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Comment by johndhi | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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