I don't like you very much
whattofix.com
whattofix.com
Through the description of the actions of each of the people with whom he disagrees, I immediately found myself sympathising with the "other side". I mean, there are the usual dailywtf-style "this guy is really dumb/awful to work with/whatever" stories, and we all get a bit of a laugh out of them, but this just comes across as a situation where the author is unable to grasp why other people might behave towards him in these ways, or feel particular feelings towards him.
> I honestly don't know what interests me more, why Bob doesn't want to recommend me or why I thought Bob would recommend me when he won't. I think the second question has a lot more potential than the first!
Sure, the second question is more interesting, but I don't think this article goes any distance towards attempting to answer it.
People behave in particular ways for reasons that seem apparent to them. The tone of this article annoys me because it appears to suggest that people who behave according to motivations that are hidden from the author are somehow at fault.
I just think this is symptomatic of so many of my experiences within the IT industry - people always assume that their own motives are pure and good, and that everyone else is acting dishonestly (to screw the client, or to avoid doing work, or to advance their own career). I much prefer to assume that if I don't understand somebody's motivations, the burden is on me to try to understand, rather than just writing them off as bad/lazy/dishonest/whatever.
My article had a lot of logic and tone problems which you pointed out. I thought readers of the blog should see your comments.
Let me know if this bugs you and I will remove it.
Nobody is at fault here. Let me be perfectly clear about this. The question is what types of lessons to learn from interactions with other people. You're never, ever going to learn the exact motives of everybody you interact with. In each of these cases, multiple attempts were made to understand and communicate motives, paradigms, and worldviews. These attempts failed.
In the first case, the conversation is unfinished. It's the preface to the article. In the second case, teams can't live in chaos. "Rusty" wasn't wrong, it's just we needed to communicate about things and were both unable to do it for various reasons. In the third case, "Jim" was just an amazing piece of work. If it was just me then that's one thing, but everybody had the same opinion of him. So I don't think it's anything I'm bringing to the table. I could tell you stories of several other people who had the same experience with Jim, but that's just beating up on Jim. From Jim's point of view, the rest of the world was wrong. Here he was, obviously with the answer to the problems we had, and we weren't reasonable enough to let him solve everything. (I know this because he said as much to me on a couple of occasions)
In the fourth case, I screwed up. I took liberties with my language and reaction that I hadn't earned yet. No amount of communication is going to fix an initial bad impression.
The purpose of this article isn't to slam other people or to say that people with hidden motives are somehow bad. If that's all you got out of it I really did a poor job. The purpose is to review various people that didn't like me and explore why.
You can monday-morning quarterback this thing to death -- I know, because I have. But at the end of the day, conditions are always imperfect, everybody is always acting the best way they know how, and still you end up not getting along with some people. That's just life.
Of course I'll never know the entire story -- and all you have is my side of things. But I don't blame these people, look down on them, or anything like that. Sometimes, as the article concludes, shit happens. It's impossible to get along with everybody you meet.
You can say "forget it, I'm not worrying about it" or you can obsess over it. The best thing to do, in my opinion, is try to find some kind of narrative to put over it that teaches you a valuable lesson. It's not a perfect solution, but it allows growth without demonizing others or putting yourself down. It's a certainty that the narrative is going to be incomplete and trivializing of certain things, but that's also unavoidable.
> The purpose is to review various people that didn't like me and explore why.
I guess my problem with the article was that the tone implied that most of these people weren't justified in not liking you, or that it was some natural effect of a bad situation, rather than something caused by your own actions.
Note: I am not suggesting that one has to "fix" things other people dislike; every (sane) character trait is a trade-off between good points and bad points. But one should be aware what they are.
The tone was due to a hurried write, as was the ham-fisted nature.
Of course from their end these people were completely justified in not liking me.
But also of course from my side it looks unjustified. How else could it look? From my angle, just like them, I've been acting rationally and with good intentions all along.
I tend to avoid confrontation and haven't had many incidents like Daniel's (this is a big part of why I work solo) but even I've hit into it. I positively reviewed a book on Amazon yet some third party guy I've never heard of (and unrelated to the book) went crazy in the comments how he didn't like me. Like.. WTF? So, yeah, let's write these people off to just being the crazy side of life we'll never understand - life's kinda fun like that :)
Sets off my spidey sense for PHB.
It seems clear to me after reading several of his posts that he manages people. While it is certainly true that there are a subset of managers who are also PHBs, I don't think you could highly correlate those who are and those who aren't by the number of posts they make about working code.
If a person wrote nothing but posts about code and how it worked, no one would ever disparage them because they weren't a manager. Why is it that people disparage managers who don't write about code?
Because it increases the probability that they don't understand what they're managing.
Look at Peter Norvig or Urs Hoelzle or Jeff Dean. They are still very, very technical despite managing many people. That earns them credibility among their troops.
By contrast, this guy has written about 70 posts on Agile with almost zero code. I could find exactly three lines of code on his entire site under the F# tag, though I didn't look that hard.
Bottom line is that he's unlikely to be someone who would earn an engineer's technical respect.
Agile can be two things. It can be a development methodology and it can be a project management methodology. Being good at one does not imply being good at the other. I work with people who are geniuses at managing agile projects but that couldn't code their way out of a shoe box with 3 sides cut out. It's their ability to manage that is important, not their technical chops.
The first trait of a manager in high tech (whether professor or product manager) has to be technical competence.
That trait is not usually sufficient to be a good manager. But I think it's necessary (you seem to disagree?)
I could see this being different in other environments (eg I can't imagine a research team manager not being an alpha geek) but for most corporate environments there are a lot of other skills I'd look for before technical competence.
For example, one of my inspirations early in my career was an EPM (engineering project manager in the company's lingo) who had zero technical background. What she did have was an amazing ability to listen to everyone involved in the project, pick out the chains of dependencies, negotiate schedules with us, follow up relentlessly on any open questions and summarize what we'd just said better than we ever could. She made a massive difference, and the team's productivity dropped like a stone when someone less talented took over.
I don't randomly walk up to people and discuss my opinion of them. But if someone started a conversation with me about how many people do or don't like them then yes I would have to tell them I find them irritating and walk away. There is nothing 'tough' about it.
Nor am I an Internet tough guy, just giving an opinion is all I'm doing. People that obsess over who like them or not and why, I just don't like them.
"No matter how right you are, if you care about effecting change, you should never open your mouth without some sense of who will agree with you and who won’t."
I think it's just important to pay attention.
In most cases they laugh it off and say it was nothing but maybe in some cases it does help, I dunno.
I would never see the gain of explicitly telling someone "no".
Anyhow, I think it's polite to answer to a request - even if it is - "dude , I never did like you, sorry"
Hounding people for recommendations will either lead to refusal (which will inspire you to write a blog post about people who don't like you), or people will write you a mildly insincere recommendation to avoid causing offence. At that point, you should be grateful that your acquaintance has considerably more social graces than you do.
I sent him an email on an old personal email address a few weeks ago, pointing out that we always didn't agree but we always respected and liked each other and if he could spare a few kind words it would mean a lot to me. I didn't receive a response.
I was reading a great book on consulting this week, and it pointed out that you should take emotional chances with our work. Reach out to people emotionally to find out where they are coming from.
About this same time, I noticed he recommended one of the other guys that was on the team.
So I sent him another email at his work address -- basically a repeat of the first email. I figured either he didn't get the first email or the answer was no. And if the answer was no, I should find out why (which I plan on doing when I get back) Either way, it was a win.
Of all things, I did not want an insincere recommendation. Rather I am extremely curious as to why two people who are supposedly experts on teams don't have the mutual respect it takes to point out and praise the positive qualities of the other, even if they disagree. I imagine I somehow ticked the fellow off to the point of hurt feelings, but if so, I am unaware of when that happened. Like I said, on a personal level we always seemed to get along just fine.
I don't understand how someone declining a request to write a recommendation gets you to assume he dislikes you. He just doesn't want to recommend you.
I know plenty of people that I like and work with, but that I wouldn't want to write a recommendation for. This is largely because I do not believe in lauding someone's good sides without also addressing their shortcomings. The latter will not be looked kindly upon in a recommendation. In short: I can not honestly write a recommendation.
One of the guys I wrote a recommendation for wanted to interview at google, the other at vmware. The vmware guy got the job, the other didn't.
Whether my recommendations were the deciding factor or not I'll never know, but I did do just what you would do, I addressed their good sides and their shortcomings both, which I think is only fair.
But it still was a recommendation, from the heart, I'd hire both of these guys myself in a heartbeat if the situation would allow it, which is my criterion for whether or not I would write one.
I remember a few years back I was vacating a position as a contractor, and I was asked for recommendations. So, at the time my business was contracting, and I didn't really need as much help as I had. I recommended they hire one of the guys who was working for me but it was a "well, he can do the job, but here are what's wrong with him. I recommend you hire him"
The client didn't bite. later the body shop/recruiter who had gotten me the gig asked for recommendations, and I said the same thing. Apparently he talked the client into hiring my guy, and the client was pretty happy with the guy for a year or so. (the client hired me again when the guy left.)
Would it have been better for the client if I was good at sales and able to directly sell the guy? maybe.
(my other minor nit was that nobody gave me a kickback. Eh, I did get the guy to work for me at way below market wages for a year or two, so I got something out of it.)
But the upshot is when I give a recommendation, I see it as doing a favor to the company or person that has the open position more than a favor to the person I'm recommending. I mean, if I didn't think you were qualified, I wouldn't have recommended you for the gig, right? sometimes my recommendations are in the format "person X is perfect for the job, but you are unlikely to catch his interest"
On LinkedIn, though, it is different. the recommendations are setup as if you were doing a favor to the person you are recommending, which makes it much harder for me. I mean, how much of the negative stuff do you put in? hell, change the situation and a massive flaw becomes a massive advantage.
You never really know if you're pushing hard enough until you ruffle a few feathers along the way.
I'd rather have a few folks "actively dislike me" than worry if I compromised too many times over the years. I haven't and it sounds like you haven't either. I think we're both doing fine.
Once I started getting glowing reviews from the clueless, then I'd start to worry.
I used to think if I worked hard enough, I could get anybody to like me. When people didn't, I viewed it as some sort of personal mistake.
Now I'm thinking that random chance has a lot to do with it. The more people you interact with, the more who are not going to like you -- there is always going to be that 1-5%.
Oddly enough from this position I am beginning to see the logic of your point, although I have never taken it to heart. The more real work you are doing, the more people you interact with, the more change you make -- of course is going to ruffle feathers. You can't help it.
I think the worst attribute any team member can have is not wanting to make waves. In fact, I think it's the number one attribute I would actively seek out to exclude from a team. Everybody has to work without nets on an agile team. If we're not taking emotional chances and communicating, we're losing ground.
Is this wisdom born from long experience or is it unwise naivety? Is there any grounds for saying "if you want to encourage waves then you have to have an environment where people wont fear being fired for sticking out. At all."?
I think actually having such an atmosphere and acceptance that everyone believes would be a lot harder than it sounds. Perhaps that's something that startups have - the founders have equity in the company, they can't fire the other founders and they can't be fired, so they have the freedom to do whatever they think will make the company progress, and no particular benefit (e.g. "not being fired") for not rocking the boat.
The trick is that people can and should passionately defend and believe in the viewpoints, espouse and defend them, and then go along with what the group decides.
Either "passionately defending" or "going along" is not sufficient in itself. You have to have both.
I'm stealing that one. (grin)
It's hard to say that communication problems are "a little bit of me, and a little bit of them" if you go and say things like "Wow, you're a tall fucker!" to new clients when you meet them. Y'know?
I can see how that might lead to a long dark night of the soul, but who wants to read about it -- when it's written so hamfistedly?
And why here?
People love to upvote things that make them right, but I guess that's kind of the idea.