When your coworker does great work, tell their manager (2020) | Hacker News Reader

When your coworker does great work, tell their manager (2020)

jvns.ca

572 pointsvikrum358 comments

>Ask if it’s ok first…

This is very astute. Not everyone likes getting praise in public settings or they might not want their micromanaging manager to know they helped you outside the scope of their work. You should be cognizant of when praise should be given (i.e. when is it appropriate) and in what context as mentioned in the article.

That said, if you aren’t thanking and praising your colleagues for doing good work - YTA of the team. If you are calling out your colleagues for doing bad work, or not the way you would do it work, you should try to rephrase into praise w/ direction. “I really liked how you tackled this, have you thought about this approach?” Instead of “Why didn’t you do it this way?”

*edit* There’s a whole bunch of interesting information on why behavioral praise is better than outcome praise. Here’s a video about it I find sums it up perfectly (though it’s geared towards how it relates to children) https://youtu.be/59gx55bNunU

>“I really liked how you tackled this, have you thought about this approach?” Instead of “Why didn’t you do it this way?”

That crosses the line by lying, I think it would be better to say "I think it would be better if you did it this way." It's bad to call them stupid or make a superfluous claim of objectivity, but you don't need to pretend to smile and praise.

I like to say something like "Hey, I realize you put a lot of hard work into X, but I think Y would be more efficient and save us all time in the long run!"

Because then you're being totally truthful (assuming they actually are putting in effort) while still not coming across too directly.

"It's impressive how much time you were able to waste while only accomplishing X", but said a lot more politely.

This is how that would come across to most people, yes.

Praise should never be a time to display your intellectual superiority.

Not at all. The trick is to force yourself to find something about their approach that you liked. There's almost always something likable.

It's also the trick to being liked in general. Not everyone cares about that, but I've found it more of an asset than a distraction.

No, it's absolutely horrible. It means you think the person you're talking to is dumb and can be manipulated with this phrasing. They see through you.

It's not about phrasing, it's about being genuine and also choosing to have a certain perspective which builds the other person up. There's nothing to see through.

> it's about being genuine

I think this is an incredibly important lesson. Don't lie, _actually_ find something good to say. It's a goddamned super power, and it's also very good for your own mental health.

It’s out of context. Not all adults need or want other adults to ‘build them up’. If you start with some unrelated positive thing, it will be recognized as a manipulation technique because context tells us there’s no other reason to raise the point.

> If you start with some unrelated positive thing, it will be recognized as a manipulation technique because context tells us there’s no other reason to raise the point.

That's true, but nobody (that I saw) suggested saying things that don't fit the context.

> Not all adults need or want other adults to ‘build them up’.

Everyone wants respect and for people to be "on their side," and that's what we're talking about here. If someone doesn't care about your opinion, they won't mind you treating them respectfully, but if someone does care, then they'll mind when you don't. So why not just treat everyone respectfully?

It's manipulative only if there really is no redeeming quality to their approach, which, in any realistic scenario there probably is.

I interpret this as, not that you should lie, you should just NOT focus 100% on the negative aspect. At the very least you can thank them for taking the time & effort to implement this solution & test it or w/e (I assume they did "some" work & put in some amount of well meaning effort).

If I can't genuinely find anything to praise about something I want to criticism, it's a sign that it's pretty bad (or I have a bad working relationship with this person) and that is a bigger, separate problem

I think you have a really good point here - but have you thought about being a little less abrasive in your phrasing? It can help your point gain acceptance.

This thread is a perfect example of OPs suggestion and why it works.

I think it's sarcasm or a joke, because there are two replies I've seen phrased like "I think [praise] but [suggestion]".

Here's another. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37342414

This comes off as passive aggressive. I would avoid this kind of phrasing, unless your goal is to needle people while maintaining plausible deniability.

You are spot on about lying and intentional manipulation. It's a horrible way to be.

However. that's not what they said. They said "find something you genuinely like about an approach." It means you're smart enough to find the aspects that are worth reinforcing in the face of something that you find problematic. You can't just do it as a checkbox. You have to genuinely and authentically recognize the positive.

A better way to describe it.

Have you ever brought in a new engineer; and their first pull request gets a dozen or more 'Change this' 'this won't handle X'?

Watch an NCGs face as the avalanche of (mostly minor, but still 'you did X wrong') PR comments come in.

But if you're the reviewer - be sure to comment on nifty things in the code also. Call out that neat usage of struct as a switch or the context manager, or even praise base understanding of the problem flow.

Mixing praise in with the (hopefully constructive) criticism can go a loooong way toward building a healthy team environment. And - Suprise! - you'll find you actually get invited to that beer lunch instead of always being bitched about at it.

It's not intended to be manipulative or lying, it's meant as shorthand for saying:

"I've reviewed your work and I have feedback. To begin, I genuinely find X and Y facets of your work to be good and well done. I am here to praise you for that work. I also found P and Q to be deficient in ways A and B; unless there are additional factors I do not understand, I recommend making changes G and K to areas P and Q."

But that's a lot of words framed very stiffly, and despite being framed extremely flatly, may still be received poorly. Hence why folks go for the much shorter and less formal "I really liked X and Y, have you thought about approaching P and Q with technique G and K?"

Are you 100% right every single time? The problem with not using simple communication niceties is that you not only put the other person on defensive, you put yourself on defensive when your opinions on the approach end up wrong.

Yes, there are clear times when some work doesn't meet standard and it's important to be very straight forward. But, most of the time we're dealing in shades of grey with different tradeoffs.

Don't be seen through then. Actually appreciate your co-workers and see the good qualities in them.

Some of y'all are really overthinking the example. If you ever said:

>very fast solution, but you missed this edge case

It's the exact same format. I can praise the performance while also acknowledging that there may be some correctness issues (hopefully not such a nasty edge case performance falls off the cliff, but it happens).

It's very different talking to strangers on the internet via text versus a coworker in person or video call.

As others have said, the person will know if you are being genuine or not. Which is the real core point; not the particular phrasing you use.

Not dumb. Human. It’s rare to come across someone who, after hearing by anything vaguely negative about them, is listening attentively to what comes next. Not saying that such people don’t exist. I can count the ones I came across in my 44 years of life on two fingers.

This includes people who directly said that they want to hear things in a straightforward fashion. This includes me, who also likes to hear things in a straightforward fashion. We’re wired in a way that we don’t even notice.

If someone tries to make me believe something that isn't true, that's as bad as a lie in my book. Avoiding telling an outright lie only serves to keep the dishonest person safe, either from their own conscience or from legal trouble.

which part of "find something about their approach that you liked" is not being understood here? Have you only seen horrible code throughout your career? Has every single thing you ever reviewed rated a 0/10 in your book?

Avoid telling lies by not lying.

Sometimes I am taken aback to realize how different people can be.

It seems that you would appreciate it if other people treated you this way. Maybe most people would agree. I, however, find the behavior you endorse almost inhumanly manipulative. The notion that my coworkers would hold me in such low regard that they think I need this kind of coddling is disturbing.

I'd take shouted insults over this condescension any day. At least then I'd know where I stand.

>It seems that you would appreciate it if other people treated you this way.

by appreciating the work I do? It's not perfect and I of course hate a good amount of code I write, but I'm so confused how people can treat a compliment as "coddling". What's wrong with taking pride in your craft every once in a while?

Are we confused about frequency? No, I am fine with 9/10 of my commits having a "LGTM" and leaving it at that. Not ever task needs praise.

But you surely understand that there's a difference in praises and insults. I'm fine 10% of the time being complimented. I'm not fine 10% of the time being insulted. If you can't get your point across without calling my (or your) person into question, we have much bigger issues at play.

> Not at all [a lie]. The trick is to force yourself to find something about their approach that you liked.

A lie is not always a falsehood; it is rather any use of communication with the deliberate intention of worsening somebody’s idea of the state of the world, and cherry-picking evidence (your “trick”) very much counts. I’d say it’s a very popular approach, even. You’re welcome to use a different word than “lie” here if you want, but my point is that either way the result is the same: the target is now worse off in their knowledge than they previously were.

In the spirit of Harry Frankfurt’s definition, bullshit is the same as a lie but instead the perpetrator wants to change somebody’s perception of the world with disregard to the actual state of it, not in contradiction to that state.

So from your description I’m not sure if your “trick” counts as lying or bullshitting: generally speaking, adjusting your logic or evidence to arrive at a predetermined conclusion is bullshit, but that you talk about a “trick” suggests an acknowledgment that you’re deliberately not communicating your best idea of reality, which would make it a lie.

But it’s definitely one of the two, and regardless of which it is I still think it’s quite bad, both in the immediate sense of not letting the other person (if you’re right) or you (if you’re wrong) learn, and in the sense of eroding the conventions of honest communication in ways that make it harder for others to learn in the future.

The trick is to have a genuine respect, interest, and empathy for another person's approach, even if you disagree.

If you just take a superficial facsimile of what is suggested, without the actual respect and empathy, it will sound like bullshit as you say: it is.

But stopping to condition yourself to be empathetic first is a way of, I guess, bootstrapping that respect and empathy.

It's a low bar that people frequently don't clear.

“I really liked how you tackled this, have you thought about this approach?”

I hate this because it’s usually just a shit sandwich. “Great work. Actually it sucked. Keep going.”

“Great work” is an outcome. “Great effort” is an effort praise. It can still suck and you can still have great effort. You can’t have Great Work and it sucks.

what's the difference between "Great work" and "I really liked how you tackled this" ?

I assume it's a sports analogy for american football or similar. If you try to tackle an opposing player and you miss or do a bad job, "I really liked how you tackled <player>" is clearly talking about the work, not the effort. If you were talking about the effort, it should be something like, "that was a good attempt!" It's kind of like, "Nice shot!" when the person actually missed the goal. It just doesn't make sense.

Webster’s 1913 (as in, the 1913 edition of the dictionary) relates this sense as “grappling with”, as in wrestling, and provides an example from a Dublin University publication to illustrate this exact idiomatic usage we’re discussing.

I’d say it’s not derived from American football.

thank you for sharing that (truly that is interesting data), but how do you know that GP was using the Webster's 1913 definition?

Because "tackling a problem" is about the approach. That's how the phrase is commonly understood. The Webster's reference is just backup.

Dictionary.com provides "Make determined efforts to deal with (a problem or difficult task)." As the first verb form, before the football/rugby definition.

Further, the hn guidelines suggest that even if there was more ambiguity, we should presume the strongest interpretation.

I cited an old source to make it clearer that this is not a new sense, and that its entry into English probably had nothing to do with American Football, which existed in 1913 but was still far from being the sport of the US.

I’d have cited the OED instead, if I had access. I bet it’s got examples of this usage dating back to 1500 or something. It’s simply a sense of the word, now, hardly even figurative at all (as “grapple” barely is, in some similar senses, now)

I think their point (in this discussion here) can make sense and remain true to the point (made in the example statement) by adjusting the feedback segue to something like "I really [appreciate that] you tackled this".

Yes, exactly, I agree. That's the point I've been trying (and obviously failing) to get through.

Tackling is analogous to achieving. To put effort into and complete. To complete a tough subject. “to seize, take hold of, or grapple with especially with the intention of stopping or subduing”

The latter provides a tiny bit more detail about what you are praising. It is still lacking in concrete details though and can be improved by adding more about what you liked about why you liked how they tackled it.

and while outcomes are... great it's the effort that should be prioritized because we want that brought to all initiatives, not just the ones where you're going to be successful. Every parent should know this; give feedback like "You worked really hard on X" (effort) vs. "You're so smart!" (outcome)

The pithiness of the example is not doing any favors. In the real world there would be much more substance.

Would it work better if it was delivered as “good intention, decent start, improve the middle, but an alright finish”? Shit sandwich? Call it what you will. If it is genuine and true, lead with the good and deliver the bad afterwards works wonders. While not everyone reacts that way, many people get defensive if you lead with the bad, and won’t hear the good as something good.

Have you never had a co-worker do something in a way you appreciate for it's skillfulness but doesn't quite address what you asked them to help with? Have you ever put extra effort into something and done your best, only to have someone ignore your accomplishments and focus on what you did wrong?

You don't have to like the result to like the co-workers initiative.

Let’s break down your version: “I think it would be better if…” You start with an opinion. That’s going to cause any listener to put up their guard. It’s the beginning of any sort of confrontations. By saying “Thank you for the effort…” you are acknowledging the work they put into it and showing empathy by seeing their work they have done. If it isn’t correct, either it should have been course corrected by management or volunteer for the next one. If you think something should be done a certain away across the board, create a brown bag or lunch and learn where you evangelize it and get consensus.

You aren’t lying when you give praise about someone’s effort (unless they gave none, in which case why are you praising to begin with?), you would be lying if you said “You did a great job” when the solution is potentially tech debt for later. It’s a matter of communication and human behavior.

You wouldn’t praise someone by saying “I think it could be better”.

Your second example is a good one and I agree is a more effective approach to communicating.

But GP was right. There's a huge difference between your first example:

> “I really liked how you tackled this, have you thought about this approach?”

and the second:

> “Thank you for the effort…”

The first is most likely a lie, otherwise you wouldn't be offering an alternative suggestion! If somebody said that to me I'd feel extremely patronized and would consider that person very disingenuous.

Offering a different point of view helps either confirm their decisions or open up avenues for improvement of their work. It’s not about telling “this is how I would do it” but rather “Have you thought about other options and approaches? What do you think? Why did you choose this route?” helps the individual weigh the pros and cons with each. It should never be an opportunity for you to chime in with how you would have done it (even if you would have done it that way). You simply want to expose the other possibilities so that they are aware of them and haven’t overlooked a potential savings or killer-feature.

to be clear, I fully agree with this and your broader point. It's the specific verbiage in your first example that I think is problematic, mainly because it feels disingenuous and insincere at best, manipulative at worst. Which is highly unfortunate because I think the vast majority of the time the motives are pure!

It’s funny because I still feel the opposite of you — I think the example where you say that you like their solution is a better approach, as long as it’s not horrible.

It leaves open the possibility that you as the reviewer are actually mistaken, and they possibly have a good reason for doing it that way.

I may be the senior reviewing the junior’s code, but they probably spent longer looking at the problem than me and there is a chance that I’m missing something. By suggesting “have you considered this, it may be able to handle x situation better”, you respect their work more.

It depends on context though, if somebody clearly just didn’t understand something obvious, then I’ll just tell them directly.

Either way, probably a difference in our opinions of feedback, you might prefer more directness than me

It feels stilted and weird to me. My first thought was "OK, that sounds unnatural, I'd have to say it different." Good idea, but I could never let it come out of my mouth that was since no actual human being talks that way.

as a manager, I'm not looking to challenge your outcome, I'm looking for you to explain why your solution works best compared to the others that were suggested. "have you thought about X?" is a genuine curiosity so that I may defend your solution to the higher ups when they ask me "what about X?". They are constantly being courted by vendors. Vendors who think they know the problem better than you do. Let's show them that you covered the bases and hit that home run properly.

In this context, is it weird to ask if you've "thought about X"? Is it disingenuine or condescending to you? Servant leadership is about supporting the team that I'm responsible for, to block and shield them from the wrath of VPs who want blood because their napkin-idea-over-cocktails wasn't selected for funding.

I'm trying to prepare you, the presenter of the solution, for the onslaught of questions that will come your way. If you feel these kinds of questions are a praise sandwich, I'm more than happy to present your solution for you.

interesting indeed, thank you!

> It leaves open the possibility that you as the reviewer are actually mistaken, and they possibly have a good reason for doing it that way.

That's a great point. There must be room in this to cover that the person actually had good reasons that the asker doesn't know about. It's a hard needle to thread.

"I like the way you tackeled this" Implies the work has been done successfully. ", have you thought about this approach?" is trying to imply that the work is not sufficient actually without actually saying that. Your message has taken a complete 180 since the first half of the sentence but you haven't given the listener any clues because if you use a word like "but" it might hurt the facade of niceness. It's mixed messaging.

But I think a lot of the issue here is because were talking about a made up example. If we just add a little more detail to the made up response it clears up a lot of the ambiguity and makes it sound less contradictory.

"I really liked how you tackled [X Requirement], have you thought about [Y Requirement + approach]?"

These approaches and how effective they are are both culturally and individually sensitive.

The "Yes, but" approach works well in a context where people understand it as feedback that they should change. Softening the criticism with praise works for many people. It can also backfire in a context where people distrust praise, where the criticism is not understood as such, or when people have trouble with American business idioms.

The more direct approach works better in other contexts. I have had coworkers who responded much better to blunt criticism about why they should do things differently than to a praise sandwich.

This gets very tricky if you are interacting with multiple very different people at once. What is a strong enough criticism for one person might be well below detectable for another. There isn't one ideal answer or approach.

It's a lot easier to teach many people how to receive communication in one style than it is to teach everyone to send communication in many styles. We can, and many organizations do, write style guides for internal communication. The most successful such style guides (eg. military, intelligence) emphasize the ABCs (accuracy, brevity, clarity) any to avoid extraneous verbiage.

If your coworkers respond negatively to a simple, direct question like "Why didn't you do it this way?", they can be trained to handle professional communication more dispassionately (more professionally).

There’s a whole division dedicated to undoing military communication style to adapt it to the real world in the private sector. Just FYI. Also, the word “didn’t” doesn’t exist in that communication style… “unable”, “status red”, “negative”, “not able”. The words “can’t” and “didn’t” are stricken.

Can you help me understand your intent with phrasing your response that way? I can see it coming off as challenging instead of collaborative, but if there's something I'm not seeing, I'd like to know.

Or, taking your cue, I could just say, "I think it would be better if you didn't immediately presume that you knew better than the person who actually spent hours working on the problem".

And, for those who say they like the direct approach in the second paragraph better, I don't disagree that it's a better response to a flip HN comment. When you're reacting to something someone has put serious personal effort into, a bit of tact goes a long way.

If you struggle with "I really liked" because you really didn't, I'd suggest the value-neutral "That's an interesting approach!" followed by "have you thought about X"/"how does it compare to <other approach>"/"how did you land on it".

You're still starting from a positive point of view for the recipient, which makes them more open to actually engaging with you. Without having to "pretend to smile and praise".

It's an interesting choice alright. If it weren't, you wouldn't be talking about it.

It's still not an interesting approach unless it interested you... There are no positive sounding meaningless adjectives because positive and meaningless are conflicting attributes.

If you're dead-set on being somebody nobody wants to work with, sure, keep ignoring that people have feelings. It won't work particularly well for you in the long run, but you do you.

Would you praise someone by saying “That’s an interesting approach?” Or is that just a comment on their outcome?

I'm not going to praise an outcome that's clearly suboptimal, but "that's interesting" still beats beating them over the head with "well, I'm always scrupulously honest, I don't care about anybody's feelings, your stuff sucks".

There's always effort-based praise if you want to praise.

Very often they _have_ thought about the other approach and rejected it for reasons. When you go into something like this open minded, you might come out learning something new. :)

Your assertion that this sort of linguistic hedge is a lie is itself based on a few false assumptions:

1. That there is one correct way to do something

2. That you know that way, and they don't

3. That they didn't consider and disregard that way in early planning due to something you're unaware of

What you see as lying is intended to avoid an arrogant disregard for their time and thought, and also to avoid having ego dictate the conversation rather than ideas.

"I think..." is a hedge, "I really liked," (when you didn't) is a lie.

But what if you did? No one is saying to lie. If you genuinely cannot find any good out of the code review (considerations for performance, easy to read, functional solution, time to execute, ability to reach out to proper peers), then maybe they shouldn't have been hired to begin with? Even a well picked intern these days should have one of those qualities.

So, that would be "I think you did it wrong; of course, I can't claim to know that objectively; anyway, I really liked the way you did it"...

You sound wishy washy and you need to review your requirements, and/or rope in someone who does knows how to do it right in that case.

There is nothing wrong with "this doesn't feel right but I don't have the capacity to tell". If you aren't qualified for that sort of code review, find the proper peer who can.

My comment was parody. Surely, nobody actually says things like that?

unfortunately I have seen that sort of language. Usually more as mumblings of a manager that has given up on trying to maintain a quality codebase, but I suppose Poe's Law strikes yet again.

It's right there in the description of the situation. You didn't like it: "If you are calling out your colleagues for doing bad work, ...".

There's a spectrum of "like" and "didn't like", you know. Have you ever truly come across a situation with a co-worker where there was no redeedming quality in their code review?

> Have you ever truly come across a situation with a co-worker where there was no redeedming quality in their code review?

This is irrelevant. Calling out specific parts as good is a great idea, if nothing else as clarification of what in particular it was that you didn't like. This is not what people are arguing against.

In the example under discussion, the judgement of the work as a whole was "bad", while the communication on the work as a whole was "I really liked your approach". This is not pointing out redeeming qualities, it's just dishonesty.

>This is irrelevant.

no, it's the entire point. Don't focus all on the bad, we're biased towards that and it's something we should always keep in mind.

>In the example under discussion, the judgement of the work as a whole was "bad",

exhibit A. Where in that top post was the objective judgement "bad"? As a reminder:

> If you are calling out your colleagues for doing bad work, or not the way you would do it work, you should try to rephrase into praise w/ direction. “I really liked how you tackled this, have you thought about this approach?” Instead of “Why didn’t you do it this way?”

We're assuming the "caller" in this case is right. When there may not be a metric of "correct approach". This is especially highlighted with "not the way you would do it". Okay, who says your way is the best way?

If you cant self-introspect and understand different approaches, as well as shortcomings in your own, then yes. I would say you are that hostile worker no one wants to work with.

> If you cant self-introspect and understand different approaches, as well as shortcomings in your own, then yes. I would say you are that hostile worker no one wants to work with.

That is entirely unwarranted, and beside the point.

> Where in that top post was the objective judgement "bad"?

No objective judgement is being made or communicated.

> We're assuming the "caller" in this case is right.

We don't need to assume that, or even take technical merit into consideration. This is not a question of who is right or wrong in a technical sense.

What is communicated by the caller's first sentence is whether the caller liked the approach. By their own admission they did not like it ("bad work"), but they communicated that they did like it ("I really liked").

okay, so we're talking in circles and you simply dismiss any attempts at clarifiation. I have a point but you are free to ignore it, even if you think it's irrelevant it is to me.

just keep this thread in mind the next time you say in your mind "I don't know why coworker X isn't getting it". Sometimes you need to check under your shoe.

EDIT: the last response shows I was wasting my time here. I wish we had an ignore feature on HN.

> Sometimes you need to check under your shoe.

Indeed.

Yes? It's certainly not common but I've been asked to review PRs where the author misunderstood the problem, did completely the wrong thing, and did a bad job of doing the wrong thing too. I think it's always been from someone who normally does decent work but was in a rush for whatever reason and just completely botched things this one time.

nah people know when they’re sucking and you just look patronizing talking like that

ever play any competitive games? theres nothing you can say directly to a person when they screw up. you have to just have to ignore and focus on the gameplay. saying anything to them raises the likelihood of a negative outcome.

Coworkers have different incentives than players in a game of Dota. In a competitive game, they'll skulk or grief until the game is over, then queue for another and likely will be matched with other people. That behavior doesn't really work in an office, since people are working with the same colleagues every day.

is it incentives or are these just the underlying feelings that happen in most people and there isn’t as much of a reason to suppress in an online environment? Sort of like the road rage problem

That's just not true. What do you think happens when the catcher goes to talk to the pitcher? It's not just strategy.

"Good eye" "good hustle" "you got this" "we got em on the next one"-- good teammates find lots of ways to support their teammates and keep morale up.

I think the point behind this discussion is that people will take external input in very different ways, and if you spent some time with your colleage/teammate hopefully you found a way that works for them. There will definitely be catchers that tell you to fuck off if you come to them and they already know what you're trying to say.

Praise sandwitches for some, straight requests for other, no direct communication in some cases etc. it needs to be tailored and not a recipe.

Mike Tomlin (coach of the steelers) is a master motivator. I really like what he said to his rookie QB after a bad loss https://twitter.com/sdextrasmedia/status/1585807604277657600

"There's going to be better days. Head, high, fighting all the time." You can see Kenny Picket visibly lift his head up as they walked back to the locker room.

yea that's because it's his coach. if his teammate said that and it wasn't someone he had a lot of rapport with he'd just say eat a dick

A few potentially false assumptions. The (very real) possibility of being wrong exists, but declaring that because of it nobody ever—or you specifically—can be right seems overkill and contradictory to the ethos of the engineering profession and the approach it uses for its chosen range of problems.

(I have the vague impression that people who talk along these lines usually think that being wrong is somehow a bad thing, or at least that even if they personally don’t others do and those others need to be accomodated.

Of course, while being wrong might not be pleasant, it’s absolutely necessary, and the harder the problem is the more times you’ll need to be wrong before you solve it. Thus shaming people for being wrong, especially in an educational setting, is one of the very small number of things that make me genuinely furious. Not telling people they’re wrong when [you think] they are because you think they might feel shame because of it is... not as bad, but still feels seriously counterproductive. I can’t say I have a grip on how to train or at least help others out of that shame, though.

Is your motivation different here? Because, I don’t know, you seem to say that telling others they’re wrong [about an engineering problem] always [or often] constitutes arrogance, and that is such an extrodinarily extreme position from where I’m standing that I can’t convincingly model it.)

Drop your insistence on a dichotomy of right and wrong and the advice may make more sense.

Most of the time there are lots of ways to do things and there are lots of trade-offs, some humility when addressing others is a useful skill and you will very rarely know for sure that you are right and the other person is entirely wrong.

Interpretation depends on the culture. In UK this is basically "you fucked up", in Germany this means "you did great with small nuances" :)

I think the OP confused 2 states. One is bad, and it's important to let the person know it didn't meet standard for whatever reason. Use all the normal communication styles for that.

The other is, it wasn't done how I would do it, but isn't necessarily bad. That's when I would use the approach you have an issue with.

In a lot of engineering there is no right answer, only different tradeoffs. It could certain be that the reviewer isn't seeing a tradeoff that the writer saw, etc...

I've often phrased it closer to "I like how much effort you put into this. You clearly put some thought in, did you consider this approach?"

I don't have to say I liked the solution to appreciate the effort and dedication.

I think it's important not to lie, but I don't think the above is automatically a lie. Instead, it's a call to evaluate people on multiple dimensions rather than one.

When you're giving feedback to someone, it is often a knee jerk thing to ONLY evaluate the outcome of their work. The other thing you should evaluate, though, is your estimation of their effort, e.g. how hard they worked at it, and your estimation of their process, e.g. how well they used their time.

If you only evaluate the outcome of their work, and the work is not adequate, you have given them a purely negative evaluation. If you acknowledge respect for their toil and their process, then you have given them 2 positive evaluations and 1 negative evaluation. You're also acknowledging that because you respect their toil and process, they are doing the right thing in spite of needing the course correction you are providing.

Of course, maybe you have a negative opinion on all 3 aspects of the evaluation. If you think they didn't apply themselves, e.g. their effort was not good enough, AND you think they were't efficient in their process, AND you think the outcome was bad, then certainly it would be a lie to praise any of those aspects, though at that point there's almost certainly something more fundamental that's going on and the person is not a good fit for the job.

Finally, it's important to evaluate your own sense of certainty about the feedback.

I think the important thing about the above advice is that if you are giving feedback and you only focus on the course correction part, it's safe to assume that most people will take that as negative feedback on all the aspects of their work. Now, there are situations and teams where there is so much trust built up around everyone's mutual respect that you can skip to the outcome feedback. There are also feedback-recipients who are confident enough in themselves that they feel that they don't need anything but correctional feedback. In other words, "This was shit!" can totally fly when there's a lot of mutual trust and confidence. But too often I've seen people misread the room in that aspect: THEY, the feedback-givers, have plenty of psychological safety, and they think that is extended to other people who absolutely don't feel that way.

The other (depressing) situation is that newcomers often want to praise someone for their work, not realizing they work in a company whose managers are focused on playing games and forming alliances. In such environments, praising someone can actually work against you. I've heard the finance tech industry tends to suffer from this.

Thankfully this seems rarer than the one you're mentioning, where everyone is happy to build a nice company they want to work for. It's an odd situation, where the natural incentives align to reward the opposite. Is there a way to guard against those?

I’ve seen things…

Unfortunately the only way to win at office politics is to either not play, or play to win. Pick. If you find yourself in an organization where upper management is vying for control playing politics and alliances, I think it might be time to reach out to your network.

Sounds like a dysfunctional workplace, or at least a very bad manager, if one has to secretly help colleagues. I'd leave that boss or job as soon as possible.

Giving praise should always be OK. Rephrasing feedback for bad work as praise also sounds like a bad idea. In my experience, negative feedback should be honest, clear, constructive, and private.

Agreed. If my manager was like what I described, not liking praise given because it was out of scope of their routine, and was immediately upset - I’d be gone too. However, if it’s something that happens over and over again and eventually your manager says “Hey, it’s great your helping others, let’s document that so you can get back to the departments initiatives”. I’d have more respect.

>Sounds like a dysfunctional workplace, or at least a very bad manager, if one has to secretly help colleagues.

There are gradations of things though. There are sometimes things you want to be doing, don't take a huge amount of time, and you know are clearly out of your scope. You then have a choice to just stop doing or continue to do quietly on the side. (Where the helpee knows silence is golden.)

Companies function through all sorts of informal networks that are often better for not having too much light shown on everything.

"they might not want their micromanaging manager to know they helped you outside the scope of their work."

So true.

My manager was telling me it would look good if I contribute outside of the team. I recently spent maybe 15-30 minutes helping another team - not because I was told to but just because it was the right thing to do (I was the only person left with the knowledge). My manager found out then told me that I shouldn't be helping other teams without getting approval, etc. WTF?

The only way I'd give one of my reports this feedback is if I'd previously heard "I'm spending all of my time helping other teams get stuff done, and it's blocking me from getting my own stuff done."

> or they might not want their micromanaging manager to know they helped you outside the scope of their work

This is me. My boss lays so much on my plate that I legit get talked to when I help other people. I tell them not to tell anyone I helped them

I think that performative praise is obnoxious most of the time, and causes more trouble than it’s worth, unless there’s a process behind it. Individual public stuff tends to bias heroics or forget people behind the scenes.

In public, team praise is the best policy.

Sometimes you just want someone to acknowledge the hard effort you put into it and share the rejoice that it’s over/complete.

Totally agree. You just need to be mindful of context.

I’m in a senior director role. Part of that is that I need to be cognizant of what I say and how I say it, because Spooky23 is talking, but “corporate officer guy” is who the audience hears.

One early mistake that I made was recognizing a colleague who was essential to my aspect of delivering a key project. Which was true. But because of how I said it and what I didn’t provide (context), a person reached out to me, genuinely hurt and upset because they felt that the (very significant) contributions that they made were forgotten or ignored.

You can’t walk on eggshells, but a celebration should be that.

Similarly had that experience as well as a director. I learned to give praise to the team and individually prior to doing any sort of public showing. I try to offer up equal praise across the team to reinforce it was a team effort. To prove that it’s not favorites or one’s contribution didn’t outweigh the others’

You can’t walk on eggshells but you can elevate your empathy and awareness - choosing the right words is a skill.

> “I really liked how you tackled this, have you thought about this approach?” Instead of “Why didn’t you do it this way?”

Commonly called "Positive, to & try", taught to Snowboard Instructors.

i.e.

"I really like how you did that, to get even better results, try x"

(I'm being vague to not make it about snowboarding, but it's important to be concrete)

i.e.

Instead of "that took too long, make it faster", use

I really like how you got consensus in that meeting. To make it happen even faster, try outlining the pros and cons of the solution right at start of the meeting.

instead of "You're not bending your knees enough", use

I really like how you completed those (snowboard) turns. To get even higher performance, try bending your knees more so the edge of your snowboard bites into the snow harder.

At some point people understand the 'approach', and it is extra condescending. Being straight/blunt is not about hurting someone's feeling.

Except I’m not imparting some snowbro knowledge. I’m asking if they had indeed, thought about that approach because odds are, we’ll be asked about it. I’m trying to either see if you, indeed looked at all the options and carved the gnarly path forward through it, or didn’t know this other way existed and you could use some of that knowledge to improve your solution. I do know, without a shadow of a doubt, that the VPs will ask - “What about X?” because some vendor is in their ear.

> snowbro knowledge

Hey now, Ill have you know I'm a professional snowboard instructor. Certified and all. I get paid to snowboard. It's actually pretty rad.

The phrasing seems confusing and manipulative. Did you like my approach or not?

I would rather someone be straight up with me. If you don't like the approach or would have done it differently say so and we can talk about it. Save the compliments for when I do something you actually like.

>Save the compliments for when I do something you actually like.

issue in cultures like this is compliments never come. Maybe a "thanks/good work" after the project/module is done, but by then it's empty words. feels more like "thanks for making me lots of money" instead of "thanks for contributing your skills to this project" if we treat compliments with a waterfall approach with no substance.

In the culture of prefacing every simple question with empty praise, then all praise becomes an empty formality. It's far worse than receiving a simple "good work" after the job is done. If you have to choose between the two instead of finding some reasonable middle-ground, then you should choose the one that entails treating your coworkers like professional adults instead of emotionally sensitive children.

In reality, we tend towards one extreme. So to correct that, there is nothing wrong with over-correcting and leaning back if it becomes a problem. This is assuming benevolent actors, of course.

IME even in attempts to over correct we may still end up undercorrecting. So I'm not too afraid of a huge shift to empty platitudes.

I tend to compliment people when they do something well at work. There is rarely a week that goes by where I haven't at least one compliment. To me that is more genuine. I am complimenting them with no ulterior motive. Not as some ploy to soften criticism.

I don’t know, what is your approach? What others did you evaluate? That’s what I want to know. It’s not a gotcha question. Some people seem to think it is because of their experience with a bad manager. I genuinely want to know what approaches you took, why those didn’t work, why yours is the right one, so I can defend you to the VP.

This is a very stylistic and subjective take. Not all workplace cultures and not all people prefer to communicate this way, and many of us resent the "YTA" label that is applied to a direct communication style. I don't work for praise, and I maintain high standards as a matter of personal professionalism. I couldn't care less whether my colleagues recognize me, and business leaders don't care about your effort; they care about the bottom line.

It's not surprising that your video relates to children. This sort of feelings-driven approach has no place in a professional workplace full of adults who are all expected to know why they're there, the terms of their employment, and what objective they're working towards. In fact I find it somewhat demeaning to have the default communication style be so childish.

Did you notice that "Why didn't you do it this way?" is rather less verbose than your alternative? This holds true in the general case too: communication tailored to your audience is much more verbose, and therefore laborious to produce, than communication written following the ABCs - accuracy, brevity, clarity. Imagine all the time that such organizations waste rewording things ad infinitum. Managing emotional state should be the responsibility of the listener/reader, while the communicator's job should be to get their idea across as clearly and concisely as possible. It's just more efficient that way.

>Did you notice that "Why didn't you do it this way?" is rather less verbose than your alternative?

"your code sucks" is even more concise. We can take a minute out of our time to elaborate and clarify, and of course not result to insults.

>Managing emotional state should be the responsibility of the listener/reader, while the communicator's job should be to get their idea across as clearly and concisely as possible.

And this mindset is exactly what leads to meltdowns in certain industries. "it's not my fault you feel bad about my abuse". People still want to generally feel like they belong and if all you put out is criticism they will find that belonging elsewhere. You can't be negative 100% of the time and be surprised when morale is down.

“FU” is even more concise. I don’t want to work in an environment where engineers actively put each other down instead of helping achieve goals.

> "your code sucks" is even more concise.

It doesn't convey the same meaning at all though. One is a constructive criticism, one is not. Asking about reasoning for discarding alternative solutions is a perfectly standard part of any review process. It doesn't need to be further elongated and stylized to reduce directness.

> "it's not my fault you feel bad about my abuse"

Nowhere in my post did I justify abuse. Ad hominem is generally out of bounds in professional communication. I'm defending a more direct style that communicates the same message, not a difference message all together.

I'm not saying that praise isn't useful feedback, only that it shouldn't be used in place of criticism as the parent post suggested. A submission is either adequate or not, and a review finding a submission inadequate should lay out its reasoning as clearly as possible.

If you're consistently authoring inadequate contributions, the onus is on you to figure out why, and negative emotion is a powerful tool to motivate an individual to do so. The same applies to teams and organizations that fail to meet their objectives. After all these emotions didn't evolve for no reason or in a vacuum.

> People still want to generally feel like they belong

Some people do, some people understand that they're fulfilling a professional function in exchange for compensation and don't see that their feelings have anything to do with it.

Have you noticed that the people advocating for emotional coddling in this thread also seem to have trouble with nuance? They pose this false dichotomy of "Wow I really love this but..." vs "This sucks go fuck yourself"

Simply being direct and forward without wrapping your words with empty praise or naked insults doesn't seem to be an option they recognize.

'I apologize for such a long letter - I didn't have time to write a short one.' - Mark Twain

I also notice many people advocating "directness" tend to be bad with words. You may be paid to code, but you're still a professional expected to know how to communicate with peers and everyone else involved. Take time in both your craft and words.

If you can't find the middle-ground between fake smarmy praise and telling people to go fuck themselves, maybe you should check yourself and not go around telling other people they aren't good at communicating.

> In reality, we tend towards one extreme.

This is a personal problem, you should work on improving this.

More immature dichotomous thinking: "Why does one ask "why"? There's two primary reason: curiosity and accusation."

Shocking mentality.

> One is a constructive criticism, one is not.

The other one is accusatory in tone and puts the user in a defensive position. Even a simple tweak to say "did you consider this approach" is better than a direct "why did you do it this way/not that way"? So I argue the original form leans a bit away from constructive.

> I'm defending a more direct style that communicates the same message, not a difference message all together.

and unfortunately, that direct style has histories of being used to put down. Hence my allegory. Good intentions, but if you can't consider how that language was used by others in less savory ways, you will simply end up the same when you dismiss someone's personal concerns: Tonedeaf.

>If you're consistently authoring inadequate contributions

And here's the assumption that once again comes out of nowhere. Why are we assuming that the hostile employee is right and everyone else is dumb? There are very few cases where these kinds of workers are truly in the right, and those that do tend to have enough emotional intelligence to go on a tirade against every co-worker, as opposed to talking to a manager or director.

Complain up the ladder, not in your immediate radius. I'm assuming we're all competent professionals, so there's almost no reason to ever lash out at a co-worker over their code quality.

>some people understand that they're fulfilling a professional function in exchange for compensation and don't see that their feelings have anything to do with it.

Then they shouldn't care about their co-worker's code quality unless they are constantly asked to fix it. Which is a managerial problem, not a co-worker problem. Same matter applies.

> The other one is accusatory in tone

I think you need to revisit the definition. There is nothing accusatory about "Why didn't you do it this way?". It's simple question with a simple answer in the format: "Because <reason>". Reading an accusatory tone from a perfectly neutral question, and then getting defensive about it, is exactly the sort of corporate culture that has no place in a productive environment.

ChatGPT gave the following answer:

> If I encountered the phrase "Why didn't you do it this way?" during a code review, I would likely assume a curious or neutral tone.

To avoid miscommunications, we should all be at least as sane as ChatGPT.

> has histories of being used to put down

The whole point is to interpret the words as they are written, and with common definitions from the dictionary. Not to read tones into them that may not exist in the culture of the speaker.

> assumption that once again comes out of nowhere

I was responding to your quote:

> You can't be negative 100% of the time

If you're receiving 100% negative feedback, the first place I'd look is internally. A review process is a solicitation for criticism. It's you who is saying that a who clearly, directly, professionally, and constructively criticizes work is "hostile".

> Then they shouldn't care about their co-worker's code quality unless they are constantly asked to fix it

They should care when they are asked to review it, since that's the point of a review process.

>I think you need to revisit the definition. There is nothing accusatory about "Why didn't you do it this way?"

okay:

>indicating or suggesting that one believes a person has done something wrong.

I believe the definition is apt here. You believe something is done wrong so you open it up with an accusation of not doing it "this way". It's almost textbook definition. There could be room for context, but in a vacuum it's not best to open up your review with "why didn't you X?". You should have established X while triaging the task.

>ChatGPT gave the following answer:

If there's one thing I'm not going to rely on an AI for, it's for human tone. Even advanced sci-fi sentient android have the stereotype of not capturing tone properly. So there's little point in trusting 2023 web scraping.

It says it's a neutral tone because somewhere in its training data there is a person who assumed a neutral tone. Which in and of itself is subjective. It's based on the AI's limited experience on the internet, and the Internet is also infamously horrible at conveying tone.

back in reality, I've been asked "why" so many times in an accusatory tone IRL that it's always going to put me on the defensive. "Why are you here?", "Why is this not done?", "Why are you late to this meeting?". It's not a good idea in general to do a cold open with that.

>If you're receiving 100% negative feedback, the first place I'd look is internally.

If you get negative feedback from everyone, sure

If you get 100% negative feedback from a few specific persons, then it's probably personal. Especially if those few people are not your direct managers. Something we seem to both agree on is that we shouldn't take things personally in the workplace, but there often is a few people like that no matter where you go.

> You believe something is done wrong so you open it up with an accusation

Nowhere is this belief stated in the text. It's simply not what the words mean. It is being fabricated entirely in your mind. The only appropriate thing to infer from a question is that the asker wants to know the answer.

> I've been asked "why" so many times in an accusatory tone IRL that it's always going to put me on the defensive.

The onus is on you to cope with that. Don't transfer this burden to everyone you communicate with. It's unprofessional.

> If there's one thing I'm not going to rely on an AI for, it's for human tone.

Sentiment analysis is actually something LLMs excel at.

>Nowhere is this belief stated in the text. It's simply not what the words mean.

Why does one ask "why"? There's two primary reason: curiosity and accusation. And generally you're not too curious on what any single worker in day to day work is doing. You may not process it as an accusation, but it can come off that way.

-----

We seem to not being seeing eye to eye so no point continuing this conversation. Instead of pushing all the blame on me, consider other lenses and experiences and understand why they feel that way. I am very pragmatic and would like to simply assume a question is a question, but that's just not how 90% of questions work when a manager is DM'ing you in chat, or some lead pops into a code review to ask why you made this PR in their module.

Heck, consider this conversation. I give my experiences and you dismiss me and try to prove my experiences wrong with algorithms. Are you really surprised I act defensively when your first instinct is to say my experienced are wrong? Can you see why this may come off as insensitive and foster a hostile environment, an environment where no one cares about your opinions and pushes all blame on you?

Good thing I don't need to tolerate comments like this at work.

I’m with you on this. However, it’s going to take time for those who don’t understand this to understand this. You have to live through it I think. Once you have, you’ll see it immediately. If you haven’t, well, enjoy your direct tone deaf communication style.

Gonna take a lot of time apparently. So much gaslighting in these responses.

I guess I can see why we still have all those "tech is a hostile industry to women/minorities" stuff even in the 2020's. People legitimately think they can talk like Linus Torvald could back in the 90's.But at least Linus was talking to faceless volunteers he had little power over.

>The only appropriate thing to infer from a question is that the asker wants to know the answer.

Categorically incorrect.

Every question comes from either one of two places. Ignorance. Or Vindictiveness.

Let’s explore the latter.

You: driving home after having a great time at your companies happy hour. You finally got to discuss that project you wanted to work on and got a verbal green light.

Cop: “Do you know why I pulled you over?”

In this situation - if the question was indeed ignorance, you respond “going home from work”. You assume it’s ignorance because we genuinely want to believe people are good.

In this situation, the cop is not asking from a place of ignorance, but vindictiveness. He/she believed you broke the law, the next question will prove this…

Cop: “Have you been drinking?”

In my examples above (far far above), “have you thought about X?” Is ignorance. Do you see the difference?

>>they might not want their micromanaging manager to know they helped you outside the scope of their work

    So, Yeah, im going to have to ask you to do more given you have received so much praise from your colleagues... Yeah.... Thankssssss....

This is a valid concern.

There are some many unaware wolves that think they are good managers because they have info on their staff, as opposed to a relationship understanding their staff....

I don't want to work with people that communicate this way.

Are you saying you don't want to work with the people who use praise w/ direction? That is my assumption about what you meant given that it seems like the contrary opinion and thus the reason for replying. If that's the case, care to elaborate why you don't like that style?

Because its confusing. Don't say that you like something when you don't. It's a failure to communicate.

I'll share my reason. It's phony as hell. If someone is legitimately angry or disappointed with my performance, just say it. Don't construct a "compliment sandwich" and patronize me with that.

Considering this is about how you communicate with others, you are saying people should consider the way you want to be communicated with, but you should be able to ignore how others want to be communicated with?

That just makes you a disappointing, inefficient hypocrite.

No, I didn't say any of that. I would like people to be straight with me. I try to be straight with them. Golden Rule and all of that, right?

> I would like people to be straight with me

But you understand that people can genuinely like you right?

Perhaps that person is trying to not throw the baby out with the bath water.

“Hey I’m glad you patched the bug, but can you give the SREs a heads up next time? They p0’ed on an expected traffic spike”

The person is actually happy with you for fixing a bug. They don’t want to you take away that in the future, to not take initiative and fix bugs.

"Hey I’m glad you patched the bug, but.."

To me that just sounds passive aggressive and sort of like "you should mind your own business".

I'd feel better you if someone just told me: "I saw you patched a bug, could you do X"

or even just "can you give the SREs a heads up next time?" alone.

Then again I'm used to a culture where any praise is ussually implicit and criticism tends to be quite explicit so it's easy to interpret words like "glad" etc. as insincere by default without even wanting too..

Because the example is oversimplified for the sake of HN commentary. In the real world it goes more like this:

"Hey, I saw you patched that bug that was causing traffics spikes. That's awesome work and I appreciate your proactivity! The Ops team thought we had to work late tonight to implement mitigations for the problem.

In fact, it looks like we had a communication breakdown and they didn't realize you had fixed the issue until 6 hours later. In the future do you think you could let them know when this sort of problem is fixed, just to make sure we're all on the same page? We'll have to look at a solution for automated alerts too -- maybe an integration with the ticket system or build system. Do you have any ideas for that so we don't have to rely on manual communication? We're moving so fast that it's hard for everyone to keep up! Thanks again for the great work."

> But you understand that people can genuinely like you right?

Yeah, I do. And when I get genuine compliments, I like them!

But it's obvious when someone consistently prefaces their statements with "softening" compliments. When they're "deploying" a "communications strategy."

Talk to me like a real person, please. It will make it easier for those compliments to land when recipients know they're real. But if you're the type to always lead with one, then they're all worthless. You're just a happy-talker. Your praise is empty.

I always have doubts about others' work and suggestions on how they could do it better. To avoid constantly dominating others, I either have to shut my mouth or try to be more accommodating in how I deliver my feedback. I do a mix of both, but if you tell me to be straight with you, then I'll be straight with you.

Especially in large corporate organizations where there are vast differences in how people communicate and take input, and you talk to too many people in a given day to really get close with any of them, it requires a handshake to know that I can always indicate my roughly unfiltered technical opinion to you and that you'll take it in stride, and if you feel strongly about it, you'll have the confidence to shoot my idea down without me having to give you an opening by posing my suggestion as a question.

This should just be the default. Many organizations do in fact write this down in their internal communication guides, where it's known as the ABCs (accuracy, brevity, clarity) of professional communication.

> I always have doubts about others' work and suggestions on how they could do it better

If you're right, they should listen to you (gratefully), if you're not they should tell you why so you can learn. There is no good reason to react emotionally to professional criticism, it is a worst-practice which no measures ought be taken to accommodate.

> There is no good reason to react emotionally to professional criticism.

And yet when it happens (not a rare event), it can be quite unproductive for both parties. I would hope that you deal with other worst-practices in your domain with greater grace than a total refusal to deal with and prevent pathological outcomes.

Additionally, if you truly believe what you stated, then so long as I avoid sacrificing significant efficiency/productivity to keep my words from bothering people, then I do not see why it should bother you either. If I had to self-judge, I really don't think that the added conversational padding pans out to more than 15 minutes per day. That's worth spending to make sure that the people you work with are engaged with you and the task at hand in an accommodating way, rather than fearing being rebuked at each turn.

> And yet when it happens

When it does happen, like any other mistake, it should be corrected. Just like if someone put secrets into git, it should be explained to them why they shouldn't do that, and an expectation should be set not to do it again. If the individual fails to meet that expectation, disciplinary action should be taken, up to and including termination.

I've in fact had this happen to a developer who took PR comments personally. The rest of the team was very glad to see them terminated. Fifteen minutes per day adds up to a lot, and I'm quite sure it's more for staff whose roles are heavier on communication or those for whom anticipating people's feelings comes less naturally.

> rather than fearing being rebuked at each turn

My point is that a fear of professional criticism is a fundamental flaw in a professional, one that should be corrected to the benefit of the individual and the organization. A leader who refuses to correct this flaw in their reports is holding back their professional development and failing in their role as mentor. One should experience nothing but sublime gratitude that one's mistakes were found and corrected before they caused any damage.

I actually agree with most of the points you've made here. I think the difference lies in what context this feedback is relayed to a teammate.

If I'm tasked with a code review, that is pretty much a directive for me to offer feedback. When I am asked explicitly for feedback, whether directly by my peer or as assigned by a higher up, I tend not to bother with the kind of niceties I am talking about. Still, being nice is nice. But I expect the other person to take my words as-is, so I won't mince them.

Accommodating others becomes more important to me outside of this "directly asked for feedback" context. If I'm in a group discussion, or if my feedback hasn't been explicitly solicited, then that's a trickier environment with greater potential for me to negatively dominate the discussion. Similarly, if the issue at hand is not one of baseline technical necessity (like committing secrets to git) but more open to different opinions (like how to structure an interface we're exposing), I place greater weight on trying to be accommodating. I find that most discussions tend to be of the latter kind.

> Hey I’m glad you patched the bug, but can you give the SREs a heads up next time?

I read it as passive aggressive. Pretty much everyone in my culture would read it this way. If you think it is a good example, please reconsider.

Okay, if we worked with each other in real life, I would accept that and I guess never speak to you that way.

Since this is a discussion of communication theory, I have to say, it’s crazy to me that you read it as passive aggressive.

Like when I say bad things about you, you can just accept those things in a straightforward fashion. However when I say good things about you, that cannot be accept in just as straightforward a way, and instead it is viewed as passive aggressive.

You don’t see the asymmetry there?

You don’t seem to understand the reasons why I would consider it passive aggressive, and it’s my fault because I didn’t explain it. Thing is, in my culture exactly this phrasing had been a form of passive aggressive tone that had been very common way of working communication. I’m not sure if that’s still the case - I’ve left my country years ago. But this exact phrasing is a strong trigger.

> However when I say good things about you

Yeah, I read it as the exact opposite, in this particular phrasing. Historical reasons.

In fact I’m on the SRE side in this example, and I often have to remind people to suppress alerts when they change something. I normally go with “We got paged for the planned works, could you please turn off alerts next time? Thanks”. I’m not thanking people for their job in this case because it’s likely irrelevant - we’re from different teams and chances are I don’t even know what exactly they’ve been working on (in a broad sense) or for what reason. I’m being polite and straightforward. Never got any complain, at least so far.

Im not the GP but it hides all clarity wrt how important the colleague thinks the “directions” that the praise came along with are. If I accept the praise but dismiss the directions, am I being an asshole? Or am I being subordinate? Am I ignoring a direct order? The boss was in the room and they didn’t object to the directions! What does it all mean?

All this is a level of 4D interpersonal chess that you’re forcing me to play that could simply be avoided if you said that you think its worth changing it like so and so because such and such.

Fair point. I think it comes down to knowing your audience, which is always the most fundamental and important part. Coworkers with lots of rapport can be very direct with each other. Or a neurodivergent person who struggles with social/verbal cues may be much better served with succinct direct feedback (and likewise not feel the sting and demotivation that the initial strategy is intended to avoid)

>I really liked how you tackled this

Because you open the communication with a lie.

Such communication style can work well, but only if it is genuine. When people do mess up, there is often something good in the mix. It’s possible to lead with a compliment to point out what was done well, and follow up with constructive criticism. It’s about style. When done well, you don’t notice it and you like it. If done awkwardly or stiffly, it feels fake, patronizing, and disingenuous.

The shit sandwich approach...

But yeah if you're a person who's only capable of complaining and criticizing others (assuming it's perfectly legitimate/reasonable) you might struggle communicating with most people who don't know you really well/are used to different culture.

Well, only if it is a lie. The example is a hypothetical story so we can read into it whatever we want.

There are ways to like someone’s work, even if you don’t think it’s complete or optimal.

For example, I think a huge part of getting a job done is just having someone take initiative and at least try, as opposed to waiting for someone else to start them off.

The line might mean “I’m glad you started us down this road…”

I kind of agree, I don’t want to work with a HR robot. I know someone that talks like this to non-coworker friends and it’s honestly just… offputting.

I’m more into “ehhh honestly not how I would do it. The {problem} will cause issues down the road”. And that opens up a two ended respectful conversation. Someone telling that to me, I’m not going to think they’re being an asshole.

I’ve learned a lot from people stopping me from firing a footgun directly into my… foot.

> “ehhh honestly not how I would do it. The {problem} will cause issues down the road”

If the context is that someone is speaking about something they think they know, and which would be acted upon, what about phrasing the concern as a question, like "How does that approach handle {problem}?"?

(Not that I always practice this, because I don't. But probably it's generally best if I don't assume I'm right. Risks include people who misinterpret question-asking.)

thats even more patronizing imo.

Are you assuming that you're right?

I think it's about tone; it feels patronizing to me as well. "How does this approach handle {problem}?" is very socratic. You're asking a question meant to make them reconsider their idea in a very round about way. I think that actually comes off as assuming you're right in this conversation. I would imagine the person asking me that is being a snobby asshole showing off how intelligent they are. It's on the other person to try and piece together your wisdom you've delivered in cryptic socratic whataboutisms.

If two doctors are having a conversation about a treatment, do you think they have these roundabout conversations or do they just say "No, his liver is shot, he can't take that." We're professionals too. We should have enough mutual respect for each other to be upfront.

> You're asking a question meant to make them reconsider their idea in a very round about way.

How would you ask the question differently, if your intent was that you wanted to understand how they handled "{problem}"?

By not asking a question. “I think this won’t work because {reasoning}”. I’m fine being told that. If you’re working with level headed people, that starts a two way respectful conversation.

Honestly that’s just my mileage I guess. Maybe it depends on everyone’s own personal attachment to their ideas, but if someone thinks I’m about to pull the footgun trigger, I want them to tell me that.

If they’re right, they saved my foot.

If they’re wrong, I show them that the safety is on, and we go on.

Getting all “well what is it you expect to accomplish with that? Is this aligned with the incentives of the team? If there was a safety would it be on, hypothetically?” just serves to muddy the message and come off “smarter than thou”. I’d call it manager speak.

> "How does this approach handle {problem}?" is very socratic. You're asking a question meant to make them reconsider their idea in a very round about way. I think that actually comes off as assuming you're right in this conversation. I would imagine the person asking me that is being a snobby asshole showing off how intelligent they are.

Alternatively, the questioner might not have your context on the situation and they might sincerely want to know if you've considered the problem they're asking about.

"Not sure, but I'll look into that" is an acceptable answer most of the time.

>”How does that approach handle {problem}?"

This is good so long as it’s framed in a use-case. Like, we need to handle sending emails (simple example), How does your approach solve the need to send emails? Demonstrate it.

It’s important that we remember we are talking about praise, not criticism here. Something often lost on the rest of the commenters here.

That's a cultural and personal thing. Consider the recipient's preferences.

If you would like to learn about these cultural preferences, read Erin Meyer's The Culture Map. https://erinmeyer.com/books/the-culture-map/

This is why the Golden Rule is wrong. Not “Do unto others as you would have them to do to you.” but instead “Do unto others how they uhh want to be done unto.” Different folks, different strokes.

Some call that the Platinum Rule.

Problem is that you don't know what others want and it takes time to establish that. Even then they may not necessarily know what they want. People change their minds.

It's a rule of thumb regardless. not an ironclad rule. generally, people want to be treated respectfully, so treat them respectfully and course correct if cultural/social lines demand it.

Yes. If you like that kind of culture, feel free to seek it out.

I would not enjoy that kind of workplace, and if I accidentally join a place that leaned very heavily on that communication style, I would likely leave quickly.

There's something to be said to adapting to the environment rather than expecting the environment to fit your whims. Sometimes you should change your approach in the vein of being more effective at your job. Most reasonably sized organizations are going to have a mixed of people with different preferences; jumping ship every time the culture doesn't meet your ideal seems like you may end up switching jobs often enough to not have much of an impact. (I know job-hopping is a discussion all its own)

There's also something to be said for not working in environments you dislike if you don't need to. Especially since cultural mismatches grate and lead to underperformance.

Given that I have consistently gotten thanked for how I give and take feedback from colleagues, I think I will be fine on finding organizations that work for me culturally.

(Edit: And no, that praise didn't contain "but I wish..."es.)

If you can find something fulfilling that is a good cultural fit, great. But lots of people get caught up in the "grass is always greener somewhere else" mentality and end up job swapping constantly to find some mythical culture that perfectly aligns with them. And maybe that works if your primary goal is what's in it for you. But it can also have the effect of minimizing your impact, which is counter-productive for a goal of contributing to something beyond yourself.

The point that may have gone missed in my original comment was the perspective was focused on "being effective" and not "working somewhere I like". One is somewhat selfish, the other is not.

FWIW, I'm not saying anyone should have to care about their impact. It's just ironic when I see people constantly job-hopping with the stated goal of finding a cultural fit so they can have said impact.

> I don't want to work with people that communicate this way.

"I don't want to work with people efficiently, and would rather cling to inefficient ways."

It’s not efficient to send 3 messages when only one is needed.

I think you have the efficiency backwards.

It is the HR-motivated eternal infantilization of the people. In fact, to the person who went through mental and physical developments with no blockages or traumas, it comes across as a quite paternalistic way of communicating, but it is a style liked and embraced by corporate coaches, HR, and the informal CYA policies.

I don’t think it has to be that deep. The world is a big place, full of many cultures that operate - especially with giving criticism - very differently. You don’t need to master the tone of every culture, but it’s important to at least be cognisant that even these difference exist.

I don't see my comment as particularly profound.

I have lived for a few decades at this point and have noticed, like anyone else I imagine, a desire in (some, but a nontrivial percentage of) people to maintain lifelong ways of thinking and behaving that have been historically associated with early life.

For example, a desire to be praised and not challenged, to dress like a teenager even as one nears retirement, to show a degree of enthusiasm for pedestrian events that was once reserved for major accomplishments.

> to dress like a teenager even as one nears retirement

For some of us this is a KPI of our life/job satisfaction.

I can tell you that if I was in some job that did not allow me to schlep around in hoodies and cargo pants I would be much, much less happy than I am today.

I don't like to judge the appearance of others and prefer just to maintain high standards for myself. My comment was descriptive and not normative.

I like working out and being in shape, but if others prefer to do some side project at night instead of hitting weights, it is fine with me. I enjoy reading and thinking, but if others prefer to watch reality tv, who am I to judge them?

Admittedly, seeing some of my middle-aged colleagues who are complete slobs, from their worn-out clothes to their prominent bellies to their unkempt hair and beards and some fun smell coming out of them, is a stress-test for the fortitude of my beliefs.

I disagree. Rather strongly actually. I’ve had bad managers that couldn’t communicate. I’ve been that manager. I’ve learned how to communicate to be more effective with others. Everyone has blockages and traumas (especially now). It’s important to use those in context and draw from that experience. It’s not HR motivated, it’s a style of empathetic communication.

It is important not to think of black-white alternatives. The style "good job, kid!", "great effort, little man/woman!" is undoubtedly paternalistic.

There are people who like this style on both sides of the conversation, but in my experience, these are not high performers who make a difference in an initiative, a company, or a group of friends.

Now, the alternative to paternalism is not rudeness, or brutality, but, as I see it, a clear communication that does not infantilize people, but treat them seriously, like serious adult people, and not kids who have to be coddled or paid excessive attention too, or, even worse, as "damaged goods".

A few years ago, I received a message from someone I had a date with, and they used the sandwich, paternalistic style of communication that most adults dislike. "Hi, it was great to meet you and we had such a great time. Unfortunately, I don't think it would work etc. I wish you the very best/you are a great guy/see you around". Unsurprisingly, they were working in corporate. It is annoying to be treated like kids when there are white hairs on semi-bald heads.

>”Hi, it was great to meet you and we had such a great time.”

Is it hard to believe that someone could have a great time with you but not see you as a future partner for themselves?

Maybe this visceral dislike for this style of communication is why? You’re entitled to your opinion and preferences as are they. If you’re willing to look past yourself, maybe that person thought you were too much, instead of too little. Maybe you were further down the road than they are and they want someone closer to where they are in the journey.

I’m simply stating that expressing praise for a thing doesn’t have to be clouded in ulterior motives like trying to prove you know better. You can simply reply back “Thanks, I had a great time too. If you ever change your mind or want to hang out again, give me a ring. If not, I hope you find your happiness, whatever that looks like for you.”

That’s a respectful reply.

Me either. Prefer honest direct communication in a business setting.

I do. Having worked with so many engineers with almost no social skills, I think there's a lot of room for improvement in their communication style. "Why didn't you do it this way?" is aggressive and critical. "have you thought about this approach?" makes them feel like you have their back and are trying to help. I agree there's not a huge need to the "I really liked how you tackled this" part but even never praising your coworkers is a an issue.

I personally prefer earnest over disingenuous. There are fewer opportunities to misunderstand.

A question by it's nature isn't aggressive. The words "should" and "we" are the real cancers IMO, as in "we should have done..."

I think your example of have you thought about, vs. Why did you is potentially better but I personally don't have an issue answering either question or feel attacked in either case.

I would on the other hand be concerned about working with someone immature enough to read in so far to perfectly innocuous curiosity.

There are intelligent people who are great at ingenuous praise. I'm not one of them, but often in striving for the former, I fail at the latter. Smart people are able to find things that are praiseworthy, which gives greater credibility to questions and critique.

That's different though. I don't think your parent meant the "have you tried this approach" part but the very very fake and passive aggressive praise that then is turned into "actually I don't think you did great, please try this other approach". That's so fake and irritating.

Yeah I agree that comes across as fake, especially if done constantly. But its still good to recognize your peers effort even if sometimes it results in the wrong outcome.

Fake praise isn't recognition, though. It verges on (and sometimes is quite intentionally) mockery.

It depends on context, but I have found the opposite.

"Have you thought about this approach" can come across as condcending. Of course I thought about that, it was the first thing I tried before the much more complicated solution that actually works.

"Why didn't you do it this way" invites them to share the war story of what happened when they tried doing that.

But your example are cases where you feel strong because you have this war story. How about the cases where you just made a mistake?

That said, I never liked the 'sandwhich' method, saying; "Great effort. The result is horrible, like your indentation though."

Then you should be glad someone pointed out your mistake, improved the work, and gave you an opportunity to learn. You should be thanking them.

"war story" is a bit strong, but most of the time I don't go with the obvious solution, there was some investigating done that led to the conclusion that the obvious solution wouldn't work.

The trick is to know who you are talking to. If they did think of your idea, accusing them of having missed it is offensive. If they didn't consider it, asking them to justify their reasoning puts them on the spot.

The value of the sandwich method depends upon some sort of equivalence of the praise. It may have taken hours or days of work to produce the code that generated horrible results, while indentation would likely register as a triviality. To choose a better example: "Your code is great. The results were off, but how you structured it made it easy to isolate the problem."

Overall I agree with your assessment though. People giving this sort of feedback usually focus upon the problem and grasp at straws when it comes to the compliment.

>”Have you thought about this approach" can come across as condcending. Of course I thought about that, it was the first thing I tried before the much more complicated solution that actually works.

This is what I want to hear. Tell me you first considered it and ruled it out because of XYZ. No where am I saying “I think you’re incompetent and I would have done it this way”. On the contrary, I think you’re the right person for the job and I want to hear the assessment of the various other approaches (if any) and why yours fits the bill. It could be as simple as “well, mine does Y, others don’t”. Next time someone asks you about your approach, try not to assume they are trying to belittle you or get you into a “gotcha” situation.

I’m sorry that you had bad managers in the past and are hurt by someone asking about your methods. I genuinely want to know so I can defend the choice to the higher ups on your behalf.

"I see you went with ${solution X}, which is reasonable, though it suffers of ${major downside K} in fairly common ${situation T}. Would ${solution Y} address ${major downside K}? Granted, we are trading off a bit of ${minor downside J}, but at a quick glance appears a solid overall improvement."

That's a good suggestion. It makes clear what the questioner knows and why they asking about an alternative instead of putting the other person on the defensive, trying to guess why the question is being asked.

I dont think it is good faith to label different communication styles as poor social skills. Many a DnD nerd have no problems communicating, but simply have a different communication style than johhny the quarterback. Part of diversity is understanding cultural differences as much as style.

I love being told short, crisp, critical feedbacj that is data dense. Any overly verbose communication adds a layer of parsing and interpretation which may be unnecessarily ambiguous, which is more costly and for the benefit of what? a subjective opinion that it is 'more social'?

As with most things, it depends and knowing your audience goes miles.

The social skill is having different communication styles, and applying them appropriately.

Only having one is a form of poor social skills.

My goto is “can you help me understand x?”

I guess any style could be interpreted many ways. If something was hard to understand, it sounds sincere but if you actually do understand then it could sound condescending. I guess with all this, context matters.

I don't think I've seen this style of communication generally work as a viable substitute for social skills and good will towards colleagues.

Wrapping of criticism in praise is a poor substitute for genuinely praising good work, and being empathetic and helpful with direct, unambiguous feedback when someone can improve. Mistakes are inevitable. They're not a problem. It's ok to discuss them directly.

> "Why didn't you do it this way?" is aggressive and critical.

'Why didn't you do it this way?' reveals an expectation that you would have done whatever it was 'this way', but it doesn't indicate that that expectation is normative. A junior might well ask that just because 'this way' is the only way they know how to do it, and they're curious about whether the developer they're asking chose a different route for stylistic reasons, performance reasons, or out of some entirely different consideration. Nothing critical about it.

Inferring criticism from mere surprise may be uncomfortable, but it also seems a kind of misapprehension that will very quickly sort itself out as the conversation goes on.

In contrast to the case above, by the way, 'have you thought about this [other] approach?' does imply that the asker knows better because it very directly and explicitly raises the possibility that the one being asked hasn't even considered alternative implementations.

"Aggressive and critical" I couldn't find the right words initially but a better word might be accusatory. To me, it sounds like they should have but didn't. A lot of other posters don't get that flavor from it and see it as just a genuine curiosity which makes sense.

> To me, it sounds like they should have but didn't. A lot of other posters don't get that flavor from it and see it as just a genuine curiosity which makes sense.

Imo a lot of the difficulty with things like this comes from high turnover and/or siloing. When you're working with someone who is basically a stranger, that means you've hardly had a chance to build up a real sense of rapport/trust/comfort with that person. So it's easier to doubt yourself and harder to know what the other person really intends.

Most differences in communication style or preferences about how to approach criticism are at least somewhat easier to deal with between people who know each other and understand what their particular differences are.

It's not aggressive and being critical of work deliverables is the very point of quality assurance.

It doesn't mean you have to be mean about it, but you can just spit it out.

Weird, I perceive these the opposite of how you do.

"Why didn't you do it this way?" I trust that you considered many alternatives. Can you tell me your thoughts about the decision you arrived at?

“have you thought about this approach?” You probably couldn’t imagine this possibility, let me do it for you. Checkmate!

I can also see how they could each be interpreted in the opposite directions.

I’m betting it’s more about the contextual body language and tone they’re delivered with than the words/sentences themselves that matters, which I just don’t see being that different once you look behind them to see the gist of the message.

That’s the double edged sword of text-only communication: you can choose to interpret everything charitably, but you can also infer a condescending tone even if it wasn’t intended.

Expecting people to wordsmith to your individual taste is just asking for otherwise fine coworkers to be mind readers.

Rather than asking "why didn't you do it this way?" you could ask "why did you choose this approach?", but only do so if you are prepared to acknowledge their reasoning may be valid (and, ideally, you are known for accepting justifiable approaches).

I have personally switched my default communication style to the "have you thought about this approach?" style because I found it worked better with most people. Still, for me, I dislike it. Coming from a lot of people, I find it not what they really mean, which puts me on edge.

>> “I really liked how you tackled this, have you thought about this approach?” Instead of “Why didn’t you do it this way?”

So, basically lie in the face. How could that be good advice?!

If I do not like it, I would just say it. One thing is being polite, other completely different to be a liar.

How is that praise?

I really like how direct you have been in stating your preference, but have you thought about an approach where tailoring your message to the audience to produce the best reception?

Me neither. I would reply with:

"Thanks that you liked it, I'm always happy with positive feedback so will share it widely within the team and towards my manager. When I get home I'll also tell my wife and put it in the family's group chat. Grandma's FB post should be up soon".

Don't lie to my face. I'm not a moron nor a child. You didn't like how I tackled it at all. You can just say that and point to tangible things where I went wrong. Any working professional should be able to handle that. And not just that, embrace it, it's a learning experience.

I think it is a matter of culture. I personally would prefer a straightforward approach, and I think many of my German colleagues, but I think my British colleagues would prefer that indirect way of communications.

I also hate this. When someone tells me they really like how I did something, when they clearly don't and only say so to package their criticism, I find it hard to take their criticism seriously because at that point I no longer know which parts are honest anymore. But it seems to be a cultural thing. I've noticed when I moved from The Netherlands to North America, that people here are often less direct, and actually appreciate the packaging. People seem to be more easily shocked when things are said in a more direct way. It's not necessarily a bad thing, but going from one culture to another it can cause unpleasant situations, on both sides.

I've found that people who prefer to receive "direct" critiques don't object to genuine praise accompanying suggestions, and so there's no need to adapt communication styles to omit praise.

But I personally can't adapt to the subset of people who spin a preference for receiving "direct" critiques into a penchant for giving critiques with no consideration whatever for preserving the face of the recipient.

My worst experiences have been with people who make a big deal about being "direct" but are actually quite psychologically astute and who find ways to smuggle maximum cruelty within their "direct" critiques, yet without going over the line where a sanction would be justified.

It's tough to argue against better communication and kinder words, but having to care about someone's feelings (ego) when just trying to solve a problem is a problem in itself, and if you're a competent engineer, then it's the much harder problem.

I'd rather work with someone who says, "fuck, why did I do it this way," first. To that I'd say, "it's not the end of the world, let's get on this."

Worth pointing out that you should always ask even when you think you don't need to. It's easy to think that a micromanager is always obvious to anyone outside their team but that's not a given. Some managers are very aware of the stigma and will try to hide it from outsiders.

Why are you telling your colleagues you "really liked" how they did something when you feel the need to call them out for "doing bad work"? It comes off as cynical backstabbing.

You wouldn’t. You are either telling them you liked it or telling them they did it wrong. My comment was, if you are telling people they aren’t doing it right, rephrase it into something constructive instead of off-putting.

I'd hate to get a condescending review like that, hell I'd prefer someone straight up saying it's shit and not elaborating than trying to beat around the bush like this.

What part is condescending? Asking if you thought through another approach? Or asking for your findings?

Fair warning, the research mentioned at the beginning of this video is controversial and (I think it's fair to say) has generally failed to replicate.

The research in question ("Praise for intelligence can undermine children's motivation and performance", Dweck & Mueller): https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9686450/

Overview of the controversy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carol_Dweck#Criticism

Previous HN discussion on the paper: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12233571

Has it? Ok, I’ll follow up and see if a better example can be found/substituted. Thank you.

I typically find these people in corporate firms. The “I want to be friends with everyone” person.

Detangling their corporate double speak and no spine demeanor can become tiresome and counter productive.

Great comment, love the effort. Next reply can you try to be more genuine and less patronizing?

> I really liked how you tackled this, have you thought about this approach?

I would slightly rephrase it like this: I liked your approach, because (reasons), though I believe there’s a better one, because (reasons).

If you put it this way you show that you actually understood the approach and not just saying “do it my way”. It gives the opportunity to learn something and it invites to a discussion - “hey, I thought about your approach but I decided to use mine because…”

> If you are calling out your colleagues for [...] not the way you would do it work, you should try to rephrase into praise w/ direction.

Is the following alternative completely insane? Be more combative, but playful about it:

> I don't like this code. Let's fight about it ;)

> ...

I feel like under a lot of circumstances that would be way more comfortable for me than trying to suss out whether someone was genuinely praising me, criticizing me, etc. Social ambiguity is more uncomfortable to me than disagreement or criticism.

(To be clear, I'm not endorsing this as a general approach.)

> “I really liked how you tackled this, have you thought about this approach?” Instead of “Why didn’t you do it this way?”

Both of these are bad. Split the difference and drop the smarmy "I really liked how you tackled this," crap. That sort of thing makes you sound like a mother praising her toddler's scribbled drawings. Don't treat your coworkers like kids. If you want to know if they considered another approach, just ask them that without trying to softball it. "Have you thought about this approach?" If that's what you want to know, that's what you should ask.

> “I really liked how you tackled this, have you thought about this approach?” Instead of “Why didn’t you do it this way?”

Few things make me want to work with someone less then passive aggressive bullshit.

I disagree with the angle on this about asking and how to go about things but mostly because complimenting in context is helpful.

When someone does great work, tell everyone, not just their manager. Do it in public and clearly in standups after they talk about what they did last day/week.

"I just want to mention, that work that Joe did on that module is fantastic, thanks!" It is so easy to be a force for good.

Being the person who does this evenly for all good work is a guaranteed way to make others feel better, work better, and to develop real friendships. People tend to know when they are working hard.

Compliment in public, correct in private.

I hope I never have to work with you. I would be mortified if someone did this to me.

I hope I never have to work with you

Please don't cross into personal attack.

I never understood the "correct in private" stance. How can others learn who did not do the mistake? The argument to have critique in private only is probably because of ego and honor culture where people feel personally attacked in topics where it's not about them at all but about the actions they have taken in a professional context with rules and expectations.

But I fully agree on not talking to the manager, but praising in the full team instead.

I think correcting in private makes sense if also paired with a no-blame oriented retro after the fact for everyone to know what happened and to brainstorm about preventative measure in the future.

How can a correction be private and blameless? In a 1:1 if you talk about what “we” did wrong you’re clearly talking about me.

Those are two separate discussions. Even if I do something dumb and am rightly blamed for it, we can still have a retro to discuss process improvements that would make it harder for that mistake to happen again in the future.

This is what I had in mind, thank you for putting it into better words that I could.

Taking responsibility for messing up is important and part of personal growth. Having the team be aware of an issue and then together develop a way to avoid that issue in the future is huge.

I had a boss who told me that when something like this happened, it was usually an issue with a system in place. Merged bad code that shouldn't have gone to production? We need to improve review processes and testing. Production server outage after system dependencies changed? We need a more accurate staging environment and testing process for our infra.

That mindset was so great to learn and I fully embrace it still.

Teams should introspect at a group level. That’s not controversial or relevant.

Unsolicited individual feedback has the potential to cause harm and an outside observer (you) can’t know the situation. So the safe and respectful move is to simply ask first. It costs nothing, your feedback is heard, and no harm is done.

"Correct" is the key word, I think it is important to make sure that people feel not attacked and your take on it is mostly correct but this is mostly in context of opinions and nit-picking. Actual failures need to be owned publicly.

I think a missing element in what I said is that I also fully believe that if I fail at something, it is my responsibility to inform the team rather than wait for someone else to levy blame. ("My apologies, I realized I misread the ticket and wrote the logic expecting X when it should be expecting Y." or "I created the typo there, I'm sorry, will fix by XX AM.") If the team works in that context, then you don't need to correct in front of the team as the person who failed would inform others and use it as a learning moment for all. This also kills the ego problem a little.

I also think failures tend to be systematic in nature and are rarely owned by a single person once you get to the bottom of the 5 "whys". We use Github BATS in PRs now, this fully killed the whole rubber duck of shame culture in our engineering division. While someone breaking the build used to be a singular responsibility, now it is a shared responsibility of the reviewer and tooling and nobody else's build gets broken by bad code. It is easy to blame the person who wrote the code but that excuses those that create the systems and culture.

Not everything is, or has to be, a learning opportunity for everyone else.

why not? Where is the benefit of not making it one?

I actually think the tip about asking is really useful for one specific reason - and it totally might not apply to you. Engineers can be extremely unaware of social cues. I feel confident I can judge my time and place and phrase my compliments such that I don't feel like I need to ask first - or atleast that I'm a good enough judge of context to know when I need to ask first. I'm pretty good at getting to know people and I'm very good at coming across open and well intentioned. To use a wanky term - I'm good at building trusted relationships.

However some people really struggle with social interactions and judging situations. The advice about asking is really valuable for someone who isn't quite as good at judging complex situations. It's simple - just ask! It might not apply to everyone.

No good deed goes unpunished.

There are bizarre incentives in stratified hierarchical pseudo-authoritarian corporate social structures.

I think people are coming up with edge cases like "what if they helped you do something they weren't supposed to do, and complimenting them on it gets them fired?!", but that's an exception, and most people would use common sense and discretion in any reasonable scenario. As a rule, pass on a good word about people who help you, it's not that complicated.

Don’t do this. Ask for consent. It isn’t hard.

Let's try a different scenario here:

My boss is great and part of that is being aware of everything that's going on. We're got some problem people who really love bypassing our support queue. And then some critical system goes down while their favorite developer is on vacation and we don't find out until they've escalated the problem to upper management.

If I got complimented by someone in another department for something he wasn't aware of, I will get asked for the context. If it's important, I need to create a support ticket to document it.

Personally, I'm fine with that but sometimes I really don't want to spend 15 minutes discussing and writing up what may have been a 30-second conversation.

Not sure about this advice in general. I get quite uncomfortable if I receive praise or compliments in general, and in a group setting is even worse. I find it embarrassing and awkward.

Im not saying “never give praise in public”. But, you know, read the room. As always, especially with social interactions, context is key! Know the people you’re talking with!

Can you share more about what makes it awkward?

Sometimes it’s just that people don’t know the template for responding. Like, for example just saying “thank you” and smile, or heart reacji if on slack or something.

But I don’t want to assume in your case.

I strongly disagree and have worked in multiple environments where your actions would have harmed me personally. Your manager is never your friend. All relationships with management are adversarial. It’s like talking to the police. Do not volunteer information. You don’t know where other people are, always obtain consent.

> Do not volunteer information.

Well, I guess where you worked was either stack ranked or a generally oppressive atmosphere smothered in politics. Work should be a collaborative effort, even from the greedy billionaire perspective you hire 2 people to do twice the work. If you end up being 25% efficient something is wrong.

And this is a sort of odd angle to begin with: your work isn't private to the manager stack. Some CEO ordered a product manager who ordered a director who ordered your manager to order you to make that stuff. the CEO probably doesn't care about you, but it would be easy to track you down if they did care. Likewise, I'm sure any reasonable company has a log history that other co-workers can access

That all sounds and feels nice but is divorced from reality. It is admirable to want to improve working conditions but you should consider the effect on your peers when you take that stand.

Divorced from the reality that you don't own the work corporations extract from you? From the reality that there are co-workers who aren't mutually planning your destruction?

Everyone's experience is different, I guess. But I assure you there are places where co-workers are fine focusing on work and not making specifically you miserable.

I'm not sure what conversation you are having or who you think you are having it with. The world you have described doesn't exist. The point here is that taking a stand is admirable but personal. You should never force others to join you. You may desire a world in which unsolicited feedback has no negative consequence but we don't live in that reality.

> You should never force others to join you

you were clearly never on the same wavelength as me to begin with if that's your conclusion. Remember your original comment compared "giving out information" that your boss already has to talking to the police (who at least need to subpeona the govt. to get more information).

I'm just saying that not every job has you living in fear. If you haven't experienced that environment yet, I wish you greener pastures.

This has not been my experience at any of the places I've worked. All of my managers have been supportive, open with information, and collaborative, including in promotions and in negotiations with other teams for resources.

I would never knowingly take a job at a company where the culture requires this attitude towards management. I'd also try hard to avoid corporate cultures where praise can somehow hurt someone.

Sounds like you have a good job. That's great! But you still have no idea what your coworkers are going through. Maybe you have a good job, but your coworker has an awful one, and praising them makes them a target.

Jeez, that sucks, sorry you had to endure such a toxic environment. I hope you're working in a more psychologically-safe workplace now. I've worked in the full spectrum from probably-legally-actionable toxicity to extremely welcoming/safe and productive environments and can definitely say I won't tolerate the toxic shit for a second anymore. It's easy for me to say that because I have a lot of experience, and I absolutely feel for ppl who are early in their career and don't feel they have the flexibility to flee a toxic work environment..

We have similar experiences and have learned similar lessons.

The point here is that you don’t know where other people are right now. Treat them like adults, talk to them, and don’t put them in compromising positions. Unsolicited feedback to management has the potential to do harm so don’t do it. Just ask first, it’s not difficult.

I think this is more appropriate when talking to people that are on your level or below you.

The post is about compliments to managers and I think it's valid to ask in that case, especially in large companies where you might not know the people you work with very well.

1000% agree with, "Compliment in public, correct in private." But I still ask a person if it's okay if I compliment them in front of large groups to make sure they are comfortable with it. I've embarrassed people before when I haven't asked. Different people have different reactions to compliments in groups.

> Compliment in public, correct in private.

Not for me, thanks.

I disagree with the "ask first" suggestion. That's adding friction to the process that makes it less organic and will disincentivize actually doing it.

Instead I will give feedback that I know won't hurt the employee I'm praising. There is an art to writing this stuff - usually making it more about yourself and how your problems are easier.

I let managers know about great interactions with their direct reports. It never occurred to me to ask. I may start doing so. But this reason for not doing it boils my blood:

> One person mentioned that they got reprimanded by their manager for getting a spot peer bonus for helping someone on another team.

This is a hill I will die on: people at $this_company are a team and helping one another is critical in building healthy teams and organizations. Slack in the schedule must exist and helping each other should fill that slack. Balance of course, but "sorry, I can't help for an hour to unblock you until [checks calendar] next quarter... maybe" type responses hurt organizations more than they know.

To me, the text you quoted is a separate issue/topic.

If a manager is that horrible, then it's time to give negative feedback to THEIR manager. Just like I don't ask before I send a Slack message to someone about a work-related topic, I also don't ask before I send HR-related praise.

Same, and if you have a manager like that, just recognize that they're not going to be able to do much about it if you do help others. Just kind of ignore them if they suggest doing otherwise.

The phrase is “I won’t die on that hill”. It references the pointless meat grinders of the Vietnam war. There is no corollary hill worth dying on.

If you still want to throw your life away on a meaningless endeavor do not bring me along with you. Talking to management can and will hurt people. Do not make decisions for others without their consent.

If there was no corollary hill worth dying on then there'd be no reason to specify that the hill in question wasn't worth dying on. Thus, we can assume there are hills worth dying on.

Anecdotally, I think I hear the "I will die on this hill" variant more than the converse.

> If there was no corollary hill worth dying on then there'd be no reason to specify that the hill in question wasn't worth dying on.

This does not hold. The hills in question were numbered arbitrarily. They had no value. We threw away lives to capture them only to give them up immediately. It was a pointless exercise. The phrase references this pointlessness. Attempting to assign meaning to the hill betrays a complete misunderstanding of both the history and the lesson.

I'd probably take the more charitable view that usage of the phrase in the negative is a willingness to embrace the spirit of the saying rather than attribute it to a misunderstanding.

If it is a misunderstanding, that is. While all sources I've seen sdo agree the phrase is of military origin, the Ngram shows usage as early as 1908 [1], with usage between 1930 and 1955 in English fiction [2]. Maybe the origin of the phrase predates the pointless numbered hills of the Vietnam War, and perhaps those hills had value and were worth dying on.

Not that this is a hill I'm willing to die on, though. All I wanted to point out is that the opposite phrase is used often per past experience, and Google Trends [3]. I can't actually find any trend data for the "original," but it is used.

[1] https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=hill+to+die+on...

[2] https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=hill+to+die+on...

[3] https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=w...

> There is no corollary hill worth dying on.

A quick Google search would reveal that "This is a hill I will die on" is in fact an extremely common saying.

Yes, it is common. I would even call it cliche. Being common doesn't make it interesting or valuable.

Sounds like this is a hill you're willing to die on

You can't control the vocabulary of others. Don't push the river.

Asking first makes sense because they may have been told by their manager to deprioritize or stop working on whatever your problem was, but they used their judgement and helped you anyway. Praising them in front of others undermines that directive, and even if their manager was ok with them helping you in this one off situation they may not want to advertise "Go to John for help with X".

You hear stories of employees getting fired after a positive review is posted online "Our server Marie was amazing! She went above and beyond by giving our son a free ice cream on his birthday!"

If the manager told the IC to deprioritize what I'm asking for, the IC should tell me that. If the IC tells me that, I'll consider that in what I write about the IC.

Also - I'm not necessarily advocating for praising in front of others in every case. In some cases that makes sense, in some cases it makes sense just to send a message to the manager directly.

This is a ridiculously entitled position. You have your perception and are acting on it without considering the consequences to anyone else. Your risk-reward calculation is wrong in the worst way because it hurts someone else and you never feel the consequence so you never correct.

No, this is personal responsibility in action.

I understand where you're coming from; I've never thought to ask permission before. However, I think it's a good idea to honor the intent of this section and "read the room" before doing something that will affect someone else.

>> I disagree with the "ask first" suggestion.

I've found two types of organizations.

1. Organizations where folks doing great work are given more work.

2. Organizations where folks doing great work are given more responsibility, coached, and put on a path to promotion or tangible recognition.

For workers in type-1 organizations, they may fear they will just get assigned more work with no added benefit. Sometimes the work assigned should be done by others who arent doing their own share.

You can’t possibly know what will cause harm. Just ask them, it isn’t complicated.

Yes. This helps build the type of organization YOU WANT TO WORK FOR.

Reinforce it. You can't provide material motivation to the business (unless you're also the company's biggest customer .. heh.) You CAN provide reinforcing feedback to management.

Quantify why XYZ coworker helped.

And if Management does NOT listen, f'em. Notice when mgmt responds in a truly incorrect manner. And vote next with your feet.

Don’t throw your coworkers under the bus. You may feel this cause is worthy but don’t force others into your crusade.

Would an example be to celebrate someone who is doing something I think is great, and overlook celebrating others whose work is less my crusade?

Or is the point to avoid critiquing coworkers TO management, bypassing seeking feedback of the person first?

The point is to talk to your coworker first. You can’t know their relationship with their manager so you could do harm even if you intend to help.

Ok, an unintended consequences scenario?

I am interested though, when would praising a coworker negatively impact them via their manager?

This has already been clearly explained in the thread. If you care read it from the root.

The tl;dr is that you can’t know the relationship between a coworker and their manager. You may desire a world where that’s always productive but it’s simply not real.

If a manager is hostile to your coworker and you provide unsolicited feedback the manager could use your well intentioned feedback to sabotage that peer.

An example of this is “muulmen went out of their way to solve a launch blocker for my project.”

But do you know I’m not already behind on a failed project out of my control but helping in a way I believe best benefits the company? Your unsolicited feedback could be the final piece of evidence that gets me blamed for the delay and fired, even though I helped you and the company.

Do. Not. Talk. To. The. Authorities.

Speak for yourself. NEVER for anyone else.

Not just coworkers.

If a customer service has really helped me with my issue, I will ask if I can talk to their manager to let them know how much I appreciated their help today.

So far everyone sounded pretty happy about that.

I tell the manager that <employee name> really helped me with my issue and made me happy to be a customer of <company name>. The managers also seem pretty happy to hear that and some have mentioned that they will be adding that feedback to the employee’s file.

The lab I'm involved in right now started off pleasant but there were definitely a handful of people who were less than pleasant to work with. Our PI has played a big part in picking the right people but we've all been very supportive of each other too. I don't think any one person started it but we all speak well of each other and it's only improved over time even when providing criticism of each other's work. This has been a big deal given our time working with human subject data throughout a pandemic.

At this point I can't think of anyone in my lab I don't like working with.

It’s funny, I’m a lead in my team and there is this one co-developer on my team that is obviously looking to replace me or be my lead in some capacity. He’s even made jokes about it on multiple occasions. From time to time he compliments me on work I do, but it comes off as if I’m only finally approaching his level of expertise. It’s hard to describe. You could probably say I’m reading too deep into it, but I swear it’s true. I haven’t responded to it, because well, he’s pretty good anyway and he’s fun to work with. Just one of those things I guess.

The comments here really demonstrate how this is a culturally-nuanced topic.

FWIW, the author comes from a North-American background.

Would be interested to hear anecdotes from your culture.

In the NA culture, we’ve reached a “kindergarten” sort of stage, where the prime directive is to protect feelings and reduce “harm”. I suspect this may be due the growing influence of academia on the private sector.

The comments here show they need to get a job that doesn't abuse them. You shouldn't be so scared of a compliment because it will be used against you by your boss or coworkers. You'll never get work done if you spend all your time looking over your back.

EDIT: looking through the 2020 thread, it's intersting how different the conversation went, especially wrt stack rankging. It felt like it was focusing more on process at companies. Here, it feels a lot more "personal". More about "well I just want it straight" or "compliments can inadvertently hurt people".

Can't call it better or worse objectively, but one feels a bit more surface level than the other.

The issue here is that you are making a decision for someone else.

No, you're not, you're making a decision to talk about your work experience with the other manager. Coworkers can talk to each other about work, what people work on is not secret information

You're talking about someone else to their manager. That is the person you are making a decision for.

I can see how it comes off that way, fair enough. But I'll clarify:

Abuse can be subjective and you shouldn't be abused based on your personal lines of abuse, which I of course cannot decide. If you are not comfortable in your work environment and have the capacity to leave, I hope it isn't a controversial take to suggest leaving. full time work is a good chunk of your life after all, and abuse will bleed into the other parts of your life even after you leave for the day.

If you have intrinsic reasons to stay despite having that capacity to leave, then I suppose you value those reasons above your personal mental health. Which is unfortuante, but your call.

----

This goes a bit beyond the topic of compliments. But such a topic seem to bring so many experiences of office politics out in this iteration of discussion, so I felt it be worth mentioning. As I edited in my above post, this post feels a lot more "personal" than the discussion 3 years ago.

You’re still not getting it. You’re projecting a personal fantasy on your peers in a way that hurts them in service of an idea that proves you aren’t a trustworthy peer. Taking a personal stand is admirable. Taking a stand at someone else’s expense isn’t.

You're reading a lot into a comment that simply says "find a job you're comfortable with". It's not a fantasy when I'm reading comments in this very thread thst say they are afraid of getting fired over standing out too much. Well, the comments themselves can be fantasy, but thars not a healthy way to approach a forum like this.

There is no stand, merely a suggestion. Feel free staying miserable but many people in a community like this aren't minimum wage workers struggling to pay rent. It's your choice to stay miserable by that point. I'm glad I'm in environments where people can use their words about their boundaries without fear and I don't have to assume people are the way you are currently projecting them to be.

You’re still missing the point. Not everyone has the option to change jobs. Your unsolicited feedback has the potential to cause harm. So why not just ask first? It’s so easy to do.

“Just get a better job lol” is a ridiculously privileged response to “your good intentions may have unintended consequences.”

Only in the abstract, I guess. If you drop 5 dollars and I pick it up and tell you that you dropped it, I also made a decision for you, no? That you'd want to be informed of such things?

I believe that consent is good, and I believe that voluntarily crossing a person's boundaries is bad, but I also believe that participating in a society means we cannot entirely control all aspects of how we're engaged with and perceived. An employee talking to a vested party about an experience they had is a perfectly normal, healthy and expected behavior. The example we're talking about is even a positive! So some amount of "making a decision for someone else" (even though I reject that concept as existing here) is normal, healthy and expected.

> If you drop 5 dollars and I pick it up and tell you that you dropped it, I also made a decision for you, no?

No, you didn’t. What decision do you think you made except your own?

    benefit of starting to give feedback if you're not already:
    ============================== - a lot
    risk that giving feedback without asking that hurts the recipient:
    == - very small
    0 ---------------------------- a lot
              <-impact->

If you are trying to follow this advice but are scared your feedback might "backfire," see the infographic above. The risk is non-zero, but the takeaway here should be "you should start giving feedback" not "feedback might backfire and hurt the person!" The benefits of giving more praise to managers far far outstrips the risk of misplaced praise.

So: when in doubt, go for it! Asking can help, I usually send the person my feedback first if I'm unsure & ask if they want to revise it in some way. If they want to refocus on something else, that's fine. The point of it is to express gratitude & help them out.

Weird take. There’s risk in unsolicited feedback but nearly zero cost in simply asking. Why take the chance?

A couple reasons: Some people are excessively modest to the point of self-sabotage & will discourage you from providing deserved praise because they see it as boasting. Also, asking is another step and creates more friction in providing positive feedback. Given that this is something people already don't do, if you're trying to encourage the behaviour it should be made as easy as possible. There will be some people who can overcome their reticence to provide positive feedback, but asking them also to have an awkward conversation with the recipient beforehand is one step too many & they'll revert to simply not giving feedback at all.

So I disagree that there is nearly zero cost. Some people find these conversations awkward & the cost may be them opting out of this process altogether. And again, this guide over-emphasizes the potential "risk" of providing positive feedback.

Your "why take the chance" is precisely the issue I'm talking about–giving praise has been wrongly framed as a "risky" behaviour. It's like saying "you should exercise but be careful not to fall off a cliff! Check for cliffs ahead of time so you don't die!" This is overstating the risk of exercising & putting emphasis in the wrong place.

So you think you know better than the people work with. I’m not interested in working people like you. Treat your coworkers with respect, not contempt. Your intentions don’t matter. The perception and consequences of your actions do.

Since this argument has somehow become personal, Mr/Ms Internet Stranger, I'd encourage you consider how frequently you give positive feedback to colleagues & peers that their manager could see (i.e. "on the record"). When was the last time you've done it? How frequently have you done so in the past 6 months? For me the answers to these questions are "this morning" and "at least a dozen times."

Given your extreme sensitivity to the possible damage of giving positive feedback, I am guessing you rarely engage in this "risky" behaviour. Am I wrong? If not, I don't plan to take advice on giving positive feedback from "the person who rarely gives positive feedback."

I sleep quite soundly knowing that when someone does me a good turn I give them positive feedback "on the record."

One thing I'd add to this: When your coworker does great work - tell them! It's great when people notice you've done something good. Not everything has to be reported to a manager, sometimes just compliment their work or thank them for the effort.

Boggles my mind that for as long as I've worked, I rarely see this in practice. It costs almost nothing to do. I try to do it when I can.

Look at the responses in this thread and you see why. People are just bundles of nerves these days and can't even take a compliment without over-analyzing the intent behind it. Sometimes a duck is just a duck.

I had this team where during the retrospective we would each list good and bad points of the sprint (yes, it was agile, and that part of the whole religious process was the only one that I found useful).

After a while, we would all start the sentences with "I am happy because ..." and "I am not so happy because...", and it became customary to have some "happy" points to compensate for the complaints. And there we all started thanking colleagues of the team. "I am happy because Alexia helped me doing this", or simply "I am happy because Bernard is back from holiday". It was a post-it thing, so when coming back from holiday, you would usually get a post-it from everyone.

We were not collecting them, counting them or showing them to a manager, it was just internal to the team. We would quickly ignore them and move to the bad points (group them, vote for the 3 most important ones, and define actions to solve them). It just felt nice, and I think it was a nice (small but regular) team building moment.

I don't believe in managers: I imagine that they would probably just start counting the reviews, creating some bullshit metrics and ranking the employees. I don't want that. I thank my coworkers when I can to make them feel good, not to make them look good to the manager.

Compliments should be easy. Too much forethought will reduce volume and I would keep it simple to encourage volume. Yes, Quantity over quality.

I can agree with the article's framing during performance reviews and periods of heightened scrutiny. But for the day to day, frequent collective appreciation and recognition has mattered a lot to me.

"You did well on this grunge work" is a death sentence only if it's contrasted by silence. Maybe I have a blind spot here, but even if the compliment had to stand alone, does the receiver really have so little agency to not reframe or rebut any unintended consequences of the compliment?

Does frequency cheapen compliments? Maybe. Does every piece of praise need to be so weighty? I don't think so. "Please" and "thank you" might not mean much but I still like it when people are polite. So too effort can be recognized.

Since I started in technology I've always kept my eyes open for chances to do this.

I'm a "career-switcher" who came from commercial aviation operations. In the airlines one of the big fears was to get a 'write-up' in your file, either from a teammate, or manager, or customer.

But, on the flip side, there was nothing better than to get an "atta-boy" letter from any of those same people. (Within the company the same form could be used: ours was called an "Unusual Occurrence Report", and it could be submitted for good outcomes/performances as well as mishaps/poor performances.

I brought this same idea with me when I started in technology. I probably should have sent more of these messages than I have, but still, it's nice to know that you're helping a colleague get some positive attention from their managers. We all know that in the corporate world praise is hard to come by, and it only takes a few minutes to write a email retelling how someone saved the day.

Rule #5: "Credit floats up, and blame travels down on the corporate ladder"

This is a universal fact with few exceptions

Be careful who you manage =)

As member of an underrepresented group I would say stop over thinking about how you can help us. Just treat us equally, not worse not better. I personally cringe at people trying to make me feel "represented". I get it, you are trying to do something positive for me (and for yourself, let's no pretend it is not about you also) but if you are not careful you may end up annoying me and even doing/saying "racist" stuff, and 9/10 times you will. Like this super nice dude at work invited me to eat spicy food because he thought all Latinos like spicy food like Mexicans, or these guys at a bike shop near my home giving me a discount for being brown so that I could afford biking, despite the fact that I have a little fortune in pro mountain bikes in my garage.

This is kind of exactly what various peer review processes are for. Managers usually solicit a report's peers' feedback (team members + whoever the report suggests) so it's really nice when there is an unsolicited feedback note. I try to give out at least a few every cycle.

I haven't done this for very long or at director level before so I'd love to know if managers with lots of reports end up with certain "frequent fliers" who either get a positive reputation for the extra notes, or tank their reputation by complaining too much. :-)

Am not one of those people that likes getting noticed too much but have learned praise can be a very soft power when needed. Some people really do put a lot of value on what others think of them and that isn’t a weakness. It can be a great strength to them.

Additionally, it’s a soft power. Managers talk. When I’ve intervened in organizational resource actions, there was always one manager/exec who would jump for me. One of those saves became a VP and another achieved the highest technical rank at a Fortune 200. I did it for them but I also did it for the company.

I always enjoy reading her posts. She must be an outstanding coworker.

I have also found that some people are experts at "weaponized compliments."

They can give a compliment that is an insult, or an attack.

"That's great, how you roughened the edges." when talking about a graphic asset with obvious mistakes.

"I always told Bob how great you are, at that." This is the "stolen valor" compliment. It insinuates that you could not have done it without their help.

etc.

In some cases, it's completely accidental, so we need to think carefully about our compliment.

Can you provide more details on this? I've always had a fascination with these kinds of subjects (eg, conversational terrorism like "distorted active listening" that politicians use) and the examples online seem to only hint at how a narcissist weaponizes this.

Well, in my experience, it's usually around "power dynamics."

Some folks always have to be "on top" of every relationship.

Compliments are a way to wrest control.

For example, if we complement someone on being productive, depending on the wording, it can infer that they are only productive because we say they are, or that we are the only ones willing to "credit" them with their productivity.

It can also be used as a way to make ourselves look good, like saying that we are the only ones that noticed a certain pattern or trait, so we are using them as a foil to complement ourselves.

I have spent my entire adult life around some of the most manipulative people on Earth, and have developed a certain level of cynicism. I have also learned ways to "counter" these "compliments."

For example, in the OP, I might say "Huh. I thought it was obvious I screwed that up." That turns the "complement" onto the other, or "Yeah, but I showed Bob that I was good at that, and that's why I got the promotion."

At $WORK we actually have a "kudos" column in our biweekly retrospectives specifically for shout-outs to coworkers who were particularly helpful. I think it's a good idea.

social media at work, you say.

My own bar for great stuff done by others is high, yet at least if I mention anything it's sincere.

Besides some more formal systems for praising/thanking people that my company has, my department has a 'Gratitude' chat on Teams dedicated to thanking people when someone goes out of their way, unblocks you, demonstrates extraordinary patience, gets back to you especially quickly, etc.

I think it's awesome. It sets a public precedent for kind behavior and appreciative attitudes. It always makes me happy to see people thanking each other in that chat.

> I think it's awesome. It sets a public precedent for kind behavior and appreciative attitudes. It always makes me happy to see people thanking each other in that chat.

Which brings exactly the same problem as the likes: some people always appear on those chats, some people never do. Does that mean that they are doing a bad job? No... they just get less visibility.

How do you get more visibility on the "gratitude" chat? By thanking the others, so that they see you more and think about thanking you in return, I suppose? In my experience, some teams keep congratulating themselves, some don't, at all. And management sees those who are visible, even if it is not fair.

It can quickly get artificial, and a bit depressing for the people who don't really appear there.

My department is pretty siloed, so I don't offhand know who all normally works closely with whom. I don't consult the org chart when I see people praise or thank each other, either, so I don't have a good sense of how much public praise in my department is intra-team puffery.

I can say, though, that I've (so far) never used that channel to thank anyone on my own team. On my own small team, my manager already knows when someone has been especially helpful to someone else. I use that chat in part to make things visible to external managers who otherwise might not know.

> And management sees those who are visible, even if it is not fair.

I admit that even in the best circumstances this could create some bias, but I don't think it has to be that severe. Managers should have other, better sources of information than that which should weigh more heavily than that.

> It can quickly get artificial

Yeah. I think keeping it low stakes and not treating it as some kind of informal metric is important for preserving some level of authenticity.

Truthfully, though, I don't really find myself evaluating the authenticity of exchanges of gratitude between others. I just know that when I use it, I'm genuinely thankful to whomever I'm thanking, and so far I feel like the thanks I've received have also been genuine.

> a bit depressing for the people who don't really appear there.

That's true. I've even felt a bit of that myself. But I think ultimately it's imperative for organizations (especially managers, but to a lesser extent basically everyone) to try to ensure that all kinds of people feel appreciated for their work, including people who are introverts and people whose work is solitary or unsexy maintenance work. And that means that recognition can't just be formulaic or systematic or happen in only one place.

Ideally, feeling underappreciated or left out in a certain system of recognition/thanks would be something you'd bring to your manager during a 1:1. And they could try to answer it by making your impact visible in some other way, like organizing a presentation or a demo of your work, or writing up some kind of report on it and sharing it somewhere, or just DMing you every now and then and letting you know that they had a conversation with so-and-so about how whatever you did was nice, helpful, vital, or whatever, or (hopefully!) arrange something more substantial like a promotion, raise, or bonus.

I like our gratitude chat at work but I wouldn't begrudge anyone still feeling underappreciated for whatever reason or saying that it doesn't do much for them.

Fair, I totally get your points. I was just saying that as someone who has a "gratitude" chat at work. It has made me realized that I was working very hard for absolutely no recognition, and it destroyed my motivation.

I've learned that recognition and feeling connected to others is really important for me as a developer, too. If I go too long without sharing my work with someone or getting feedback from a user, I can start to feel invisible, or even useless, and it's very demotivating.

Arranging demos/informal tests with users frequently (ideally once every week or two, or even more frequently if I have a lot of work to show and test) to solicit feedback from users and make my work's purpose more immediate to me has been hugely helpful. (Every single time I put a user in front of something I've made, it always helps me identify new UX and documentation bugs, too.)

I hope you can make arrangements to feel more connected to others in your work and acknowledged for your effort, up to and including finding a different job! It makes such a huge difference in life and it's really worth it.

Asking is CRITICAL. Do not praise me without consent. I have had too many abusive managers in my career to ever desire unsolicited praise. All information is a weapon in the hands of an abuser.

I may have helped you complete your task but my manager could interpret that as wasting time not delivering my own task.

In other words going over someone’s head (direct to their manager) is an aggressive and rude action. It is never kind or helpful, regardless of intent.

I feel like not asking is a reasonable default, and creates the culture and world I want to live in.

If you really don't want to be praised without consent I will respect those wishes but you'll need to let me know first.

>All information is a weapon in the hands of an abuser.

the only way to stop giving your company information is by not working there. Why does this come off like you can hide the work you do at work?

>I may have helped you complete your task but my manager could interpret that as wasting time not delivering my own task.

If I feel that worried I simply won't help. Direct them to your manager and make sure it goes down the chain of command before getting a task assigned to you. Boring, and inefficient, yes. But it is maliciously complient to the oppressive atmosphere your manager contributes to.

Yeah, tell their manager you did said work and demand a raise!

I do this a lot with various service-people… I've missed a few flights here or there, and then contacted the airline, "hey I missed my flight, Janet Buttersworth helped me fix it up for a flight an hour later, she was super cool and I really appreciate it.

Or a cable installer, I'll just ask for the name of their boss so I can put in a good word for them.

Quite sure this has been responsible for a few bonuses here and there, pay it forward, etc.

There's an obvious political slant here and likely some white savior syndrome. Is racism the reason why managers overlook some high-performers? And why would empty praise from a co-worker help any? What if the manager is part of an "underrepresented group" themselves?

Smart people hate being treated like children so you run the risk of offending them. That actually could offend someone for real.

It is introduced in the context of anti-racism, but the content actually seems more related to enabling a true meritocracy. It's hard to interpret that as a bad thing.

It is a fun exercise to think of all the interesting ways the 2nd order effects of these feedback hacks can be weaponized in office politicks.

Is this a justification for keeping complimentary feedback to yourself? Seems like a recipe for a continually worsening world. We gotta rise above that shit.

If you have something nice to say, you should say it. Any workplace that penalizes you for that, you should leave--maybe with a parting act of sabotage.

> Any workplace that penalizes you for that, you should leave

I don't think that's necessarily what the parent means. I can totally imagine that the workplace will penalize those who get less praise (because if they don't get spontaneous complimentary feedback (or less), they are probably not as good, right?).

What happens for people who are less social, or more isolated (e.g. in a smaller team)?

Not saying that we should not compliment coworkers. Just that it is important to think that there are ways to do it wrong ("Let's have a white board collecting the nice feedback everybody gets, so that we all enjoy it! What do you mean this creates a public ranking in the office?").

If you're playing that game, well have fun!

I worked at a large bank that attempted to formalise this through a software application they purchased, which allowed you to recognise people on your team. The solution was over-engineered to hell with low engagement. A culture which fostered simple acknowledgements in a stand-up meeting would have been immeasurably more personal and effective.

This is good, but better yet is to then remind the manager again at the key point in the year/cycle right before performance reviews are being filled in.

This has the most chance of having an impact plus it adds weight to the compliment (ie if you remembered how good they were perhaps five months later it's not just a throw away comment)

My way is to write an internal Newsletter highlighting people’s interesting work, achievements, and highlight often-overlooked gotchas. People liked it, even the most introverted DevOps was happy that people started asked him more about his work, such as, his beautiful documentation.

I have always done this since way back in my early days of working. I have never understood people who follow "Art of War" tactics in the job world. I suspect those people feel they have no talent and assume they have to play dirty to succeed.

Discussed at the time:

When your coworker does great work, tell their manager - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23858662 - July 2020 (367 comments)

I've also learned, when people that work for you do great, tell your manager.

I've never worked in a large organization, so perhaps this is a stupid question, by why wouldn't the manager know that a person under him did a great job? Isn't that a manager's job?

Apologies for not commenting on the content of the article, but just wanted to say it's great to see the use of a gender neutral pronoun at the top of HN this evening.

Is there a way to write that title with genders?

"When your coworker does great, tell his manager."

Pro tip for managers: Whenever someone on your team does something good, keep a record of it in a doc. This will make your performance reviews a breeze to write

at my job, it's part of company culture to praise people publicly whenever they're doing great work. it's a great way of knowing you're on the right path.

Public praise is different than direct management praise. It still shouldn’t be done without consent. Your intention may be good but only effect matters.

... and they will get promoted instead of you.

Unless your honesty is noticed.

this seems to me to be too much extra work (to prepare) to deliver a compliment.

I'd rather see a culture where compliments/kudos are quick, easy, and often.

this is a good thing to do in a team.

Ah the manager game

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