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Comment by stevezsa8 | Hacker News Reader

Yeah this is a common issue for people who move across cultures.

I had a boss who said he only hires a certain ethnic group because they always take on more work and never say no.

He had 2 of these people end up in hospital and a formal accusation of bullying against him... my conclusion was, he'd narrowed on a culture that is averse to social challenge / conflict. Where saying "no" would be socially unacceptable.

But he wasn't aware of the flip-side... that the manager is then responsible for judging the situation and not making direct requests that are impossible to refuse.

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Yeah unfortunately I see that a ton as an Indian myself , where we’ve been taught to be submissive.

Many of my other Indian coworkers are always too scared to push back in any form, and many of my Indian friends back in India would work till the early hours of the morning regularly.

I’m lucky in the sense that I know to push back often when something doesn’t feel right or is illogical to me. Ironically I was often chided in high school for that as teachers would suggest that this would be bad for my career. It’s actually been the best thing for it, letting me become system architects at multiple large companies. But I see where they were coming from, in that the same attitude would have burned me if I’d stayed.

> I had a boss who said he only hires a certain ethnic group because they always take on more work and never say no.

> But he wasn't aware of the flip-side... that the manager is then responsible for judging the situation and not making direct requests that are impossible to refuse.

He was fully aware of the "flip-side." He explicitly admitted he's hiring people solely with a cultural predisposition towards "never saying no." He can ask anything of them knowing it's impossible for them to refuse, even if it kills them.

> But he wasn't aware of the flip-side... that the manager is then responsible for judging the situation and not making direct requests that are impossible to refuse.

You assume he cares. Assuming the person across from you gives a crap about you is a regularly fatal one.

Humans are not basically good. They are basically greedy.

Most humans are basically good. A significant minority aren't, maybe about 10%. Enough that you should never ignore the possibility the other person is a psycho, but few enough that you should never assume everybody else is a psycho.

Also, psychos tend to concentrate in certain places. If you're in a board room, or hanging out with a bunch of surgeons, perhaps it's rational to assume everybody else there is a psycho.

Try 30%.

Most humans are both good (empathy is a strong thing) and greedy (wanting what's best for yourself and those are you close to is also a strong incentive). Balancing those two, sometimes opposing, desires is part of being human.

It's worth noting that they're not always opposing. Sometimes empathy makes us feel better when others feel good, and the negative impact on ourselves can be more than countered by the good feeling from making others happier.

> Humans are not basically good. They are basically greedy.

It's more complex than that, albeit not much. If you are in a hurry skip to figure 3. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.1600451

Ask Culture meets Guess Culture:

https://ask.metafilter.com/55153/Whats-the-middle-ground-bet...

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