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Comment by thenerdhead | Hacker News Reader

> If disagreeableness does not help individuals attain power, why do so many people believe that nice guys (and gals) finish last? Given our studies focused on the attainment of power, does disagreeableness help people maintain power once they possess it?

This study seems like common sense. Extroverted people who are agreeable climb the fastest.

People confuse disagreeable with “asshole”. Most assholes can be agreeable, just how they play the game is disagreeable. Political assholes take credit for others work and never take risk. Controlling assholes micromanage and suggest everything was their idea. Most disagreeable people hardly get promoted. It seems rather obvious that being liked tends to serve you well regardless of your expertise. Of course the Peter principle and Dilbert principle can kick in because of this.

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Let's take it a step further: agreeable people don't care about good engineering. They can't, by definition.

Standing up for an idea or principle makes one disagreeable. An engineer who is just "going with the flow" is not bringing any expertise to the table.

To be clear, there are limits to how much and when one should stand-up for an idea or principle (i.e. pick your battles). Someone who fights every battle is, once again, entering asshole territory. But if being agreeable means picking no battles, then what are you even doing?

No, that's massively oversimplified. 'disagreeableness' is not literally about how often you disagree, it's about how you disagree. The OP defines it in the first sentence as 'behaving in aggressive, selfish, and manipulative ways' which is much more than simply disagreeing. It's quite possible to be an agreeable person, and still push through major changes.

"It's quite possible to be an agreeable person, and still push through major changes."

Mr. Rogers speaking to Congress.

Exactly. This is an entire paper around whether someone wants to be 'right or effective.' I may know the right answer and how to move forward, but if I'm an asshole about it (aggressive, manipulative and selfish), then I'm less likely to effect change.

The point is that some engineers can be seen as "disagreeable" simply by being competent and unwilling to ignore problems and "go with the flow".

I've seen this first hand. It's always smooth sailing politically to just go along with what the leader(s) say.

That can happen. I think it's often a symptom of other issues though, either with the org or with that engineers communication skills. An organisation needs to reach commitment on a course of action, and if you disagree at the right points it isn't seen as being disagreeable (either before stakeholders have become too invested, or after they have but when it has become clear that the living with the issues is too painful). The problem is that some orgs either don't seek feedback widely enough, or are not flexible enough to avoid committment until sufficient experts have had a say. Especially if that org is one that culturally doesn't value engineers.

> some engineers can be seen as "disagreeable"

Which is why the study didn't ask "is this person disagreeable" of laypeople who happen to be their coworkers, but used psychological tests designed to measure the psychological version of the term over 14 years.

>Let's take it a step further: agreeable people don't care about good engineering. They can't, by definition.

this sounds like another way of saying there is ever only one right way of doing something?

If on the other hand you believe that engineering is about tradeoffs, then being agreeable might be a willingness to work out what tradeoffs to make.

exactly, seems like a big oversimplification. I'm "agreeable" at work, as in, let's see if you are correct about your way, and if not, we'll correct it based on the data. Rarely there is a predictable binary decision about how to build stuff, at least in software.

I use the "safe enough to try" test. If I can't convince my coworker or employee that my idea has better tradeoffs (using my 30+ years of experience), I'm humble enough to know that maybe I'm wrong. I then ask myself the question "is what they are proposing safe enough to try?" If the answer is yes, then they will do their work their way and we'll learn something. They will learn the old guy might know a thing or two or I'll learn that new things come along all the time.

Either way, we are better off for it.

I agree (ha!)

If you make everybody happy, you're a politician and you're not being effective in your role. With the caveat that many people don't fully understand their role within an organization. A given person is more likely to have been hired to go with the flow than to provide, say, technical rigor or sanity checks.

Some of the best engineers I’ve ever worked were just “going with the flow”. They certainly brought tons to the table. Some people are just quiet and don’t like conflict. If you ask them what they think plus give them a calm environment, time and support you can find yourself looking at some very elegant easy to maintain systems.

>But if being agreeable means picking no battles, then what are you even doing?

Usually other people's bidding

Extraversion is completely separate from agreeableness in psychology. They are independent personality traits based on the Big Five model (which is the most scientifically supported model).

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