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Comment by highperfanon | Hacker News Reader

Those behaviors manifest when you work in high performance environments.

Yeah, if you're on the sidelines in an over-funded environment with little connection to the performance of the business, then you can play tea-party and be nice, and inclusive, and oh so delightful.

But when you've got a critical deadline you need to meet, and some fuckhead decided he was going to slack and cause the rest of us to have to pick up his end of things due to shear caprice, there's going to be strong language thrown around about the situation -- where all patience has already been exhausted weeks ago.

Same shit happens in the Boy Scouts, same shit happens in the military, same shit happens in boardrooms, same shit happens everywhere people go to get stuff done.

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[When someone does something stupid, and then people get angry]

That's not what we're talking about here.

But rather: the type of people who basically prefer to be assholes, on general principle. Even when no one is messing up and everything is going perfectly fine.

Then we're talking past each other because our experiences are at odds.

I have never met, what I imagine is, a gratuitous asshole in the workplace.

I've met people who were just all-around cantankerous assholes outside of work, but I quickly distance myself from them.

Maybe it's because I've never worked in a corporate environment -- but only small, close-knit teams where that shit isn't tolerated. Or maybe I've just been lucky, I don't know.

Yes. You’re lucky. They exist, and my first rule of start-ups is “no assholes”.

I’ve encountered true jerks who naturally gravitate towards anger and abuse, and I’ve even worked for a couple of them. It’s quite difficult. When it takes someone energy to keep from getting angry, that’s a dangerous boss to have.

Conversely, what I have encountered more frequently over time is people taking firm refusal to give them what they want (e.g., sign off on a design) as meanness. Firm assertiveness has been conflated with aggression in some contexts. It’s a losing game to be put in an environment with technically weak people where accusations of meanness for holding to organizational standards are given weight. B-players will eventually recognize the crack in the incentive model and get ahead via complaints instead of competence.

There was a point where Jeff Bezos advocated truth-seeking over social cohesion regularly for Amazon, and it resulted in a bruising but brutally effective culture able to attack numerous hard problems effectively.

“Affable” can only get people so far in a productive enterprise, but it’s just no fun to work with a jerk. Jerks and mediocrity are both ways to kill teams.

Yeah the corporate world is absolutely full of such people.

Granted, it usually isn't premeditated; it's more likely to be of the reactive / passive sort. Some form of: "Oh I'm having a bad day, so I'm going to spontaneously get salty at you over something completely non-consequential, or in fact, over an outright, and frankly pretty thick-headed misunderstanding on my part. Not that I'll ever apologize, though. Oh and good luck trying to go over my head to get one out of me."

That sort of thing. Less frequently, outright nasty and career-damaging (and sometimes health-damaging) stuff happens too.

Such that at some point, one realizes that, to a large extent -- putting up with this nonsense is what the gig is all about, and what you're essentially getting paid for.

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