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Comment by 0xblood | Hacker News Reader

The more we become overly sensitive, the harsher it will feel if we accidentally miss being overly sensitive. Now you tell me I shouldn't use "you have a sec?" ? if this goes on where are we going to be in 10 years? No personal communication at all anymore because it might make somebody feel anxious and I can only have a personal discussion with them if I send a week before a full agenda and rundown?

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> The more we become overly sensitive, the harsher it will feel if we accidentally miss being overly sensitive.

Who is "we" here?

> if this goes on where are we going to be in 10 years? No personal communication at all anymore because it might make somebody feel anxious and I can only have a personal discussion with them if I send a week before a full agenda and rundown?

I don't think it's about sending an agenda before or even planning, it's about avoiding creating unnecessary tension. Instead of "you have a sec?", you can say "you have a sec to talk about <subject>?". This will take you a few seconds more. And this will make a lot of people answer you quicker, with a clearer response. I understand that it's not easy to change your habits, but this seems like a win-win situation.

>Who is "we" here? Everyone?

Regarding your other points, of course I try to be specific, already because it makes context switching easier and is generally more productive. However, in some situations you want to be vague. If you want to get the opinion from someone and don't want to discuss this with everyone else around for example, or if you want to hear their immediate idea right now without overthinking it, etc. Not very common, but also nothing bad about it in my opinion.

The problem is that the actual scary conversations are always masked as an innocent one for exactly the reason to not induce panic, nobody will say "you have a moment to discuss your performance wrt/ the layoffs that will be coming?". This sucks but that's how things are. If we change our language and interactions to make it impossible to take somebody aside without being explicit about that it's not scary - how do you take somebody aside for an actual scary conversation? These should be anyways rare and typically not coming out of the blue and if somebody is constantly anxious that they might have done something terribly wrong there are deeper problems in your employment relationship

"A sec" is very ambiguous. Asking someone if they have 15 minutes to talk about the new deployment is much more useful and allows people to prepare for it, shortening required time to converse and providing you with more useful answers. Everyone benefits

For obvious reasons I avoid this as well. However, sometimes it's just simpler to take somebody aside without specifying context (or very vague), because somebody else in the group might feel VERY STRONGLY about that new deployment, overhear that it's about that and try to inject themselves

If it goes on, who knows? We might belong to a profession where people are known for their tact and sensitivity and keen ability to intuit someone else’s emotional state. People might say, “Those software engineers, they sure do know how to talk to people!”

There's a middle you're excluding here. The choice isn't between "you have a sec" and sending a full agenda a week ahead.

Just saying "I need to talk about x. Have a sec?" is plenty good.

My point was that we can just establish that "have a sec?" is (typically) never spooky, this is a different way to combat anxiety and ultimately makes working together more straightforward and simple.

The scary stuff is always meant to exactly resemble an innocuous request in the attempt to exactly not panic the employee even though they have all right to be panicking

> we can just establish that "have a sec?" is (typically) never spooky

I don't think that's true, though. Most times someone higher up the org chart than me has said "have a sec?" or some variation, it's been bad news for me.

If it's good news, they almost always give a quick summary of the news first.

Yes, that's what I mean with establishing it to be normal and not only when there a bad news. That way you don't automatically assume it's bad when someone just wants to pull you by the side for a quick conversation about something complex but harmless.

I'm curious, how would you suggest people higher up in the org chart start the conversation with you otherwise? Would you prefer them outright telling you the bad news directly with a quick summary, maybe even in public? Don't get me wrong, a lot of the typical HR procedures for bad news are pretty messed up, but then again I don't have any better idea which is why I'm asking

> Would you prefer them outright telling you the bad news directly with a quick summary, maybe even in public?

The right way, in my opinion, is the same whether the news is good, bad, or neutral: say what the subject to be discussed is. It can and should be very brief and broad ("Re: X project progress" or "Re: your birthday" or whatever).

Certainly it shouldn't be in public. But the meeting request itself shouldn't be done publicly anyway, in my opinion, whether the meeting is good, bad, or indifferent. It should be in email, chat, or a meeting request in Outlook or similar.

The problem is that this becomes more difficult the more unpleasant the topic is. If you have to talk with somebody because there was a complaint about them, and you send the invite "Re: X project issues" because that's where the original complaint originated from you end up in the same situation - that was what I was trying to say in my OP, because then people will say again that it is too broad and anxiety inducing. If you are upright "Re: Complaints about your behavior in project X" you get the employee all riled up and panicking, potentially overreacting and not getting any rest until the meeting actually happens

EDIT, NB: E-mails are typically archived and have to be produced in case of a litigation, or could be requested by HR. You might be fully on the side of your employee and don't want keep an explicit record of this as it might be misconstructed ("Well there were records that XXX misbehaved before" etc)

> If you have to talk with somebody because there was a complaint about them, and you send the invite "Re: X project issues"

I see your point. But in that case, wouldn't it be "Re: HR issue" or somesuch?

> E-mails are typically archived and have to be produced in case of a litigation, or could be requested by HR.

True. I may be weird, but I count this as a plus. I want a paper trail for everything -- so if I have an important verbal exchange, I will always send an email to the person restating what I took away from it.

It's saved my ass countless times.

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