Comment by prmph | Hacker News Reader

Comment by prmph | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Well, as an engineering team lead for years, and recently founder of a small gig, increasingly I've been shocked at how many people (employees, contractors, prospective business partners or co-founders) just want to take the easy way out, instead of putting in honest, conscientious, reflective work and effort, or are just plain incompetent at what they claim to be good at.

Every once on a while you come across someone that is enthusiastic, actually competent, and wants to do things to the best of their ability (or a reasonable approximation thereof), but those are few IMHO.

I mean, I know not all people can be interested in all things, but if you say you're up for something, be it a job, project, or partnership, you've got to give it your reasonable best.

I think the need to be kind and nice all too often is abused by their targets. The key is to find a way to be kind and flexible, but not allowing that to paper over rank incompetence or a bad attitude.

I guess I'm not really sure what your point is but it seems like you're saying being nice and delivering are not compatible.

You can have high standards and expectations and still be nice. In reality no one is going to be operating at 100% all of the time. They will have good days and bad days. I assume that others are doing their best. If their best is not enough for the role they were hired for than I made a bad hire. If I cant find a way to communicate expectations and standards without remaining nice than I'm the one taking the easy way out.

It's easy to be an ass and use emotion to make strong employees feel like they need to do better or deliver more. But at the end of the day your employees will leave once they have had enough.

I've left jobs I was highly effective at because my manager was constantly pushing for more and more. I would have stayed much longer if they would have had the EQ to recognize that I was operating at a high level and praise and kindness would be more effective in the long run. Who cares if someone delivers more of X when they leave in 6-12 months? Every gain will be canceled out by the amount of time you will spend finding their replacement and training them.

So to end my ramblings... If your point is that kindness can be abused... Sure. I agree. But is choosing to be kind and understanding, even if you feel like you are being abused at times, going to lead to you having significantly greater employee retention? Will choosing to act some other way cause your employees to leave which will drop their production from whatever % to 0% for an extended period of time?

It's even worse than what you say sometimes : some people are actually competent in engineering, but when it comes to simply remembering basic stuff or communicating about what they do -- total blackout. Meaning, they just want someone else to manage every little thing they have to do, remember the small details. And then they'd complain they don't like to be micro managed

Reply on news.ycombinator.com