Comment by gdp | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gdp | Hacker News Reader

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Wow. I don't know if it's just a literary device being employed here, but this article comes off as the work of somebody with a lack of empathy.

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.

Just curious, did you mirror this comment on whattofix, or is it some feature of that blog to include HN comments?

I didn't do anything except post here, so I assume it's a feature of that blog.

I thought you had a great comment, so I manually entered it.

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.

That strikes me as a particularly wierd thing to do in the absence of attribution or explanation.

As the author, I've done a poor job of communicating. For that, I apologize.

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.

OK, perhaps I didn't phrase my objection very well.

> 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.

I don't mean to put the boot in too much, but what comes across is not just lack of empathy but lack of self-knowledge. The fact that the OP has to think why people don't like him strikes me as... troubling. This is not a personal comment on the OP - everybody has people who don't like them (hey, some of us more than others) - but if you really don't know at this stage in your life what it is you do that puts those who dislike you off, I suggest you collar some of your good friends and ask them straight up, because you really need a hint.

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.

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.

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.

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