Do not try to be the smartest in the room; try to be the kindest
jorgegalindo.me
jorgegalindo.me
[1] https://www.upworthy.com/nice-vs-kind-are-east-coast-people-...
East Coast "kind" would be to tell the person working for you about their performance issues early, in a constructive feedback manner such that they could course correct or find a role they are better suited for. The hope is they either improve in the role, find a new role internally, or decide to move on before having to stomach a firing.
West Coast nice would be to let the person working for you continue to perform poorly without feedback, being "nice" to them, but privately considering them incompetent. Eventually you will end up firing them without much warning when a cut actually has to be made. Think Amazon PIP.
Going to the west coast - it is weird. People arent genuinely empathetic or rather, its a foreign concept to them. Empathy is always done through some indirect means, through hobbies for instance. I do feel people on the west coast and midwest arent really used to community collaboration either near as much as the east coast either. Also they are not used to openly expressing themselves, I suspect this has to do with fear of being negatively judged
I also just went to LA. It is such a foreign concept to me how black and white everything is. A lot of people will believe there are truly evil or good people - its such a weird thing for me to hear coming from the east coast - we just think of people as like people.
I think at least on the west coast, alot of this artificial niceness has to do with rising CoL, asian influence, and homeless problems
Mid west is more so like less exposure to international culture compared to east coast
Conformity is like rewarded a lot more in the midwest and west coast, people imo struggle to be individualistic and most resort to some sort of pseudonym to express themselves
I do feel people on the east coast are just in general, simpler people used to simpler things and overall just happier people
I have some friends that moved from seattle, they do tend to express themselves better in text then verbally
> I do feel people on the west coast and midwest arent really used to community collaboration either near as much as the east coast either. Also they are not used to openly expressing themselves...
If you spend some time in Chicago, I think you would find that it isn't much different from the east coast, based on your description. I can assure you that we have no issues openly expressing ourselves :)
People are definitely community oriented there - theres alot of polish community events, open friendliness towards sports outings and open pickups (basketball volleyball etc)
I will say though I think in Chicago it tends to be a bit more like clique-y though - culturally and sportswise comparitvely to something like NYC.
Like in NYC theres alot more international / individualism though, in Chicago the city itself enforces a good number of rules on what you should and shouldnt be (example is the pride colors painted in boys town)
Usually it was used in the context of some devious ladder climbing political hack manager in corporate that we'd refer to as a "smile f'er" as he (always he) would be smiling while he secretly f'd you.
I would bet managers on the east coast keep under performers around just to have people to cut also, doesn’t take a genius to figure out the strategy. You invest in people you think can improve and help you, you get rid of the ones that hurt you, and you keep the so so ones for when you need to sacrifice.
Therefore, keeping around people who genuinely deserve firing is a drag on delivering. As a result it is always in your interest to get improvements out of your team members, whether by upskilling, role changing, hoping they leave on their own or worst case actually laying them off.
I've worked in financial service tech for nearly 20 years across 6 companies and only 1 I would say did a "5% every year" thing, and even that got paused for years at a time when market conditions pushed that way.
Even if your statement is true, it is a matter of framing. Obviously you keep your best staff, and fire the actively negatively contributing staff. The people in the middle aren't just "for when you need to sacrifice".. they are simply the middle 50%. You obviously want to see them improve as well.
I cannot comment on pervasiveness, but I thought the "fire bottom x%" (or stack ranking or yank and rank) strategy started on the east coast, with businesses like GE, hence it would not be a trait isolated to either coast.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitality_curve
>The people in the middle aren't just "for when you need to sacrifice".. they are simply the middle 50%. You obviously want to see them improve as well.
Everyone wants to see everyone improve, but time and energy are a scarce resource, so it is just a matter of how much you want to bet on each person.
Ignoring those few largest companies and focusing on the other 99% of businesses that don't hire management consultancies, this is definitely a "thing" with businesses on the west coast.
But they are hired for a certain specific kind of "expertise" they uniquely possess — that being the internal knowledge about management decisions being made in other companies (perhaps with their guidance; or perhaps just with them there at the time to witness those decisions.)
In other words, management consultancies can tell you how to "copy the success" of companies you personally think are worth copying, provided the management consultancy you hire has records of their consultants working at that company. (You won't actually be "copying their success", because you'll be applying your mental schema of what would make for success to deciding which of their internal practices and decisions should be copied. So it's more a "cargo-culting of success." But executives still want that!)
A CEO won't trust the thinking of a fresh 20-year-old sent over by Bain. But they will trust the thinking of a CEO they admire. And they're willing to pay big bucks just for Bain to send them the 20-year-old rather than Bain's best, not only because the 20-year-old is a political tool; but also because the 20-year-old is a channel through which the CEO can tap into Bain's institutional memory of private leadership meetings held by their most-admired CEOs!
(And this creates an active transmission vector for the spread of business-management-theory memes. "Return To Office"? It may have started because a few bigcorps like Apple had big albatross investments of commercial real-estate in the form of massive HQ buildings. But it spread throughout the Fortune 500 via their shared reliance on the management-consultancy grapevine.)
Management consultancies know that this is half the reason companies hire them — or at least the consultants who've been around the block know this. And this is why there's any place at all for senior management consultants, rather than it being strictly a "get in, make your money, retire early" sort of job. It's not that the senior consultants know more about business. It's that their field experience has enabled them to internalize and distill the current corporate zeitgeist — and so they can just tell you off the top of their heads what you should be doing to be the management-theory equivalent of "fashionable." (And this doesn't look outwardly any different than the "best practices" advice the 20-year-old will give you based on what they learned in their MBA program. So there's plausible deniability in this, in a way there isn't in asking the 20-year-old to dredge up records from your competitors.)
As far as the English language goes, what you define as "kind" is also "nice".
Kind: of a sympathetic or helpful nature
Nice: pleasing, agreeable
I would argue that they are actually different.
The point is that nice is a pretty broad term. It can mean agreeable but that's merely one use of the word. You can be nice and not agreeable.
The given example for nice
> nice would be to let the person working for you continue to perform poorly without feedback, being "nice" to them, but privately considering them incompetent.
Is actually being hypocritical, not nice. The nice person would still tell the under performing person what's what, they'd just not be rude about it.
You can also create a scenario in which being kind becomes detrimental if taken to the extreme. However, the author of that book decided that being nice was bad, and being kind was good. This understandably continues to annoy people when this frankly dumb definition is brought up.
Kind is only the exception to the norm if you're in a crappy culture. In some places the ethic is such that kindness is the norm.
don't know why we need to quibble about the meaning of "nice" or invent a new word when polite will do
politeness, unlike kindness or niceness, has no implication of intent, only tone, which is what's trying to be conveyed
When the car broke down in a turn lane in the rain: lots of honking behind me
When the hazard lights came on: honking stopped, people materialized to help push it back out of the road
A hazard light means there is a problem that can’t be solved with honking.
tough love: I think she needs.
ruinous empathy: she thinks she needs.Missed the thing but what a front-loaded mess. What we want to say is
Nice sucks, be kind.
The pithiness works in presentation but past that...
But my delivery came with it's own neg assoc (against whoever came up with the E/W coast theory).
The intent is probably to clarify and communicate better. But with that word choice you end up confusing and muddying. The problem is, people have to know exactly what you mean already (which means you probably don’t have that much to talk about on that topic anyway).
His list of points is fine. It’s mostly the servant leadership mentality, which I’m all for. But sometimes to be an effective leader you have to make hard decisions. You’ve got to know your personal boundaries and know when to yield and when to hold them, or other less sweet people are going to steamrolling you, or you’re going to get overloaded by taking on too much, etc. And sometimes you have to be direct and blunt and not so sweet to show true kindness. Confrontation is hard and it’s not something most people really want, but I believe it’s sometimes necessary to embody kindness. For yourself, your teammates, the customer, the organization. Because at the end of the day if you are not effective, that’s going to hurt everyone.
Listening, being respectful, and being empathetic may drive one person to bite their tongue and silence feedback that someone is performing poorly out of fear of hurting them or the morale of the team. Another may be driven by the very same things into giving candid feedback.
This article does not do a good job of exploring the difference. It just asserts "Being nice is the new punk".
I've worked in very competent teams and very incompetent teams. There were two types of incompetent teams. The type that always denied making mistakes, and the kind that owned up to their own incompetence. Being kind leads to the latter.
It still sucked being in an incompetent team, but when they admit their weakness, they get out of your way and defer to you. When they don't admit it, you'll face barriers all the way.
Being kind to a person that behaves as described in the grandparent comment could communicate that you find this kind of behavior helpful. Fine if that's really the case; problematic for everyone if not.
This entire discussion needs to come to a screeching halt while people get together and hammer out some definitions. It's clear we're all working from different and contradictory assumptions about what these words mean.
I think most people would agree Fred Rogers was kind - but I have to imagine he had to fire people from the show over the course of its run.
If someone is fucking up, they are in the wrong position. People need to work for a living, and shouldn't be under duress constantly. It is up to them and their manager to find a position that is rewarding and engaging for them.
If they don't care, they are also in the wrong position.
It is no reason to not treat them with kindness. You don't have to blow them, but you don't need to be UNkind, as several have said below.
The only people I don't treat with kindness are people who are legitimately trying to hurt me and people I love, or promote hateful ideas with glee. People who are failing at their job need help.
And if they still annoy you, then I think the problem might be in how you view the situation. Compassion helps with anger. Try to think about why you are so angry, and if it really matters or helps to be so angry. Especially if you are not the manager. If you are the manager, consider that maybe the job isn't for you. You shouldn't be pissed at work all day!!
A business is not a charity.
(I don’t know you but you sound like every white male teenager who discovers Ayn Rand.)
If you're a leader with a strategic role, time is your most important and limited resource. You just cannot afford to spend time on something that doesn't further the goals of the business, even if you're a hippie or a communist.
Moreover as an IC there is a lot you can do; most importantly you can quit if you feel the team you're in is being mismanaged.
While I believe you should show a baseline level of kindness to people when you first meet them much like you should give people a baseline level of respect, there are actions which can and should lose both.
When I’m kind to people, especially in other departments, they don’t mirror it: they’re stressed, they’re pressured by their boss or it’s just not the culture of that department… even after months of cooperation
It takes less effort, becomes easier, and in time will come naturally to you as well.
I personally don't believe it's possible to "give out" kindness, compassion, friendship solely from an utilitarian position. It would either be fake, and people feel the difference and the desired effect does not follow, or your utilitarian position is a front, in order to justify being kind to unkind people around you judging you.
Some persons (me included) suspect that humans rarely if ever act with true altruism; that it's actually a nicely dressed up form of self-serving hedonism.
And so for us, the challenge becomes how to get ourselves to act good / kind despite that. One way is to find ways to intentionally tie kind behavior to our own self-interest.
It's a rather huge theoretical distinction that at least in the West goes all the way back!
In general, one shouldn't confuse ethics itself with the whatever one might think is the most viable ethical system! It isnt a product to market. Utilitarianism is no less silly the anything else, and has its own ridiculous edge cases and all that.
It's been fascinating to read up on something about which my thoughts were only half-formed.
My best is: they are saying it is worth taking a step back and making a prioritized list of our values. If we do this, we may place "being kind" over "being productive"
I think their warning here is about: what happens in a situation where being kind is NOT productive? Will you just drop it?
I think I agree with the broad strokes of this. My rebuttal is: the comment above this was just pointing out, for people who do not value kindness over productivity, that they are not in opposition. That you don't have to pick one or the other. You can have both.
We can get mad and turn away from people who do not share our values/priorities. Or we can show them ways that our value systems do not clash and it can be win win
One of the problems with engineers counter-signalling engineering values (like actual technical competence) is that we live in a world where those values are extremely underrated while every manager, HR-bot etc. are already pushing values like kindness.
E.g. if you ever wonder why government doesn't work it's because they're absurdly skewed towards HR-values and opposed to engineering-values.
Look at Conway’s Law: “any organization that designs a system (defined broadly) will produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization's communication structure.”
The “kind” people are the people who optimize an organization’s communication structure by helping competent people to have a voice and not be impeded by political wrangling.
In short, I think it’s the ‘kind’ people who can help an organization realize an architecture that is less warped by political considerations and more true to the customer’s needs.
Of course an organization needs both kindness and competence. In my decades in tech, competence was over-valued in my early years (the worship of the trope of the rockstar-but-asshole programmer), so if there is an overindication towards kindness right now, it is probably a counterbalance.
I would also question your conclusion about the government. While I have not worked in the government myself, I come from a sort of “federal government family”, in that I have multiple close family who have spent decades in federal government roles, and they are full of stories of incompetent managers undermining their employees, politically fighting one another, etc. To your point, they also have plenty of stories of crass incompetence, Nepotism, etc. But I think it’s an easy and incorrect answer to say it’s simply due to “HR-values” as opposed to “engineering-values”: it’s multi-faceted in both directions.
All that need for political wrangling was created by incompetent kind people. Getting more of those just creates more of those issues, if not at your place its at others, its an arms race.
When it comes to incompetence, people can hide that behind kindness, or behind bluster and bullying. Both are certainly unhealthy. I wouldn’t say one leads to issues over the other.
If you’re wanting to build a high speed rail line, space rocket or nuclear power plant; a propaganda specialist is probably going to be more useful than an engineer.
And then it runs 10x over budget due to incompetence. The propaganda specialists creates more issues than they solve, they might solve this issue but they make many other issues not get funded in its place overall increasing incompetence by moving money from competent to incompetent people.
Feels like the majority of those well-known failures (the 'we spent $5 billion+ and spent 10 years on something that should have taken a few years and maybe a tenth of that budget ones) come from either management who has no idea what they want, planning that hasn't taken into account even half the obstacles the project will need to overcome, or dozens of leaders all trying to make their mark.
Actual technical/work incompetence probably plays some part, but it's probably less of a matter of "people weren't honest enough about the quality of other people's work" and more of a matter of "we hired the cheapest possible team to do the work, and they weren't qualified in the slightest".
Bonus points for the leader of that team being the nephew/niece/relative of some guy in charge of the project.
If you look at mid-century project management, when it was engineering-based, a lot of the focus was on things like optimising resource inputs, identify the critical path so scheduling could be done to minimise blocking, figuring out approaches to accurately calculate time and money estimates (i.e. making sure estimates were not uniformly biased towards being underestimates as that demonstrates a failure to make empirically-informed predictions).
While I totally agree that nowadays most projects fail due to bad management, I'd go further and say they fail because management is HR-values based. None of the above has anything to do with kindness, or indeed social skills in general.
Engineers, having systematically deprecated engineering-values, now have their projects managed by non-engineers who go around screwing things up.
Kindness and incompetence are orthogonal. You can be kind and still give honest, direct feedback. And your feedback will probably be received better because of your kindness.
Yes, only valuing kindness with valuing technical competence is not ideal but so is the inverse. You want both.
Technical competence requires a certain amount of self-discipline and sacrifice. You don’t become competent just by doing the same things over and over, so experience alone is not competence. With self-discipline comes a healthy habit of self-motivation. You don’t need your employer “making you” feel valued, you derive a sense of accomplishment from doing good work. You know you’re valued because you’re literally valued (in dollars).
Too many engineers take the 2nd approach, and then tell themselves that everyone else is the problem when they get labeled as “disagreeable”. At best, they mean well but are sorely lacking in social skills. At worst, the cruelty is the point, and “I’m just telling it like it is” is their attempt at gaslighting others.
Perhaps I should have said conformist instead. Basically I'm taking about what PG is talking about here: https://www.paulgraham.com/conformism.html
If you find a project was held back by infighting, siloed groups, major shifts in direction or key people leaving, kindness will help with all of these things.
The reality is, people working as individuals, no matter how competent those individuals are, can only accomplish things within the scope of a single person. There are some things like that, but there are many things that are not. To accomplish any of those things, people need to work together, in a complementary way, toward a common goal. That just won’t happen if they don’t get along. Social competence can become just as important as technical competence. Kindness is part of that.
Government projects stand apart because things like cost are balanced against the inherent jobs-creation objectives of funding them.
Kindness doesn't mean to let incompetent people sit in roles they are incapable of indefinitely. That's more "niceness", using all sorts of HR speak about family/win together/blah blah blah while waiting until the budget cuts come to surprise fire people who were never performing in their role.
Kindness is to give people feedback that helps them improve. It is sometimes a poorly socialized engineers impression that people simply do their jobs poorly on purpose. In reality it's a mix of skills and awareness. Eventually everyone gets put into a role they aren't truly capable of and either grows into it or moves on. Feedback helps that happen sooner rather than later.
The lack of competition means that (1) if the organization is dysfunctional, it won't be beaten by a better one, and (2) it has little incentive to improve.
Source? Ever heard of elections? Sounds like a braindead libertarian software developer take on a topic you have no idea about to me
They can't control each of the individual organizations within it.
If the Pest Control Section of the Department of Agriculture has a badly run subsection, the single vote of each voter can't independently influence it and the thousands of other organizations within the state.
You make a good point about government, there are so many big problems including bad incentives about working hard, taking risks, etc, it’s hard for to see that as the main one.
Almost all problems on projects boil down to a people problem in the end many of which are made intractable by company and wider culture.
That's like saying a company didn't fail because it ran out of money. It failed because no one was around to operate it.
A lack of kindness can lead to mistakes not being rectified, as well as the wrong type of folks doing the work.
(Classic case of false dichotomy).
Tesla self driving Tesla robotaxi Tesla park summon Tesla cybertruck Tesla solar roof tiles Boring company etc etc
One of the main things that Toyota Production System brings to manufacturing is the concept of respect, everything is supposed to be based on respect for each other. Maybe people fall short of that alot of the time, but that is the goal and intrinsic to all their other techinques like genchi genbutsu, kanban, just in time, waste elimination, etc.
> In Spanish, we have a saying, "Maestro Liendre: De tó sabe, pero de ná entiende." I don't really know (and don't want) to translate it because it loses its punch, but it fits perfectly here.
Wait, why mention it if I, the reader, cannot understand the saying or how it is even relevant to the article, but leave me with the tease that "but it fits perfectly here". Very puzzling, to say the least. Google Translate tells me "Master Niendre: He knows everything, but he understands nothing". Now I'm even more confused. That is so pithy and unambiguous that I really have to ask: what is it about the Spanish version that "loses its punch" when translated to English?!
A more literal translation (with some liberties for the rhyme) would be “handyman nit: knows a bit of everything, but understands jack shit”.
The saying "Maestro Liendre: De tó sabe, pero de ná entiende" generally means that someone appears to know a little bit about many things but doesn't have a deep understanding of any of them. It's used to describe someone who pretends to be knowledgeable but lacks true expertise.
https://www.spanishdict.com/guide/shortening-of-words > There are a few apocopes of very common words that are pronounced and written in informal Spanish as monosyllabic words. These popular apocopes include na, pa, and to, that stand for nada (nothing), para (for), and todo (all). You may find these words written with an apostrophe at the end, but spelling experts advise against it.
This English version, you cannot just punch it, there has to be a pause like after "yet" or a comma before yet and then punch is delivered but still "understands nothing" is a mouthful compared to "pero de ná entiende" even though my Spanish is non existing, still feels like I could pronounce it much faster or much easier.
I enjoy a lot the process of translating very idiomatic phrases, one way or another. I feel like I get to know both languages better.
There are many situations where a kindness turns to an expectation, which leads to entitlement: suddenly you are the bad guy if you don't go above and beyond.
Being helpful around people who view work as a zero sum game is a recipe for disaster.
This article also reframes "things you should do because it's an advantage to you" as kindness.
For the most part, I like to live in a world where the default position is that we're mostly well-intentioned, rising apes rather than fallen angels (RIP, Sir Terry Pratchett). This is clearly not always the case, and it's important to accept that, but it shouldn't stop me from still aspiring to be as kind as possible in my own life.
You do not always want to be perceived (because that's what you're going for) as kind, it is situation specific.
You do not want to be kind during negotiation, because that means you're usually missing out on a better deal.
You do not want to be kind when dealing with bad behaviour. I've too often seen missing stairs running loose for far too long due to "kindness" from HR, whether it was sincere or rather an expression of cowardliness .
What do you want to aim at all time is respectful behaviour, because that is what could undermine your current position in the conversation. People do not listen to jerks.
Perhaps the human beings in question refused to participate in that game and therefore went "missing"? People using the term "missing stair" are very often sanctimonious, obsessed with power, and just do enough of faking kindness to fly under the radar. And they treat others like inanimate objects.
That's a lot of assumption to make from the use of one illustrated idiom, that were by no means intended from my side.
Not sure why it makes you fake, there's lots of nice, simple people that are authentic
The author never implies that one should be kind to the exclusion of being smart.
Accepting that this is just the way things are is difficult the more emotionally invested you are in your technical work, if you happen to be on a non-technical or semi-technical team. I think this article is helpful for situations where either the pay compensates for bad work culture, or where you’re simply stuck on a team where maybe you are the “smartest” person in the room and it makes you hate your job. At least that’s how I’m interpreting it for my situation.
Kindness with true reciprocity is very hard to find (I do not mean CoC compliant fake kindness that just keeps the actual power structures in place while everyone is backstabbing.)
I'd suggest the solution is coming and it will decentralize culture decisions the same way capitalism decentralized spending decisions.
(Personally I’m not sure “kindness” is necessarily the right word that encompasses the four qualities listed. Resolutive? Seems like that’s something independent.)
All together, it comes across a little smug.
It also doesn’t wrestle at all with the complexities and tradeoffs of how we deal with people in different scenarios. Be kind to bullies and assholes? There’s a way to do it, sure, but there’s a lot of technique and nuance involved, and this post doesn’t scratch the surface.
Now, I do not mean passion projects... I mean wage slavery work hell holes... My passion projects and companies are made up of people I trust, have verified their experience. We are nice to each 60% of the time- we understand the other 40% is necessary. We don't take it personally, we brush it off. We are mature professionals, not whiney day care adults.
Life is often a game of making sure you have enough at bats to eventually succeed.
From a self interested utilitarian view, people will remember you warmly for being kind and be happy to work with you again / give you another shot, far more than they will if you are smart & difficult.
Being incompetent and kind isn't my suggestion here. It is simply that if you are as smart and hard working as you think you are, it's not that hard to also be a little kind. If it is so hard for you, you may want to try working on it.
"That is not to say you shouldn't come prepared and knowledgeable to meetings you attend. You should provide clear value to each and every meeting you attend from a knowledge perspective. However, the human value of kindness is far more important in the eyes of attendees."
Kindness reduces barriers to accepting the honest truth and is thus part of maximizing honesty and realism.
Ie. you could also say that egoism is being kind to yourself etc.
If I feel I'm doing a disservice to the person by not speaking up, but still stay silent because I don't want to be confrontational or harsh, I don't think I'm being kind to the person. I'm only protecting the relation or myself, as I don't have the tools or a path to convey helpful information while making clear I'm having the person's good in mind.
I see it as a failure in communication (it usually can be blamed on both parties), and clearly not a character quality.
To be fair does it not depend on the audience. There's a balance between the audience and an idea you want to push.
Here in YC you can probably go full on with your tech/science knowledge/ideas/theories/whatever and people will judge you purely on your points made, and the people listening are in the same boat.
In another context you may be the smartest person in the room by a long way on a topic and have something constructive to say, but no one else in the room is as competent so you cannot go full on with your YC-like comment and have to balance the knowledge/empathy available of the audience.
I guess in the end it's about ignorance busting and offering some new insights into a thing that other people can appreciate.
I would disagree with this, even here it is important to be kind. Too often I find the comments on a given thread are full of self importance or worse disdain for the "shortcomings" of the topic in question. Whether or not that disdain might be due to a wealth of knowledge and experience, it brings the general experience of being here down, and in my opinion lowers the quality of the site and the person doing the disdaining.
I'm not asking for fawning over every submission like it is a new revelation, but the adage that "if you can't say anything nice, don't say anything at all" springs to mind. HN is going to be full of people from differing experiences and walks of life. Tech is too big now for us to all be on the same page, or even within the same general age range. When someone drops a "Show HN" link to some hobby or passion project of theirs, and the comments are full of "experienced" people critiquing the project as if it were supposed to be a google scale web service or even as if it needed to be a viable commercial product – no matter how correct those assessments may be – that's damaging to our shared sense of community.
My own philosophy over time has been to only offer critique if it is also accompanied by my own efforts at providing what solutions I can directly (code, documentation whatever). If it bothers me enough to think I should say something, then it should bother me enough to also put in the effort to be/submit the change I want to see. Anything less is at best a piling on of cheap criticism ("cheap" in this case in the sense of "a dime a dozen"), and at worst unkindness for the sake of showing off knowledge. Absent something to contribute beyond criticism / critique, the goal I set for myself is either to engage with the subject and the creator on the assumption of earnest passion for the project, or if I'm disinterested for whatever reason, to not engage at all.
I definitely don't always succeed in this endeavor, but over the decades I've grown increasingly tired of the airs of cynicism that permeates the "smart" spaces I've been in. Be kind in all audiences, whether peers, betters or lay people and you will usually avoid being pretentious, confidently incorrect or condescending respectively. And those are 3 things I think we could do with less of in most communities.
When it comes to social etiquette, empathy, agreeableness, there are definitely a lot of people 'on the scale' around here and that's absolutely fine. There are smart well-balanced people and there's uber-smart people who know more than most about a thing but perhaps lack that social etiquette- and that's fine to me. If they can communicate their point, I don't mind so much their lack of grace on it.
At least being formerly graceless and continuing to develop grace, that has been my experience.
yes, this is a huge adjustment for me as old Gen X trying to work with Gen Z / Millenials. I feel like Michael Scott sometimes to be honest... raised in an environment where bigoted jokes, brutal insults, shouting, were the norm and expected, adjusting to being around the new generation which was raised on anti-bullying and therapy. I am glad things are changing, the old ways were very dysfunctional and counterproductive.
Maybe its just the lead poisoning.
I'm Gen X, raised feral like the rest. Movies like The Lost Boys, The Goonies and Explorers feel like biographies. We were vicious to one another before the arrival of political correctness in the early 90s, which received backlash like today's woke. But kindness is always on the right side of history.
I agree though about feeling like some kind of crass <expletive> around young people today. I have a hard time staying domesticated as I watch society crumble under the guise of gentrification. I just want to act out so badly sometimes, deface something, watch it all burn like the good old days, SLC Punk style. But the real punk is to be ruthlessly human to one another.
There's a certain thrill in sacrificing one's ego to help someone achieve their dreams that just can't be replaced. The biggest baddasses are teachers, nurses, your mom, and everyone knows it.
The kind or nice person, sure if they are some kind of glue to the team that helps the entire group work together, they don't need to be the highest performers. But incompetent nice people also are a problem.
With that said, of course you should be kind. But don’t be afraid to be smart too. The world needs smart.
I would say helping others is incredibly punk. Such as responding to chat messages requesting help in some particular coding problem. So many people will direct them to a support queue, but I love taking time to understand their issue and help them out.
Punk was the reaction of the individual vs. the global machine. The global machine’s surface is nice but the machine is not kind.
Meetings are really about getting things done. The kindest act is to not have the meeting if it’s unnecessary. And if it is, outline what you want to get out of it at the start. During the meeting, yes, you should be kind.
I struggle with being "kind" when under pressure. I don't mean to be unkind, but it can seem that way. People who don't know me well sometimes get offended by that. People who know me a little better don't get offended, they know I'll be more approachable when the deed is done (whatever the deed may be). It's ok to be a hedgehog sometimes. Not being kind sometimes is ok. Just don't be mean, that's much more important.
bows
Edit: OK well you guys two full moons have definitely not gone by since I've made this comment I'm starting to think y'all ain't as kind as you make yourselves out to be..
Don't get angry at a man till you've walked a mile in his shoes. By then, you will have had time to calm down. And you will be a mile away. :)
Luckily there are other organizations out there that encourage kindness rather than penalizing it.
Only catch is, you probably won't make it through the first interview if you don't start practicing being kind right where you are. Soft skills are hard and take sustained effort to internalize.
Which, by the way, screams insecurity.
There are personality types that thrive on competition, they get renewed passion and commitment by having others also better themselves, this is not an ego or alpha complex, instead of the mental models they work in.
Or we can just call them insecure and be done with it.
And yeah, nobody likes those guys.
What one should try to avoid being, is a dick. Help people improve. Point out their weaknesses and how they can improve, but get your ducks in a row beforehand - don't be a hypocrite. He who lives in a glass house and all that....
Have empathy, and understand your surroundings, as well as reading the room with context. Be direct with people, don't waste their time, but don't be rude or crass with them. Pleases and thank you's.
If someone is falling behind at work, talk to them and understand why - don't just fire them (perhaps something outside of work that is serious is weighing them down - if that is the case tread with caution, and don't be so quick to make a decision that could cost you or your organization socially or fiscally down the road). If you must cut ties with someone, make sure you do so in a direct, honest and respectful way. If YOU were to be fired, how would you like to be treated? There's your baseline.
Don't act like an HR drone trying to use flowery language around everyone. Be respectful of everyone as well as their time, and have a baseline level of professionalism that is applied to EVERYONE regardless if they are above or below you on the org chart. Every organization I've worked in, everyone from the janitor to the CEO got a "good morning" and a "yes sir/no sir" on a daily basis. Respect in life is earned, but there's a baseline of where it should be a given. Treat people with dignity.
Some people can teach others or be the smartest in the room, but I’ve not found those to be as rewarding. I like the challenge of getting to the top more than I do sitting at the peak.
For normal healthy people, kindness is the default state when it is free. When there are costs, it becomes a luxury only some people can afford.
If the management chain wants X, they need to incentivize X. In my experience 9/10 times, then management chain claims they value some set of values abstractly - but what they really mean is "Make me more money, and don't upset the order of things. There is no skill you can have in any quality that will ever make me think you should have my job or better."
If the management chain values kindness, let them communicate that request, then prove it by promoting people on that trait rather than nepotism/beauty/years/profitability/whatever.
“Choose being kind over being right, and you’ll be right every time.” — Richard Carlson
“When I was young, I used to admire intelligent people; as I grow older, I admire kind people.” — Abraham Joshua Heschel
Commonly translated as "loving-kindness", applicable to the post, but even more simply as "friendliness" to yourself and others. It's crazy the feelings that can come when you sit, say, and feel the effect of phrases like "may I/you be happy", "may I/you be at ease". This isn't a game where we try to get points for being nice for an afterlife, but somewhat of a compounding way of looking at life and interactions with others.
There are many quick start posts, but this is a good one [1] to follow along. Rob Burbea has many talks about mettā, and these [2] are a good intro series.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maitr%C4%AB
As someone who works in a "kind" culture (Taiwan) - there is an infuriating flip side
If everyone is constantly worried about being kind, it becomes very difficult for people to say "unkind" things.
- It's hard for people to give you important critical feedback
- People will not give their half baked thoughts (which are the start of good discussions), and only bring stuff up when it's already a problem
- People have a complete inability to tell you "Hey when you do that thing A and B, I really don't like that"
The end result is that people end up masking a bunch of stuff in an effort to be kind which results in
- People having huge blow ups when things boil over
- Insane amounts of office gossip and people saying shit behind each other's back (bc they can't say it to your face and resolve it)
In my own experience it's possible to tell people anything as long as you're friendly and strike the right tone. The key is to not get worked up or emotional. Even something extreme like telling someone you don't like working with them - there is a friendly way to tell someone that with a smile on your face
Every unkind "truth" can be wrapped in the right packaging. The usual crux is to not get emotional and not get worked up and to lay out the facts, no matter how painful, in a way that shows you're not boiling over
On a team level I'm not sure what you can do. Especially with a group of low EQ nerds :). Maybe if one or two people set the examples then it's easier for others to catch on?
The second is that "people skill" covers a lot of things, where "be kind when communicating" is still broad, but a more actionable instruction. For "low EQ" (and I include myself in that category) people, it's those actionable things that really matter.
just a few people are going to miss the smartest in the room, but everyone is going to miss someone kind
On that topic, I’d rather have people trying to not become offended for little things, seems easier than faking kindness for personal benefits
It's hard to achieve business goals if no one wants to work with each other.
As the jerk, you might not think it is your fault, but it is your problem if you are the common thread between other people not wanting to engage with you to meet "business objectives".
Generally, I think it's useful to reflect on how your behaviour impacts the work of yourself and others around you. Even if you want to be as utilitarian as possible, work happens better around people who get on better with each other.
There's not being a dick, and then there's being a doormat. You don't want to be close to either of those extremes.
No single article on the internet has irritated me as much as this. Being a 'hacker' does not mean someone gets special privileges to be a scumbag.
I think it translates to "knows everything, understands nothing" or "jack of all trades, master of none".
Then the second person is blindsided when the first person goes and does something utterly selfish, as soon as the opportunity presents itself.
And the first person is baffled that anyone wouldn't expect someone to do that, since they assume anyone would do the selfish thing. And they still think of themselves as a kind person. Where their definition of kind is presenting a certain vibe exterior.
I call the first person a "sunny sociopath", after characters we'd often see in TV shows set in California.
(Oh shit)
Demonstrating that you’re the smartest guy in the room is an ape-like expression of dominance. The IQ is a distant second.