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My bottle of Aspirin says, I should take 2 pills after meals. My cough syrup says, I should take one tablespoon before bed.

But something that will, potentially, save me from myself cannot be delivered with tact, compassion and restraint with no delicacy whatsoever with regard to my sensibilities?

If the advice someone gives me is not in the form I can ingest, then what they have done is pleasure themselves publicly at my expense.

This was advice. I hope what I wrote falls into a form that you found ingestible.

when I hear too many platitudes or niceties that are designed to pad out critical analysis, my ears shut off and the person delivering the analysis loses credibility in my mind. What some people find easy to ingest, others find insulting and will reject it.

It is my perception (and this may or may not be correct) think that people who are often too concerned with seeming nice - are going to be exactly the people who do things like fudge or fake data, and I think it's important to have a strong immune system against those people, at least in my field (science).

To go one step further, saccharine niceness, in my mind, is often coupled with vicious back-stabbing (over-compensation?). I don't want those people around. If you're going to be saying something nasty, say it to my face. Just a matter of respect.

There's a large middle ground between saccharine niceness and vicious back-stabbing.

I find that someone who doesn't work well with emotions is typically bad at reasoning too, because the arguments they make end up expressing their feelings in obtuse ways.

>There's a large middle ground between saccharine niceness and vicious back-stabbing.

Perhaps you misread me. I'm claiming that saccharine niceness goes WITH vicious back-stabbing. Because people who are vicious back-stabbers are going to be inclined to overcompensate with niceness.

>I find that someone who doesn't work well with emotions is typically bad at reasoning too, because the arguments they make end up expressing their feelings in obtuse ways.

I find the opposite. In science, in order to assess your evidence, you often have adopt a somewhat dispassionate stance, and make judgements unclouded by emotion. An inability to process emotion, then, can be a tactical advantage, because it doesn't incur the overhead of compartmentalization (which taxes my brain). And to go to the extreme, I have had had more than one friend who were extremely impaired in their ability to process human emotions (I think the in thing is to label this 'asperger's') who were extremely good at reasoning, as evidenced by the fact that they were brilliant mathematicians, and I don't mean number crunchers - full on propositional logic and proof-crafters.

> Perhaps you misread me. I'm claiming that saccharine niceness goes WITH vicious back-stabbing. Because people who are vicious back-stabbers are going to be inclined to overcompensate with niceness.

I don't think we really disagree. I think that if conflict is avoided through saccharine niceness, eventually it will come out as vicious back-stabbing, and vice versa as you've noted. So the two apparent opposites actually go hand-in-hand, they feed each other. But when I say a middle ground I mean something like firm politeness. I don't believe that brutality paired with honesty is a middle ground; it's just an aggressive solution instead of a passive aggressive one.

I think when I say bad at reasoning, I really mean anything that at least partially involves a judgment call. A lot of the scientific process is deciding which experiments to do. Yes, an inability to process emotions is generally going to mean you're suited for working with logic, and as such might excel at proofs, programming, theoretical physics, stuff like that.

But the problem I've noticed is that people's careers often get derailed because of emotional issues: it could be because they're passive, they can't handle anger, they get stepped on or taken advantage of, they have grandiose dreams about their research, they become unwilling to admit they were wrong, etc.

Hmmm, maybe a better way to say it is that the firm politeness pairing is a middle ground between the saccharine niceness / vicious back-stabbing pairing and the brutal honesty pairing.

> I find that someone who doesn't work well with emotions is typically bad at reasoning too, because the arguments they make end up expressing their feelings in obtuse ways.

This is an interesting explanation. Do you think that people bad at understanding their emotions are less aware or mindful of their unconscious biases?

Yeah, more or less. I think that whatever is unconscious (read: lost, forgotten, dissociated, unfelt, or unthought) ends up getting expressed anyway, in yourself or in your relationships. Seeing this expression clearly in the world requires working with your emotions. If you cannot do that, then it's very difficult for any of your strongly held "rational" views to change, because doing so would require dealing with some pretty heavy emotions.

The upshot is that it gets really tiresome to argue in situations where you've realized this is what's happening. In my experience, most of the time that you see hardcore polarization on an issue, where all appeals to reason seem to fall on deaf ears, it's actually due to some kind of emotional blockage like this. At this point, practicing empathy and asserting firm but flexible boundaries is often the only way out.

So, pay attention to your emotions, they're trying to tell you something.

I agree wholeheartedly that unconscious desires find ways to express themselves, but it's novel for me to correlate those who are disconnected from their emotions (i.e. push them into their unconscious) with those who are more likely to fall victim to cognitive biases, dissonance, etc. It makes a ton of sense; for example, it takes all of my mindfulness to stop myself during a discussion/argument and ask myself honestly whether I'm open to hearing someone's argument or if I'm just feigning openness while trying to get a point across that I've tied my ego to. Oh, the inertia of preconceived thoughts and biases.

This is very useful to know, so thanks for the light-bulb moment. It'll be easier to step away from discussions when I can recognize that someone will live and die with their agenda because A) they lack the mindfulness to divorce their emotions from their stance, B) their identity and ego is built upon this stance, and C) no one will let you come by and sweep away their identity/ego without a fight, especially when their emotions, repressed or not, are swarming.

I guess it's easier to trust the judgment someone who's aware of their emotions than someone who's got a glaring blind spot.

Cool, glad my perspective was helpful. Sometimes stepping away from an argument, while it gets you away from being locked into either attachment to the argument or aversion to the argument, can turn into the third poison of disinterest in the argument. Detached engagement is the antidote here. If it's somebody I care about that I'm close to, or if it's myself, often I will ask about and validate associated feelings with the hope but not the expectation that it loosens whatever strongly held stance a little bit. People are a lot less rigid in their thinking when they know that they've been heard both intellectually and emotionally. Most of the time this approach won't actually change anything, but once in a while you'll get to witness a miracle.

Yet another good point re: disinterest in an argument being a potential third poison. I can see how detached engagement at least gives you an opportunity to have your voice be heard without the angst of fully-attached engagement. I think I have a tendency to walk away from arguments with unreasonable people, which seems like a good thing at first but is probably suboptimal from a professional standpoint. Thanks again, friend.

Great points. Permit me to expand on them slightly.

To some people, myself included, frank honesty is respectful. I could be alone here, but I can find passive-aggressiveness, needless euphemisms, and the like to be patronizing. Treating me with kid gloves is like saying, "I have an opinion, but I don't think you are emotionally mature enough to handle it in its raw form."

It's important for "jerks" to be conscious of how their behavior affects their relationships with coworkers. But it's equally important for "nice" people to do the same.

> "I have an opinion, but I don't think you are emotionally mature enough to handle it in its raw form."

exactly. That is how I feel when someone treats me with kid gloves.

But also, I have encountered several people who considered themselves to be just honest all the while implying that the person they tried to help was stupid and beneath them, lazy and so on. If there is no close relationship between the two it will lead to misunderstandings and a very bad work environment very soon.

It's impossible (for most of us) to switch this context-reading off, therefore be very careful to use neutral language and emphasize what is not implied if it could be understood that way (unless you do try to tell the person they're stupid - of course you shouldn't lie).

I've had a team break up over this. One teammember used languange he thought was just honest, but managed to insult and demotivate everyone else by making them feel ignorant in everything they did.

TL;DR: It's good to be open and honest, but make sure subtext is not negative (you cannot have no subtext); unless maybe the person you're talking to knows you respect them anyway.

but you don't have the ability to control the other person's perceptions or references, and so you don't have control over subtexts. The BETTER solution is to just be honest, factually and emotionally. If you need to establish that you respect someone anyways (and you should, if they deserve it), you do that contextually outside of the sub-argument where you're 'being brutal', ideally, before, and after, and if there's an emotional misunderstanding, you work to fix it retrospectively. And part of this is, you probably shouldn't be 100% negative in all of your interactions (unless the project truly deserves no accolades) - if you do give out strong accolades when they are due, that is an equal part of being brutally honest.

> but you don't have the ability to control the other person's perceptions or references, and so you don't have control over subtexts.

Ah, within reason, you do, especially when people are as rational as we all aspire to be. Those people-skills books people recommend around here tell you how.

I agree with the rest of your post though, just, you can only fix so many emotional misunderstandings before the general atmosphere goes south. Sidestepping and ignoring several insults every time you try to discuss a problem becomes very unnerving after a while. Thing is, those people usually don't notice they're doing it. When you treat them the same way you feel they treat you, they feel hurt. Well, bad months, I should stop here.

>> the tolerance for bullshit is low

My problem with this is that we often take what's easy and make it into a virtue. It is easy for us (esp. developers) to take the easy way out and decide that one must act the same no matter the context.

The truth is that your audience matters. Outcomes matter. Did the people in the room hear your message in a way that is going to move them closer to fixing the problem? No? Then you lost. (And your brutal honesty is just going to sound like complaining or anticipatory ass-covering.)

There are some organizations and people that are immune to criticism no matter the form. There are many other organizations and people that will accept criticism if it's phrased correctly for the context.

I prefer a more tactful style myself, but i would have to agree that a lot of perceived "jerkiness" is really an expression of misplaced respect.

I have known programmers who are brutally honest, but they do it because in their mind that is how adults talk to each other and this is how they wish to be treated themselves. Being 'tactful' in their mind is the equivalent of treating the other person like a child, and inherently disrespectful. I can see that point of view even if i don't think it is productive.

And then i have known programmers who are just bullies and mean. The difference is that they bittercoat things, making them sound deliberately worse, and they push people down so they can feel smug. That is not ok.

even bittercoating things is not necessarily bad. Sometimes it's good to take a pessimistic attitude and come out being pleasantly surprised, if you're the type of person who sees it as a challenge and not a discouragement. The litmus test is when the bittercoated thing turns out to work, does the person who delivered the skepticism come forward and congratulate you on a job well done?

It's been my experience that putting a really negative person on a team is like handing that team an anchor. Either the team starts to ignore and isolate them or their attitude wears everyone down and the rest of the team stops trying. I've seen successful negative people whose jobs allowed them to go off and do their own thing, but I've never seen them thrive on a team unless their attitude changed.

well, I should have qualified that I don't mean that you should be negative all the time. Because you exhibit a lack of judgement if you can't identify good things, just as much as you exhibit a lack of judgement if you can't identify mistakes and vocalize it vociferously.

Wrong. Tact, compassion, and honesty are not in any way incompatible.

And no, people who think they are being "brutally honest" while forgetting compassion or even basic fucking manners are not doing so with others' best interests at heart.

They are just being assholes. There are bonafide reasons for that behavior, and they deserve a measure of compassion themselves while receiving that message, but don't try gilding the orifice's behavior.

Correct. I'm sick of the "I am just being honest" defense. There is a large margin between being honest and being an asshole.

Question: "Do you think I should rewrite this code?"

Honest answer: "Yes, definitely. You've made some mistakes that will make this impossible to maintain, such as...".

Asshole answer: "Yeah, this code looks like shit".

As the author noted, this tendency is symptomatic of people with high intelligence, but questionably intact egos. I left Mensa because I was tired of all the petty bickering resulting from people "being honest" about their opinions; if I had a nickel for every time someone was called a "moron" for stating their political leaning...ugh.

Nobody is above civility and tact.

I think if you are using Mensa as your reference set, you've got some pretty extreme sample bias in terms of 'egos'.

lol...nice catch. When I received my acceptance letter, I had to call them to see if I was actually a member; they had sent me someone else's test results. Nobody is above looking like a dumbass from time to time, either. =)

Yes yes yes... all my yes

This.

Being "Brutally Honest" while combining that with tact is a rare communication skill that is an essential part of interacting in polite company. Having that skill and developing it has done more for the effectiveness of my teams than any other skill I have ever developed.

[maybe nsfw]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2cV_q-mVAAA