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Comment by bgwalter | Hacker News Reader

Calling someone a "disagreeable asshole" just for saying that something is a dumb question is a bit strong. So he went out for challenging management on an internal document and he was 100% correct according to that tweet.

Seems to me that the actual assholes are still employed in that company. Perhaps he was just hired to fix the mess. Once the job was done, he was no longer needed.

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Telling the interviewer that his first question is stupid is a sign of a disagreeable asshole. Now granted, you can push back about questions irrelevant to the job but asking candidate for a data engineering role a MySQL question is fair game. And even if it were irrelevant you’d want to frame it better. I’ve pushed back twice. Once the interviewer apologized (you’re right that’s not really relevant to the role) the other time the interviewer was playing tech bingo and we simultaneously invalidated each other.

However inappropriate the reaction to the SQL question may be, tweeting in a thinly anonymized manner about the incident is worse or perhaps even illegal.

As for management, perhaps we should coin the term "agreeable assholes" as a neologism for Machiavellian.

You can be a disagreeable asshole even while being completely correct.

Being an “asshole” relates to inter-personal relationships, it has nothing to do with facts or correctness.

In the immortal words of The Dude: "You're not wrong, Walter, you're just an asshole."

As long as they don't insult people personally then they're not an asshole in my book.

Attacking ideas is one, attacking people behind those ideas is another.

I agree, but not everyone sees it that way. People project themselves onto their ideas. It helps to consider that, sometimes.

Not entirely though: if you are attacking coworkers just for being wrong that is asshole. If you are holding the top of the pyramid accountable for their illegal immoral wrong "ideas" then that is a level of correct that the world needs way more of

Being a disagreable asshole is a sin of the working class. The server not the served.

found the disagreeable asshole

(I'm a disagreeable asshole)

I knew it, I'm surrounded by disagreeable assholes!

Sir, this is a funhouse.

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