The Cult Of Positive Attitude and Always Saying Yes

That being said, I took this approach at one of my previous jobs, a fairly well known enterprise software company in the Valley, and I got blackballed for being too negative. We were working on a project and there was simply no hope of it ever working. The technical lead on the project was over-arrogant and under-talented, and essentially built a system that wouldn't scale. I brought this up a bunch of times, and gave solutions on how to fix it, but they were all rejected by the technical lead. I was told by my manager that I was being too negative and was given a poor performance review, which really rattled me, so I gave up the "good fight". 9 months later, the project was canned because of scalability issues.

So this "Cult of Positive Attitude" really does exist, can be pervasive in a company to the point of being toxic, and sometimes the best solution is to just leave, which is what I ended up doing.

He says after calling his co-workers idiots.

But really, his point of view is crystallized by the first sentence:

"Every lie and lame idea in the corporate world is now protected by an airtight bubble of positive attitude and yes-men. And I’m sick of it."

He's projecting his shitty job onto every corporation in the world. I haven't ever worked with a culture of yes men or positive-attitude police, and I have worked at several corporations, so (from my own limited experience) it seems like he's just an angsty single-minded coward who for whatever reason likes working with people he hates.

If you don't like the culture of your job, try to improve it. If it doesn't improve, leave. But writing these emo screeds about "saying no" is retarded, because anyone with a brain would agree that sometimes saying yes and sometimes saying no is a good idea.

It's better to give a psychological "yes" even if the final answer should be "no" to a particular implementation. So point out the things you like about an idea before walking through the details (where problems may crop up).

Give others credit for good ideas (or sub-ideas, since of course you can often salvage something good from a flawed suggestion), but disassociate problems immediately from other people. ("I think we should go with Jane's great idea about X, with this tweak to address my worry about scaling").

Feel free to discuss your own ideas that you jettison soon after -- this can happen a lot if you talk through a problem while you're still thinking it over -- and is a very healthy approach to model.

Stay open-minded about your own suggestions, and stay far away from a win/lose mindset. Realistically, if my suggestion for a particular problem won't be what the team chooses today, is there actually going to be a poor result?

The main thing that works for me is to go meta sometimes... I will actually say in a meeting "hang on; I want to be sure I'm not just hanging on to this approach because I've thought it through more deeply."

None of this involves me ever saying "that's a bad idea" (unless it was mine!), or even really "no" very often at all. More like "I like that, but I worry about".

If someone tells you "you need to work on saying yes instead of no all the time", they may just be telling you to improve your human skills a bit -- not shutting you down at all.

I learned two decades ago about a concept called meta programs. Meta programs are filters that people use to understand their environment. Two of these are 'moving toward' and 'moving away' meta programs.

People are typically drawn to one or the other. They either filter their thoughts in moving toward or moving away first before considering the other. I have found that having both of these types of people on a project a very positive thing. You need people who can see the positive and you need people who can identify the pitfalls.

The problems start when either of these people think their position is always the correct position. The moving toward people want to take on the world and the moving away people are yelling you why you can't do that. Nothing gets done in these situation. And the reason why moving toward or moving away people become so strong in their opinion is because there is a lack of leadership.

You NEED to have that one person who can listen to both of these people, respect their points of view and make tough choices.

I've worked with too many nerdy-geeky-type people who love to demonstrate their cleverness to the obviously inferior sales/marketrdroids by immediately say "Yes, of COURSE we can, DUH" to whatever harebrained nonsense they've thought up over their long lunch at the local stripper pub.

Then spending the next 6 months bitching endlessly about what a ridiculously stupid and impossible project the sales/marketdroids have foisted upon them and life is just NOT FAIR and I'M GOING TO MY ROOM.

Start with "No" - everyone will hate you but at least you'll get shit done.

The world isn't black and white and not all managers are assholes and employees never divide neatly down "yes" and "no" lines and any manager worth their salt knows this.

And the secret of success doesn't lie with saying "yes" or "no" or making the team think a certain way, the secret of success lies with finding a way for the team to say yes to the right ideas and no to the wrong ones and kick ass in the process.

If you work with or for people that think as half as shallow as the people described in the OP, run - don't blog about it, run.

But this has always been a problem that must be avoided. People get tired of arguing and just want to push their ideas through. It's understandable but it's a mistake.

Then the engineers give their feedback, modify my initial estimates and architecture and provide a plan of attack. I agree, then go back to the rest of my job of managing design, development, marketing, and business issues -- not to mention sorting out HR and hiring.

I don't have time to shoulder-program or try to dictate the exact terms of how something technical should be done. I try to trust my team to make the right decisions, and if they don't, we fix them.

At worst, the tendency for people to reward people who tell them what they like to hear is the fatal flaw that will make humans wind up like the dinosaurs.

Look at how nothing gets done about global warming, or how CNBC never explains exactly how HFTs make money (it's because they use undocumented order types, not just because they're fast.)

For a long time I've suggested that we draft people for congress. If you approach any "respectable" politician with an offer to be corrupt, at worst they'll politely tell you they're not interested. Try that with ordinary Americans from the left or right and perhaps 20% of them will get offended, go the FBI or go to the media or give you a black eye or pull a gun. "Respectable" people who go far learn to be tolerant of this kind of BS.

My ten year old has learned (from me and my mom) to be world class at arguing, complaining and bargaining. From dealing with him, I've improved my negotiating skills which means I get 5-10% better prices on many deals I make.

The thing is, he habitually finds something negative to say about any situation, any product, any person. The main thing I've been working on is making him conscious of it. When he's really insufferable I'll sometimes make him say more bad things, as long as they original, until he burns out and can't say any more. We both do the exercise of specifically thinking about good things to say about people, companies, services, etc.

In a healthy marital relationship, people say good things much more often than they say bad things. You should try to say seven good things for every bad thing.

This can (and should) be applied to the workplace. It's a good habit to get into to have frequent praise. It doesn't matter if you liked a subroutine somebody wrote, feel that an ops guy was really on top of a situation, or if you just like somebody's hat.

A major university once planned a Peoplesoft implementation, and the project manager involved estimated that it would cost $100M to implement all five modules.

They told him this was too much and he'd have to get it under $30M and they pushed him out. They hired some young guy who said yes to anything. Years later they spent $65M to deploy one module (in a barely satisfactory manner) and stole huge amounts of time from other IT projects that wasn't properly accounted for. Heads rolled.

The PM with integrity moved on to a more responsible position at a big school on the west coast. The fact is that people who tell the truth in tough situations are like gold and they're the people you can trust with the most difficult situations.

Every discussion he would bring up me being negative and it started to grind on me even in my exit interview.

I was sick of having that badge and no one else saying the truth, I ended up being quiet and the manager didn't like that either.

My new job is much better, I get the work done and everyone is happy. I'm upfront with my views.

Even just mentioning an issue was negative, when I said we need to earmark it and look at solving it.

Some people are visionaries and spend their days trying to connect the the dots that other people haven't yet connected to push the boundaries. Steve Jobs was like this.

Most developers are implementers. Since developers spend their days working through the details of any particular spec, they think of the details much more than the visionaries. Woz was like this.

Both types of people are crucial for any product to be a success and both types can really help each other in crafting something up if they would both listen to each other.

Unfortunately this rarely happens...

[0] See Bossypants, apparently excerpted at, e.g., http://mycareertopia.com/tina-feys-rules-for-improv-and-the-... -- it's probably a copyright infringement (if memory serves, it copies Fey's text pretty much wholesale), but it's one of many, and probably the most readable of the bunch.

In an ideal world it wouldn't matter but people do have egos and sometimes it is worth to sweeten the message. Some people call it "soft skills", others call it "spray painting the turd" and my advice to the latter is not to use this wording during meetings :)

If you're the kind of person who frequently says "no" during meetings, you need to also be the kind of person who proposes alternatives.

I don't see people's statements as opportunities to argue, as this quote indicates the author does: "Grow Up and Learn To Argue Like An Adult". I see them more like a construction. Someone presents their view point, and if its not what I see as truth, its not my job to "argue" it, its now OUR job to figure out truth. So the conversation should be a back and forth of explanation until the truth is agreed upon. This does require both participants to be willing to change their viewpoint, which I agree people need to be better at.

In the case of the manager saying people need to have a more positive attitude, my strategy there would be: be willing to entertain the idea and then explore the idea together. As you explore the idea, genuinely bring up concerns you see from your perspective, e.g. "Oh but that will be problematic because we don't have enough time with projects X, Y, and Z going on. If you did mandate this, moral will go down and at best your rating will go down, at worst people may leave." Suddenly the manager is illuminated.

If the individual you're discovering truth with refuses to acknowledge your viewpoint and either accept it or counteract it with knowledge of their own, then you should be concerned about the long term implications of interacting with such an individual. Specifically, people who have difficulty incorporating new information into their model of the world often often lack positive growth trajectory, and likely have problems dealing with change when it inevitably arrives. I'd distance myself.

My advice to the author would be to do as I've done with this comment: look for where the other person is coming from and realize that there are reasons people say and do the things they say and do. Then, instead of attacking, approach it as an opportunity for both of you to learn something new by sharing your differing viewpoints and converging on the truth. I'm looking forward to discovering the truth of how best to handle these situations based on the experience provided in by those who may respond to my comment! :)

As an addendum: sometimes people are immovable from their position due to things outside of their control, but we still must interact with them. The receipt checker at Sam's Club will never be convinced enough of my opinion to act in accordance with it, for example. In this case, we are not at issue with the person, but with the rule. Therefore, I try to act as obliquely to the rule as possible, and encourage others to do so as well so that it no longer makes sense to pursue the rule (in the case of Sam's Club, this means I never acknowledge the receipt checker and make them chase me down.)

Replace positive with constructive, and you get closer to what people who preach this way of thinking are really getting at.

First, there's the engineer-manager impedance mismatch. We're told by compilers to fix our work in very annoying ways. The machine has no fear of us and refuses to execute nonsensical instructions. (We generally prefer this over blind compliance.) Managers are simply not used to negative feedback because they never get it. People will lie to them rather than risk their careers on delivery of bad news. We, on the other hand, think everyone should be like a compiler and complain hastily when given bad instructions. And we don't take it personally when that happens.

Second, what most of us fail to realize until too late is that work is about social status for most people. It's not about getting the right answer or maximizing profits or anything else. I wish these assholes were greedy, because greed can be positive-sum as opposed to their short-sighted zero-sum social squabbling. It's about being the boss, and fending off the other guy. That's what most people care about at work, at least in corporate jobs.

Most bad ideas fail in a way that can still have positive expectancy for the originator's social status. That's why you see the bike-shedding. An idea has to be really, really bad to hurt the originator's social status before he can get promoted away from the mess. So, when you challenge a bad idea, you're actually stepping in the way of that person's career (or, at least, it's perceived that way).

That's why I can't tolerate executives. I understand that there's a need for management to a limited degree, but these entitled high priests who job is to "have ideas" (who also have the power to fire people who push back against awful ones) are a scourge. There should never be a culture where ideas are unquestionable because of their originators. We all have shitty ideas from time to time, and it's only these narcissistic executives who aren't honest about the fact.