.

People who aren't nice get routed around when crisis situations happen as adding them to the mix is not pleasant - this is probably different from the extrovert-friendly connotations people pick up in interviews, but a more clear "is this person going to yell at me or help me (first)".

This lesson is probably doubled up in personal life as people have kids and try to get their tweenagers to communicate with them - the "you did WHAT?" reaction is basically equivalent with the not-nice people who are competent, but tired of cleaning up the mess of over years (not realizing their reaction has a long-term impact on what kids think adults do).

The role growth part is also relevant, as people with context don't want to come to you unless they have to, you slowly lose context on what's going on until you are in a basement with a stapler.

[1] - https://twitter.com/tdinkar/status/1149554345077137410

I didn't enter this (at the time) largely solitary profession to have all the best, juiciest parts of the job get taken over by these people-oriented idiots.

There needs to be a revolution that returns programming back into the hands of solitary nerds working on sheer competence. More people need to care about the quality of the final output than whether or not the guy who wrote it is "a nice fellow".

I feel like this is 'participation trophy' culture coming back to haunt us. Stop being so afraid of getting yelled at, anger is a part of life!

The truth is, most jobs don't need the best of the best, problems are not always needing a breakthrough, often it's business as usual, so sufficiently good is good enough, and then you need to be able to collaborate effectively. That latter quality is as important to business success as the former.

If people are trying to find someone they like, the current common tech interview process certainly isn't the way to do it. Back when I started, interviewers would ask open ended questions about prior projects that were worked on; explain some mistakes; explain some benefits and made the judgement based on that. That seems like a much better way to find a culture fit as opposed to obscure tech gotcha questions.

I think this is dangerous ground to thread. I don't like to work with assholes any more than the next guy and I'd certainly prefer working with people I personally like but that kind of thinking opens doors to all kinds of abuse; from favoritism (I like him, therefore he gets a pass when somebody else might not), through promotions (what does giving a promotion to somebody likeable over somebody more competent do to morale?) to plain fuckarounditis (playing career games rather than what's good for the business, wasting company resources on petty political games).

I mean, I get it - it's human nature. But something feels off when we're justifying our simian prejudices in an environment where we're supposed to prioritize somebody else's satisfaction (whoever is paying us) but instead we do what we feel is best for us personally, using a fairly emotional and error prone system of judgment (I don't care if this guy sucks, I like him because he's my friend).

zero competence will still result in a low level of trust. I think what the article is saying is that its easy to overwhelmingly improve your character at a job you may only have marginal competence at. This boosts your Trust, and in doing so makes you palatable to all but the hard-working tech people with low character and high competence, who view you as a grinning moron they occasionally have to stop to support.

And it happens both on the positive and the negative. Nasty people tends to bring more nasty people on board.

"Skin in the game" being the game changer.

People are social beings. Part of working together comes from feeling like you want to cooperate. You could have someone who is incredibly smart and clever as your business partner, but will you really feel like you want to go the extra mile for him/her? Do you have to watch your back constantly? Do you have the same goals in life? Does every interaction drain energy from you?

We come from families, social structures. We have people in our families who are incompetent but we love them. It's not unreasonable to think that some of this behavior would continue in our work worlds.

"Diversity" in the trendy usage today, for most people still doesn't trump whether you want to work with someone, and that hopefully doesn't have much to do with race/background/gender/etc. I say hopefully of course, and helping people overcome or not be prejudiced that some characteristic correlates with ability/desire to work with them, is an important thing to do.

But forcing people to believe that someone's <x> characteristic is more important than whether you want to work with them is a recipe for dissatisfaction and backlash against people who insist that it should be so.

This can't be stated enough

I mean - you spend more time with your teammates than you do with your spouse, it's not hard to understand why friendliness is ranked as high importance.

If you've ever REALLY worked with a team full of assholes, you'd get it too. If not, maybe you were one of the assholes.

That said, this isn't a question of whats best for the firm, it's what people prefer in their work environment. Goes along with higher pay, less hours, better benefits.

I would caution that this not become an invitation to become a Willy Loman. Dead fish float downstream. Wanting to be liked is a recipe for obsequiousness, cowardice, and mediocrity of character. The doormats of the world are people who need to be liked. It is the ethos of the undignified, the dishonest, and the resentful.

We should not care if we are liked. We should care about doing what we ought. One ought not be an asshole, not because you won't be liked (and there is bound to be someone that will like the asshole, btw), but because being an asshole is a defect of character which you should recognize and repair instead.

Of course, the side effect of doing what we ought is the respect of good people, but that is incidental.

I don't care about this, and never will care.

How startups expect to make progress or deliver a groundbreaking products following this inverted psychology is beyond me.

In simple words possible: I have hired people who I don't like naturally only on professional expertise and the value that they delivered to my company was immense.

You cannot learn to be likeable.

You don't need this nonsense. You, as a professional, must learn to communicate and respect people for their skills and accomplishments, not for similarities in music taste, consumer purchases or favorite movies.

All of this crap is produced by companies who want to exploit overtime by creating emotional bonding and subjective preferences. The added "benefit" is that this artificial divide leads to generational hostility and mistrust (which is handy when someone old with experience will try to share useful information to someone young and full with illusions).

I have managed teams of people who didn't like each other at all, and this was not a problem because of clear communication, procedure and company mission.

It's about time, this "cultural fit" nonsense to die. Companies who are operating with this mentality will never produce long-term value. Period.

It's about time, we as a community, to grow up and stop pretending that we are not having a role in growing ageism and tribalism in our industry.

Can you imagine if engineers of the Apollo Program were selected by friendliness?

It is interesting, but that is me. I am always brought into inner circles. From work to friend's families. People feel like bringing me into folds; it is odd. Maybe it is because I'm trusting, who knows. But what I also find odd is that I don't have a large friend network, so I'm not gaining friends from this odd ability. Strange. </greybeard_ramble>

- nobody wants to come to work (duh but hold on)

- above points creates a constant laziness drag

- the system maintains some socially / somatically critical functions

- hierarchy is function of criticality, the more important, the higher it's gonna propagate

- the rest is fluff that can be delayed, forgotten, half assed

- learn the critical functions by heart, never ever miss them

- to spot them check whenever your superior comes down, and when he talks about his/her superior coming down (remember, people don't care, they don't wanna be here, they never want to come down unless they're forced to)

- then crack jokes with your colleagues

- everybody will ignore you doing nothing, unless critical functions are rolling

ps: your point about hiring/culture-fit is a sad realization to me, they could have told me so after HS.. instead of learning sublinear Fibonacci computations during a master, I'd have spent one year at burning man to be chill. All in all, I kinda agree about the need to fit, humans cannot operate nice if they don't click with their colleagues, it's only gonna lead to walking pressure cookers who cannot make progress. But the lack of honesty around this is staggering

1. Can they do the job? 2. Will they like the job? 3. Will I like working with them?

1 and 2 are the easiest to determine, yet we overemphasize it in interview time. We usually save 3 for the last five minutes of any session.

The easier you make doing my job (eg, I can get my work done without you adding bullshit code that I need to make my way around), the more I’m willing to forgive almost anything.

Just be invisible to my work plans for the day, and we’re all good.

This reminds of people who try to defend someone accused of incompetence: "but s/he's so nice!"

What about a very competent but toxic personality who ends up preventing contributions from other team members, because when they contribute they get belittled or bullied?

Did you met unfriendly and incompetent? Cause those really sux.

The worst is "jerk, average competent, but people who don't work directly with him assume he is genius because he is jerk".

Except of course for the perfectly (if narrowly) competent but decidedly jerkface and/or outright asshole teammate. Who is even more likely to get a pass for being such a "rainmaker". Or because "it's crunchtime and we need all the firepower we can get our hands on".

Which was basically the article's point.

So I'm personally not like that though in most situations. I think it's counterproductive with most people and often rude. I think the above is a bad strategy in more than 60% of cases (scientific number; totally not pulling that out of my ass), because most people take direct criticism personally or become defensive.

However in my closer professional circle I very often prefer uncomfortable no-bullshit type of style. It's simply more _effective_ and clear.

If you could translate "friendliness" and "competence" into equivalent units, I think competence would be devalued compared to friendliness, at least once you get into negative values (e.g. for every extra point of unfriendliness, you need 5-10 competence points to make up for it).

If they ask for help and won't just go missing for a week or something like that, then its not a big deal if they need some hand holding on a more complex task. Reliably mediocre is better than unreliable, any day.

Except that you can teach them things.

It's hard to teach an unfriendly person anything, and it's impossible to teach an arrogant asshole anything at all, because they think they're better than anyone else.

In my experience, a brilliant asshole is worse. He's less likely to be terminated, and causes problems for everyone. Incompetent people are self aware of their incompetence. Brilliant assholes rarely acknowledge their problem.

The one time I dealt with a brilliant asshole - oh wow. He would be right 90% of the time, but for the remaining 10% there would be no way on Earth you could convince him he was wrong. You could bring evidence, mathematical proof, anything: He just wouldn't listen. It got to me being very careful that he not be around when I'd ask for help - because he often misunderstood my problem and would then insist I implement his solution, and there was no way I could convince him that he misunderstood the problem statement. If I ignored him and implemented a different solution, he would throw a loud tantrum. And he had no stake in my work - we were working on different projects.

I spent two years in that team and every time he acted up I started documenting it.

I never complained (it was clear the manager didn't want to deal with people problems), and on the outside I didn't let my frustration show. I now hear that another member of that team is really complaining to the manager about him. I reached out to him and let him know that if he wants to escalate with HR, I have plenty of material to provide.

The one nice thing with incompetent people is you at least look better when it comes to reviews. I know in one job I had I ended up slacking quite a bit, but I knew it wouldn't hurt me because they had quite a few people at my grade level who were just plain incompetent. Management isn't going to give the whole team a poor review.

This is the wrong way of looking at things. You shouldn't compromise on friendliness and you shouldn't compromise on competence. If you have to compromise, you compromise a little bit on both but not too much on either. An unfriendly teammate is very bad.

I was actively looking for a new job when he quit, and it was such a relief. My productivity (and happiness) went through the roof, and a couple months into the year my manager told me that I'd already accomplished everything he hoped I'd accomplish _for the year_.

By exchanging a some technical skill for a better work environment our whole team benefitted.

And I couldn't agree with you more. As long as a set level of competency is there, I'd rather work with friendly people than a bunch of know-it-mosts that don't know tact.

Why's that?

Here on HN there are Ask HN threads every few months about one cofounder trying to get rid of another competent, but toxic cofounder.

"People managers" prioritize interpersonal manageability while owners / "sufficiently incentivized" / technical managers have more weighting towards competency and execution performance.

At either end of the "sociable vs competent" spectrum (a reduction for sure), an underperforming or rude colleague will invariably decrease output from ordinary team members. The impact variable must be closely monitored and responded to.

Quarterly eNPS-type feedback helps keep these cycles tight.

edit: quotes

The "we did things differently at X" is also a huge red flag. Competent people will figure out the different needs of different workplaces instead of just assuming that the biggest name had the best approach. If you think something is good because google does it, you probably don't understand why google did it nor why it worked for google (and whether or not it would work at a different company).

It's extra work that you do under the radar, in addition to your own work.

A lot of people coast by at work, so for them it's fine when their coworkers are not good, because someone else will deal with it. It's more of a problem when you're the one taking up the work on your shoulders

For example, the algorithm technical interview ensures the candidate has enough social skills to ask questions, explain their thought process and talk about technical solutions without getting angry even when stressed. That is all you need from your software engineers.

> The researchers found that people who exhibited both competence, through the use of challenging voice, and trustworthiness, through the use of supportive voice, were the most in-demand people when it came to assembling teams. [emphasis mine]

and later,

> “Our findings suggest that when people feel like they can trust you, even if you’re not necessarily the best worker, they’re going to be more likely to want to work with you,” Maupin said. “They know that there are likely to be fewer interpersonal issues in that case.”

So the article is not saying "be a lemming because no one cares how good you are," it's saying being supportive of others has a greater positive impact on how others see you than your willingness to challenge others' ideas and signal your competency.