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Comment by codelikeawolf | Hacker News Reader

Ever since that back and forth about "East Coast being kind vs West Coast being nice" thing a while back[1], I think it's important to distinguish the two. Because they are noticeably different (at least to me) and shouldn't be used interchangeably. I want someone to be kind to me in a meeting. I think niceness could seriously inhibit progress. A kind person will tell me that an idea I have won't work, but they'll offer to help me work through it. A nice person will tell me that a bad idea is good, just to avoid conflict.

[1] https://www.upworthy.com/nice-vs-kind-are-east-coast-people-...

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To summarize the idea in a work concept for those who won't read through -

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.

>Eventually you will end up firing them without much warning when a cut actually has to be made. Think Amazon PIP.

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.

Most companies don't run an Amazon style PIP program where you HAVE to cut X% annually on every team.

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.

>Most companies don't run an Amazon style PIP program where you HAVE to cut X% annually on every team.

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.

It's still not most companies. But it's maybe the top N public companies — the ones that are all "headless" in corporate-vision terms, and so hire the same few management consultancies to tell them what to do.

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.

Just want to correct something here. Management consultancies are *rarely* hired for expertise. They're functionally a form of career insurance for senior leadership's proposals and an internal political tool to allow unpalatable or political challenging things to be executed.

Yes, management consultancies are not hired because anyone expects them to know what they're doing.

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.)

My wife and I refer to the latter as "Smile F'ing"

I became familiar with this term in the mid 2000s and took it to be a Britishism, though I may have been wrong on its origin.

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 am from Florida, where there is a lot of southern hosptiality and east coast “kind”. We tend to be a bit more aggressive in our language and openly expressive but it tends to come from one of empathy and support. We tend to understand and communicate well, small talk is easy and normalized. People also will greet you even if you are a stranger, its really nice

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 think you nailed it. However, as someone that grew up in the midwest, then spent 5 years living on the west coast, I would say that lumping the midwest in with the west coast for this statement is wildly inaccurate:

> 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 :)

I have been to Chicago as well! I will say though Chicago is a bit of an outlier though - it is technically the midwest but its also not entirely culturally the midwest either

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)

That's totally fair. There are large parts of the Midwest that I haven't spent enough time in to making sweeping generalizations. I've only driven through the states west of Illinois. I also haven't spent much time on the east coast, but most of the people I have worked with over the past 4 years live there. I felt comfortable around my east coast colleagues immediately versus feeling that "weird" you described in your original comment when I lived on the west coast.

I have to say: It's really annoying that some idiot who wrote a book in the 90's has resulted in everyone redefining "nice", when they should have invented a new word.

As far as the English language goes, what you define as "kind" is also "nice".

Considering how many different things "nice" has meant over the past few hundred years, I doubt one more meaning will make a difference!

Well, unfortunately nobody did invent a new word. Considering a cursory search of the definitions of both words:

Kind: of a sympathetic or helpful nature

Nice: pleasing, agreeable

I would argue that they are actually different.

I think you're misunderstanding the point they were making.

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.

Most people are nice (convention, norm, culture, etc.) to conform to a set of rules, being kind is the exception to the rule.

Yet another faulty categorization and coopting - this time of both words.

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.

there's already a word for using a specific type of soft language regardless as to intent, and it's "polite"

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

Merriam Webster literally lists "kind" as one of the definitions of nice.

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 comment above and a recollection of the sub-title of Pratchett & Gaiman's Good Omens prompted me to look up the etymology of "nice" and it seems that it has had a surprising number of unrelated meanings: https://www.merriam-webster.com/wordplay/nice-multiple-meani.... Maybe that's not the right word to object to regarding changes in its meaning.

I get that it has multiple meanings. And others should get that if someone is a nice guy he's probably not like the archetype in that book.

This is real.

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

I don’t understand the relevance of this example. Without the hazard light, there’s a 99% chance the person is simply looking at their phone, needlessly delaying everyone else, hence the honking to alert them to move. What else is another driver supposed to do?

A hazard light means there is a problem that can’t be solved with honking.

Nice people wouldn't honk at the stationary car without it's hazards on.

I would not categorize that as a “nice” people thing to do. Unless nice somehow means quiet and willing to be walked all over.

I think unmentioned is that this is the east coast style. In Seattle we just let you sit there indefinitely because honking wouldn’t be “nice”.

"Tough love" is kind but not nice. There doesn't seem to be a good phrase for the opposite in English but there should be.

The book Radical Candor calls the opposite "ruinous empathy".

Definitely a good book. As someone who is very prone to ruinous empathy, the mantra, “it isn’t mean, it’s clear” has been very helpful for giving me the courage to raise issues earlier, when they are not a big deal.

Feeding my dog as much as ...

  tough love: I think she needs.
  ruinous empathy: she thinks she needs.

Unfortunately "though love" as practiced is mostly just an excuse to be an asshole.

Same with “brutally honest”, where the one saying it is more about the “brutally” than the “honest”.

Virtue signaling is definitely adjecent

Thinking of cats/dogs - euthanasia seems to also be a good fit for "kind, but not nice"

Which of the two would say nothing in the public meeting to let you save face, but then would pull you aside for a "quick chat" afterward, and tell you your idea is bad then?

The one who is both nice and kind. :P

And smart

> Ever since that back and forth about "East Coast being kind vs West Coast being nice" thing a while back

Missed the thing but what a front-loaded mess. What we want to say is

    Nice sucks, be kind.

The rest feels unhelpful. Kinder to state the principle and let folks chew on it.

A person can be both...though that might just be skilled kindness.

You're right. Doubly so because either-or scenarios are usually false choices.

The pithiness works in presentation but past that...

I agree with you but your delivery could have been... kinder.

You aren't wrong. The one-liner serves to isolate the goal from negative associations.

But my delivery came with it's own neg assoc (against whoever came up with the E/W coast theory).

Honestly, I think it’s a mistake to try to retroactively impose a technical distinction between two words that have been synonyms for quite a while.

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).

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