Comment by NalNezumi | Hacker News Reader

Comment by NalNezumi | Hacker News Reader

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>You might dismiss these results if you believe that military data somehow doesn’t apply to the business world, but you would be wrong to do so. After all, the U.S. Department of Defense is the single largest employer in the world, dwarfing Walmart by nearly 1 million employees

I don't think anyone dismiss the data taken only from the military because of their workforce size & variety of positions (as indicated later) but because their task/goal is very unique to other private companies where the (primary) goal is making a profit, and the fact that at the military, sizable proportion of the employee might be in a high stress, life-or-death situation (the data was taken under Iraq/Afgan war) .

All in all this seems like a "checked all the boxes for a good study; but still whimsical result" kind of study. (I guess that's why it went to a low impact factor Journal)

I still would prefer HR people take recommendations from this article, such as: "Measure happiness in both employees & job candidates" at face value rather than wasting their time in BS Personality-type and pseudo-IQ tests for hiring/managing project groups

Edit: Might also add that (to me) it makes no sense to equate "getting a medal" to performance, when they also claim "Military also have non-combatant jobs!" as the basis for generalization of the study; yea but your success metric doesn't take that in to account? Does military-chefs get medals for extra-ordinary dishes? Does safety technicians get medals for "extra-ordinary safety"?

While you're entitled to your own opinion, I can safely say this study matches my own observations 100%. Having hired and led over a hundred engineers, I wasn't surprised of the magnitude of this finding at all.

Yes, happy people get easily worn down in bureaucratical organizations.

Some of them adapt and get cynical.

Some of them quit and join organizations where they can be happy and effective. It's the best part of my day to work among many of them.

I've worked for a couple of businesses where bullying, spitefulness and a generally unpleasant atmosphere were the norm and where it was clear from the outset that no one was happy and happiness in others was not to be tolerated.

I would describe myself as 'optimistic' rather than 'happy' but, in both cases, these businesses sucked the life out of me and the happiest days were when I left. Both times to my initial financial detriment.

Neither business is currently operating though, so no loss to me long term.

> happiness in others was not to be tolerated

This is something that worries me on occasion. Certainly very few would intentionally do it, but I fear there could be some alligator-brain crab bucket game going on in the subconscious where some team members will be inclined to "even out" any happiness deltas across the team.

I wonder how much this has to do with complaining.

In my experience - not all unproductive people are complainers - but almost all complainers are not productive.

The productive people are proactive and start making change rather than complain.

I haven't met a lot of unhappy proactive people.

I thought the study was saying you need to be happy first.

I never stated something else.

The DoD's culture is indeed unique. There aren't many corporations where you're enlisted for a set duration, have to go through a very unpleasant Basic Training Bootcamp, and aren't allowed off the premises without permission.

And that's before you get to the sharp end, which is about killing people.

It's certainly going to take a certain kind of personality to be happy in that kind of setting.

Whether you can generalise that to corporate life in general and software development in particularly is very, very debatable.

Of course this is a popular trope with a certain kind of manager - business as sport, business as military command, and so on.

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