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Comment by kyleyeats | Hacker News Reader

You're probably disagreeable. I'm struggling too. Have you tried agreeing with absolutely everything? That's what your competition is doing.

Next time a company tells you about their mission statement, stop them midway, eyes open in awe, and say "That's my mission statement."

Do the same thing when they tell you about their tech stack. Or anything else. I'm not kidding. The last applicant agreed with everything, and you need to agree with everything harder.

Agreeability and disagreeability are two separate skills but the tech industry sees it as a spectrum. They do not hire disagreeable people.

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> Do the same thing when they tell you about their tech stack. Or anything else.

Another dimension of the "it depends" response to this is seniority.

If you're relatively junior, or will appear relatively junior based on your resume, don't express strong disagreement, but rather eagerness to learn. The team wants you to be someone who can contribute, and help them make progress towards their current goals. You're not there to re-evaluate decisions about their stack based on the glimpses get you get during the interview process.

But if you're quite senior, the team perhaps wants you to help them level up or improve. Agreeing with everything would also suggest you don't have something new to contribute that helps take them beyond the track they're on now. Don't disagree without a good reason, and be able to explain your thinking. Ask questions before you arrive at a position. Understand why the fence is there before you advocate its removal. But insightful, constructive "disagreement" can still be a way to demonstrate the value you'll bring.

Seniority yes but also consulting. Consulting is the only place I've ever found success.

Even if you are senior, I wouldn’t outright disagree. You never want an interview to go a negative direction and disagreement is generally by its nature a negative event. Instead use phrases like “have you considered…”. It doesn’t convey active disagreement, but offers a way to state your direction more hypothetically. Even if the position is there to help them improve, you still need a level of diplomacy and the interview will likely try and reveal that.

This is general work advice not just interview advice

bad: I disagree with the way this is done/this is just bad. Lets do X!

good: I see the motivation with the current approach and understand the goals but i wonder if we might be better served by doing X instead. Usually this allows for Y benefits, but I'm open to discussion here.

Add some fluff to ensure nobody gets defensive and articulate your flexibility (even if you don't really have it)

> Next time a company tells you about their mission statement, stop them midway, eyes open in awe, and say "That's my mission statement."

As somebody who only does technical interviews, I must say, you better cut that crap out before you get to me. Because I just puked a little.

I worked at a company with the mission statement "To deliver well-qualified users to customers." Yeah, claiming it's your personal mission statement wouldn't go over so well.

This is the kind of terrible advice that many people (including many programmers) think is great advice because they don’t see nuance in the world.

To get a job you don’t have to agree to the nth degree with everything that’s said to you. You just have to be a nice more-or-less qualified person who’s enjoyable to be around and communicate with. That’s a foreign concept to many people (not just programmers) so they look for some “trick” like never disagreeing.

It’s even better that this trick makes them feel better about being a miserable wet blanket because they’re putting one over on the interviewers.

Counterpoint: I interview developers regularly and my current company is 100% looking for agreeable people. If you say you love doing TDD and pair programming, then you are half way through being hired.

If you mention reservations about either, that's going to cost you.

It may “cost them” but they may not want the job either after that point depending on the context of the question. I really dislike pair programming if it’s required all the time and would kindly thank you for your time and look elsewhere. If they want a job at all costs I guess I can’t speak to that.

On a side note, oh man the stories I could tell you. Pair programming all the time is like an evolution of Foucault's panopticon. You police yourself because you are closely being watched all the time and your peers will tattletale to your manager if you don't pair hard enough.

It's brutal.

You police yourself so you do well at the thing your bosses want you to do well at? That sounds awful.

I disagree but I don't think a discussion with you would be productive. The sarcasm tells me you are not going to engage honestly. If you wish to learn more about the negative psychological effects of being watched all the time, there's plenty of material online for you to read. Particularly, Foucault and the panopticon.

To be honest, I think you’re the one who won’t engage honestly.

Here’s a question for you: What are the benefits of being watched all the time?

I understand that from the employee’s perspective they might not like being watched all the time and that it can affect their behavior. It can also prevent them from doing their best work.

That said, there are reasons why an employer would want to watch their employees all the time. If the employee dislikes it enough and thinks they have better options, they can stop working there.

Doesn't the culture of being watched all of the time result in people staying later and doing things to appear busy but generally not productive? In Japan that culture is present in many offices but in the west we've adopted a different balance.

My impression is that you certainly were angling for a very specific negative interpretation of what the person you were responding to was saying, namely that that person was implying they didn't want to perform the duties of their job. They were not saying this, they were saying that constant surveillance is not good.

The only reasons an employer has to constantly be watching relate to paranoia or micromanagement, i.e. a lack of trust in the professionalism and competence of their employees. This is abysmal and the employee quitting or not is unrelated, much as how bullying is bad even if technically an employee can quit. Not to mention that quitting is not an optional for everyone, depending on their circumstances.

The truth is that some people can’t be trusted and aren’t that competent. These people may be cheap to hire though. Pair programming and/or monitoring of them is a way to get a predictable baseline out of them - even if that baseline is very low. You can say it’s a bad decision by the business, but it’s their bad decision to make.

It's their bad decision to make, and it deserves criticism. If you're basically intentionally hiring terrible performers and the only way to ensure an adequate baseline is to literally monitor them 8 hours a day, I hope that that company goes out of business. The alternative is to promote a culture of competence whereby other employees will want to set such a baseline for other employees such that abysmal performance does not slide but without someone hovering over your shoulder your entire tenure.

That transparent obsequiousness would be a huge red flag for me. I guess I'm disagreable.

You don’t need to be cynical about being agreeable. You can just have a positive disposition, smile when you sit down, and find the positives instead of surfacing the negatives. A lot of people get an ego kick feeling smarter than others because they’re more cynical.

The trick is to not be transparent about it.

Maybe hiring is overly biased toward agreeableness but both ends of that spectrum are really bad, one end has people-pleasers and yes-people who provided no feedback but give a false confidence that they do, but at the other end is folks who shut down every idea because they don't immediately know how it can be implemented or it doesn't immediately pass their existing filters.

I think there's a middle path and I think I'd try to apply it interviews, rather than "just" daily life and work, and that's to assume there's something of value where the other party is coming from, and use your creative powers to try to find that value. Make an attempt to understand the other party with an understanding that your thought process may have to play with things it reactively thinks are bad and solve within that framework before either rejecting the bad thing or finding out it's wrong.

Don't blanket accept or reject their mission statement or tech stack, come with a creative curiosity about it.

"They do not hire disagreeable people."

And this is why skilled people can't find a job. Unless you can kiss a*s you won't get hired. This is wrong! If some one agrees with every word you say, this should be a red light. This might means the person don't have a mind of there own. Unless you want to hire a robot ^_^

I dunno I'm an asshole and I'm having to beat people off with a stick at the moment. However in UK and there is a market vacuum.

Anyway you don't have to kiss ass. All you have to do is have a solution to problems and ability to shape ideas not just cut them off. Unless it's nodejs. That can just fuck off.

When I hire people myself I'm looking for people who are opinionated but can back that up with experience and evidence and thought processes which show how the conclusion was reached. I really don't want to hire passive production monkeys.

It works, the following words made me rich:

- Great idea

- Makes total sense

- That's how I would do it

- I agree

And this is not a joke.

Well a team has to come together around a shared goal. If a team is made up of people who disagree with what the team is trying to do... it's not a team

I think people often share common goals, but “how” is where disagreement tends to be. And I think that’s healthy. Some friction in decision making will often yield better decisions.

> Some friction in decision making will often yield better decisions.

I agree. The problem starts when this sort of friction continues after all the decision-making is done and starts manifesting as contrarian positions towards how the project is being conducted, always insisting that their idea was better, and even assuming aspects of sabotage.

It's one thing to determine a path forward, but an entirely different thing to assume a "my way or no way" stance.

Even if I don't agree 100%, I'll find myself saying these things. Especially in today's world of pointless Zoom meetings, endless "check-ins", it's often not worth arguing. Rarely is anything mission critical. (If it's a "big deal", I will disagree.)

them: "We should switch to rebase! I read this blog!"

me: "ok."

(even though this will cost hundreds of productivity hours - explaining it to new devs and wondering why all your history disappeared again, sigh you shouldn't rebase on a public branch! , gah fuck it)

Is this a hill I’m willing to die on?… again?…

Yeah, sure, sounds like a great idea.

I worked on projects where rebase was the norm, even for public feature branches.

Not a problem.

Rebase is a tradeoff of handling merge conflicts with achieving a commit history that is far cleaner and audit-friendly.

The point being that some technical choices are not black and white, and people mistake baseless personal opinions with technical truths. There's an awful lot of workable grey areas with tradeoffs.

If a team member insists on pushing his personal opinions as the truth, challenges and opposes each and every proposal that does not match his personal opinion, and drags on personal vendettas in decisions that didn't went their way... I'd say that no matter where their tech skills are, that person is still incompetent and a liability in any team.

>>And this is why skilled people can't find a job. Unless you can kiss a*s you won't get hired.

You're trying too hard to rationalize away personal problems and your inability and/or unwillingness to address them.

The opposite of disagreeable is not "kissing ass". The opposite of disagreeable, to start off, is not being a total asshole. No one's technical prowess is impressive enough to ignore the fact that they are completely insufferable. A project survives extra weeks or even months, but a team does not survive an eggeegious team member who makes everyone around them miserable.

Take a long hard look at yourself before throwing blanket accusations at anyone and everyone around you.

As the saying goes, "if someone is an asshole, they're an asshole, if everyone is an asshole, you're the asshole"

"I do not hold all the exact same beliefs as you" is not at all the same thing as "I am a disagreeable person."

"I will say yes to absolutely everything you say" is not at all the same thing as "I will do a good job."

There are absolutely far too many workplaces where you are expected to kiss ass to be hired or to progress.

Personally, I know that I would never feel OK working there, so I don't see the point of trying to pretend I'm an ass-kisser in interviews. I actually am an agreeable person, overall; I just want to find a place to work that will be OK working with me, not with some extremely different false face I have to spend a huge amount of energy putting on every day just to get paid there.

That’s not an unreasonable take when it comes to companies.

Missed calls, days to hear anything, weeks of back and forth, constant apologies, spaced out mgmt, PMs, euphemisms, platitudes, a whole bunch of typical humans nitpicking every sentence and syntax structure, unpaid wages… it’s rampant across society and we all keep accepting it.

You’re turning this into a blame game on one person when there’s plenty of anecdotes, legal cases, and data to show that company’s are full of assholes.

What makes someone an asshole?

>> You're trying too hard to rationalize away personal problems and your inability and/or unwillingness to address them.

Stop your anonymouse trolling on HN and seek some professional mental health you really need it.

Every time I've hired someone like this they've made awful decisions. The same thing that makes them so agreeable, I think, makes them awful at making decisions.

>>"They do not hire disagreeable people."

>And this is why skilled people can't find a job

Which is a good thing because it makes it affordable for startups to hire skilled people.

While I'm sure there are places where that's the winning move, I think most companies are just fine hiring from the majority of folks who fall somewhere on the spectrum between "agree with everything as hard as possible" and "argue/complain in the interview to the point that it becomes a culture-fit red flag".

If you're looking for technical work and are really getting rejected because of something at the culture-fit level (which is where "agreeableness" falls), I'd say it's less likely that you're insufficiently kiss-ass/agreeable, and more likely that you're being identified as "potential problem teammate" material for other reasons.

Funny, I typically hire people who are skilled, but disagree with me in some way. I want to be challenged and grow a diverse team.

My previous boss, who offered me a CTO position a couple years after having been hired as a freelancer, said the thing he appreciated from me the most was that I wasn't afraid to say "No, Paul. Let's not do that. Here's why."

Sometimes the boss has a bad idea, if you're the tech guy it is your responsibility to decide if it has legs or it's a waste of time. Many consultants say yes to anything because even wild-goose chases are billable. But honesty and integrity tend to pay off in the long run, IME.

Agreeing is pretty much always the best move in the beginning. If you after careful consideration thinks something is wrong, you better be ready to offer an alternative or make a compelling argument for dropping it. You'll also have to have earned their trust, otherwise you're just some random stranger with an opinion.

Even so, it’s a lot of work trying to get your opinion heard over the noise of people with terrible ideas.

This is an excellent point you made here, I'm not a people pleaser and really need to think about this better.

Playing the hiring manager's advocate:

Why should I hire you if you don't like my mission, my tech stack or my culture when there are clearly a bunch of talented people who do like all of them?

Would it not serve both of us for you to shut up, be grateful for the work while you keep looking for that perfect fit? Or even better, just keep looking and I'll keep looking for someone who genuinely likes the way we do things.

More relatable perhaps is the idea of charisma. If I’m interviewing a technically skilled person who is a bull in a China shop when it comes to personality, it doesn’t matter what they create - they’re breaking the team with their oblivious nature.

If people will actively seeking other teams because of a new member’s personality, it’s something you can bet will be looked for look for in an interview.

This may be true, but wait until you get hired and you disagree with a lot of what they do or say, internally. You will not be able to let it be known and you will hate the people, your job, and everything. It may be better to find another team that you agree with if you don't desperately need the job.

I'm not sure where OP's question would lead anyone to decide they were disagreeable unless you know them. I also would never advise anyone to lie or mislead during an interview because the people who hired them will know they've been had and that can be harmful for future relationships. My best advice is to always be nice, polite, and kind; and for all we know, OP might be doing that already.

i think w3c really missed out by not specifying a sarcasm tag for html.

Right? At least server codes got a teapot!

I'd call it hyperbole, not sarcasm, because I do actually agree with the underlying point. I'm a big fan of absurd humor and obtuse humor.

Expressing genuine interest in their problem space and challenges will get you further than feigned agreeableness.

It sounds like the core of your personality issue comes down to you thinking that this is the dichotomy.

The other reason for this, is you want to present the enthusiastic side of you.

A candidate that is energetic, excited, and passionate about programming. Practice this in front of the mirror. Record yourself.

So you think that they just want to hire simple yes-men? Is is really that simple?

Good advice

Good advice? This is AMAZING advice! I can't remember the last time I received such great advice. This advice is like a gift from the heavens. Life changing stuff right here.

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