Comment by scarface74 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by scarface74 | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

At my last job, I was brought in by the then new CTO to make their company “cloud native” as they were both trying to bring development in house and pivot toward selling access to our micro services to large health care providers. We aggregated publicly available (non PII) provider data from all 50 states and national databases.

I never had a formal interview. We met for lunch through a recruiter that was helping him hire. We just talked like adults. I had no real non theoretical AWS experience at the time. But I had led projects before.

He took a chance on me. After a couple of months and we got to know each other. I told him that neither one of us had time for “shit sandwiches”. We have a lot to do and we need to be able to be honest with each other.

After a while, when we were just talking alone he would just be blunt. He once asked me “why are you coming to me with this shit. You have admin access to everything. Come up with a solution and let me know how much it will cost”. I would also tell him “you know in your heart that’s a dumb move and isn’t going to turn out well”.

We had passionate technical disagreements. But if the argument was well made, either one of us would “disagree and commit” or change our opinions.

We got a lot of shit done. Two years later, I ended up at AWS in ProServe almost exclusively because he pushed me to be better, more articulate, stretch myself, etc and the company had an exit for 10x revenue (small company - $30 million exit). I probably would have gotten about $50K - $70K if I had stayed or about $30K if I had exercised my options - not life changing money. But my two year sign on bonus was more than that at AWS.

I still talk to him sometimes and he said one of the major motivating factors for the acquisition is how well my designs stood up to the growth and increase in traffic right after Covid and they could point at their cloud maturity - scalability, redundancy, etc.

I'm not sure what you are saying. Do you mean that calmly stating my position and reasons could perceived as a dishonest "shit sandwich"? If so, that is what my friends and I came to in the end. If they didn't give me reasoned argument, I would ignore them regardless of their passion, and if I wasn't sure enough of my opinion to act upset that it was being challenged, they would ignore me as well. I say act but it is more me allowing myself to become emotionally attached to my position for the purpose of truth finding. With maybe a few expletives added strategically if I know they value them. So a bit of acting too.

A shit sandwich is

1. Spend time saying something positive

2. “This is why you suck”

3. Spend time saying something positive.

Let’s just get to #2. Don’t waste time trying to protect my feelings. Most of the time even for #2 you waste time trying not to be too “hurtful”.

Only discussing #2 avoids wasting time and helped me improve and get to a solution.

I can be diplomatic when necessary. But it’s like when you are learning a foreign language and translating everything in your head.

Oh, yeah, I agree that tact is simply a form of dishonesty. I just don't really care if I am wrong or right, and I project that on to others. Since they don't care if they are right, they won't mind me calmly telling them all the reasons they are wrong. If they get upset at that when defending their position then my instinct is to assume they are irrational. But what my friends taught me is that passionate arguments, like most instincts can be used as a shortcut to bypass work. So becoming impassioned as I tell them all the reasons they are wrong, can help my argument.

Some people will respond well to this - I'm one of them - but many (most?) won't.

> tact is simply a form of dishonesty

Maybe it is, but our primate brains tend to get very attached to our ideas and opinions. People aren't rational. Tactfulness is one way to get the other side to see your argument without making them feel threatened. Is it manipulative? Sure. But in many cases it's the only path that will get results.

Yeah, I hate playing that game. I kind of like playing the one where you lead someone to an answer instead of just telling them, so that it is their idea. It can be seen as teaching instead of manipulation.

> tact is simply a form of dishonesty.

I see what you’re saying, and I like the gist of your point for multiple comments in this thread, but for some reason this phrasing rubs me completely the wrong way. It will tend to be inflammatory and escalatory in a bad way in a debate or discussion to think of people who are well intentioned and trying not to hurt feelings as liars. I’m not sure that’s fair or accurate either. Like why, exactly, does a compliment next to a criticism irritate you? What if the compliment is true and the criticism is true, then where’s the dishonesty? Maybe what you mean is that the indirectness wastes your time or lacks clarity?

Does tact necessarily mean spending time giving compliments next to criticism? You can be tactful in the very wording of a direct criticism without being indirect or giving useless compliments, right? And it’s very very possible to be direct and tactless. Isn’t tactlessness sometimes a function of ignorance, not necessarily lack of compassion?

Some people make a distinction between critique and criticism, and this distinction may come down to tact? The critique is viewed as constructive criticism, how to improve, while criticizing is stating destructive negatives, “you’re doing it wrong and you suck.” The more tactful one of those actually happens to be the more useful one too…

Depending on what is comsidered tact my statement could be hyperbolic. It is important to encourage others and stating the good as well as the bad is important. Though negative reinforcement must be unflagging to be effective, and positive reinforcement must be irregular to be most effective. At least that is what cogsci taught a couple decades ago.

But phrasing criticism unemotionally and directing it toward the decision or product instead of a person, isn't what I'd call tact, it is just standard politeness. It isn't manipulative so much as precise. The decision is what you want to change.

On the other hand, saying nice things to spare feelings without any actual intent to encourage specific behavior is dishonest and manipulative even if well intentioned. In extreme cases it can even turn into gaslighting where you gloss over problems and they think they are doing fine when they aren't. That sort of tact is toxic.

Good stuff in there, but instead of doubling down on “dishonest”, and escalating to gas-lighting and toxicity, how about we just acknowledge that some people aren’t the best communicators in the world and are afraid of hurting feelings and starting fights and being confrontational? What’s potentially toxic is presuming someone else’s motivation. You’re setting up a mental framework for making assumptions and jumping to conclusions that people are being actively malicious when they simply try to soften their critique. This will infect your responses in a negative and destructive way, at least it has mine when I’ve made this mistake. If compliments or critique-softening bother you, how about just directly asking your conversant to get straight to the point?

My whole point was that unfounded praise and assurances don't rely on any specific motivation to be harmful or yes, dishonest. I have been guilty of gaslighting before, mostly out of indifference. I let bad behavior slide and said it was fine because I truly didn't care or think it was a big deal. But that simply made the individual think they were crazy when they did get called out for it. So indifference, conflict avoidance, excessive compassion, none of the reasons matter if it harms people.

I disagree pretty strongly that tact is a form of dishonesty. Being tactful does not mean dancing around the issue or feeding someone a line of bullshit. It simply means communicating in a way that's less likely to make someone defensive. Tact is orthogonal to clarity or directness. The fact that people may dance around difficult conversations because they already know how it will be received is neither here nor there.

WRT to using passion and emotion to win an argument, I'm not so sure. I tend towards the passionate side, and while it served me well in startups and smaller groups where I had a strong reputation for competence and putting in the work. But as I moved into more senior rolls at bigger tech companies, where I need to collaborate with a broader set of people who I don't know closely, I had to tone it down to be effective. What style is most effective? Essentially it boils down to one thing: know your audience.

Agreed, but there is still possibility for nuance in step 2. Something can be merely a bad idea, or it can be a disaster waiting to happen. Sometimes when people stop 1 and 3 they also lose the nuance in step 2.

On jeopardy you phrase your answer in the form of a question. It adds a minor layer of complexity, similar to what you call a shit sandwich. It’s the longest running game show on tv, maybe one of the longest running show of any type other than the news. Sometimes people forget to phrase their answers in the form of a question. Alex would say, “oh, I’m sorry but you have to phrase your answer as a question.” Dan reminds me of Alex Tribeck in that way. The winners on hn, those with the most karma, never seem to make that mistake. It’s a fairly low barrier, but for some of us quite a challenge.

Yeah, it is a problem for sure. I have said plenty of inappropriate stuff on this site I think, and been moderated for it, but I don't have anything against the site or the users. It is just difficult or impossible to really obey the HN guidelines, and if you step out of line just a few times you basically get silenced in a big way (if you post a single "fuck you" here, you're in trouble!)

Do you normally use "fuck you" in conversations in anything other than a light-hearted way? I just read the guidelines and they describe my preferred communication pattern. I said my friends express emotions in their argument, and now I've learned to, but personal attacks and assuming bad faith are going to just cause me to block someone, as I don't see how the conversation could be productive at that point. The couple times I tried to escalate to match that sort of argument it did go well though. I guess that is just the communication style of some? I don't like it, makes want to hit people. Only done that once at work, and luckily they tried first so they weren't safe to report it.

I wouldn’t go that far. There is a huge difference between “your idea is dumb” and “you are dumb”

Exactly! Never go full Linus. Not even Linus does that anymore. Even gentle mockery about breaking the pipeline gets overreacted to, and that is annoying. I try to say the idea won't work rather than it is dumb, but I may try it the other way with one of my mentees, I think they might respond better.

I do and unlike hn, nobody gently corrects. You just end up with fewer friends. Karma, as much as I hate the term, or people “hearting” tweets, or downvoting posts, has made me a better person in the real world. But the important thing is to only submit yourself to good algorithms and good social feedback. There are places in the net where the prevailing wisdom, manifest as upvotes/downvotes will make you a worse person. Clearly, of all the internet, HN is the best in this regard. Largely thanks to Dan’s moderate moderation and the smart, curious and diverse user base.

I'll turn this around: you've never told someone to go fuck themselves?

I would say that I've used it more IRL than online!!

I don't think it is a thing to commonly use in conversations, no. When people are discussing things in good faith, it is inappropriate. But there are times when it is appropriate, IMO. You're having a good faith discussion here I think, if I just replied "fuck you" yeah. It would be pretty mean.

Also, sorry, I should have elaborated: by "fuck you" I don't always mean literally fuck you. I also mean phrases like "You obviously don't want to have a conversation about this" etc.. which are dismissive and against the guidelines of HN (I have been rate-limited for this type of speech, btw)

Sometimes it is appropriate, even if that appropriateness is only like you're saying: advertising to people like you that you don't want to converse with me. Good! :)

Much worse for me to just "obey the rules" and troll you in good faith while adhering to the guidelines, IMO. Much more toxic, too.

It is like your coworker who, every time you try and have a constructive conversation with, says "I'll set up a meeting to talk about this" or "we'll discuss it on standup" or "send me an email about this" or whatever - and never follows up.

Polite, appropriate, work-safe - but much more toxic than if they would just say "we're not doing that b/c of XYZ, sorry" (which is long-form for "fuck you").

So yeah, it should be OK to say "fuck you" on a healthy forum! ;)

Yes, agreed.

One argument for spending time on 1 and 3: Step 2 alone can ignite fight-or-flight responses in people's limbic systems. If that happens, rationality goes out the window. (Even more than usual, I mean!)

If this picture is correct, then I think it's worth some "overhead" to try to get a conversation between calm, rational beings going. A shouting match between two werewolves may not be valuable even if they get right to the point.

Not dismissing what you're saying. Just adding another picture.

I agree completely. You have to know who you are dealing with and you have to have already established a relationship with the person.

You had a rare person there with that CTO. Most people avoid conflict at all costs, so as soon as the conversation becomes heated for whatever reason, they shut it down.

My current CTO is like that, and it's an awful working environment.

If it wasn’t a severe conflict of interest, I would love to work with him again as an independent contractor on the side.

I wouldn’t work for him at his new company only because while he is having some similar challenges that we have worked together before to solve, I am not a good long term employee at any company these days except where I work now.

I enjoy seeing a problem, helping to solve the problem, train the organization and moving on. I need to constantly be “putting myself out of a job”.

I am the same way in a lot of ways, if I don't have a "problem" to work on I get in a bad place.

Amazon gives you this, or is the role just so drastically different in other ways?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com