Our No Asshole Rule
adventur.es
adventur.es
Ever work in a big, dysfunctional environment? I have. My job is to help teams work better, so I get a chance to work in startups, BigCorps, government IT shops -- pretty much everything.
As a rule, large dysfunctional environments are full of people who are extremely polite to each other. You have to be: when you've got a thousand people, you can't walk around ticking people off. People don't survive like that.
But those are the worst places to work. Even worse than the out-of-control, balls-to-the-wall startups. Why? Because hidden apathy is rampant. People will smile, help out, be polite -- even applaud new ideas. But nothing changes. The organization has eliminated assholes to the point where no difficult conversations take place.
Don't go there.
Ever see a high-performing team? Got news for you. Sometimes people say things they shouldn't. They're incivil -- but not on purpose. It's just that they care deeply about what they're doing and you're not always able to express criticism in the most fluffy way possible.
A better way is to go with fierce opinions, lightly held. People have difficult conversations, sometimes with invective and emotion, but from a standpoint of caring for each other and the work. Once they've made their case with as much vigor as they like, they're amenable to change.
So it's not assholes. Everybody is an asshole. It's part of being human. It's manipulative people -- weasels -- whether they use bullying or "facilitation" to manipulate. People who don't have a clear and simple mission that everybody knows and agrees with are poison to any organization.
One business self-help guy put it this way: intent counts more than technique. You can be a bit rough around the edges as long as you mean well and are flexible. What you can't do is use aggression to force people to your will. But there are plenty other tricks besides aggression to do this, and they're all bad.
During the performing stage, which many teams never actually reach, teams can exhibit arse like to outsiders. They have become a unit that fully understands each other, knows how to raise objections efficiently (often read as rude by outsiders), and doesn't want anything to break up the amazing experience that is being part of that team. Adding a new team member into the mix will upset the balance and push the team back to previous stages.
This seems code for "I don't want an egocentric person here with more confidence than me." Honestly, it depends on the role. I want my guy who handles negotiations to be a tough character. I want my lawyer to be fearless. I want my security guards to be unafraid to assert themselves if they see something.
This is what both this guy and Paul Graham get wrong: there simply is no "one good personality" for businesses. We need a mix of personalities to get things done effectively, or at all. Yeah my coders and sysadmins should probably be INTJ's, but I don't want an INTJ sales guy.
I also think there's folly in being ultra-sensitive and ultra-politically correct with hiring. So what if someone has more confidence than you? Is it such a threat to your company and well-being? I think this idea of a young company being a nerf-game nerdfest of humble geeks all "being nice" is asinine. These companies get eaten up by tough guys who just can out-compete them. Niceness comes with a lot of limits and in the long run, can't compete. Look at how quickly Google has given up its 'no evil' mantra, for example, or how Bill Gates had to transform from 1980s geek hero to 1990s hated Bill Gates. It was a limiting philosophy, especially when you have shareholders.
I think this is entirely your projection on the article; I didn't read it that way at all. I've worked with confident, effective people (including sales people) who possess none of the negative attributes the article talks about, and are all-around nice people to be with.
He could certainly be hard and firm when he needed to be, but perhaps because he was so nice when he didn't, he really didn't have to leverage much more than a flat tone when that hardness was needed.
I'm not sure what you're implying when you say niceness has limits. Are you saying being ethical is not competitive? Because I would strongly disagree with that.
I think it's interesting that you tacitly equated "asshole" with "confidence." I don't think you're alone in this, and certainly not if you treat it as merely a fast heuristic. I don't think it's right though. And I think it's a relatively new cultural phenomenon, perceptibly growing over the last thirty years.
"Confidence," (in the self-confidence sense) is etymologically just about trust or faith in oneself or one's abilities. It has nothing to do with aggression or selfishness. That correlation is something, I think, that people notice and selectively remember. It makes sense from a Darwinian perspective that we selectively remember "assholes." And the Sammy Glick / Gordon Gecko / etc narrative is so much a cultural staple at this point that it's self reinforcing.
It's entire possible to be confident without being an asshole.
> We have no tolerance for dishonest, manipulative, belittling, or egocentric individuals
, made me think that this blog post was written by an asshole.
"There are two almost sure-fire ways to understand someone’s perspective. The first is to eat with them. How do they treat the wait staff? Are they demanding, or easily agitated? What happens when things aren’t perfect? The other test is to meet their significant other. What qualities did they choose in the person with whom has the most influence over them? We call these the asshole acid test."
If yes, this test was written by an egocentric asshole.
Incidentally, I do think that taking people out for drinks to evaluate their character is a lousy practice but simply because many people don't drink for many reasons. Not because someone might secretly find out you're a religious minority.
No, no; marketing people are excluded from this rule, obviously. The rule is only applicable to these disgusting engineers who have opinions and technical insight.
It can therefore be used with good intentions, and may often result in good outcomes if done by an effective manipulator for those good reasons but according to my moral system it is never an ethical way to act, and is likely to ultimately corrode relationships.
I don't get that impression from this post. But plausibly, uniformlyrandom isn't defending the right to be an asshole; but merely mistrusts that someone who claims not to tolerate assholes, is in fact a good judge of that.
Being harsh is alright. The people are respect the most are those that have the balls to come up to me and say "your idea is rubbish, your point of view is stupid". Yes, this guy is an asshole. But he is a good one.
What you want to avoid is the bullies. The ones that will insult you for no reason. Belittle people to feel better. Those are the ones that are dangerous for a team.
Everybody is an asshole from the point of view of someone else.
Agreed. One man's asshole is another man's best friend.
Also, and perhaps more commonly, people behave differently to different people and in different circumstances. I've never met someone who was an asshole to their boss, even if they acted assholey in general to everyone else.
Bullying is a bit easier to operationally define, focused on behavior, not attitudes or personality traits as much.
To give one example: A intellectually brillant employee wants to explain some complicated programming or math concepts so that the other people at the company can become better - a very noble plan. But because of their social inaptness this is considered to be rude and arrogant by the other team members.
The difference is easy to suss out: approach the person in question, say "hey, I think behavior X is causing an issue between us, can we work on it?" and wait. If they agree to try and then actually do(even if they don't succeed), they're not an asshole. If they make excuses, or agree to change but make no visible effort, they are.
I think that if the others are trying not to be jerks, then this awkward soul won't have much trouble. Properly implemented, there can be a lot of slack available to such a person. (Heck, I'm not brilliant, but many people seem to put up with and like me despite being fairly intense when wound up.)
EDIT: Hey, references are cool: [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8800322
If they can be coached into providing help only where other team members appreciate it, then they can become a highly valuable member of the team.
Or, if they are told simply to stop it by an authority figure, a person with noble intentions will normally respect that. An acceptable but perhaps tense solution.
On the other hand, if they are allowed to annoy and frustrate other team members, then they're probably going to cause increasing amounts of trouble within the team.
If you've reached the stage you describe, you're probably not ever going to play nicely with that team. Sorry.
Engineers are all basically high-functioning
autistics who have no idea how normal people
do stuff.
Cory Doctorow
Despite normal and sometimes superior intelligence,
people with Asperger’s have difficulty understanding
social conventions and reading social cues. As a
result, they often seem tactless or rude, and making
friends can be hard for them. They may be unable to
take hints, keep secrets, or understand metaphor,
irony, and humor. The meaning of gestures, tone of
voice, and facial expressions are a mystery to them,
and their own body language and expressions may be
inappropriate or hard to interpret. They stand too
close, talk too loudly, and don’t make eye contact.
[1] http://www.health.harvard.edu/fhg/updates/update0305a.shtml
It's pretty damning to a group to automatically assign them to autism or asperger's syndrome, both of which are medical disorders only properly diagnosed by doctors. It's like automatically treating the elderly like they have Alzheimer's. It also ignores that there can be (and are) great variations within groups, and applying a label on them can have reverberating consequences in policy.
I'm sure you and Cory Doctorow have good intentions, so please don't take this as an affront against you. I'm just tired of people (especially the media) generating ridiculous stereotyped images of people. Good examples of these are the socially inept "nerd" Sheldon Cooper that you mentioned, the misunderstood genius that helps the heroes save the world in movies, and reclusive haunted writers. While I'm sure people of each type actually do exist, we should't treat people any differently unless we have a valid reason, and even then we should try to understand them as an individual.
I understand that I might have taken your comment a bit out of context, so I apologize for that.
We live in a world where algorithmic natural language generation is a real thing. I can only strongly suggest that now is the time to start communicating in an intelligent fashion because being able to express a philosophically sound thought is the only thing that distinguishes you from a machine nowadays really.
Yes, it's nice to wax lyrical about zero-tolerance of baddies, and we can all rally behind such a idea, but the practical side of how to implement this without some egotistical maniac deciding whimsically who is an asshole isn't viable, and if they do think they have achieved such a utopia, I'll bet dollars to donuts that they are deluding themselves. Case in point, this article is intolerant. Intolerant people are in actual fact, assholes.
Also, as Michael Palin once said regarding the early days of scoring Monty Python work, paraphrased, 'if you won't do anything out of principle then sooner or later you're left with nothing but".
In the end its a managers ability of good people judgement to keep problematic personalities out, in combination with probation periods.
Unfortunately sometimes some of them slip through and are even rewarded with promotions (happened in two of my previous jobs), even though all colleagues hate them, by employing the good ol sucking upwards, kicking downwards strategy.
Oh good another zero tolerance policy to be abused. That's forward thinking...
Look I don't like assholes as much as the next guy / gal (I mean asshole is an insult so that's a no-brainer) but this post is just smack with the egocentric quality they are against and just sounds naive.
Plus, we all have bad days...of course you shouldn't interview on one of those but it could happen.
What if the person has no significant other at the time..does that automatically make them an asshole?
[1] http://books.google.co.uk/books/about/Assholes.html?id=GCqXH...
The other test is to meet their significant other. What qualities did they choose in the person with whom has the most influence over them? We call these the “asshole acid test.
I'd say anyone who has "rid their company of assholes" has simply fired the people they dislike (while retaining people that somebody, somewhere, thinks are assholes). To imagine otherwise would require a much more rigorous definition of "asshole" than is evident in the article (it sounds like they've basically gone with "I know it when I see it").
(Edit: Typo)
In a small team, i think the conventional wisdom is spot on - hire a really good cultural fit, even in favor of technical chops.
In a larger organization you're inevitably going to have a wider distribution of values simply because there are more people. At a some point the organization needs to figure out how to get people to play nice together. The larger the organization, the more tolerance for variance is required. I guess if you're doing something really cool or are willing to pay a lot that can be mitigated just because you'll have a larger pool of candidates.
Of course, you can't really figure out how people respond to stress until they're stressed, which happens way way after they are hired. It's probably a better heuristic to figure out how the organization can cope with wide variance norms, rather than trying to pick people that act like me.
In the middle are people who can hold themselves and others accountable and whose behavior cultivates a culture of respect and teamwork.
In my opinion, assholes are people whose behavior (intentional or not) shuts down creativity and collaboration.
The key thing to understand is that companies learn as a team how to get the desired results. This means people need to be able to communicate, to trust their coworkers, to feel comfortable putting themselves out there, etc. Success is made up of thousands of small interactions.
Assholes are people who get in the way of healthy team functioning by bullying, trying to be right all the time, intimidating others, etc.
Some assholes are smart and have something to offer, but it should be weighed against the cascade of downsides as well.
And, assuming it's possible to implement this rule, how do you prevent exploitation, and hence, extinction?
"grinfucker"
IE, the kind of person that is socially extremely polite and gracious, but fucks you over in subtle ways.
I totally agree with the spirit of this article, but I think they've defined "asshole" as "caustic person". I think the most corrosive people are actually the grinfuckers -- the people that will smile at you one day and stab you in the back the next. I like caustic people! They might be difficult in the moment, but at least they're honest.
A better approach is to just keep a lookout when you scan their online profile (which you should). Everyone will have some posts on Twitter/HN/FB/Reddit/Disqus that they aren't proud of, but the assholes will be immediately visible.
Having no visible trail on the Internet could be a sign that you are privact concious but I'd go so far as to say it's a liability these days.
To be serious it depends greatly on the definition of asshole. If it means that racist, sexist, other discriminatory behaviour and general mean or vindictive behaviour is not tolerated that is good. It does need to be careful that it doesn't prevent disagreement and dissent when they are appropriate. Really not keen on interviewing and judging on partners either. The question of how they treat people of perceived lower status (waiting staff) is probably valuable on the other hand.
Not that I'm advocating that _every_single_person_ fall into a protected class, but I do believe that most people's personalities are inherent. I certainly don't know of any reformed assholes...
Everyone left is full of shit. <grin>