Nerds, we need to have a talk (2011)
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It is a vital skill to be able to filter through feedback, take the useful parts to heart, and shrug about low, nasty, useless comments. To learn from mistakes and do better next time. Why is that bad?
Sure, we should attempt to stop the low/nasty/useless feedback, but that's not so clear cut as we'd like it to be. Until we figure out a clear line, I'd prefer honest (and sometimes nasty) feedback over a culture of non-stop shoulder patting.
We're talking about the nasty, mean-spirited, no-holds-barred evisceration of each other by hiding behind the guise of criticism.
Take a few days ago:
"GitHub Gracious Helps Female Programmers Cower in Fear"[1]
Nobody is saying you have to agree with everything GitHub does re: sexism, or that they are above criticism. Nobody is saying you should be patting everyone on the back and giving gold stars for effort.
But what is that, really? You couldn't just say "this is wrong and doesn't help" or "your solution makes the problem worse"? No, author in this case had to go with the most needlessly inflammatory, mean-spirited, and downright asshole-ish comment possible.
Presentation matters. Criticism wrapped in vitriol becomes just vitriol, and vitriol wrapped in criticism still doesn't become good criticism.
Disagree away, but the way the geek community behaves it's clear many members take a perverse glee in eviscerating each other via "criticism". We revel in others being wrong, and we positively wet ourselves at the opportunity to point out this wrongness with gusto and vitriol. This perversity is what the author was railing against, not your ability to disagree in general.
[1] http://www.thepowerbase.com/2013/04/github-graciously-helps-...
As if it would help you prove your point, that's completely braindead. What you describe is just a different form of shooting the messenger; you don't like the way they said it so you ignore what they said. For example if I point out your solution is N^2 and you're an idiot for doing it that way instead of N log N you may not be an idiot, but the solution is still a bad one.
If vitriol is the motive for the criticism then by banning the vitriol you've also lost the criticism. This is really a huge problem for Hacker News; by banning unkind critics they've lost a lot of actual criticism. The result is HN exists in a bubble of trends and fads because the people who take glee in deflating them get banned.
> [GitHub Gracious Helps Female Programmers Cower in Fear]... author in this case had to go with the most needlessly inflammatory, mean-spirited, and downright asshole-ish comment possible.
This is a good example, but not of what you think. The content of the blog is reasonably and calmly presented, but if you throw that away because of the flame title then you've lost that.
Yes, and rightfully so. I have no problems with the author's views, I have every problem with people being assholes and douchebags with each other.
I have zero qualms about missing the thoughts of people who haven't the least modicum of respect for their fellow man. I don't care how smart you are, at the end of the day intelligence, or being right, is not the measure of a human being.
> "you don't like the way they said it so you ignore what they said"
Yes. Like I said, presentation matters.
The antisocial, the arrogant, the whatevers of the world who cannot massage their thoughts into something worth communicating will rage impotently at the fact that no one is listening to them. Us nerds have a bad habit of letting this turn into a superiority complex, but no matter how superior you might feel, still no one is listening.
At the end of the day, we're each only on this lonely rock for a short amount of time. Many of us have figured out that we'd much rather be good to one another with our time than to spend it stroking our egos by seething with rage about everything.
I think you meant righteously so. You are saying to discount facts and logic because the person saying them offended your sensibilities. You're just building a bubble of ignorance around yourself by discounting everything unseemly.
The reason why you find 'geek culture' hostile is because geeks tend to value merit more than you value morality. The computer does not care if the n log n algorithm was created by an evil genius or Ned Flanders, and neither do geeks.
There is tons of creative and worthwhile content on 4chan than you'll ever know and will deny exists (or has a right to exist). At the end of the day, there's more humanity on display at 4chan than HN.
No one is suggesting a never ending hug fest of positive comments. But criticism should be constructive. You might not care that all feedback is on the level of idiotic YouTube comments, but that's a toxic environment and it's causing harm to the Internet. A bunch of projects would have more volunteers if they weren't such hateful environments.
And that, IMO, is the problem. Whatever it is that draws us to computers seems to select very well for poor empathy. I've spent 20 years actively trying to be more empathetic, and I still suck at it. For people who don't care, you wind up with the kind of behavior TFA talks about (and that I see echoed in your response).
Every excuse I've ever seen comes down to "I didn't care enough about the other person's feelings to put any extra effort into my communication." We aren't robots. Feelings matter.
"To learn from mistakes and do better next time. Why is that bad?"
You said both things. Attempting does not mean you will always succeed. You could still fail but it does matter that you tried. And sure, you learn from mistakes and do better. So I would say that don't screw the attempting part. Also, you are probably being a little hard on this post by saying "shoulder patting".
Being "constructive" does not mean being congratulatory, shoulder-patting, praising, or anything like that. It means that the feedback itself should provide some kind of value, preferably for the benefit of the project creator.
"What's the points of this? I've been doing the same thing since the 80s by piping four shell commands together?!?" - is not really constructive.
I think using the slightly formulaic "What I liked: X; What could be improved: Y" has a high chance of being constructive feedback.
Meta discussions can also be OK.
The infamous "does the world really need another X", almost invariably deserves the answer "yes, why not?".
Letting people know you are unlikely to use the code/product/gizmo is also constructive, especially if you can manage to tell why.
As the article stated, comments in the form of "Y U MD5 STOOPID" is never OK and generally don't do anything to raise the level of the discourse. As a general guideline, comments designed to make the commenter look good or smart or superior do not usually improve the quality of the discussion, even though mods sometimes tend to reward this behavior for some reason. They shouldn't.
> Letting people know you are unlikely to use the code/product/gizmo is also constructive, especially if you can manage to tell why.
By my reading, these two statements contradict each other. The quote you claim is not constructive seems to me to be saying the author sees no value in the hypothetical contribution, as it offers no additional power and less convenience than what he already uses, and therefore he won't be using it. Isn't that exactly what say is constructive in the second statement I quoted? If I'm misunderstanding you here, can you explain what I'm missing?
Asserting that a project's existence is unjustified is a bold and unfriendly claim. Saying that it's simly not for you is another matter entirely.
"I have found my own solution to this problem that involves piping these commands together, so this project isn't for me, but good job for creating a simpler solution for people who don't necessarily need control over every step of the solution, but rather just care about the final result."
This indicates why it's not useful for the poster, but it acknowledges that not everyone is a CLI genius and that the new solution could work for people with different tools requirements.
> I think using the slightly formulaic "What I liked: X; What could be improved: Y" has a high chance of being constructive feedback.
I think you're confusing critique with mentorship. What you're expecting is something wise to be said, or at least something useful to you. Critique is not necessarily like that. Critique is encompassing pretty much everything that others answer you freely, like it or not.
If you read the comments for ANY blog post submitted, you will see how it has become a giant game to discredit everything the author says. I think it's good to be skeptical, and as nerds we have plenty of skepticism to go around, but there are ways to be do it with a little more taste and respect.
I've been looking at some of the profiles of the main cynics I see time and time again and they have like 6000 karma, but only 3 submissions in their entire lives. Crazy to think they just get all of that karma from tearing down other people's work while not creating anything themselves.
On several occasions, I've seen a poor soul post a project on here that represents a lot of blood, sweat, and tears. There will be enthusiastic support, constructive criticism, and often too many haters. I'd love it if the haters left -- maybe all head off to hate picnic or something where they can spit pickles at each other.
Perhaps a basic issue is that people say things in online commentary that they wouldn't say face to face. I think that's fundamentally wrong and mostly accidental -- a result of people's cognitive models not catching up to what's actually happening. Thanks for listening :)
The same thing can be said for mediocrity and outright regressions.
>people say things in online commentary that they wouldn't say face to face.
This is definitely often true, but not usually. I'm nicer online than I am in person, because in person I can smile, apologize, and make goofy faces to blunt honest criticism. Online, all I have is smileys and exclamation points, which make you read like a wide-eyed idiot, but don't always make you read like a nice wide-eyed idiot:)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5639430
While this one is full of people attacking the guy, basically proving his point.
If you participate here -- myself included -- this is a message to heed.
Most of the people I work with (professionally and personally) are perpetually self-critical despite being very intelligent and more than capable. The humility comes from growth over time and being able to remember doing work they'd consider terribly flawed today. If you're working with arrogant people, they're probably not growing and it'll make it harder for you to as well.
Your input matters to us! botbully.JoSh uses your grievances to better pinpoint and exploit your areas of weakness over time.
NOSTER. Coined and minted - because nerds are overly acronym-shy, I think
Don't kid yourself, Nerds and Geeks are just as competitive and nasty as jocks are.
Besides, the worst fights I see among programmers are over trivial matters of opinion anyway. Ever seen people fight over indentation styles, or the proper way to merge upstream changes into a local git repository, or whether functional or object-oriented programming is the One True Way?
The anger in these debates isn't teaching anyone a damn thing, except that the color of someone else's bike shed is really, really important to some people.
1) "I really didn't like the way you did X. It broke Y on my browser, $Browser."
2) "Oh god, why did you chose to do this like this? It's broken and stupid"
I hope that people don't nerd rage after (1). I guess they might, and if they do that's a problem.
Finance: saying "you fucked up" means "I respect you enough to offer honest criticism, and here's what you did that I don't like."
Tech startup: saying "you're awesome" means "I'd slit your throat for a 0.05%[0] more in equity. You're awesome because I'll get promoted at your expense."
[0] A nickel. As in, Shadow from FF6 and "He'd slit his mama's throat for..."
For me... - learning how to solve real-world problems using software - sharing ideas and reflecting my perspective in the conversation - understanding how others think about SW topics, more learning - criticizing decisions in order to improve my critical thinking skills and knowledge - getting feedback from my own ideas to see how well they stand up
I realize that some of these are somewhat redundant, but I feel they differ in nuance. In general it is about _improvement_.
Also, some people are just way too sensitive and need to realize that an attack on one's idea is not an attack on oneself. I have general respect for all people, but I might think your idea is stupid.
The best thing we can do is make sure we do our best to absorb hostility and respond with objectivity.
On purpose? :)
If you're programming as a hobby, it doesn't affect anyone but yourself. I totally support your using Arduinos until you figure out you can build one yourself in 5 minutes on a breadboard.
If you're programming professionally, the rules change. It's not all about supporting your personal learning experience. If you use simple hashing instead of bcrypt, and you have real users, you are potentially hurting people. It is literally true that if you don't know better than that, you should not programming a computer (well, programming an authentication system, anyway).
So yeah, don't be nasty. But also don't think your self-esteem is more important than doing a good job.
I don't mind being insulted if it comes with a helpful suggestion. I LOVE IRC channels where you get the answers: "You're shit for asking that question, but the answer is X".
In other words, IME, you can 'cut through the bullshit' w/o being a dick and you'll achieve better outcomes. Plus, you won't be a dick.
I don't know if this is true, but the stereotype of geeks is that they lack "emotional intelligence". I think it's important to recognize the people we talk to on irc, news lists, etc. are people too and it's important to be truthful & helpful, not just needlessly hurtful.
It can easily be argued that nerd culture takes this too far, reaching for the metaphorical cutting blade long before it is truly necessary. I'd agree with that statement, in fact. But nerd culture's refusal to treat it as a non-option is one of the major reasons we've proven so effective at getting things done and, in so doing, effecting change. Is this dickish? Sometimes, yes; even often. That doesn't mean it's never appropriate.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2322696
(I feel older now to realize I've been on here for two years, long enough to remember the previous submission)
Protip: just because you realize the irony of your post doesn't excuse you from being part of the problem as well.
Look, there are absolutely a lot of asshole nerds out there. A lot of guys who went through hell in high school and turned into comic book guy as a defense mechanism and just never grew up (a lot of people from all walks of life never grow up). Okay, but I don't think those people are representative of geek communities. I think by and large criticism is constructive and nerds are supportive of beginners. Maybe we don't sugarcoat things as much as would be to some people's taste, but that's not an asshole quality in and of itself. Rather I think the impression comes from the fact that it's hard to ignore assholes, and there are always going to be a number of them in any large community. People say HN is overly critical, but I think if you look carefully most of critical posts are actually fairly even-handed and not overtly mean; but if you have 20 of them all coming from different angles, and you sprinkle it with a few true asshole remarks, the resulting impression can be quite harsh.
But seriously i think this problem comes from the lag, that we don't see the people we are talking about in front of us. It's just a device. No feelings. We hate in this machine and get no direct feedback. We have to learn that the people we are flaming about are living in this world and can propably read it. I have made this mistake a couple of times but i learned and use it alone for joking.
If you want to understand this problem you have to understand psychology, the interface-feedback-problem and group dynamic.
The negative behavior is actually TAUGHT, and taught early on. This is how everyone in the western world is taught to debate opinions. Look at any high school debate club, political debates, and any other televised debate. The behavior starts there. As a society, people are not taught to be civil when dealing with disagreements. There is just an inherent "You are completely with me and my friend, or we are enemies".
It's good to bear that in mind when reading things.
For 1, the reason we have so much of this is because of the anonymity of it all. It's quite easy to criticise others in an abusive manner when nobody/barely anybody knows who you are. In real life that wouldn't happen to such a degree.
I am thinking about what other people would want to read, not how you personally might feel about what I say. I expect that leads to things said that would not be said if I were speaking directly to you, such as in an email, for instance.
I don't know if that fully explains offensive and angry posts, but that could simply be a matter of someone having a bad day and wanting the world to know it.
Watching someone else's over-reaction is a very easy source of entertainment. Reality TV is a great example of this.
What an idiot! You should give up on blogging if you don't know the right word is "said"!
Though in all seriousness, I've seen closed questions provide a lot of good information on something in their answers despite people feeling the question wasn't a good fit. In some ways it's like closing a question is a form of what the article is talking about, though I do understand the need for those rules on there.
However, if we want to restore our tribal integrity, we can't let management play us against each other so easily. There are so many conflicts that look technical but are actually cases where management deliberately played tech people against each other (usually, to create a sense of competition on work hours, dedication, et al). Most engineers lack the social skills to perceive when this is happening.
One thing about business people: they constantly talk each other up. Even if they don't like each other, they say good things about one another. It's game theory. They know the difference between luke-warm and real praise, but everyone else thinks The Manager is in good standing (and therefore stays in line). They get themselves to a state where not saying something positive about someone is a damnation. They can dog-whistle by criticizing a member of their tribe within it, but in a way that outsiders don't recognize, allowing them to keep a unified front.
On our over-honesty, there's one case I know about where an engineer was leapfrog promoted to top management and had a lot of non-engineering reports. They had a performance review system where 5 (out of 9) was nominally average, but everyone came in between 7.5 and 9.0. He gave a lot of 6's and 7's thinking he was giving honest ratings (because no one looked at the perf numbers for IT, reviews he'd written in the past had no effect) but it ended up making a huge mess when HR wanted to put two-thirds of his team on PIPs. He reacted by changing everyone's rating to a 9.0 and giving honest feedback verbally, which is how it should be done.
I feel like we need a similar "understanding" with each other. To other engineers and technologists, we give blunt and honest feedback. But we need to stop the cannibalism. To management and HR, we take a strict attitude of praising other engineers (whether we think they deserve it or not). We should never narc each other out.
I didn't just get that from people putting on a game face to interview me. I know five current Googlers from all walks of life and corporate structure, including someone who worked near you during your tenure, and they all hate what you do in public. It's an effective technique, really, because you know that you win if they go toe to toe with you.
Given that you're discussing slitting throats for more equity in other parts of this thread, and previously you've compared Google management to the terrorists that brought down the World Trade Center, I implore you to seek help. Please. Way too many people feed in to your reality distortion who haven't been around the block in the valley and Hacker News, and it's disgusting to watch.
I wasn't talking about Google. Not for that specific case. That happened at another company, where I didn't work, but I know the story. Lots of companies use PIPs and performance reviews.
The resounding sentiment from every single engineer who interviewed me (two of them with more than 8 years at Google) was how badly you misrepresent and malign Google and how half of engineering wishes they could correct you, but legality and common sense prevents them from doing so.
If they want to defend their company's practices, they should. Who knows? Perhaps the company improved massively after I left. Perhaps calibration scores were abolished last year. I'd have no way of knowing and, if that's the case, the public should know.
I'm better known for that than I'd like to be. However, I'd say that my support is about 25/25/50. 50 percent of Googlers see me as Emmanuel Goldstein and would probably never want to talk to me, that's true. I don't like that I have potentially thousands of enemies, but sometimes a person like me has to do the right thing, even at the cost of unpopularity. 25 percent are just completely indifferent. 25 percent view me positively because they want to see Google improve and think it takes someone like me to draw executive attention to problems.
Oddly enough, I'm probably doing more good for Google engineers than anyone realizes, because upper management is now aware of abuses in the middle and, at least, has a chance to correct them. I haven't probed (I don't care) but the company could be fixing itself, thanks to something I started. Of course, the perverse irony is that if Google management fixes their culture, I'll probably still be the villain (as a guy who worked there at the nadir and gave it a negative reputation) rather than the catalyst.
The best thing for my personal reputation is for Google not to improve itself, because then I'm still right. Still, it's better for the world for Google to heed my advice and fix itself in order to make all the things I've said wrong.
I know five current Googlers from all walks of life and corporate structure, including someone who worked near you during your tenure, and they all hate what you do in public.
I've said a lot of positive things about Google. They have great engineers. I've also criticized the place. Whoever came up with "calibration scores" needs to stop using his employer as a nursing home and start using an actual nursing home as a nursing home.
If Google's upper management indicates will to resolve its cultural problems (and hell, I'll work with them on this, and at a cut rate) then I will shut up.
I am already willing to admit that my information is a year and a half out of date. So there.
You need to get over this delusion that Google is wrong and and you are right, and that eventually Google will somehow come to its senses and beg for your forgiveness and guidance. It is never going to happen. Ever.
I really think that you should seek professional help. You're not just going to wind up an unemployed pariah at the rate you're going; you're going to wind up in a padded cell.
I don't know what you're talking about.
You need to get over this delusion that Google is wrong and and you are right
Not delusion. All I have said is that they're badly run and that most of the corrosion is in the middle-management layer.
and that eventually Google will somehow come to its senses and beg for your forgiveness and guidance. It is never going to happen. Ever.
You are almost certainly right on that one, although I find it pretty obvious. People rarely backtrack on mistakes, and organizations are even more prone to foolish consistency.
Also, how in the fuck am I the crazy one? I don't attack a person I've never met just to uphold the reputation of a gigantic company.
It's actually a bit sickening. Yes, I have taken aim at Google's management. If you are an engineer, you aren't in this fight and you should stay out, because I never did have any problem with you.
I don't know what you're talking about."
He's talking about this:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5625659
"Yes, I have taken aim at Google's management. If you are an engineer, you aren't in this fight and you should stay out, because I never did have any problem with you."
I think the reason many Googlers speak up against you is because of basic empathy: we see a group of people being unfairly maligned, and it's not right or ethical to keep secret and let that happen. It's somewhat unfortunate that the response of many of them has been to malign you, but you have to understand that your perception of the company is very different from many other insiders' perception of the company. Yes, it's quite possible you drew a bad manager; they do exist, even at Google. But you paint with an awfully broad brush, making grandiose proclamations about how the company is rotten to the core and run by sociopaths that should be shot, and I and many other Googlers just don't see it.
My manager(s) worked his ass off so that I and his other reports could have an environment where we're free to innovate, free to work on things that interest us, and free to accomplish things. A lot of mid-level managers burn out because of it, eventually getting fed up with having to reconcile so many different constraints and getting zero credit for it. My VPs also seem to usually make good decisions: I disagree with them sometimes (okay, often), but I can usually see the rationale behind them and the market realities that are driving them to those decisions.
Those decisions don't always go my way - I had 3 projects canceled within a span of 6 months in late 2010, and I just had my year-long research project canceled when 2 weeks before I'd been led to believe it was a long-term investment - but when I take a step back and look at the organizational forces, I can usually see how those really were the best decisions for the organization. Sometimes you can have a technically awesome solution that when you try to scale up to a team and bring to the real world, just doesn't work.
Let me explain my Google manager. His MO was, about 1-2 months in, to use fake performance problems to get people to disclose health problems, then use knowledge of their health issues to toy with them. I have tons of evidence for a pattern of this with him. I also have (verbally) that HR knows it to be a long-standing problem, but does nothing because if a manager has a reputation for "delivering", that's carte blanche to treat reports however one wishes.
HR's job is to step in and right things when managers fail, and at Google, they refuse to do that. They see their job as to protect managers. I know that most companies are this way, but it's disgusting.
There are a lot of abuses of power by management at Google, and HR does nothing about it. The going ideology is that if a manager is "delivering", his word is gold. Combine this with a Kafkaesque nightmare of closed allocation, and you get a lot of ugliness.
I have nothing but respect for the vast majority of the engineers I met at Google. But I cannot respect a management structure that thinks closed allocation is appropriate for a tech company, or that making political-success reviews part of the transfer process is morally acceptable. Google's performance review system is a play-for-play copy of Enron's. This has completely fucked up what should otherwise be an awesome technology company.
I would actually support a class-action suit by Google's shareholders against the managers who instituted closed allocation and calibration scores (breach of fiduciary duty). Those assholes are guilty of destroying several billion dollars worth of value, and justice should be sought against them. Employees who were burned by that horrible system should also be plaintiffs in this suit, because that shit fucks up peoples' careers, too. It's just all-around wrong.
No, that's a labor union's job. HR's job is to protect the company by mitigating risk from L&I related lawsuits. Period.
Programming can be considered a trade, and I think 99% of the shit you complain about could be solved by programmers unionizing. But of course, that would bring its own new set of problems.
That includes recruiting, compensation fairness, firing of negative-impact personnel, and legal risk reduction. It doesn't align them always with employees, or always with management.
It also means that good employees (who would deliver high value to the company if in a better managerial context) should be protected against bad managers. That's something HR rarely has the courage to do in most companies, but at Google, they don't even try.
When the boss^2 (who does understand negotiation and human dynamics) says "You need to be tougher on your reports", saying "Yes, sir" means you fail the test. If you're not standing up for your reports and selling their efforts with highest praise, then they probably aren't loyal to you, either.
So if you're a manager and you're smart, then when your boss asks you about your reports, the correct answer is always yes sir/ma'am, everyone is doing great--anything less reflects poorly on your ability to manage them. Your boss doesn't want to deal with people-managing your reports, that's why he/she hired you in the first place.
(You should go back.)