Hacker News Reader

Comment by giraffe_lady | Hacker News Reader

This is a mindset I think is very valuable to apply to yourself, but moderately dangerous to officially encourage in other people especially as a corporate policy or value, which I have seen.

Particularly if someone is expressing a specific grievance, asking them to assume positive intent from the other party is dismissing their experience of what happened and how they should feel about it.

Sometimes people don't act with positive intent and sometimes you can fucking tell. You don't want to be telling, for example, a woman in tech who has had a coworker take credit for her work, that she should assume positive intent in that situation.

Good general guideline for self, but be careful when asking others to follow it imo.

View on HN

I don't think the policy means "pretend it's positive intent even when you know it isn't". If you have actual reasons for why it is not positive intent, you should be able to explain them (and your employer should listen, obviously). You should be able to still talk to that employee about taking credit for the work. It just might help the tone of that meeting to be not completely accusatory at first. If your employer is ignoring you and telling you to assume it is positive intent, then that would be an abuse of it.

Rereading my comment now I think I wasn't very clear. If someone comes to you with a problem and you say "well you should assume positive intent" that is probably bad.

I know that's not what the writer of this, or these policies, intends, and not what people here mean either.

But I have seen this, a lot, at places that have "assume positive intent" as an official company value.

As with everything it requires discretion, but avoid attributing bad intentions especially on first offenses.

If someone forgets to credit you for work done, reach out and let them know so they can correct it. There is a good chance that they just forgot. Now if this happens every time without fail, something is up and blindly assuming positive intent would just be naive.

> asking them to assume positive intent from the other party is dismissing their experience of what happened and how they should feel about it.

I'd disagree here. It isn't immediately dismissive but it is a chance to change their perspective. Should you let them stew in their anger because they think Bob hates them, or should you perhaps suggest that Bob's actions were a result of outside information unknown to them (obviously depends on each case)?

I have a bad taste in my mouth or the phrase because I saw someone wielding it as a weapon at others. Its been a few years, so I don't quite remember the details unfortunately. The funny part is the person wielding it was playing politics in every avenue and was continually degrading trust and yet demanding our trust back by saying we should "assume positive intent".

(they came into our project without understanding the challenges we had or the problem we were solving, tried to throw everything out, and then with upper management present, gave a "decision making" presentation that only led to their solution as being picked)

I prefer the phrase "Trust, but verify."

Trust someone will get something done on time when they say they will, but verify they actually did. Trust that someone is communicating something in a positive way, but verify if there's confusion. Etc.

It's not perfect, nothing is, but "assume positive intent" doesn't have any fallback for when bad actors start to take advantage of it.

Yeah I was going to say there's a kind of metacorollary to this which is important to keep in mind: sometimes when someone is describing negative intent in others, it's accurate and genuine. They might not be hostile themselves, or pessimistic, or negativistic, they might actually be a victim of someone not acting in good faith. They may have positive intent in asking for help around negative intent.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com