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Comment by angryGhost | Hacker News Reader

Disagree. You can be your authentic self and be respectful of a workplace environment

It depends on your authentic self.

I've known people who were just deeply genuinely nice people. Yeah they can go totally authentic and are entirely welcome. Hell they can invite themselves over for dinner to my house and I'll be happy about it.

My authentic self is sharply sarcastic, critical and at times brutal. My coworkers don't want to deal with that - that's a very chaffing personality especially towards the end of a stressful week and it can very genuinely hurt morale. I very much tone myself down, avoid sarcasm as much as I can, carefully massage critical and direct messaging as best I can and generally try to be aware that the people around me have different communication needs.

And I think people do get a taste of the real person under the facade. I know I get that from my coworkers - I have coworkers who are great coworkers but whose friend I have no interest in being because same thing, their "out of work" authentic self I find off-putting even though they are amazing coworkers.

The most "bring yourself to work" places I've worked at always the most "don't be like that". I've been disciplined at a place that literally had a entire HR ceremony of "bring yourself to work" because I cursed many times when many systems were failing and I was a on-call line for hours,

Not even the most conservative white collar place (super super well known big classic old school engineering company) has ever mentioned jack shit when shit was burning to the ground and we were trying to keep things working

It depends on the workplace and the person.

Some workplaces:

- penalize black women for having natural hairstyles like locs

- make Sikhs remove turbans

- deny chosen names and pronouns

There are entire swaths of groups who can't be their authentic selves.

My authentic self is in bed right now drinking cider, so no, I can't.

Yes, you can! I do it.

What I don't do is bring all of myself to the workplace. Professional relationships are different than intimate relationships and not every part of me is appropriate for both kinds of relationships simultaneously. But every side I show is authentic.

Maybe adjust it to "only bring the most professionally effective and contextually appropriate subset of your authentic self to work."

Some people can, some can’t.

Having worked with people from all around the world what you think is respectful and normal might be seen as batshit insane to others.

If I could only make this comment more visible. I worked in 2 extrema of the spectrum. Ones would say nothing personal, strictly professional, never curse, like robots (any experience in Japan) The others would come, curse constantly, even calling a college would imply calling him literally “you son of a b*”, people would loudly talk about sexual encounters, and other private things (south Italy, south America). I asked both groups (as I have friends in both camps) what do they think about the other way of interacting: both think the other group is abnormal, awkward, and would not like to work in “such a terrible place”

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