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Comment by asdff | Hacker News Reader

There's a pragmatic reason too for that. You work more efficiently when you work with your friends imo vs rigid or unagreeable personalities. You show up excited to work and contribute and share ideas vs wanting to get out of there and watching the clock tick slowly all day. I'd say the friend effect is able to elevate people who have 'mediocre' skills on paper to be efficient enough and start learning at a rate that sees them performing well above their qualifications. There is definitely a performance advantage towards feeling engaged and focused.

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Yes, but as I said, that's a slippery slope to walk on - you're not there to make friends or have fun - you're there to do work. The whole point of that arrangement is that you do something that something else values enough to pay money for, perhaps something that you don't particularly want to do or something that bores you.

If you start adjusting the workplace to fit the needs of the employee (gosh, how wrong that sentence sounds!) you end up in situations where it's suddenly justifiable to let developers use technologies unsuited for the situation because they're "fun" and "interesting" to use and keeping them happy means they're more "productive". Or letting middle management play politics because it keeps them happy and more productive. Or forcing people into open offices because some boss likes the feeling of lording over his subordinates and that makes him happy and productive.

I guess what I'm trying to say is - some basic levels of courtesy and human empathy are needed for any group endeavor to work but beyond that, decisions should be made in the interest of the business rather than what makes individuals happy.

“Should”. But how do you actually move towards doing that? I’ve never worked anywhere that was the case. It might be that there is no way to make that happen if it goes against human nature.

If I could answer that question, I'd be doing management consulting, not software development.

But I think a good first step is to just be aware of it. Many people don't even notice these subtle biases. Once you're aware of them, it's a matter of training yourself to ask the question: is this good for me, or good for the business? Am I doing this because it's good for me, or good for the business?

Do you really think workplace norms should never adjust for their employees? I think a balance between doing the bare minimum to avoid bankruptcy and squeezing employees for every last drop of productivity is needed and I don't see how listening to employee demands is somehow wrong in that context.

Oh, I think they should definitely adjust. But it should not be adjusted by employees or between employees but rather by the business, to serve its goals (retention, productivity, etc...).

I think in these situations, the employee should ask himself: "what is good for the business?" rather than "what do I want to do?".

The answer often is "what is good for employees is good for the business". This is a known recipee for success that rarely gets implemented because of greed and shortsightedness

It's also true that "what is good for the business is good for employees". So it's a two-way street that needs to be walked by honest employees and empoyers. Not possible in toxic cultures. So it's important to keep the toxic employees and managers (even shareholders!) out. This is what hiring should mostly focus on (not sure on how to keep toxic shareholders out, and businesses often rot from their heads down because of this)

You can usually weasel your way to describing a personal benefit as useful to the business, e.g. "I want a new chair" -> "I need a new chair to be more productive by being more comfortable", so I'm not sure this distinction is useful. In the end, you're still weighing upsides and downsides, just a bit more directly.

>you end up in situations where it's suddenly justifiable to let developers use technologies unsuited for the situation because they're "fun" and "interesting" to use and keeping them happy means they're more "productive"

Well, companies already do that and justify the practice as something that selects for more passionate developers and makes job postings seem more attractive. Exhibit A: YC's very own Paul Graham wrote "The Python Paradox" [1] back in 2004.

[1] http://paulgraham.com/pypar.html

Not all of my compensation is in cash. Giving me time to experiment, learn, or god forbid enjoy myself is part of the cost for employers of software developers.

You obviously can not want that as an employer but you’re either gonna have empty roles for a long time or pay out the ass for the lack of fringe benefits

>Yes, but as I said, that's a slippery slope to walk on - you're not there to make friends or have fun - you're there to do work.

Both are important. Without friends and fun, in a heavily intellectual cooperative field like CS, you'll do subpar work.

"I'd say the friend effect is able to elevate people who have 'mediocre' skills on paper to be efficient enough and start learning at a rate that sees them performing well above their qualifications."

Any sources for this? Should we assume the '96 Bulls were "best buddies"? Are Amazon and Apple the "most tightly knit companies on Earth", thus reaching $1T valuation? This sounds like an "I assume this to be true by' common sense', therefore it's persuasive" type of claim.

The problem is, competence is important. Nice people who design airplanes that are "mostly right, but fall out of the sky slightly more than average" have real costs versus a team that's "a little cold to each other, but meshes well to create a high quality product."

Which matters more probably ultimately depends on the "mission criticality" / ramifications of failure of the product. But assuming that two Advanced Beginners will elevate each other to competence also ignores that they can create a "blind leading the blind" style of effect.

My instinct is that 90+ percent of all work is not mission-critical airplane design but is mostly shuffling things around between team members. So the 'good enough' metric is sufficient, where the extremely efficient but extremely unpleasant coworkers generally don't stick around unless they can be walled off.

I also suspect there's another MAJOR upside to cameraderie: cooperation rather than competition.

A huge factor with academics, and with anyone in high-skill professions (critically those where your boss does not know how to do your job) is that in a lot of job situations, one has to perform their actual job functions, and then, separately, one has to perform (literally) a PR show for their managers, putting on an outward display of competence. Managers can measure competence up to the point of obvious failure, but once you get above that it gets FAR harder to tell if someone's good, and the whole affair becomes susceptible to "con men". You see this with professors, you see this with engineers, with doctors, sometimes with lawyers, etc, etc.

So even if you're acting in good faith, you need to put on a theater act of being skilled at your job.

Here's the thing: It's a million times easier if all of your teammates are supporting you. If you're in a cooperative relationship with your teammates, then your teammates can "allow you to admit your mistakes". Quietly amongst your peers, in a way that doesn't hurt your chances of promotion. But the important thing is the mistakes get exposed AND FIXED. Also - the confidence intervals get exposed, and guarded against.

In an adversarial relationship (which you see in more zero-sum games like professors fighting over tenure), people have to hide their incompetence, and the horrible, dangerous thing is:

—they get away with it—

… because the time-scales are long, and the confidence intervals are high enough that it's a reasonably safe bet. They might have a 1-in-5 chance of having it blow up on them, but if they talk a big game, exude confidence, push a risky bet, and have it work out, they could easily become a team lead, and basically seal their career. Life is short and lots of people take those risks.

Being cooperative simply boosts competence; not merely as a team, but as an individual. Since they don't need to pretend they're always making the right choices, people don't have to double-down on "inferior choices" to avoid pretending they're wrong. They can just shamelessly change their minds and pivot to being more correct.

I would think "good enough" in case of airplanes mean they don't fall out of the sky.

You're assuming the 'unagreeable' personalities aren't hard workers and the people in favor are. There's no guarantee those 'inside the group' are elevating each other either.

I'd rather work with competent strangers who are sufficiently polite than get dragged down by friends who can't carry their weight. No need to mix personal life with work life.

I'm not saying they are not hard workers. For some jobs its also important to be collaborative with a team as well as a hard worker, to make sure you are working hard on the thing you should be working on and not wasting effort working on the wrong problem due to poor communication.

But what if you reduce the range in the example? Would you rather work with an asshole who is mildly better than you are, or someone agreeable who is mildly worse?

Given a collaborative environment, I'll always choose agreeable/worse. Because with the disagreeable/better collaborator, I suddenly have a barrier between potential productivity and output: I have to co-ordinate with the asshole.

If they are truely an asshole or barrier to productivity then that's a nonstarter, they need to be dropped. All things being equal, certainly the friendlier the better.

The friends I've enjoyed working with and whom I've learned the most from and been the most productive with are generally a bit disagreeable (in the Big Five definition of the word).

Your personal bias towards agreeableness as a universally good trait is muddying what I think is an otherwise valid point, that people are more productive working with people they like (and sometimes, they like working with disagreeable people, as hard as that may be to believe).

I'm not drawing up a psychological profile here, so no need to try and bring in psychological definitions of words.

Agreeable/disagreeable is a subjective judgement, and I'm the one making the judgement in this scenario. Whether someone is agreeable and whether I like to work with them are synonyms.

The conversation was generally talking culture fit and not universal qualities, after all.

Honestly, a lot of the people I'd consider disagreeable to work with are actually so overwhelmingly positive that it makes me feel like a cynical asshole if I don't severely self-censor. To the wrong group, I am the asshole.

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