Comment by jjk166 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jjk166 | Hacker News Reader

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> The opposite extreme is you have someone on your team who is only able to resolve conflicts by having their boss intervene.

What's wrong with that? Resolving conflicts is the boss' job. So long as the team mate is doing their actual job appropriately, that's all that matters.

> E.g. you leave some critical feedback in a PR review. The author of the PR doesn't like your comments, so they tell your mutual boss, then your boss comes to you to ask why you left the comments in the PR, instead of the author coming to you directly.

The author should not be coming to you directly, going through the boss is the appropriate route. If the author's complaints were unreasonable, it should be the boss telling them that, not you. If your boss is coming to you, it means they feel the author's complaints are at least partially valid, and you should be hearing that from your boss, not the author.

It's not necessarily a bad thing if people bypass the manager to settle things directly, so long as both parties are comfortable with that, but it's not a happy medium.

Handling negative feedback on a PR is a necessary skill for a developer. A manager should only get involved if it becomes hostile. Negative is very far from hostile.

Handling negative feedback doesn't involve going to anybody - neither the manager, nor the person who gave the PR. Someone giving negative feedback is not supposed to be a conflict in need of resolution. We are talking about a situation where there is a conflict that needs to be resolved, ie that it has already become hostile.

If they are going to their manager, and then the manager, rather than convincing them that they are over-reacting, is instead going to you and telling you that there's something wrong with the feedback you gave, you should handle that negative feedback.

> We are talking about a situation where there is a conflict that needs to be resolved

You’re overlooking the fact that your threshold for what a “conflict” is might be different from the next person’s.

There’s no universally “correct” way to label whether something is a conflict or not. People have varying perceptions.

It doesn't matter what I consider a conflict. The fact is someone went to their boss with a conflict because it rose above their threshold of what a conflict is. If one of the parties involved feels there is a conflict in need of mediation, then there is a conflict in need of mediation. Very likely the issue is that the second party didn't realize what they said would cause conflict, which is exactly why the boss should be talking to them.

No one is saying that the boss should be looking for and trying to mediate "conflicts" no one wants them to resolve.

I’m pretty sure the top comment thread was edited because I can’t figure out what we’re debating.

I think the original comment said something to the effect of “employees shouldn’t ever resolve their own conflict, their boss should do it for them”.

I was only trying to illustrate that there are some people out there who are incredibly sensitive and will make a conflict out of the color shoes you’re wearing. Sometimes it’s good to empower an employee to speak their mind about their coworkers hideous color shoes, no need to force boss man to relay the message.

If a manager is handling (almost) all disputes of all sorts, then they will fundamentally lack authority to enforce an outcome on a real dispute. They simply are too involved because resolution requires you to take some sort of side.

If my children won't speak to each other I will refuse to be the go between because I become a proxy for one to the other. If one then punches the other they won't respect my perspective that this was wrong because I've set myself up as the proxy for the others feelings.

If you need a manger to resolve the above example, the org is broken and the engineers are poor engineers.

> If a manager is handling (almost) all disputes of all sorts, then they will fundamentally lack authority to enforce an outcome on a real dispute. They simply are too involved because resolution requires you to take some sort of side.

Bullshit. Being a routine mediator makes you a better mediator when big things come up, not a worse one. It means you are in tune with the particular needs and idiosyncrasies of the people involved, and assuming you are any good at it, it means you have the trust of all parties to mediate fairly.

> If my children won't speak to each other I will refuse to be the go between because I become a proxy for one to the other.

First of all, managing adults and parenting children are two radically different things. Second, being a go between is not handling a dispute, if anything it facilitates the dispute. Kids can't agree on whose turn it is to play with a toy? Toy gets taken away with the understanding they'll get it back when they agree to a system - that's conflict resolution.

> If one then punches the other they won't respect my perspective that this was wrong because I've set myself up as the proxy for the others feelings.

What?

> If you need a manger to resolve the above example, the org is broken and the engineers are poor engineers.

The fact there is this conflict to resolve is evidence that the org is broken and the engineers are poor engineers, but given that there is a conflict, the manager should be the one resolving it, because, again, that is their job.

Bad mediators meditate everything. Good mediators focus on the intractible.

Exactly the opposite.

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