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Comment by sethammons | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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