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Earlier the author talked about Slack, so I take that to mean "public channel" or some other in-company "public." Then "private" in this context may also be a description of a feature of the conversation, not necessarily an expectation of privacy. If your company culture accepts that a private DM conversation may be pulled into a public conversation, there's no breach of trust.

To be charitable, "speak up to take the conversation" could actually mean "I propose we move this conversation to #public_channel."

Personally, I don't even consider it unhealthy. DMs are for convenience, work conversations are better off with more visibility.

Anything that is private is assumed to be private. Trust is a 2 way street. Could at least just ask the other party. Why does it have to be automatic? Whatever is the company culture it is respected for the person at the other end.

> Anything that is private is assumed to be private

Have you been involved in a deposition or a legal hold? If you're worried about your colleagues seeing your DMs, then perhaps ponder on the consequences of the same messages becoming part of the public record via the courts or regulatory body.

Nothing communicated in the execution of your duty is truly private: check the fine print in your organization's policies.

I am so confused how on earth so many people are reading this and not realizing this is exactly about asking the other party:

> someone would speak up to take the conversation to a public channel, and things returned to a more constructive tone.

That's literally "hey, let's take this to a public channel?"

The top level reply is from someone who presumably speaks a different language primarily, and may have missed the nuance of the statement.

But it's almost like the 15+ replies are from people who didn't read the article and took this person's wrong interpretation as the truth.

I think the question is how critical you can be in public channels. Your example (of being critical of a product) feels like something I'd be comfortable saying in most public channels at my company. What I would assume is more what they're talking about at Stripe is situations where 2 employees are complaining together about another team or coworker.

There's more positive or constructive ways to raise that complaint, and I can see the value in not just having a toxic cycle where people are venting about other people in private with no actual action about it ever occurring. Constructive doesn't have to mean you're some drugged up worker drone that's ignoring security faults in a product, it just means actually trying to work out what to do about the issues you're seeing.

Most people are afraid to say anything in public channels because they fear they might alone in feeling a certain way (often times they are not). It's through private conversations, they can feel confident about their view and actually do something about it. This "everything must be public" perpetuates the culture of a seemingly happy place simmering with unsaid complaints below the surface.

My first foray into big tech was met with a culture that disallowed any private discussion. If I had a question, take it public and see what people think. If I had a complaint, take it public.

It was terrible and I hated it. Sometimes I just want to talk with one person instead of the entire engineering org.

My next job I assumed they would be the same so I defaulted to never talking to anyone, which caused its own problems, as you can imagine.

The entire public by default thing is toxic, imo.

I think I mostly agree with it, but I think having a culture that inclines towards trying to talk things out in public is probably better, but you're right about there being value in also being able to talk to your manager or your teammmate in private to share your thoughts or build consensus.

In general, I think it's one of those policies that can absolutely be toxic, but can also be healthy, and it's dependent on the surrounding culture and team and how absolute the policy is.

Things in the US up till about 10 years ago were much more like the German way of doing things.

The excessive positivity and no one being accountable for anything were conscious adaptations US management brought in around 2010 or so after there was so much press and academic pressure that everything had to be changed or millenials would refuse to work at any company that didn't change. It's possible the whole thing was a charade and that none of it was necessary to attract millenials or a more diverse/equitable employee mix.

Things in software are utterly unrecognizable compared to the 90s and early 2000s when people would yell at people for failures and there was far more accountability around failures and analysis of why things weren't working. It used to be a very "tell it like it is" culture. The way it is now there's pressure to sweep everything under the rug because of a fear that low performing employees will be offended.

Everything is hush hush and weird and the low performing employees are allowed to skate until they suddenly disappear.

The weirdness IME has even extended to where you're not allowed to talk about someone making a colossal mistake even if everyone knows who made the mistake due to a git blame or something. Not talking about it just leads to the mistake being made again and again till management makes the offender mysteriously disappear.

I'd somewhat suspect this trend in the US is probably not as prevalent in some sectors like maybe defense, though I have heard some crazy stories about useless employees being allowed to skate in that sector as well. Those are often huge companies where lots of this stuff happens.

A lot of Elon Musk's antics at twitter are basically just clumsy attempts to roll things back to the way they used to be. A lot of the excess of modern tech companies would have been unimaginable before the first .com boom. My early experiences were almost nothing was free in the office except coffee. When the team had a massive success there would be a big party, but other than that the company wasn't giving away all the free stuff all the time.

Look up the memo from the founder of Waze that he wrote to list all the reasons Google culture of babysitting people changed his employees in to nonproductive weaklings.

> when people would yell at people for failures

How does this solve problems more effectively, aside from making a few people feel bad?

> there was far more accountability

Do you have a source or any kind of metric for this, or is this based on gut feel?

> you're not allowed to talk about someone making a colossal mistake even if everyone knows who made the mistake

IME why are mistakes allowed to get through the codebase in the first place? The whole idea is that we should now have processes to catch and deal with these mistakes (code reviews, pull requests, automated tests, different environments). If your co-workers are cowboy coding and committing, then sure, have at them.

If the only lever you have to keep people from slacking off is "yell at them", you're a bad manager.

The free stuff in the office isn't meant just to coddle employees. At scale, perks are cheaper than higher comp. It becomes hard for smaller companies to compete on them. It also improves productivity. Free lunches mean people are back their desk within 30 minutes, instead of taking an hour to drive off-campus. If you have the profit margins to fund this stuff, and a scarcity of talent, it's a no-brainer.

You must be speaking about some specific subset of the US. Very little of what you've said here describes anywhere I've worked, including in the last 10 years.

> Also, I'm German, where all this US "be nice and smile all the time" thing seems at best naive, but also a form of torture and company overreach to try to emotion control employees into this drugged up alice in wonderland facade.

In my experience, the required performative cheeriness is a feature of newer companies that have over-hired. I’ve worked with several US companies with established international presence where being direct and honest was the expectation.

I’ve also worked at smaller startups where toxic positivity was basically company policy. I’ve been reprimanded for my tone not being positive enough in a meeting where we were discussing a serious and urgent issue. I’ve had an employee who couldn’t handle even the slightest bit of feedback that wasn’t glowingly positive. These experiences were rare, though, and they were all associated with companies that had hired a lot of middle managers with vague directives who had little to do other than attend meetings and cheerlead. In each case it was a sign that the company valued perceptions more than reality, and it led to poor company performance.

Step outside of those companies, though, and it’s common for moderately high pressure environments with blunt, direct feedback. I’ve also had several outright abusive bosses who would disparage me personally, threaten firing at the slightest issue, and one CEO who even fired people on the spot if he was in a bad mood. The US doesn’t have a uniform work culture.

Excessive enforced positivity goes hand in hand with easy firing. They're both indicative of companies where the management can't handle criticism, or are fundamentally scared that their success will crumble if anyone sees that the emperor is wearing no clothes.

The first stage of this is almost always executives that get comfortable smiling while lying to your face in townhalls. Next is when people start talking about "culture" as if its a tangible, ownable thing. Once the dominoes start falling it's hard to stop them

My God, yeah. Preach. Also European here and this expectation in US companies that you describe, that you gotta be perpetually chirpy and upbeat, absolutely sets my teeth on edge. Being in that environment feels like experiencing sugar overdose all the time.

How I'd love for the default expectation to be just "get the job done," do it professionally, and that's it. Sachlich, to use a German term.

Problem is the constant push for more and more. They don't want to hire mediocre 'getting the job done' people. They want people who stay up until midnight working on some project that a partner mentioned at a dinner, just so that they are recognized for their effort 6 months later in a review.

While people like me try to do their job itself as best as possible, while maintaining a healthy work-life balance and don't get burned out.

But it's not the way.

"Private" vs "public" are just Slack settings, both refer to professional communication, not to a private chat between friends. People often start conversation in private chats to avoid producing noise for wider audience, not because they intend to be mean and fear repercussions.

How is it just a Slack setting? As in if you were to talk in the office and suddenly the other side shouts out loud so everyone on the same floor can hear it that's also just a setting?

People start private chats for whatever reason they like but they assume it's private. Until there is an agreement by both sides for it to be public it shouldn't. It shouldn't matter whether that's online (via Slack) or in person (via a private room).

As a European who moved to USA almost 8 years ago, the positivity still grinds on me. Yes it’s _pleasant_, even nice, but it isn’t kind. Give me a person who speaks their mind any day.

At least it’s kinda okay in engineering land. We have our wry jokes and witty remarks. But poke your head outside that bubble and the amount of verbal gymnastics you have to wade through just to figure out what someone was trying to say … urgh.

edit: This reminds me of when my sister came to visit and we went to a farmer’s market. Someone bumped into her and said ”Excuse me” and she later said ”Aw Americans are so nice!” … no dear, that means “get out of my way asshole”

Wow, that is... a very cynical way to view that interaction. Obviously you were there to hear how they said it, but I'll apologize if I bump into someone on accident and earnestly mean it.

What would you think is more honest? Someone bumps into you and cusses you out? Says nothing and ignores that the may have hurt you or caused you to drop something?

Oh no, this was a very San Francisco interaction. My sister was definitely in the way, had no idea what she was doing, and got an “cough excuse me” after not noticing the person awkwardly trying to get around her for the prerequisite 10 seconds.

And yeah in a crowded place with people having very little personal space? Just ignore it and move on. It’s not a big deal. Obviously there are levels of crowdedness, but somewhere between empty room and front row at a concert, you stop acknowledging small bumps.

Either way, I don’t think I’ve seen anyone use “excuse me” as an apology in SF. It’s more like the Minnesotan “ope” – said while you’re already shoving your way past someone purposefully. An apology sounds more like ”Shit, I’m sorry! Are you okay?”

So, in that case, what would have been the more "honest" way for that person to have gotten your sister to move? "Will you please move out of my way" is honest, but feels like it has just as much of an implied "You inconsiderate asshole" while taking far more words and time.

I'm mostly curious because I've been living with a variety of German travelers in the US for the last 10 years for reasons and have, if anything, found them to be overly polite to the point of annoyance relative to my American instincts.

I had a similar reaction when I moved to Canada when I was a kid.

It's just cultural norms. Inability to know what someone was trying to say is a feature, not a bug.

Sure, in engineering and science, it is a bug, but in everyday life, what a great feature. It forces people to translate vague-speak into my-worldview-speak, which helps bridge the culture/worldview gap. You can always drill down and double-check that you've interpreted correctly but communicating in vague-speak avoids so many sharp corners people tend to have - it's great stuff.

Can you imagine what hell places with lots of immigrants would be if all of them thought their culture was the way to go and looked down upon all that is unfamiliar and foreign?

My wife refuses to move to Canada for this reason. You can’t trust anybody.

> no dear, that means “get out of my way asshole”

That depends entirely on the tone of voice used. Typically, people mean "excuse me".

> I can't find the story here anymore, from a few weeks ago, where the guy who worked at a laser factory tried to tell people that their laser aim wasn't stable, and the company only fixed it after the customers complained - because the colleagues were aghast at such a "non-positive" attitude from the new guy.

I believe you’re referring to this comment, from the discussion about normalisation of deviance:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34795213

I sometimes simplify social interactions by dividing them into two sets: friendly-social and engineering.

In friendly-social environments, it is all about avoiding overly negative topics. It is not lying, but just keeping the conversation track on things that are positive and interesting.

In engineering environments, logic is king. You need to be able to tell an engineer that their rocket designs will not fly and put ego's aside.

> In engineering environments, logic is king. You need to be able to tell an engineer that their rocket designs will not fly and put ego's aside.

In software(!) engineering opinions are important though.

Of course. This is just a simplification that I find useful.

Software is less like traditional engineering as there are no "right" ways to do things.

> Firstly, taking private things public is a breach of trust. There was a reason this wasn't public

There is no breach of trust if there is no expectation of privacy: we are at work, everything is logged and recorded[1] and you shouldn't be ashamed to stand by your work/words. Depositions, subpoenas, a lowly HR complaint or a curious IT drone can blow away the illusion privacy. As the saying goes: Don't write anything you dont want published in the New York Times

> Also, I'm German, where all this US "be nice and smile all the time" thing seems at best naive

Hard disagree: you don't have to smile - but you have to meet a baseline of professionalism. I had a non-American colleague who loved to criticize my work in public but requested that I send my critical feedback to him via 1:1 emails. His aggression only stopped when I continued to make all our conversations public - warts and all. Sunlight is the best disinfectant.

1. Go ahead and read your organizations electronic communications policy if you think I'm wrong.

Funny since in my experience, germans are usually a lot "faker" than americans. Like, by a huge margin. Americans are overly positive, but they aren't necessarily deceptive.

> all this US "be nice and smile all the time" thing seems at best naive

This is hardly a universal US thing, though. The vast majorities of companies I've worked at weren't like that.

Ah this was the biggest learning for me too as I moved here. Didn't know it had a name. Passive aggressive behavior! I don't know if this is a big co thing. I felt in startups (I mean real ones - not the let us wait 15+ years without going Public with hundreds of employees) there is little time to be passive aggressive and you just speak your mind. Ofcourse the challenge here was how to be candid without being an ahole!

Agree. I would add that "Shit-talking" is necessary in any healthy organization. Employees needs a space in which they can talk openly with other peers (usually, their equals) about what they don't like at the organization. If you cannot have private DMs for that, well, employees will use other channels (e.g., Telegram).

Yeah, that really rubs me the wrong way in a "virtue police" sense. However, from a company PoV, it may be an exercise in Japanese values where you are taught to suppress your public persona to become more agreeable or else be the squeaky nail that gets hammered.