That Guy with a Thousand Inconsequential Objections | Hacker News Reader

That Guy with a Thousand Inconsequential Objections

blogs.hbr.org

60 points_pius64 comments

Captious, nit-picky behavior in a professional context usually signals to me that there is another problem that is worth attending to. e.g. A person raising a series of petty objections in a meeting may have deeper problems with the plan that she can't yet articulate, or is being put in a position of apparent but not real authority (that is, "the ship has sailed" on a decision without real agreement being reached).

Telling someone to more or less shut up might pay off in the short term, as in make a particular meeting go faster, but in the long haul you're ignoring a pretty telling symptom.

No there really are people that just bring up problems that aren't problems.

I think you can tell the captious people from those who aren't by whether they behave that way in every day meaningless conversation.

The type of person who responds to everything opinion regardless of how meaningless with "not necessarily" is probably going to have the same problems at work.

Agree. I always use this behavior as a red flag for myself... whenever I look back on my behavior for the day/week and find myself being captious, petty or not, it tends to be a reminder to check my motives and examine if I have unresolved (generally negative) feelings toward the topic / people at hand that needs to be resolved. Sometimes it's just stress leaking out from other areas of life.

The smarter one is in a given arena, the more easily we can delude ourselves with smart-sounding rationalizations/objections, especially if we haven't examined our motives.

Let's presume, for the sake of the argument, that not every conversation That Guy has is slow and painful. It's far more likely that That Guy only has a problem communicating with some people than that every conversation TG has ever had looks like the one in the article.

This is a fair assumption because otherwise That Guy wouldn't bother trying to talk to anybody anymore. So TG is TG from the perspective of the Normal Person. That Guy may be a normal person from the perspective of many other people.

So my problem with this article is that That Guy's guilt is presumed. In all likelihood this fictitious That Guy expected the conversation to go like this:

    NC: “I think the new guy is really getting up to speed quickly.”

    TG: “OK, but what do you mean by quickly?”

    NC: “After the first week he hasn't interrupted me with questions every
    hour, unlike some of the previous interns.”

    TG: “Gotcha.”

Here TG discovers that what NC originally described as "getting up to speed" really meant "hasn't interrupted me in a while". And perhaps TG knows that follow up questions are needed to figure out what NC is really saying.

If NC presumes that TG is out to antagonize him then every question will be answered with a short (and unhelpful) reply until both parties are exasperated.

TG's behavior strikes me more as trolling...the example you gave could play out like:

  NC: “After the first week he hasn't interrupted me with questions every hour, unlike some of the previous interns.”

  TG: “Which of the previous interns?”

  NC: “Bob and Alice.”

  TG: “Why were their questions inappropriate?”

etc.

Folks like TG can be sociopaths, where a game is being played with the aim of making the target spend more effort on the response than it takes to ask the question.

There are also chat-bot AIs that use interaction patterns like this to keep the subject engaged as long as possible.

I suppose it's possible TG is a sociopath, although I don't know anybody who deliberately trolls like that.

I still think it's far more likely that both people are poor communicators in that TG wants to get a precise and accurate answer from somebody who doesn't think about language that way and that NG is oblivious of the fact that TG is looking for a precise answer and will get frustrated with replies that don't answer his questions.

If you start giving them action items based on their objections it changes the value equation for a socio-path.

TG: Which of the previous interns?

NC: Unclear, go find a list of all questions asked by all interns and rank them by frequency. Normalize the list where the most questions is rank 10 and the least rank 1. Then place the new guy on that scale. Let's have that done by Friday, kay?

I think you grant too many favours... Or perhaps you are that guy!

This. Part of being a good communicator is understanding how other people communicate and being able to adapt your communication to their style.

I think the difference is between:

"OK, but what do you mean by quickly?"

and

"Oh that's great to hear. What is impressing you most?"

Sometimes I have to be That Guy during technical conversations, to tease out deeper architectural issues. Conversations generally follow the pattern:

Coworker: "Hey, can you add feature X to that library you wrote?" (The library was feature-complete a month ago.)

Me: "What do you need feature X for?"

C: "Because the library doesn't have it and it seems like it belongs there." (It doesn't for a reason.)

Me: "But what will you be using it for?"

C: "I need it to work around problem Y that I'm having." (Problem Y should never happen in our system.)

Me: "Problem Y… how did you design your code that problem Y is happening?"

C: "Well, I structured it like XYZ…" (We decided on day 1 that nothing in our system will use XYZ for reasons, and that there exist ways to solve the problem without using XYZ.)

At this point I know that my coworker's design has not been reviewed, has potential issues, and that my coworker might not understand the architecture we are using and why we're using it. Important things, which I wouldn't have known if I didn't play That Guy.

(Yes, I'm also That Guy who nitpicks code reviews and API designs, rambles about decoupling and cohesion, and complains when things are coded without any sort of reviewed specification.)

That doesn't sound like being captious (to use the article's term), that sounds more like asking the "Five Whys":

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5_Whys

which is almost always a good thing.

Interesting link.

I know my questions are not captious, but I can tell they come across that way: the questionee thinks all things are fine and dandy, and can't understand why I'm asking so many (to them) irrelevant questions.

The article identifies a problem, but doesn't give much in the way of solutions. Putting a hat on someone just passes the problem off to them - "It's not my poor communication that's the problem, he's captious". It's more interesting to build up skills that help you deal with these people.

> and also hopefully discourage him (because he’ll know you know he’s captious).

He probably won't know he's captious.

> Some students of mine went a step further and actually had hats made with “captious” printed on them so that if anyone did behave captiously, they could hat the cat in question.

I wouldn't like to be in an environment like that.

While this article raises a valid point, its arguments are often used to brush aside real concerns on important topics like workplace safety or product reliability. I'm sure many HNers have found themselves on the wrong end of a conversation where they're told to 'just make it work!' by someone who isn't interested in understanding downside risks.

Yeah, didn't we just have a front page article about how terrible the "Get Shit Done!" style of management is? I got a very strong vibe of that off this article.

I've seen people who really are this "That Guy". I've also seen people who are just more experienced and have already been burned by certain classes of bad decisions being mislabeled as "That Guy" by other guys who have a massively skewed view of what objections are truly "inconsequential".

People who are more experienced should also able to understand their audience and explain their objections in ways the other person will understand, even if it's just "The last time we did this the business lost $x. Can you explain to me how the situation is different this time?"

But that's shoulda woulda coulda. How about the other people around that person not throwing the baby out with the bath water because they should be smart enough to understand the wise old sage may have a point but be less than stellar at convincing you of it. Which sin is worse?

This is basically just advocating bullying.

Some guy who's manner of communicating that makes us feel uncomfortable should be named and shamed, just for the sake of it, with no attempt at resolution or mutual understanding.

Yes, I've experienced the annoyance, and yes, I've also been "that guy". Labeling, ridiculing and humiliating people is not the way to deal with that.

With very, very rare exceptions, there's always a very real underlying issue here, and "that guy" behavior is more often than not a symptom of a systemic issue.

While we're stereotyping strawmen, I might as well point out that Captious Guy is just the mirror image of the the Pointy Haired Boss, the guy who doesn't care about any details and only uses language so vague and meaningless that you can always interpret it in a simple and agreeable way, provided you don't think about what he said too much.

Both are poisonous for organizations. However, I'm not sure why the author thought Captious Guy deserved special recognition.

I would say it's highly unprofessional to name and shame in a workplace - regardless of how captious That Guy is. You'll end up having bigger problems if you start doing that (low morale for instance).

Rather bad advice to say "don't be That Guy" when you actually have leadership issues and you can't convince your underlings on the execution. Sounds familiar?

Paul Graham, this should be linked from the site guidelines.

Careful, there - as I write this, every other first-level comment thus far is captious in nature (and only one that isn't captious itself is the classic HN "I like/don't like the opposite of whatever's being talked about"). Don't want to upset the herd too much!

This is going to be like Betteridge's law of headlines. After people have learnt about it, they can't stop referring to it for months and months!

Personally I find people that gloss over the details too often equally annoying.

What details, specifically?

I generally agree.

This has to be my single most favorite HN post in quite some time. The article is about people who raise petty objections and how to deal with them. And so the comments are filled with petty objections against the article.

Indeed. I opened the thread to see how pedantic pedants could get about pedantry.

This the first one I've seen, but I really enjoy. -- Author of the HBR Blog Itself

I'm not sure the objections are petty. Reading down them, I get the impression of a lot of people who managers have categorised as "that guy" feeling even more disempowered by this article.

Now two things (amongst others) could be true here:

1. They are "that guy," and should learn not to be captious.

or possibly:

2. The article is a salvo in an ongoing workplace politics issue in which one side just wants to get work done without having to face objections or think deeply about them.

My own impression is that the first part of the article is exactly correct - there are some people who do ask irrelevant objections.

I'm not so sure about the second part: "you know them when you hear them."

I think, reading through the objections here, that the art of knowing whether an objection is petty may well be a skill that some managers just don't have.

I think also that a lot of managers feel very strongly that they have that skill.

Hence, one way of reading this thread is not as a set of petty objections to the article, but as a set of emotional responses from people who already feel put down.

> However, like pornography, I think most of us know it when we see it.

Also like pornography, I think most of us would disagree at least to some degree.

Details matter, sometimes by a great deal. A coworker and I raise objections and ask for clarifications a hundred times a day in the course of our work, and more often than not at the end of that day we discover there are still important details that are missing or incorrect.

Sometimes these so-called "inconsequential details" are what will ultimately sink a project, and in spite of our captious nature the project will try to sail out of the harbor regardless.

[Edit]

Since there seems to be a lot of disagreement on this matter, I'd like to take another stab at exactly why I feel like the article is incorrect.

If a colleague is finding a lot of faults in your idea, that should say two things to you assuming you have respect for your colleague and value their opinion: one, that your colleague has a genuine interest in your idea and is trying to think it through from various angles to find what areas of it need refined; and two, that your idea is in need of refining and you should probably be taking notes.

If, however, you do not have any respect for your colleague, you may dismiss their comments and criticisms and simply call them "captious".

If there is an established cycle of this scenario then there are three possibilities: that you have a lot of ideas that are worth consideration and polish, that you have a lot of bad ideas and lack enough of an understanding of the subject matter to determine what constitutes "petty", or that your colleague has personal issues that need directly addressed. This is how it should and often does play out in the real world.

In the author's scenario, which ironically enough takes place in a classroom, the old adage of "there is no such thing as a stupid question" seems to have been disposed of. They have narrowed the definition of "captious" to target individual issues, which in any normal context would otherwise signal that the person in question is lacking in understanding. Worse still, they are given a "shame hat" for doing so.

You know what sort of fictitious conversations sprung to my mind upon reading this?

Adobe Engineer: We should use bcrypt to secure our users' passwords, it's scalable and processor intensive so it's more secure.

Adobe Middle Manager: Or we can use this other encryption protocol and save on server costs.

Adobe Engineer: But that's encryption, not hashing, we shou-

Adobe Middle Manager: Same difference, stop being captious.

Petty details, indeed.

> Also like pornography, I think most of us would disagree at least to some degree.

Hint: You're that guy.

You can call captious derogatory, but I'll call it a compliment.

I'll also be around to say "I told you so" once my nit picking proves out.

You can't just raise every objection, petty or not, and feel justified when a couple of them turn out to be important. The ideal to strive for should be to identify non-petty objections and only raise those. Raising many petty ones are actively harmful to the social fabric of the workplace.

As I explained in my parent comment, "petty" is far too subjective a term.

I have no doubt that I'm seen as captious by many of the people I work with because I bring up problems that they see as petty, but my unique perspective on the project at hand puts me in a position to see the significance of that issue and how it applies to the project as a whole.

But if those people read the linked article, they'll say "oh, he's just being captious" and be dismissive.

You are definitely that guy, who is going to live and die by the truth for the smallest inconsequential detail. Theres a war and over expending resource on every battle will destroy the effort for winning the war. A matter of economy and survival space, not correctness and truth-space.

It's a matter of the importance of that correctness and truth-space, and that you shouldn't be dismissive of people that are just trying to paint as complete a picture as possible before just diving right in and expending effort on what will ultimately be a fruitless effort.

That is where wars are won or lost.

I wish "that guy" had been there before we went into Iraq and Afghanistan.

You took the metaphor explaining a part of the original argument, not the argument itself, a metaphor used to illustrate the argument better, a metaphor that was just there to make a point clearer, then you expanded it needlessly and painfully for all involved, muddled it a great deal, turned it around and attacked the original point. With a metaphor. That you used way past its place of purpose.

I actually have no idea where this tactic should even be on the hierarchy of disagreement. It's shockingly effective in practice though - you're basically redefining the meaning of the words I use for your own purpose. I can't disagree with you, because I'm trying to say something which cannot be exactly defined, leading me to use metaphors or allegories or other kinds of inexact language, but whenever I say something like this you switch it around so it now doesn't mean what I intend it to mean. I literally lack the words with which to disagree in this situation.

I quoted the article in an attempt to pinpoint a key detail which I felt was at the heart of the issue: that what people consider petty or captious is far too subjective. This, in itself, is a fairly obvious point which I don't think the article addresses well enough, and in fact uses my quoted metaphor to dismiss entirely.

The article encourages people to learn this word and to use it to dismiss people they feel are being petty. Rather than address those so-called petty problems or even the person themselves they are encouraged to write that person off entirely.

The point of the pornography quote is to demonstrate that yes, there may be interpersonal variability in the definition of the term, but there is a strong area of agreement and overlap between us all. You seem to have missed that the point is to say: while we cannot firmly affix what constitutes pedantry and captiousness, we have an innate and largely convergent working sense for it.

"That guy" noun : any person who has any disagreement with me or raises any objection to anything I say.

eh... a little that-guy, you're being.

In that case, the most of continental Europe is "that guy" to most of the US.

This is the problem. We're about to have a pretty annoying meme that can be used endlessly, just like the "guy" forever asking "why."

>>Details matter, sometimes by a great deal.

Yep. Just because you can't see the consequences of the objections being raised does not necessarily mean they are inconsequential objections.

Sometimes these so-called "inconsequential details" are what will ultimately sink a project

Yes, and overwhelmingly more often they are better let go of, or allowed to morph through contact with others.

Telling the difference requires good judgment, which captious people lack. That is one reason why they are so tedious.

Dude, look the example conversation in the article. Really look at it. There is an obvious difference between somebody nitpicking the language you use in a social situation (the example conversation in the article) and somebody being thorough and rigorous with technical details (you, your examples). I'm almost positive that nobody, including the author, would be dismissive the latter behavior. And I'm almost positive that even you would be dismissive of former.

I'm totally that guy! My problem is that I can't differentiate between an attempt to communicate something important and someone who is uncomfortable and just wants to be saying things. If I misjudge the latter to be the former then I'll pursue a more precise understanding where none exists, putting that person on the spot and exacerbating their anxiety.

It is funny though if you think about it. Of all the comments in this thread, i think you are the only one to pick up on the fact that NC was actually just making small talk. He obviously felt put on the spot when he had to enlarge on his inconsequential banter.

Think about the consequences. In the example conversation, they were simply describing the progress of another employee. Is this person telling you to do something? Not really. Is this person telling you how to think about something technical? Not really.

You'd better be sure the objections are inconsequential before you slap the ad-hominem "That Guy" label on someone out of frustration. Sometimes you're so committed to a particular course of action that someone who raises legitimiate objections is a theat to your baby, and you're just being blind to the ego dynamics at play.

Coming at this from another angle...

>"His net impact on the meeting is generally negative, and he makes it 15 minutes longer than it needs to be."

Perhaps I'm making the meeting 15 minutes longer by asked pointed questions because I want the meeting to produce something more than plans for yet another meeting.

I would rather spend 45 minutes to produce 15 minutes of value than spend 30 for nothing.

That said, I'm only going to do this a few times. If the group or organizer is intent on holding meetings that don't generate anything of value I'll just stop attending and interfering with the status quo.

>"And I suspect that no right-minded person wants meetings to be longer than necessary."

Only in the case of the kind of worthless adherence to convention, meet for the sake of meeting style meeting I described above.

At their core, I think many people want to cooperate and produce, they hate the typical meeting and want to end it as soon as possible because it accomplishes neither of those things.

>"Of course, sometimes people roll their eyes to what are in fact smart objections, but I think most of the time most people (not That Guy) know which objections are trivial and which actually matter."

Too often, the things that "actually matter" to the folks holding/attending a meeting are frankly toxic.

* Wringing implied consent from an audience who has been guilted out of raising objections for fear of being "that guy". When the poor ideas presented or details omitted come back to bite the blame is ready "You were there. Why didn't you bring this up earlier?"

* Simply having an audience. There are a lot of people who just love to hear themselves talk, to gesticulate in front of a whiteboard and love to see their underlings nod in approval even more.

* Maintaining the status quo. Objections are likely to make work or at least require effort from people who are happily complacent and "busy" with a schedule chock full of meetings every day.

Sure, in a great environment with well-run, universally productive meetings and discussions these situations don't exist and "that guy" would be genuinely captious.

Thing is, most of us don't work in an ideal environment and I'd expect nearly of us have worked at some point in a place that was far from it.

Developers are often That Guy because they foresee what will happen when they get to writing code; they realise all the thousands of small problems the work is going to throw at them, and they spew that out to their colleagues.

Foreseeing the problems is good engineering, but it can be a bad move politically to spend a lot of time describing the issues. That's what makes you That Guy.

It's a terribly quandary -- I have to stop myself from being 'a lawyer for the compiler', if you get my drift.

I'm the author of the HBR blog. I really enjoyed these comments -- reading them helps me think about how I can be clearer. @neilbearden

Here's an idea. How about we use common sense and moderation rather than worry with a game of hat the cat. Just an idea. :)

While I'm aware of this phenomenon, I fear we will have a new meme I'm our already deafening echo chamber. :(

'That Guy' needs to start living in The Now.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Power_of_Now

~or~

The Guy who Isn't Satisfied with Ambiguity and Mediocrity.

~or~

The Guy who Isn't Capable of Communication or Cooperation.

You choose your pejorative terms, I'll choose mine.

We already read that article.

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