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Comment by demosthanos | Hacker News Reader

I get that engineers have general beef with management "techniques" of any kind—the whole concept feels manipulative and/or hand-wavy—but the comments in this article are disappointing and not really up to what I expect from HN. Multiple people read the section headings (which are absolutely provocative, unnecessarily so) and decided correctly they'd get lots of internet points for writing "summaries" that are actually just caricatures of the worst management practices they could imagine someone recommending under that section heading.

The article honestly isn't that bad and has a number of interesting points to make. I recommend reading it rather than just dismissing it out of hand because of caricatures in the HN comments.

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Yeah, I don't think it's useful (except to score [office] political points) to read the least generous interpretation you can. Trying to understand a position lets you better decide whether or not it actually makes sense, e.g. Chesterton's fence. Although, if we tried to fairly assess every argument we see, we'd spend all our time doing that instead of being productive, so I get why it's often wise to dismiss things out of hand, at least initially.

You can disagree with the article, but I think your parent comment is not a fair summary, e.g. w/ respect to bullets 1 and 2:

> At first, I thought, ‘This is a really unreasonable person.’ But later as I dug into it, I discovered he was right...This process of conflict mining served Larson a key lesson. “I could have just ignored him, But then I would have missed the key learning, which is that I was the one who was missing context, and needed to refine my approach.”

Maybe the parent comment was "conflict mining" itself. Often the quickest way to learn about something is to make a statement about it and then let others correct you if you're wrong.

On the other hand, "what is a power dynamic" is a fair counterpoint to that. Jeff Bezos, in contrast, said he generally withheld his opinion until the end so others wouldn't be afraid to contradict him; a powerful person sharing their idea can prevent others from sharing better ones.

I think that engineers would had better opinion of management techniques if those actually worked and if tech actually had more then a few good managers.The problem is that all too many management techniques are effectively cargo cult and all too many managers have low social skills.

A very good example of a ad social skill is to use provocative sentences and then wonder why people react to your provocation.

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