Be Kind | Hacker News Reader

Be Kind

boz.com

1,198 pointsaustenallred385 comments

I really like these two paragraphs towards the end:

    Being kind isn’t the same as being nice. It isn’t about superficial praise. 
    It doesn’t mean dulling your opinions. And it shouldn’t diminish the passion 
    with which you present them.
    
    Being kind is fundamentally about taking responsibility for your impact on 
    the people around you. It requires you be mindful of their feelings and 
    considerate of the way your presence affects them.

This get's missed a lot here on Hacker News. Many people are often hostile towards content creators or other commenters.

It's perfectly OK to disagree with someone; but please consider doing so in a respectful and thoughtful tone. Remember that others often shut-down when they read criticism, even when well warranted. The way you phrase and present yourself defines whether you're giving criticism or critique.

To be fair, this is also incredibly exhausting. Most peoples' reactions to things are arbitrary at best and constant worrying about how they will take something is just way too much BS to put into my day. I bought pretty deeply into this philosophy once and it just made me neurotic and quiet at a time of my life where those things very much hurt me.

I think being selectively kind makes a lot more sense. I'm kind to children and animals and my loved ones. People at work, retail staff, etc should be prepared to not have their emotions constantly validated and deal with disagreement and other things that are unpleasant.

I'm not one of those "grow a thick skin, jerk" types, but there's this cheap sentiment I see about how everyone needs to be more kind and compassionate, and when its not phoned in, it usually ends up as a way to take advantage of others. Its easy for celebrity millionaire Kurt Vonnegut to write about compassion and be quoted by tumblerinas and its totally another thing for some kid no one gives a shit about trying to make his way in the world try to live it.

I find high-concept philosophies are often the playthings of the well-off and comfortable. If you're fighting for your living, its not a luxury most of us can have. Sadly, this often justifies hostility, but I think there's a sane middle-ground here, but curt statements like "be kind" just seems so classist and off-putting to me. Like a soccer mom telling me how wonderful the Maharishi is or how relaxing doing 4 hours of Yoga is (no, she doesnt work, her husband does) and after I got off a long shift and dealt with a lot of shit and a crappy commute.

Cheap sentiment just doesn't resolve the fundamental issue facing humanity today and probably until our final extinction event: we are all competing for the very same resources and competition can sometimes be ugly. It doesn't need to be truly awful and we shouldn't be encouraged to be overly negative and vindictive, but conflict and disagreement happens on a certain level and pretending we can kindly make it go away is just being unrealistic about our fundamental economic beings. Kindness is often taken advantage of as one party feels obligated to engage in it moreso than the other. This is a fairly large problem in gender politics where we raise women to be kind and then they find themselves at a disadvantage to men in the workplace who don't have these values.

Considering everyone here is visiting a hard-nosed libertarian-leaning entrepreneur forum about becoming wealthy quickly, but the second something pseudo-spiritual gets posted suddenly we're all Siddhartha under the Bodhi tree. We're not. If anything, the personality types here are very, very far from any sort of selfless ideal. Patting ourselves on the back because our six-figure salaries let us rise above the struggle doesn't mean the struggle doesn't exist and that struggle means acting in a rational, usually unkind way. High class pseudo-spirituality is such a hilariously hypocritical thing its a running gag on HBO's Silicon Valley, yet here we are Gavin Belson'ing it up. At least I'm honest with myself to say that, no, I'm not "kind" by these standards and that I will argue and fight with you when I feel its appropriate and more importantly -- I will not feel bad about it afterwards.

Sadly, most of the replies to my comment are fairly unkind responses telling me how much of a horrible person I am, especially to retail staff even though I gave no concrete examples of how I act. How ironic. If anyone is truly interested, I meditate daily and follow Buddhist ideals. I just refuse to go to the yogi-like extremes of insincere self-love in an attempt to con my way out of the struggle of Samsara. Accepting the reality of who I am is real mindfulness and liberating, and that person is not this uber-kind enlightened being who is 'above it all' and I doubt anyone here reading this is either. If anything, if we're buying into cheap manufactured sentiment that just happens to be self-complimentary, I'd say we're fairly far from that ideal. The same way we point at the nasty evangelicals will hearts full of hate who pat each other on the back for being so pious. Lets not go that route, as tempting as it is. All the technology is showing you this message was made by sweatshop-style labor. We're just not kind.

"If you're fighting for your living, its not a luxury most of us can have. Sadly, this often justifies hostility, but I think there's a sane middle-ground here, but curt statements like "be kind" just seems so classist and off-putting to me."

I've consistently found that (in particular when treated with kindness and respect) poorer people respond with kindness in much greater measure than wealthy people. Like the author said, kindness isn't the same as niceness.

> "People at work, retail staff, etc should be prepared to not have their emotions constantly validated and deal with disagreement and other things that are unpleasant."

The addition of "retail staff" here surprised me.

I'm a techie who took a break from tech and startups the past few months to help out my S.O., who owns a retail store. I worked the front counter, ran inventory, etc. for the past 3 months.

I had never worked retail before. I got into tech at an early age and skipped most of the "menial" jobs that typical American teenagers have. So working retail was eye-opening for me.

Retail workers get paid shit wages to deal with your crap. Yes, you. Whatever crap you've been dealing with, we have to take it with a smile and help you out. I've stood behind a counter and listened to a homeless guy ramble about anything and everything for 12 minutes (I had a small clock within view.)

Your attitude in this post indicates to me that you could probably use a bit of this type of work yourself. If you think it's beneath you, doubly so.

If you're curious what it's like for a techie/introvert/successful entrepreneur to work retail, I've been blogging about it. (Blog link in my profile) To be honest, the 3 months I spent there made me a far better person than any given 3 months I spent in the tech industry (I've run tech companies for 14 years now.) It humbled me, and gave me far more respect for my fellow human beings. And I learned there's nothing like the priceless joy in someone's eyes when you do something for them and can see pure joy radiate from them. I hope you, too, can experience this.

Not the OP, and cool story; however, what they're paid doesn't matter, it's a red herring. It's their JOB to deal with people and and it's not my job as a shopper to validate the emotions of the counter worker or my co-workers. Ring up my stuff, take my money, and let me leave.

You're chastising him for his "attitude"; what attitude? He's correct and he didn't display any attitude other than simple honesty.

It's not your job to care about the emotions or inner world of anyone around you. But you'll find that life works much better if you do.

I agree.

GP's attitude is the same attitude you have when you claim "it's their JOB to deal with people" and when you equate being nice to "[validating] the emotions of the counter worker". Sure, their job is to deal with shitty people with a smile, but it's also your job (as a nice, respectable member of society) to be a person who is pleasant to deal with.

One can be pleasant without being nice, nice is making an effort and is unnecessary for most public encounters with staff while in a store. However, even then, no it's not my job to be pleasant to deal with.

They get paid to deal with customers. It's their job, end of story.

The reason people say it's exhausting to "be nice" constantly is specifically because of people like you. You've made up your mind on something that's completely outlandish and unfair, but you're going to attack him for being "unkind" because he doesn't agree with you.

Stop acting like that and maybe more of these "blunt" people would stop being so damned blunt to you.

> Sure, their job is to deal with shitty people with a smile

There is so much projection here I'm not even sure where to start.

Lets say I'm working with retail worker who has been trained to be as difficult as possible to stop my RMA attempt for something I bought that was broken. I can see things from her point of view and understand her paycheck comes from her financial masters who want her to deny my RMA, but that infringes on my return rights. Now I express this as clearly as I can. Guess what, now I'm an "asshole" because $big_co wants to be able to casually rip people off.

I pretty much got into a yelling match about a serious engine fault on my wife's warrantied car a few years ago. Its only after I was particularly nasty did they relent and do the work. Why does the guy making $12 an hour behind the counter want to deny me my entitled service? Because Jeep told him to limit this kind of very expensive work.

This is so much more complex than you make it. Niceness and kindness do not resolve the fundamental conflict we are having. If anything, it allows the kind person to be taken advantage of. If I wasn't at the dealer with my wife they would have steamrolled her the same way other mechanics have steamrolled her.

The world is a nasty place and how we handle it is situation dependent. Want me to be nice to you? Treat me with some goddamn respect and don't try to rip me off. Because if you don't, you'll deal with a lot of "assholes." "Assholes" who are just working schmucks trying to get through the day without being ripped off.

I think the "kind" people of HN need to stop calling everyone who disagrees with them or have different motivators "assholes." Disagreement, argument, and negotiation are fundamentals in life. Retail staff need to learn to handle that. Its a huge entitlement to be this snotty retail person who hates all his customers. The lady who wants to return the broken food processor isn't a "bitch" because she got you off your freemium game for a minute and she's not a "mindless breeder" because she fed her crying baby on your counter. Or "stuck up" because she had to answer the pediatricians call on her iphone while you were processing the return.

It's possible to be assertive and insistent and yet still be polite and calm about it. The cynic in me would label this as "fuck you said with a smile", but the pragmatist in me notes that "fuck you" really does get a very different reaction from people when said with a smile.

Think of communication as having two layers, an emotional one and a factual one. In your car example, the factual layer remains the same, "You are going to fix my car." But you can either combine that with an emotional layer of "And I am fucking pissed off with you right now because you fucking don't do your job, you useless twit", or you could layer it with "I understand that your job is difficult and you're doing the best you can, I don't want to make things difficult for you, but the contract clearly says that the car is under warranty, the car is clearly broken, and I'm not leaving until it's fixed."

And experience says the emotional one is more effective because most people are primarily emotional creatures. Nice and assertive doesn't work as well as pissed off.

Agreed, it can sometimes be exhausting. But I think being kind is (to be rather mercenary) very practical also: I've found it is much easier to get people to listen to and go along with opinions stated kindly (it is also exhausting to try to get through to people who've stopped being receptive because they're feeling attacked or shamed, or anticipating that feeling).

And it's definitely possible to disagree, even sharply, in a considerate manner - eg focus on the point of disagreement, not on the person disagreeing; avoid name-calling; point out that the issue you disagree with may be valid in other cases; etc.

The thing is - most peoples' reactions to things aren't really arbitrary. There are some outliers, and a good deal of individual variation, but by and large most human emotions follow pretty consistent patterns. It can be hard to see them (particularly when you're young and haven't had a lot of practice interacting with people), but the more you get out and make socially awkward mistakes, the more you can form a mental model of what's likely to be offensive and what's safe.

I agree that it's not worth constantly worrying about what other people think of you, but it turns out that's not usually what other people are expecting anyways. Rather, it's just that when you make a mistake, apologize, try not to make it again, and move on. Everybody makes mistakes - I've seen some folks I consider very socially adept make pretty embarrassing gaffes. But usually the folks who're viewed as socially skilled just brush it off and update their mental model of how not to offend people, while the ones that people get mad at are those who are either completely oblivious or react with defensiveness.

> (particularly when you're young and haven't had a lot of practice interacting with people)

What's with the potshots at younger people that I keep seeing on HN? Things like undermining their experiences, their abilities, or their viewpoints. "Pff, I used to think like you, but now I know better"; "I did the same thing, but then I realized that I was being a moron"; "Let me guess, you haven't <experienced/got X> yet? Then your opinion is useless"; "Young people without kids will stupidly work themselves to death for their employee because they have nothing better to do with their time".

I can't say that I've experienced that older people (talking only adults here) are more socially apt, or compassionate, than younger people. And that sentence was completely optional to the rest of the paragraph.

That's not a potshot, it's personal experience. It's making the point that social skills are a learnable skill that gets better with practice. There's no judgment implied there, and in fact I say elsewhere in the same post that everybody makes mistakes, even people with lots of experience (which is amply evidenced by this comment offending you, for which I apologize...)

Welcome to the world of the self-styled "kind" person. You'll find, more often than not, that they see themselves as wizened masters and can't stand young people because young people occasionally have the gall to say how it is, and that interferes with the elaborate dance we call office politics and general self-serving ass-kissing.

Just because you're good at office politics doesn't mean you're a kind person. It just means you're good at working people over emotionally and catering to them for your own personal gain.

There's a lot I want to unpack, here. I don't think you're wrong overall -- in a work environment, for example, you want to select for people who are able to take criticism in an effective, objective, and non-judgmental manner. That's a minimum bar of level-headedness you should have for people that you interact with regularly, as a general rule.

However, when you open with, "this is also incredibly exhausting", it indicates to me that either a) you find yourself surrounded with an unhealthy amount of hyper-sensitive people, or b) there might be more to the "be kind" methodology that you have yet to internalize. I carried around this attitude for most of my life, and just recently am I coming to understand that truly internalizing kindness, the way the OP describes, is not "exhausting" in any way, shape, or form (unless you have kids. Children break this rule in half).

Another thing that sticks out is "if you're fighting for your living". I agree that, if you're truly fighting for your living, kindness and compassion should take a backseat to climbing Maslow's hierarchy to the point of comfortable reflection. Given that your english seems to be good and you're posting highly articulate opinions on an Internet forum, I'd be very surprised if your line of work forced you to reject kindness as part of your job, and I urge you to consider a new line of work if at all possible.

> To be fair, this is also incredibly exhausting. Empathy is a skill and, like any other, it gets easier with practice. Eventually the mental overhead is minimal.

Hmm. I don't think you have to be phony to be kind. In fact, I think it's easier to be kind, not more exhausting. If you think a little bit about how the other person might feel, you save an enormous amount of time dealing with them getting angry or upset. With egos out of the way, you can focus instead on the problem you both want to solve. This makes both of you look good and it might make a friend out of someone who could have been an enemy.

I'm a lot better at this today than I used to be, mostly because I don't take work so personally today. I still want to do well, but if I screw up, I don't take it as an indictment of myself as a person. This makes it a lot easier to, say, admit something is my fault QUICKLY -- if it is -- which allows us to focus on the solution instead of whose fault it is.

There are (IMO very rare) occasions where a soft word won't do the trick, and that is what the big stick is for. But almost everyone, even very obnoxious people, usually respond very well to a little bit of niceness, and it costs basically nothing to give it a try.

So you are two persons, your work person and your home person. Sounds very exhausting to me. "C'est le ton qui fait la musique". I'm sorry for you that you have to deal with a lot of shit but 4 hours of yoga (this is exaggerated of course) is not so much if you have an 8 hours sleep, 8 hours work, 8 hours relax schedule. It seems to me you need to change some things in your life. And then you can also be a nice person.

A soccer mom is a very valuable person who also does work, work that kids appreciate a lot, don't be so belittling. If you are jealous of her, try to find a partner with a good career that allows you to be a soccer dad.

YES - thank you for pointing out the negative use of soccer mom. Unpaid caring and emotional work matters!

> Most peoples' reactions to things are arbitrary at best

"Reaction I do not understand" is not the same thing as "reaction that is arbitrary."

Frequently a decision that appears to make no sense starts to do so when you put yourself in the shoes of the person who made it. Their experiences in life have been different than yours (guaranteed!), so there will be no shortage of cases where you look at something and think "A" while that other person looks at the same thing and thinks "B." But that doesn't make either of you arbitrary; you both have reasons for your interpretation, they're just different.

> People at work, retail staff, etc should be prepared to not have their emotions constantly validated and deal with disagreement and other things that are unpleasant

But that was the whole point of the article: it's possible to disagree with others in a way that is still respectful. Keeping that bit of respect in what you say is really all it takes. You don't have to agree with everything they say or spend all day pumping sunshine up their skirts; you just have to have enough respect for them to hold back from turning objection into insult. It's stopping at "I disagree with you" and not taking the extra step to "and therefore you are a bad person."

> Its easy for celebrity millionaire Kurt Vonnegut to write about compassion and be quoted by tumblerinas

Let's say I read your comment and, instead of taking the time to try and address your points directly and individually, I just fired back something along the lines of "you're quite a sperglord."

Would you be comfortable with that response? Would it feel pleasant, or even neutral? Or would it feel like a personal attack -- something that would make you feel an impulse to lash out back at me?

It would feel like an attack, of course. Why? Because I'm not dealing with you as an individual. I'm just picking you up and stuffing you into a bucket with a label on it. It would be dismissive, and people don't like being dismissed.

Now ask yourself: having said all that, can you imagine someone else feeling the same way -- and reacting the same way, as if you had attacked them -- when you dismiss them as a "tumblerina"?

> I just fired back something along the lines of "you're quite a sperglord. > Would you be comfortable with that response? Would it feel pleasant, or even neutral? Or would it feel like a personal attack -- something that would make you feel an impulse to lash out back at me?

Just as I don't care about your feelings, I also don't care that you thing I am a sperglord. It's your opinion and you're entitled to it.

I agree that we must be nice (smiling, saying "thank you", being polite, etc). I see it as a social convention, a sort of rule like driving in the right side of the road and following the traffic signs. It makes society work smoothly and we, as social beings, are hardwired to react positively to it. Now being kind... That just assumes an emotial investement in the other person, which I simply don't have with 90% of the people I interact daily.

To conclude, I'll respond to the OP's article. It's not the author's fault. His co-workers don't want to work with him because he wasn't nice, besides him being more than capable for the job. IMO it shows how unprofessional they are.

> IMO it shows how unprofessional they are.

This a million times. For lack of a better term, I find a lot of managers refuse to work with anyone but a "Uncle Tom" geek who will just say yes to everything and smile politely and never, ever correct bad ideas or wrongful assumptions. This leads to bad implementations, impossible requirements, unrealistic deadlines, bullshitting, and other issues people have to deal with.

If you can't work with the guy who occasionally says, "Whoa this is a bad practice for reasons x, y, and z," then that says a lot about how broken that culture is and not a lot about that person.

Yes, kindness is incredibly exhausting. It requires you to consider the impact of what you say and do, and not just blindly forge ahead. Every single time you do or say something. It takes quite a bit of energy to do that, and just ignoring other people's emotions makes life much easier.

But dealing with an unkind person is also exhausting. And many people will, at some point, choose to not interact with that person unless absolutely necessary. That might be worth considering as well.

Does that mean you have to constantly agree with others? Not at all. But there are different ways of disagreement. One choice is "Well, you're wrong, and stupid, and here's my way". Another one is saying "I hear what you said, and I acknowledge you feel that way. But I'd like to point out there are things you might have missed". Sometimes, pointing out those missed items is the kindness.

Fake kindness - "I love everybody so much, and we all should just relax more" - is something you rightfully abhor. And I think you are right that it is a plaything of the privileged.

But concern for another person's wellbeing? I've experienced it from a wide gamut of people of all ages and classes. From a 3-year old sharing their cake, to a middle-aged manager taking hours to help me understand my career, to a 80-year old woman living on a meagre income, concerned people living next to her would feel welcome in the neighborhood.

If I could ask a favor of you, consider that kindness. Not the reshared Vonnegut quotes, but simply living with an awareness of others emotions. Not in deference to those emotions, but with respect for them.

What an odd post. Speaking of irony, I find it hilarious that you feel the need to single out "tumblerinas" while inflicting us with the details of your ponderings on the nature of human kindness (apparently it's inherently insincere!).

But you still don't seem to have a point beyond that it isn't good to ignore real conflict while faking nice and it's annoying when affluent people assume all people can adopt their lifestyle.

I'd suggest you go back to basics and figure out what it could mean to be kind to others while still getting what you need and not being a doormat. Because at this rate you'll soon start accidentally quoting Mean Girls and treating it as a coherent life philosophy.

> To be fair, this is also incredibly exhausting

What part is exhausting? Emotional fallout can be expensive in terms of time and mental energy.

I don't know you, so this isn't a critique of you directly, but if being kind takes special effort you're doing something wrong. It shouldn't take much work at all. You don't need to be a mind reader and try to predict peoples reactions to things, most of the time it's just being mindful of how you act in certain situations and if that behavior really makes sense (for instance: if someone comes to you with a novice question, do you make them feel welcome, or do you make them feel stupid? Either way takes the same amount of effort, but one has a much better long term payoff.)

> most of the time it's just being mindful of how you act in certain situations and if that behavior really makes sense

I think if this comes naturally to you then you're perhaps more gifted in that area than you may want to give yourself credit for. In my experience most people have a hard time being mindful and it's definitely exhausting at first. I certainly have trouble with it and it takes work to remember.

I reference the perennially over-quoted Kenyon commencement speech by David Foster Wallace only because he put it - where "it" is the trouble most people have with mindfulness - much better than I ever could:

> If I choose to think this way in a store and on the freeway, fine. Lots of us do. Except thinking this way tends to be so easy and automatic that it doesn't have to be a choice. It is my natural default setting. It's the automatic way that I experience the boring, frustrating, crowded parts of adult life when I'm operating on the automatic, unconscious belief that I am the centre of the world, and that my immediate needs and feelings are what should determine the world's priorities.

> The thing is that, of course, there are totally different ways to think about these kinds of situations. In this traffic, all these vehicles stopped and idling in my way, it's not impossible that some of these people in SUV's have been in horrible auto accidents in the past, and now find driving so terrifying that their therapist has all but ordered them to get a huge, heavy SUV so they can feel safe enough to drive. Or that the Hummer that just cut me off is maybe being driven by a father whose little child is hurt or sick in the seat next to him, and he's trying to get this kid to the hospital, and he's in a bigger, more legitimate hurry than I am: it is actually I who am in HIS way.

> Or I can choose to force myself to consider the likelihood that everyone else in the supermarket's checkout line is just as bored and frustrated as I am, and that some of these people probably have harder, more tedious and painful lives than I do.

> Again, please don't think that I'm giving you moral advice, or that I'm saying you are supposed to think this way, or that anyone expects you to just automatically do it. Because it's hard. It takes will and effort, and if you are like me, some days you won't be able to do it, or you just flat out won't want to.

Trouble is, tone doesn't come through text very well. Takes a lot more typing and very careful word choice. So haste often comes off as unkind.

Maybe we can read comments more kindly, and give terse words the benefit of the doubt?

Why not both? In general, strive to follow the robustness principle: be liberal (forgiving) in what you accept, and conservative (delicate) in what you output.

"Text does not communicate tone" is a huge problem. You can solve that by deciding that certain types of communication should be done face to face.

Being kind can be more concise. Here is an example that my fiance recently pointed out...

I think the single biggest mistake people make in communication is reminding the other person they are incorrect when that does not change the content.

"As I told you Monday, the reason is X."

"I have not heard from you when I asked for feedback, so I am following up."

"We could have done it the other way, but since you already set it up, let's use this."

It is amazingly tempting, almost everyone does it, and your communication becomes an order of magnitude more benevolent when you edit those clauses out.

For more ideas on how to be concise and kind, I highly recommend the parenting book, _How to Talk so Kids Will Listen, and Listen so Kids Will Talk_. It is not just for parents. What works with 13 year old kids also works with 30 year old kids.

> You can solve that by deciding that certain types of communication should be done face to face.

And in the case where your only relationship with these people is online in the first place? (As in this community, but also in quite a few FOSS projects or remote-only companies.)

That is a tricky case.

It never hurts to be aware of the issue. Beyond that, try to stay within community norms. Every approach will have failure modes. Know and accept which ones are likely with what you are doing, and deal with them when they come.

In some communities this will mean that you are very straightforward and technical. Don't say anything emotional. Always work from facts. If you are misunderstood, note it, apologize for the misunderstanding, and move on.

In other communities it might mean that you actively solicit input from decision makers, and carefully avoid controversial topics.

A variety of approaches will work. But following strategy X in a community that is set up for strategy Y is a recipe for disaster.

Based off of my vague memory, in "How To Win Friends and Influence People", one main point is not to contradict people. In text or in person, never tell someone they're wrong.

In general, when I want to correct someone's understanding I frame it as a failure of my own understanding. Like, hey, I'm the asshole here, would you do me a favor by going over this one more time for me? This is great because it allows the other person to graciously concede your point, and to feel like they're the one helping you. It's also great because when it turns out you're wrong, you don't have to backtrack.

Additionally I find it useful as an exercise in suspending belief. Sure, I think I'm right, but let's set that belief aside for a moment and explore our understanding. Nothing misleads people more than the conviction that they're right.

I rather liked that book and want to disagree with many of the points it tries to make, but find myself choosing not to.

It is not economically or socially beneficial for me to be as blunt as I am - but my personal morality triumphs over both of those. If someone is wrong, they are wrong and I will let them know they are wrong.

It won't win me any friends and it isn't beneficial for me to be as blunt as I am - but I don't treat life like an economist, trying to maximize use out of people and my relationships with them.

I feel the same as you, but I'm come to realize most people have a deep seated need to be win friends even at the cost of being right. Your response, like my own, is very Aspie.

I fit into that "aspie" category as well which likely manifested itself in ways similar to you and the person you are responding to earlier in my life.

Now at 41 I'm probably indistinguishable in action from the group you've categorized as having a "deep seated need to win friends" not because I do actually have such a need, but because I realized my need to be vocally, publicly "right" was mostly a manifestation of a core lack of confidence, something which has since been mostly alleviated. Also, in retrospect, I was actually wrong about a lot of things I was sure I was right about because I was intelligent but not wise and the two are often divergent.

Well, you can't win "friends" by avoiding conflict. A friend is (among other things) someone you can have a fight with, and then make up. A friend will tell you when you're wrong -- and when you're right. A colleague, peer, acquaintance or fellow traveller isn't the same thing as a "friend". Any such person might become a friend -- but not because you held off being honest.

All that said, there's a difference between being honest and blunt, and being needlessly honest and cruel.

As mentioned in this thread, in text, tone is most certainly an issue. The photographer Howard Schatz did an interesting series, where he takes photographs of actors "In Character", among others Ricky Gervais[1], and he says at one point: "The other thing about it is: Comedy comes from a good or a bad place. And I think that the funniest people always comes from a good place. Two people can say the same thing, and one person can be so nasty and vitriolic -- and therefore not funny. And the other can be, you know, a celebration. You know, you can be in on the joke." --Ricky Gervais

[1] http://www.howardschatz.com/film.php?ID=3814

I strongly believe cooperation yields better long term outcomes for everyone, and because of that I pick low cost pro-social strategies over low cost anti-social strategies. I don't frame this as "trying to maximize use out of people". I think about it as sparing people from having unnecessary unpleasant interactions.

I see telling people they're wrong as selfish. It's almost never necessary, and in a probabilistic sense is not the most efficient way to make them correct, because instead of just changing their mind, they have to tamp down their ego, avoid getting ticked at you, and then change their mind. Bam: you've just made their lives harder, for the satisfaction of being explicit that you're more correct than they are.

Why is it Nadya's responsibility to persuade or convince?

A reasonable question. Perhaps it's not and there's no reason for anyone to take any time to say anything when someone's wrong.

But if they do take that time and say something, then it's not unreasonable to consider the goal. Is it to demonstrate superiority and massage ego? Unkindness works well. If it's to help someone correct a mistake, do better next time or bring their conversational partners thinking closer to theirs on a subject, then kindness is likely to work better.

Personally, I prefer to work with someone who's right and delivers the message in a way they think I and my other colleagues will respond well to, than someone who's right and delivers the message thoughtlessly, or in a way designed to maximise their own pleasure.

I really like this response.

I especially like that you validate their question and then convincingly explore the nuance to the situation, framing your response around their question. Then you make your ultimate position subjective ("Personally, I prefer...") instead of trying to make it some objective truth ("it's better to be kind."), which allows that the others person's position is also subjective - merely a personal preference - and thus changeable.

A+, effective communication.

The communication was so effective I chose not to respond to it.

I personally prefer (there it is!) to work in an environment where being incorrect isn't such a big deal everyone thinks you have to walk around eggshells in order to point it out.

I responded to another poster in this thread and told them they may just be in the wrong place. Or to put it another way.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K4hqFvXm57M&t=01m23s

What you read as effective communication I read as the guy whose mindset is so far off of what's effective it isn't even worth engaging him.

But he effectively communicated his mindset quite well, right?

I also think there are degrees to how much one can avoid contradicting others. I also want to be able to take contrary positions in meetings without hedging and without people getting upset or other nonsense. I don't think that has to be avoided by "walking around on eggshells". If it had that effect in my life I would never have adopted it.

Additionally none of my comments are really about cultural proclivities: I am opposed to trying to rigidly enforce communication standards within a group. "Sorry MReiland, you didn't state your position about why we shouldn't be using the braid data structure with enough sensitivity." The thing you're taking a position against sounds terrible but isn't really the thing we're talking about.

this is the quote that I initially responded to, emphasis mine.

> I see telling people they're wrong as selfish. It's almost never necessary, and in a probabilistic sense is not the most efficient way to make them correct, because instead of just changing their mind, they have to tamp down their ego, avoid getting ticked at you, and then change their mind. Bam: you've just made their lives harder, for the satisfaction of being explicit that you're more correct than they are.

That's the context of this conversation (a statement made by YOU).

If I can't approach someone about improving/fixing/changing something being worked on then I have no interest in working with them, and I have enough control over my own life that I don't have to.

If someone is really going to insist that I need to spend my time trying to work with them, they're going to get dismissed and I'm going to go on with my life.

I have enough control over my own life that I don't have to deal with those sorts of issues. Perhaps if you're working in a job where you feel forced to have to deal with other people's bullshit than you suddenly feel as if it's important to start worrying about this sort of thing, but I'm not there.

And no amount of communication is going to put me there.

> If I can't approach someone about improving/fixing/changing something being worked on

I think maybe we're misunderstanding each other. I'm not saying don't approach someone to improve/fix/change something. I'm making a statement about manner of approach. Being unable to approach people when they're wrong is intolerable. Being an asshole about it will make you intolerable. The statement I made is about finding a middle way.

One might view that as a form of perfectionism - for me it all depends on what you're trying to optimize.

I've lived much of my life like that - but what's my goal here - to be right? Or to be happy? To me being happy means working towards harmonious relationships. I'm not going to pretend someone is right when they're not, but I might be a bit more diplomatic in my communication.

I'm not sure I get the morality angle. Is it immoral to chose not to contradict someone? Not in my moral code.

That's the thing about morals. They change from person to person and society to society. What is immoral in one society might be neutral in another - or even moral in another!

I find misinformation and ignorance to be a detriment to humankind in its entirety. It drags us down and hides the truth behind the world and how it works.

People believe things that are wrong - myself included. When I am wrong, I hope for others to correct me.

Spreading wrong and misinformed beliefs, to me, is morally wrong. What good comes from spreading wrong information?

my personal morality triumphs over both of those. If someone is wrong, they are wrong and I will let them know they are wrong.

So, your personal morality requires you to not only offend people, but to reduce the odds of them hearing what you're saying because you choose to deliver it in an unkind manner. This is absurdly self-serving of you, and really only goes to show that you're not actually interested in "[letting] them know they are wrong", but rather in demonstrating that you are right to the detriment of personal relationships.

Ironically, that behavior is not even self-serving--it's self-defeating if your goal is to persuade or convince. Probably the worst way to win someone over to your point of view is to tell them that they are wrong.

Being blunt is not the same as being unkind. /blunt reply

>> If someone is wrong, they are wrong and I will let them know they are wrong.

In that case, they will probably not understand that they are wrong. There's a saying that people will not remember what you said, but will remember how you made them feel. There is a lot of truth in that. Once you tell someone they're wrong, they feel bad and are much less likely to accept truth from you - even if it's obvious. A mountain of evidence will be seen as a personal attack and your message won't get through.

I went back and rewrote that paragraph after realizing that I basically said "you're approach is wrong". So instead I tried to frame it as a problem with the listener and their emotional response. There is truth in both way to present it, but isn't one more likely to get you to change your approach?

I don't know. I think you can tell someone you disagree outright and still be nice about it. I've been in situations where people act like how you're suggesting (i.e., frame the issue as being with them, instead of with me) and it comes off as a little passive aggressive. I know that might sound odd, but in the end it makes me feel like they're hiding something from me or not willing to tell me what they really think.

I feel the same, but I think we must admit we are weird. Most people do not want to hear what other people really think, and you most certainly should not assume that people usually have such desire.

There are some instances when you have a moral duty to let people know they are wrong.

The fundamental key for a communication is respect, if this breaks, nothing else would ever work to maintain a relationship.

>I frame it as a failure of my own understanding

I think the best way to get into the habit of doing this is to actually believe it. Respect the people around you enough that you consider your own misunderstanding as likely a reason for disagreement as theirs. Constructive communication then comes completely naturally, instead of feeling forced.

Dilbert is trying that approach http://dilbert.com/strip/2015-05-13

Thank you for pointing this one out in particular. I've noticed myself falling into this trap at times, which is sad because it's something I know is frustrating when I hear it from others.

The pattern in the examples you mentioned is the desire, conscious or not, to twist the knife a little and squeeze out a "sorry" from the other person. The desire for someone else to realize an error they've made turns into a desire for guilt, a general "think better next time" that is just specific enough to hurt but vague enough to not actually be helpful. It's like training an animal with a blunt instrument and expecting that to get results anytime fast.

My rule is, don't mention the other person at all in HN comments. Address only the subject. I don't always succeed, but the comments I've made that folks like are always of this sort where I expand on the topic, instead of contradicting. The worst sin is trying to rephrase what was said before e.g. "You said blah blah". That is always unnecessary, and often folks take offence.

"How to Talk so Kids Will Listen, and Listen so Kids Will Talk" made a bigger difference to my interactions with colleagues than it did with my kids. It should be on every management reading list.

This is exactly why smileys were born. But some people tend to be elitist and frown upon them. :)

You are talking nonsense.

:-)

> But some people tend to be elitist and frown upon them. :)

That may be due to the fact that the little smile at the end of a sentence can look really self-satisfied or fake.

Especially if you were to dismiss any complainers by calling them elitists, and afterward tack a smile on the end of the sentence. Here, I'm being nice too! :) :) :)

woosh?

:?|

This is why I use :3

It makes me look stupid, so it can only be a sincere smile. Or maybe I'm just stupid... Well to be fair, we're discussing the psychology of smileys.

I have a theory about ":)", that people use it when there's a discrepancy between what they say and what they think, through the same mechanism of humor (which is also about discrepancies). And so in general, I don't trust people who use it strangely. But now, they're all going to use :3... We're doomed.

I prefer flipped smileys. (:

By any chance, are you left-handed? (My brother-in-law is left-handed, and does his smileys flipped.)

Great! D:

Wait, I mean :D

The effectiveness of emoticons has been greatly diminished by interfaces that rewrite them as emoji. While I can cope with someone adding an accent to their writing with an emoitcon, when it turns into an emoji I completely discount the writing. Something about the yellow pacman face in various poses ruins a conversation for me.

Oh, and it blows to copy-and-paste code into one of those blasted chat programs... hateful things.

Totally agree, if I'm using a smiley and not an actual emoji.

It's really weird, but in Hipchat, it always throws me off a little bit when I include an emoticon, but the resulting graphic conveys a slightly different connotation than I was expecting.

I agree the rewriting is obnoxious.

It's a generational thing tho. 😁 Try and find a college aged girl that doesn't use emojis. Only ones that don't are "conscientious objectors", and to most people in that age group and younger emoji are as ambient as air.

For me, smileys tend to be invisible - I often miss them completely.

>Trouble is, tone doesn't come through text very well

PG's a great example of this. In almost every interview I've seen with him, he comes across as warm and sincere. In almost every online comment I've read of his, he comes across as cold and terse to the point of dismissiveness. Clearly these aren't different people, but the medium shapes the message in more ways than many of us grok. Something that sounds matter-of-fact in my head when I write it will often sound dickish to those who read it.

I'm really glad that he worded that so well; it's really easy to disguise "being a jerk" as "just being right," and I often see it justified as such (at times by myself).

Being right and being kind aren't mutually exclusive.

> It's perfectly OK to disagree with someone; but please consider doing so in a respectful and thoughtful tone.

The problem I've found is I literally get ignored and end up repeatedly dealing with the same mess until I stop being "kind" about it.

I generally have to do literally 10x as much work to be "kind" than when I'm less generous about it. The problem with kindness is its frequently taken [in IT, in places I've worked] as it not being a serious problem that actually needs to be addressed except as a favor to you. It eventually, frequently, gets to the point where serious problems are repeatedly introduced and you end up having to clean it up.

Because from their point of view, if it really was a problem, you would have stopped being nice after the first or second time.

Miss Manners wrote about her newspaper subscription not arriving. She called repeatedly and was nice. Finally she got somebody in charge who told her "We don't do anything unless the customer is angry". She asked nicely if he would put her down as having been irate. He kindly did.

Ah, now for the important question - Was she angry or not? My answer is yes.

Yeah, oddly enough in the real world, no one ever admits that in social situations with coworkers.

This is confusing "kind" with "nice". If your audience can handle some directness, be direct. It's okay to say, "This is a horrible idea, and I can't believe we're considering this." That can be kind when you care about the person you're talking to.

What's unkind is saying, "You're an idiot, and that's a ridiculous idea." Attacking people is not kind, but directness _can_ be kind.

On the other hand, you deserve to be shown some kindness too. If your coworkers don't listen to you, maybe it's time to start looking for a new job.

> What's unkind is saying, "You're an idiot, and that's a ridiculous idea." Attacking people is not kind, but directness _can_ be kind.

I don't call people idiots at work but I can behave in a way some people view as "adversarial".

> On the other hand, you deserve to be shown some kindness too. If your coworkers don't listen to you, maybe it's time to start looking for a new job.

Oh, they listen they just don't agree. That is the problem with the general "kindness" bit. People simply assume if you are being kind about it that it isn't a big deal.

Many, many people operate on the "If you are not upset, this is not a serious issue". After all, if it only impacts them rarely...it isn't important to them personally.

I don't understand the down votes you're getting. Your contribution to this discussion seems considered and worth considering.

He's getting downvotes because no one actually says "you're an idiot" in real life and that comparison has fuck all to do with the actual point anyone in this thread is coming close to.

It depends. Saying "horrible idea" and "can't believe we're considering this" will be pointlessly hostile in many situations. Why not just be specific about the problem?

> The problem I've found is I literally get ignored and end up repeatedly dealing with the same mess until I stop being "kind" about it.

I am currently in a situation like that, and have been in similar situations over the years. There seems to be this gift that many people have where they can lie on a near compulsive basis, and no one will do anything about it. Disagreeing with them in a reasoned and polite manner is beyond ineffective, somehow "you're wrong" on their part wins every argument, regardless of the evidence. Only when you eventually get so fed up and cause a scene pointing out blatant problems, errors, and incompetence, only then does something finally happen, but of course then the response is "hey man, why didn't you just say something?" And despite there being a long paper trail of doing exactly that with no success, this tactic once again wins the day, and the reputation of the one who freaks out is the one that is tarnished in the eyes of management. And then of course, the cycle begins all over again.

I don't ask why you have to put a gun to some people's heads to get them to do the job they are paid (handsomely) for, that I can understand, but why is it so common that no one is willing to stand up for what is right, and for management to allow this behavior? I have seen it on different projects in different cities, and across various industries. It really makes me wonder if somehow the problem is with me and I try to reason through that, but as hard as I try I just can't make that case.

Two of my favorite quotes about being 'nice' come from the musical, Into The Woods.

The first is Red Riding Hood's quip, "Nice is is different than good", which is then fleshed out later by the witch: "You're so nice. You're not good, you're not bad, you're just nice. I'm not good, I'm not nice, I'm just right."

I think "kind" and "good" are reasonable synonyms here, and Boz and Sondheim express very similar sentiments.

Exactly this. IMHO, the first paragraph quoted above is especially important to understand.

This post reads like someone discovering the line between aggressive and assertive. Aggressive is most definitely unkind. Assertive is often confused with unkind, but it isn't really that: it's about demonstrating respect both for yourself and for those around you.

> Being kind is fundamentally about taking responsibility for your impact on the people around you.

Totally agree, especially in regard to when people share their projects on HN. The HN community moderation always seemed to be based on a very superficial rules - don't swear, don't mention banned keywords X Y or Z. Never have they seemed to seriously consider the impact that words have on other people, instead of just the words themselves.

Agreed. I will never share anything I make with HN for this reason.

We all know the last 20% (polish) takes 80% of the work, and isn't the fun stuff. Yet that's generally what gets criticized when someone shares a link.

For any of my hobby projects, it's about making a POC or rickety MVP. I want to build things and learn quickly, not doing the last 20% schlub work that eats at my time to learn something else. Because of that, and what I've seen of the reception to other hobby projects, I have determined that HN is not an appropriate forum for me to share projects with.

Ignore 80% of the feedback (about the lack of polish) and pay attention to the 20% of 'useful' feedback. :)

I'm 100% guilty of criticizing the lack of polish on some things that get posted. Often times because I am not familiar enough to criticize more important details that may not be apparent to the average observer.

For example - I might have to comb through an entire project in a programming language I'm not familiar with to perhaps give feedback on a better algorithm they could have used for X to improve performance... Or I could criticize that their search feature is entirely broken and always results in an empty results page.

The latter is easier to find and a casual user might run into it, although it might be a pain for the programmer to fix on the front end. The former will likely have less notice for the casual user, but is more beneficial for the programmer.

This is my take on why you see a lot of criticism about the lack of polish compared to other aspects or details.

> The HN community moderation always seemed to be based on a very superficial rules - don't swear, don't mention banned keywords X Y or Z. Never have they seemed to seriously consider the impact that words have on other people

Of course there's no rule against swearing.

This whole description is so remote from everything we try to do that I'm at a loss to know what else to say.

Certain very strong community norms have formed here, whether you realize it, or whether it was intentional or not. Sorry, I meant "rule" just as something that is somehow enforced, empirically. Probably "rule" is completely the wrong word, as empirical actions can often be the opposite of the written rules.

https://hn.algolia.com/?query=fuck&sort=byDate&prefix&page=0...

I'm talking relative, you're showing absolute. Oh, I see I edited that out of my previous comment.

Previously, I said to try an experiment using multiple accounts where you post comments with a swear word and slightly censored swearing, versus just posting uncensored swearing and nothing else different. You'll quickly see the relative difference in the community's reaction.

I fucking swear all the time here and don't give a shit how often I do it.

You'll only get voted down for it when the swearing makes it harder to read your comment, or conveys an emotional urgency unwarranted by the thread. For instance: "Fuck you" is unlikely to be well-received in any thread.

*gets :p

This is very evident in the styles people do interviews. For example, Bill O'Reilly is loud, calls names etc when his guests disagree with him - to the point that some of his conversations end up being loud shouting matches and the only thing left to do (as a viewer) is to turn it off. Jon Stewart on the other hand - he disagrees with his guests in a kind, calm and funny manner - it is interesting to watch him and his guests go back and forth on ideas. I'm guessing that attitude probably spills into other areas of their lives too

Example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=URHPD6AJ5Fg&t=2m (Bill ends up calling his guest a fascist)

Unfortunately some claim [1] that if Jon Stewart really disagrees with you, he has no qualms against using editing tricks and false pretenses to make you look foolish and stupid.

[1] http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2014-09-23/don-t-ever-...

Wow, didn't know that :( Thanks for the link.

He's famous for it. Even going so far as to do multiple shows in an attempt to humiliate you.

That's very interesting (and I will never go on the daily show now if I disagree with them), but I am not sure that it applies here. The parent was discussing the interviews that Jon Stewart performs himself in the interview part of the show. Often when there is a serious ideological difference there they publish a long-form interview(20 minutes) which is clearly the whole interview.

The piece you link to seems to be more about the field pieces which are not what was being discussed, and not what the parent was comparing O'Reilly's interviews to.

Isn't O'Riley trying to rile up his target audience by getting his guest worked up though? If he makes the guest look unruly, even by becoming unruly himself, he can blame the guest and make the guest look bad. It's the attraction to the show.

I don't watch O'Riley, but that's my perception from reading about things he's done/said.

Possibly, but more likely it's both. O'Reilly is pretty intelligent but he also has a massive temper and gets enraged at the drop of a hat.

Both are propaganda programs and it's all about which audience they're pandering to. Stewart's audience is attracted to pretension and smugness, a "holier and smarter than thou" perspective, and O' Reilly's audience is attracted to people getting what's perceived to be their comeuppance. Both programs exist for the same purpose -- to reinforce the political beliefs of the people that run them. It's much less profitable to be moderate and fair.

Of course it costs nothing to address people in a way that they feel comfortable with, so you should do it. But, in a Postel's law sort of way, in terms of critiquing argument I don't think it's worth dwelling on the tone. Two plus two is four no matter how many times the person arguing it uses the word "fuck", to put it crudely. And often, addressing tone is a way of eliding real argumentation.

> Of course it costs nothing to address people in a way that they feel comfortable with, so you should do it.

It doesn't cost nothing, it's costs a lot of time and attention to find out what they're comfortable with and much attention to filter yourself to to fit that, so no you shouldn't just do it without a good reason.

OK, I guess it costs. But I say it's unwise to be miserly along such lines.

Maybe it is and maybe it isn't, but you assume it's a choice and that's a mistake. You presume it's easy to know how people want to be treated, but there are a great many conditions that make reading other people difficult for entire classes of people. They aren't necessarily being miserly, they may be doing the best they can and that's all they've got. Those with Aspergers for example have to do with intellect what most people do instinctively socially speaking, and that's exhausting for them; they simply aren't wired to be social.

Yes, totally this. Moreover, I'd like to add anonymously down-voting / reporting someone's opinion just because it's not yours is just as mean-spirited as calling someone names.

Every internet message board has its own culture with its own take on what's "right" and what's "wrong", and on HN (and reddit) the institutionally accepted way of being mean is misusing the downvoting / flagkilling system to attempt to bleep out someone else's opinion because you disagree with it and labeled it as "toxic" from your perspective.

I mean, it's one thing to downvote someone because of spam or noise (e.g. one line posts of "lolwtf" or "this is dumb"), but every time I scroll through the comments and see discussion chains of folks arguing some valid points (about say referrals and paywalls or the ever controversial issue of sexism) under a flagkilled or completely invisible down-voted-to-hell post, I think to myself "this shouldn't be how our community operates."

well said

I basically stopped commenting (well, except now -- doh) here on HN because of how frequently I saw toxic responses and punishment down-voting. There are a noisy subset of users here who either (a) can't understand or respect generalizations, especially based on older/real-life experience, or (b) demand "proof" for any claim, or (c) will punish any kind of not-narrowly-PC statement. And then the blatantly rude. Folks who say something in a comment they'd never dare to say to your face.

Therefore I've given up on caring and now much prefer Reddit's community. Less pinheads there, greater topic variety, greater sense of fun, can collapse threads, can delete comments much later (if you discover one that attracts a hate mob). I still enjoy reading HN, mostly the off-site articles linked to. But not so much the comment threads here. Not anymore.

What if you could see who downvoted you?

I'd be less annoyed by a downvote from pg, because I probably deserved it, than a downvote from someone completely random, who I might not care about.

In some ways, I also wish downvoting cost you a point like it does on stackoverflow.

I don't think the upvote/downvote system here provides enough feedback to the person being voted. There just isn't the information there.

For the longest time I was confused at seeing down-voted comments because I mentally assumed that downvotes mean "this is a troll comment / this is some kind of abusive comment". Not so.

Also (and I've said this before so apologies for repeating myself!), if downvotes do mean 'disagreement', could we get rid of the graying out of down-voted comments, or maybe just make it an account preference? I'm interested in reading viewpoints that I might not agree with and graying out the comment makes it really hard to do so. It also seems to fit better with the model of "downvote = this comment shouldn't be in the conversation".

I agree with you.IMHO, graying out text is a way to convey censorship. Allowing each individual to configure his HN experience sounds positive to me. I like reading controversial opinions just like you. For me, it's both a way to challenge my worldview and a way to understand a particular community better.

This has been discussed before (well, the general configuration for users). The main argument against it was that not having a common experience in the core elements makes it very hard for the community to stay coherent (which is given as desirable) and have good discussions.

Eg when I don't know how you perceive the comments in the vicinity of the discussion, it is harder for me to understand your comment's intentions and finer points.

Of course this doesn't apply to peripherical features such as the colour of the header bar.

From what I understand, upvotes signify "this adds to the conversation" and downvotes signify "this subtracts from the conversation" -- it's a stronger sentiment than disagreement, but weaker than trolling or abuse (which is what flags are for.)

If a comment is disagreeable but worthwhile, my preference is to give a substantive response. If a comment is value-subtracting, even if I agree with the sentiment, I'll downvote it (and may take the time to explain the downvote if I think my explanation will be helpful.)

The main attributes I consider to make a comment value-subtracting are:

- substantial factual errors (not just a nitpick, but core to the point)

- gratuitous negativity or unnecessary incivility

- waste of space ("me too", memes or jokes except if they're edw519 caliber, excessive references to irrelevant topics such as mentioning someone else's religion several times in a thread that has nothing to do with that)

- extremely poor reasoning or communication, to the degree that trying to engage substantively becomes difficult

Well then, it seems to me that you have a very healthy approach to votes and flags.

It should be common sense but I suspect not everyone with the ability to downvote has such considerations and the HN guidelines¹ offer very little comment on that.

I'm guessing that mods think that once you've risen above the downvote reputation threshold you must be qualified and should have a good criteria on how to use this newly given privilege.

I'm not trying to tell anyone how to do their job, but maybe it would be useful to add some guidelines for that too (Voting, specifically), I think I like your guidelines.

¹ https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

>> I'd be less annoyed by a downvote from pg, because I probably deserved it, than a downvote from someone completely random, who I might not care about.

I admire PGs work too, but don't you think this criteria would introduce to the community a herd-like mindset of following perceived moral leaders instead of evaluating ideas for their own standing?

Sorry, I don't understand the relationship you're trying to make between votes and mindset.

If someone important likes what I said, I'm going to think that I made a good comment. If they dislike it, then I'm going to reconsider what I said a bit more deeply. Neither of these would change my mindset from a simple up/down vote. I'd want a comment or discussion to take place first.

I find many things troubling in your statement, I'll explain myself as constructively as possible without sacrificing pragmatism (I hope all the following doesn't come as condescending, I'm just trying to help here).

1st of all. This is not facebook. Upvotes and downvotes are not likes/dislikes.

That said, here's another way to explain what I meant: Commenting is not about pleasing readers (is also not about displeasing, so be kind, like the post recommends). If "someone important" likes or dislikes what you said, should not have such an impact that would make you consider changing your mind, your mind should be changed by feedback in the form of comprehensive information, that kind of feedback is much more meaningful than someone else's emotion (or even disagreement by itself without feedback provided).

There can be many reason/motives to upvote/downvote, but emotion is not reason, acting on emotion alone is just compulsive.

I don't think PG would ever downvote you if he dislikes what you said, I'd like to think he's more sophisticated than that; he would either have an interest (motive) on muting the info you introduce to the conversation (but that's sketchy), or even better he would provide feedback (reason) on why he disagrees with you. (But I have absolutely no idea on how would PG make decisions, I'm just being rhetorical here and using PG as an example of "someone important")

So my point is:

You should not make comments expecting PGs approval (or any other figure you consider "someone important", which is what I stated as a "perceived moral leader"), because that's the very definition of a "herd-like mindset of following perceived moral leaders", if HN introduces tools that allow that mindset, the community's value will suffer. Being inspired by leaders is cool, but allowing them to make your mind just by liking or disliking what you said is very dangerous (and immature).

You should participate in a conversation with confidence, and to obtain confidence you need to be well informed and prepared to test your ideas.

EDIT: Rephrased a few things, but didn't change substance I hope.

The previous is suggesting opinion on threads would bias around popular personalities on the site. pg is popular here, others are too, but not all are universally "important" to the world. Publicizing to a greater extent these personalities' thoughts on subjects will drive out other viewpoints, as commenters self-edit in hopes of those up-votes.

In the case of your example, if someone important likes what you said and you feel rewarded for that, you're more likely to say that (or something similar) again, regardless of the objective merit of the statement.

Say your comment was "Java is stupid". it only gets 3 upvotes, but XYZ likes it. You feel validated, so next time the subject comes up you say it again. Commentary was then shaped by a personality rather than the merit of the commentary.

I was trying to be crystal clear. But I liked your conciseness more than my long-winded reasoning break down.

Seeing who downvoted you sounds like a good idea. Spending karma to downvote however - I see your point, but trolls or noise still needs to be punished, not sure people would still do that enough.

I don't agree with your "argument from authority" though - even pg can be wrong sometimes...

I'm against trigger-happy flagging/downvoters too. On the other hand, I actually like the fact that Reddit's and HN's communities are different in that way. I go to Reddit when I'm hungry for lots of information and want to have a good time, also to get in touch with a broader internet community. I come to HN when I want to know what's making an impact, and that means -among MANY other things- surviving criticism.

So I would not complain because HN needs criticism. I'd rather suggest a technical solution through UX design, for the false alarm flagging mostly.

agreed: differences and variety are good

A subset of your (a) that I see here a lot is when I write a 500 word essay arguing some point, and the first reply comes in and says something to the effect of: "On word 348, you said 'all'. Here's a counter-example that proves that you should have said 'some' instead! I found the word that is wrong in your statement! See? Your entire argument is invalid!"

Nit-picking and pedantry is toxic in real life and on message boards, however it seems to be ever-present in communication with fellow software engineers. In software engineering, if you miss an = sign or misplace a { or use a single wrong keyword in a 100K line program, the program can fail spectacularly. Debugging a broken program often involves nit-picking syntax--it's an essential tool in a software engineer's arsenal.

This is not universally true for written argument or rhetoric. Being clear is good. Using correct grammar is good. The details count. But attacking a clear, articulate argument by nit-picking grammar or word usage is pointless and does not substantially add to the conversation. Despite this, this behavior seems to exist as a cancer everywhere on the Internet where you encounter written argument or persuasion, including here.

Great nuance and insight! That feels like part of it.

When I'm wearing the Software Engineer hat, yes, the entire world can fail if a single nit is imperfect. But when we wear the Human Conversing or Persuading hat I expect and indeed enjoy seeing and using a more fuzzy logic. I expect more buffer and assume-I'm-not-an-idiot-kid-please-get-off-my-lawn-been-there-done-that-have-the-tee-shirt-thanks.

Compilers and CPUs are the world's most productive utter idiots. The best engineers adjust their thoughts to see them and emulate them, but sometimes this backfires when they forget to exit that mode.

Unfortunately, I don't think "aha!-you're-not-exactly-right" kind of people are going away anytime soon, they've been around on the net since I first laid mouse on it (the 90s, I'm not that old) and they've conquered the technical forums for a reason. Some people simply have that sort of mindset, one just needs to wear the "deal with it" hat and get over it.

In fact, those people are very useful and most of them have helped me from time to time, so I'm grateful for them.

Side note: >> assume-I'm-not-an-idiot-kid-please-get-off-my-lawn-been-there-done-that-have-the-tee-shirt-thanks

Thank you for that, I'll use it sometime, not sure why or when, but it's so funny I must! :D

ha. your welcome!

maybe turn it into a C poem and wear as a T-shirt?

I once had the following printed on a T-shirt and wore to a Meetup.com event here in Colorado, and out of the crowd an early Bell Labs alumnus (C/UNIX era) emerged and tried to recruit me:

    while (!(success = try()));

perhaps:

    void whatever(params) {
        assert assume_im_not_an_idiot_kid_please_get_off_my_lawn_been_there_done_that_have_the_shirt_thanks(params);
        ...
    }

haha that's hilarious, I don't think I have enough rep to make my voting count, but I nevertheless upvoted you just in case.

And I should warn you! I WILL make a T-shirt and give you credit.

consider me forewarned. if in twenty years I'm retired living on a golden yacht sailing the icy seas of Europa I hope a non-trivial portion of my income is coming from the royalties on the sales of that T-shirt.

and/or from the earnings on my book series The Dread Space Pirate Richard. (srsly)

or... savings from my day job. a good strategy has several fallbacks. :-P

Oh hey, you wrote that? You might have mentioned it on another thread because I have it on my amazon wishlist already. xP

I've just promoted your book up in the long to-read list.

you have been both very kind and very constructive. email me at groglogic@gmail.com and I'll ensure you always have free copies of all the books and audio episodes. (I did not see your email in your profile otherwise I would have sent this privately.)

I agree with you 100%. They waste time and energy in a toxic way. Do you or anyone else on here have any ideas on how to fix it?

Gamify NVC.

I've found that the most healthy way to deal with people that dismiss your entire argument/point/opinion by nit-picking your grammar (or similar) is to dismiss them back, kindly.

The kindly part is so important; their attitude shows that they don't have an open mind at the moment; dismissing kindly leaves a moral door open so that in the infrequent (but not rare) event that they'll have an open mind later in the day (or later in a lifetime), they may remember your reasoning and revisit the logic in their minds and agree with you, sometimes they acknowledge you merit for it and sometimes they don't, but when they do, bingo, you just made an intellectual ally, but that works only if you were kind and treated them with respect.

Pick your battles; If you insist on proving yourself right and antagonize people (remember even trolls are people) you make gratuitous enemies and waste resources in general; time, energy, focus, etc.

Trust me, I've turned foes into allies several times in my short lifetime. And more importantly, I've saved myself from wasting time and headaches. Kindness works miracles and saves time.

Be kind, rewind (your mind?).

And don't forget to read the welcomming page and the guidelines:

https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Those are all great points and I try to follow them myself when interacting online. I was actually looking for some kind of way to stop it from an algorithmic standpoint or some other fashion. Mainly because I don't like reading and wasting time on some minor nitpicks.

Not sure if I understood you correctly but as far as I know HN uses algorithms already for this sort of taks.

That's cool but I'd like to have better control, so I'm designing a custom HN curator myself. And I've noticed some other people have done the very same thing themselves.

Understand that we're generalising here, but a counter-example on your main argument would have, in fact, refuted your whole thesis. There's a massive gap between a short (in length) invalidation of an argument and useless nitpicking. There's also increased conflation of the two in online discussion channels.

"Yes, totally this. Moreover, I'd like to add anonymously down-voting / reporting someone's opinion just because it's not yours is just as mean-spirited as calling someone names."

I've stopped up/down voting all together for similar reasons.

I'd always assumed the intent was to vote when you feel something contributes to the discussion, or is particularly relevant.

For example, upvoting when a subject matter expert gives some context, or the person offers a comment that you found interesting. Conversely downvoting when there is a "me too"/contentless comment.

Personally I most commonly find myself downvoting what I would describe as either rhetoric or offensive.

"I'd always assumed the intent was to vote when you feel something contributes to the discussion, or is particularly relevant."

It is. I've decided to just leave the comments (reactions) as they are and signal upvote by commenting. If the post/comment is of no interest, no comment. Voting in some ways has distorted the real intent of the site: "talking about things hackers like".

Imagine of the rating system did away with votes and instead measured the quality of the discourse on something interesting.

It's not much, but when I see posts that are downvoted for no discernable reason (assuming good faith on the poster), I'll usually throw them an upvote to bring them a bit out of grey.

It's not much, but if I'm having a crap day and something I say it getting downvoted, I feel a little better when it ticks up a notch, knowing at least one person isn't trying to just bomb my post. It's basically the tiniest little gift I like to give to people, heh.

I also think that, if enough people put that upvote in, the community could shift how it reacts to things.

Just my two cents

> It's not much, but if I'm having a crap day and something I say it getting downvoted, I feel a little better when it ticks up a notch, knowing at least one person isn't trying to just bomb my post. It's basically the tiniest little gift I like to give to people, heh.

I think you're too concerned about what strangers think and do around the internet. Most people will "bomb" your subjective side of the argument (the snarky, mean, remarks), and not the underlying idea. I've found out that conveying your arguments while avoiding personal, subjective, attacks is a much better way of getting your point across, since people are more receptive if they don't get the impression they need to be defensive.

Yeah. Part of "good faith" for me is that the person isn't being discernibly or overtly aggressive, mean, or sarcastic.

Basically, if you're being an asshole, I don't feel a need to save you from yourself.

There aren't many (if any) formal guidelines for comment voting on HN, so this is me driving at what I want out of the community. I don't speak for everyone. For my part, I want civility, and to encourage people to contribute their opinions, popular or not.

The polite responses to misinformed ideas are often some of the most educational, at least for me, and so I'd like an environment where anxiety about the chance of being wrong is low for everyone.

I also don't want any of this to sound like an indictment of hacker news. I keep coming back here because I think the community is really top notch, and the signal to noise ratio is high. Commenting systems and forums have had these problems for ages, and they're hard problems. I just wanted to add my voice to the crowd.

>> assuming good faith on the poster

haha I get it. And that's also very kind of you.

I do it too sometimes, trying not to lose perspective of the true purpose of the conversation taking place of course; a single upvote in a bombarded comment won't cause detriment to the conversation but it will provide some motivation for the participant to keep trying to participate (assuming good faith on the poster, as well).

For example in StackOverflow, if I notice a -1 post but the post has some value, I'll upvote it even if it wasn't particularly useful for my issue, in order to give it a chance to be reevaluated without a negative bias of that -1

I find it a bit funny/curios on why we do such things. I've always known I'm not the only one doing that, it's one of those unsaid things that happen on the net, part of its culture.

You might be right. Even when in many cases you can immediately tell downvotes were necessary, deserved and the commenter should've seen it coming.

I've also encountered many cases that confused me a bit and at the time didn't quite understand why those people/commenters were being downvoted.

So I've spent a long time just reading HN without commenting, trying to first understand the culture, the news are just as important as the people curating them IMHO. After sometime I've begun to understand the different mindsets and dynamics; there are many discernible reasons to be downvoted by the community, there's for example, being perceived as a shill or a strawman, and etc. And correct me if I'm wrong but there's also the secret/magic algorithms making the mod's jobs easier, I don't think those algorithms are perfect and may make mistakes sometimes, that's understandable.

But there are still enough cases that I suspect ended up being downvoted just because disagreement motive or maybe even for irrational emotion (very rarely do strong emotions come with reason) motive. And there's also the case of Trigger-happy-downvoting individuals, all these latter cases generate such damage that I have * sometimes * even found myself a bit suspicious of the worth of the HN community as a whole.

But I stressed "sometimes" for a reason...

...One has to understand that communities change, that's a fact, and as YC has had success and obtained more and more media attention (and therefore HN as well), different kind of audiences have joined the flock (me included, since a few years ago).

My guess is that HN's community is still adapting to the new audience, must be tough since there must be thousands of real people along with hundreds of fake accounts (some with nefarious purposes) and bots.

In the end, you'll find it more useful to acquire a thick skin and a "deal with it" attitude towards gratuitous negativity (down-voters included), but not an impermeable shell because sometimes there's some useful criticism behind rude negativity, just don't take it personal and master the art of spinning the conversation towards a constructive direction.

Side note: >> anonymously down-voting / reporting someone's opinion just because it's not yours is just as mean-spirited as calling someone names.

Amazingly well phrased, I had to point that one out :)

> In the end, you'll find it more useful to acquire a thick skin and a "deal with it" attitude towards gratuitous negativity (down-voters included), but not an impermeable shell because sometimes there's some useful criticism behind rude negativity, just don't take it personal and master the art of spinning the conversation towards a constructive direction.

This is the most important lesson I was never formally taught about discourse. If you can mange to be Kind & Thick-skinned you will be capable of communicating with a far wider group of people than those who are missing one component of that pair.

Well, there's some high value on learning lessons by yourself, it may have taken some time from your life, but you ended up understanding better the in and outs. So good for you my friend.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171

Well so he says, but is it useful? When downvoting means two different things, it is hard to discern what is meant. I usually vote with 'helpful'/'I learnt something new' and 'not helpful'/'wasted my time in a mean manner'. I also don't see how one could only want comments one agrees with at the top - you learn less, and there might be less of a discussion. (Maybe I misunderstood pg's intention here?)

One could argue for another voting just for agreement/disagreement that wouldn't impact the positioning and colour of the comments, because seeing HN's opinions is also interesting. It would however add another layer of complexity.

I don't know that I agree with him, but consider:

As long as people upvote "I learnt something I agree with," and not "I learnt something I disagree with," the effect is the same, the amplification is just tuned a bit. Having a different standard for upvotes and downvotes doesn't do much. If you get less upvotes, it is effectively as if you got more downvotes.

I found it curious that something is never mentioned in that post. That is, not voting at all.

So yeah, I generally agree with PG in that

    > it's ok to use the up and down arrows to express agreement

But he never said to do it in a trigger-happy manner. There can be many other reasons to vote, but when the reasoning is 'agreement/disagreement', voting IMHO should be done when you strongly agree or strongly disagree; this way you allow some "space" in between for freedom of expression.

So my current take on this whole vote up/down to convey agreement/dissagreement discussion would be not voting at all unless you find it pertinent.

Also IMHO, in other types of reasoning one should be a bit faster to downvote, for example 'rudeness', or worse, 'hate messages', for those ones I downvote immediately, or flag and sometimes even educate (if the person seems to be just confused, and I make one attempt only, if the person is not interested in changing their mind, I skip).

Other types of reasoning deserve a different approach, for example; Interesting comments I upvote even if I don't agree. Well redacted but uninteresting comments I leave untouched (I don't vote up nor down).

And there are many other considerations for different scenarios and different types of reasoning, I mostly prefer not to waste time, but I liked this post about kindness and find the topic of community very engaging and relevant to me. Maybe because I'm starting to build a community myself.

I admit that I'm a bit faster to upvote, for anything that deserves positive feedback; attention, approval, agreement, endorsement, celebration, applause, kudos, kindness, etc. And I'm OK with that.

Could HN benefit from a dual-voting system? One for 'agree'/'disagree', and the other for 'constructive'/'non-constructive'?

It's a bit like when you have a survey and you have 5 or 6 options ranging from 'hate it' and 'love it'.

The difference is often very small and just adds not really necessary options which makes making a choice harder.

How about checking if a user downvoted more than e.g. average number of comments on some post, resulting in his downvotes carrying very little weight if it is true. Unless it's being done already.

Don't you think that would break the minimalist design? I don't think it would benefit, not to mention it would be a little too opinionated.

I suspect HN's up/down system follows the pattern of simplicity by design and for good reason; the reason being the flexibility to welcome a cognitive diverse audience.

Apparently HN's decline in audience quality over time was expected from the start¹; quality and popularity seem to be inversely correlated, but the voting privilege threshold is a good way to maintain culture values to some degree.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but given the fact this community was conceived as "an experiment"¹ to explore and empower the hacker community, I suspect one of the points has always been that the "best" ideas float to the top. In this case, the "best" ideas are always relative to the values of the community as a whole; the sum of criteria of the engaged participants, a very diverse audience.

That diverse audience can have multiple motives to vote up or down, according to each individual mindset; it can be agree/disagree, constructive/non-constructive, as you proposed, yes, but it also can be interesting/uninteresting, like/dislike, kind/unkind. Or many other criteria that are not necessarily antonyms; amazing/disgusting, enlightening/TLDR, etc.

So this singular up/down "un-opinionated" system's simplicity allows a cognition diversity one-size-fits-all dynamic, any change in UX would have to be planned for a justifiable purpose and very carefully executed.

¹ https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html

Being kind also mean being more open-minded.

I visit HN not to argue about the right or wrong, but to get more informed and educated. The more you know, the more you'll be humble and kind to those who you disagree with.

The notion that there is not absolute correctness even for a most trivial problem may be hard for engineers to understand, but I've learned it the hard way. I've learned a lot and working better with others since I started reading more on non-technical books and articles. It's a lot easier to being kind socially than to being kind on technical discussion and decision times. I think every engineering major should take courses in philosophy and psychology or read some related books.

> Being kind also mean being more open-minded.

Should I be more open-minded about climate change deniers when NASA has stated multiple times human activity is affecting it?

I have better things to do with my time.

Yes.

And you'll know more and save more time for better things.

Because if there's one place everyone can go to be better informed about climate change, it's definitely not NASA.

This is why people like you get dismissed in the first place. I can choose to spend time worrying about why you would think that, or I can go on with my life.

I choose to go on with my life. It is not true that all opinions are created equal.

Sorry, that's just the way it is.

I don't agree with mreiland. I didn't dismiss you donizx, your first comment was a smart POV.

mreiland is just being rude, he probably had a bad day or was recently frustrated with some discussion gone eerie with a climate change denier and he's taking it out on you. And he's worried about climate change, that's understandable, cut him some slack.

If you don't want to waste your time with climate change deniers, just skip and don't address them, that's cool, life is short no doubt about that.

If you find yourself in a situation where somehow you DID address them (maybe because you care about the world, and you DO sound like someone reasonable that cares about important matters), that means you already decided to use some time on them climate change deniers, so make the most of it, remember they're human beings and treat them with respect and you might end up inspiring them to actually listen to you to understand instead of listening to retort (like most people do when they're on defensive mode), be kind and you might even end up incepting some sense into their minds.

Trust me, kindness works miracles.

That's a strawman. I specifically quoted someone talking about being open-minded, I specifically used the verbiage 'open-minded' in my response, and you start talking about taking the time to "address an issue".

What if you had taken the time to be more fair to my post than that?

If someone has to wonder wether they are kind; I have found they are just Not kind. They don't change unless they have a nervous breakdown, major health scare(like a TBI), or become poor(really poor).

Capitalism seems to cater to selfish individuals? A lot of selfish individuals get far financially in life. Think about some of the "successful" people, some of us, idolize here on HN. Think about that person before they became rich and famous. I can usually bring up a list of retched things they did to become financially successful.

That's the rub. They become comfortable in life and are in complete denial over how they carved their way to the top of their version of success.

That's all I have--I have a headache, but kind people know they are kind. They don't need to advertise it. They don't need an audience in order to give to the suffering (human, animals, environment). They are just kind!

Now, the Fakers--well that's what makes me unkind. Oh there are so many Fakers.

(I have a sister who stepped on family members in order to become financially successful, and her journey was ugly. I might be a little over sensitive when it comes to people and kindness.)

How to be kind?

http://www.wikihow.com/Be-Kind

This text could be on the down there, on the "Guidelines" of HN.

This is a fantastic article from Boz. I have to be blunt in my criticism, however, as I imagine Boz would expect and appreciate. I had a few run-ins with him in the early 2010s and I don't see much evidence that he learned from these experiences or changed his basic working pattern. Or maybe he was even more raw before I met him. :) I learned very early on not to have anything Boz wanted nor to cross him. It's hard to judge the impact of what people don't say, once they get into the habit of not saying certain things around you.

Yup, this post is about the start of a journey that is still ongoing for me. It still takes work and I still lose focus and do poorly and tried to call that out at the end.

To your specific point, I probably was even worse in 2008 than what you experienced in 2010. That's probably true at every point since. I'm getting better, but I am sure you can find people even in the last year who would say this post doesn't reflect the Boz they met. I believe those people are getting fewer and their experiences less bad, but I am definitely not great at this yet so the post should be taken as a belief I hold and a behavior I aspire to.

Thanks for the honesty and careful articulation! I find myself to be a bit of bulldog myself, and it's hard to change ingrained habits. Thanks for the reminder!

> Being kind is fundamentally about taking responsibility for your impact on the people around you.

> the start of a journey that is still ongoing

Then you still have a long way to go on that journey, because you apparently have no idea the damage you've done to the world with Facebook. You have help lead people into undermining their own privacy, straight into the hands of a surveillance state.

So keep on that journey. Maybe in a few decades, when it is far too late, you'll realize how much you have hurt humanity. For the time being, I expect you'll just dismiss this entire post.

/sigh/ I don't have many regrets in life, but you, "Boz", are one of them. I wish I never ran those 4-H programming projects, and never worked to get you interested in computers. It probably wouldn't have changed much, but maybe the problem we call "Facebook" would be just a little bit easier to fight.

I really hope there is a joke in there I am missing, besides the obvious irony in relation to the article content.

I always mean what I say.

^^^thinks it would be kinder to netizens if 'Dan-o' found no means by which to facebook us...

>> So why was I being sidelined? I demanded answers. Dustin did not disappoint.

Nice, you have some storytelling skills :) I'd bet those will come in handy once you learn to apply them for your human communication skills.

I assume you already know this but it's not an easy journey and it will take time.

I am on the same journey as you and my conclusion is that I am essentially a creature driven by emotions. My emotions get the better of me and I revert back to my old state where I will bluntly tell someone how I feel about them and their work.

Just last week I had to bring appology chocolates to work. Self improvement was never easy.

Really, the main change I see now is that I almost immediately regret my words or actions, but I still have to work on the immediate apology that should follow that regret.

Don't beat yourself up too much. Diversity means having an honest full-spectrum cohort of people to grow with, not a curated one. If I removed people like you [us] (typically genius+passionate+outspoken+intellectually-arrogant) I would miss you. People might avoid you because they are weak, but you probably help tow the bottom line at fb more than you know.

I've struggled with similar in my career (eng@uber) to a lesser degree and these are some of my findings:

- in terms of long-term survival; friendship, connection and investing in humans brings much more satisfaction than any technical part of my work and will outlast the business every time.

- when I'm arguing a solution or iteration that I've designed, the harder I hold onto that solution the tougher it is to sell.

- every time I instruct an engineer rather than let them figure something out on their own it seems to not go in my favor.

- the best designs and implementations [at scale] in engineering [sadly, for my ego] always seem to require multi-faceted perspectives (a team) to simulate adequately and vet impact (business+social+tech).

- promotion and progression in an organization is a subjective mess, all biased, and largely driven by non-technical markers namely social proof, liking and perception.

I've heard so many horror stories about Boz and the extremely toxic work environment that he apparently cultivated. Good to see that at the very least, he's self aware.

I am an Engineering major(I have been programming since I was 13), and I have a bad habit of over-analyzing everything. I never skim over the details, and I always try to dig into a topic as much as I can to make sure my interpretations are correct.

Because of this attitude, I can not enjoy fantasy novels. They ask me to bridge the gap between multiple paragraphs with insufficient information. But at the same time, I am really comfortable with technical writing; no matter how complicated they are.

My girlfriend tells me I am mean to people, and I am not very kind. But it can't be furthest from the truth(from my perspective). I have never had any intention to hurt anyone. Gosh! I don't even hurt an ant. All she tells me is that I am `good person`.

So I asked her to demonstrate me some of the variants of conversation where I don't come of as an unkind person. I thought with enough examples, I'd able to extract a pattern.

She has been trying this for the last couple of years. But it's not working. I am yet to find a pattern, and unless I find a pattern I don't know what the anti-pattern will be.

The best solution I've found thus far is to smile and remain silent. But that can't be the only solution. So my question to HN crowd,

How do I learn to be kind?

Kill your ego. That is step one.

I guess we are in the same ship...

I believe to just don't care much about detail, someone is saying something that is not completely true ? As long as the main point is correct no one care about little detail.

No be pedantic...

Try to emphasasis with whoever know a little less than you, do you remember the last time you learned lets say closure ? They were hard at first ? What does it even means to return a function ? Now you use closure everyday.

Whenever somebody ask you about closure remember how you felt the first time you were learning it ? "function than return another function" is true, but it does not help anybody who is learning... Why ? What is the point ? How it is possible ? When they should be used ?

Go deeper in your explanation, it will make you more a mentor than a simple asoles that know a lot of pointless thing but does not what to help anybody...

Also, I made the same mistake over and over...

When somebody tell me something I am used to register just what they told me.

It looks like that people wrap any single word in a huge contest that I never consider...

So it may happens that if I say something in the wrong tone, other people think: "Ohhh he consider himself so smart that he said that in that nasty way... For sure he think I am stupid" and I sound mean... But definitely is not what I want...

Anyway, I still have lot to learn...

I think kindness comes in two steps. (1) Empathy. Think about what the other person is thinking and feeling. Think about how your words and actions can affect them either positively or negatively. (2) Implementation. When you speak or act, make others' desires or happiness a priority even if it conflicts with your own to some extent. How you manage that tradeoff is of course up to you.

I had problems with this when younger, and I can point you in two directions:

1. Empathy. This is about understanding others. I think this is 80% of "being kind". It's a learnable skill. I learned through books and trial and error, though lately I suggest this book "Empathy: why it matters and how to get it". http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B00HDMMEP2

2. Observe/Listen. Many conversations we are planning our next point rather than really deeply observing and listening to the other person: their eyes, body language, voice timber, gestures, and phrasing of the words they use. Huge amounts of information is on display in the shortest of phrases. Playing back observations to another is one of the simplest acts of kindness: it validates, affirms, shows interest, admits nuance, etc.

There are a few references on how to pick up on this stuff, though for entertainment value I'd recommend the more mainstream PUA books such as "The Game" or "Rules of the Game" as it is good information on non verbal communication even though the purpose is seedy.

> Many conversations we are planning our next point rather than really deeply observing and listening to the other person

I often hear similiar suggestions to be empathic on others, but I find it difficult in practice too. To deeply observe others and to understand their points and to accurately express my points all at the same time is hard for me. Simply considering phrasing and planning my points alone is mentally exhausting enough. (I admit my verbal skill is not that good.) Let alone to mention considering others' feelings.

I did try to think about others' feelings, then I found myself having to pause and think (which is not so good for a conversation), sometimes forgetting others' points, and sometimes making less clear, reasonable, persuasive points.

Just sharing my experience, I guess this all could be improved by practice. Though I'd be thrilled for some tips.

Yes, this all can be improved with practice. But it also means caring differently about the outcome of communication. Like it might take more than one conversation, or it might not matter all that much if you can't get your ideas across to the other person this particular moment.

I find I argue a lot less with people as I get older unless I really know the person, because it's so easy to be misinterpreted. I've found that a Socratic approach helps a ton if I'm not thinking straight - asking more questions about the areas I am worried about is easier to form for me when I am not able to articulate a position. By asking questions you are simultaneously showing empathy and communicating your own thoughts.

A lot of it depends on the situation and past history - sometimes people are in need of a full bore reality check and don't need much empathy. :)

Other times it helps if you care less about the outcome of the conversation - ie. It's okay to defer the issue to give you time to think. Or to just let the other person "win", if the topic isn't all that important.

Anyway I appreciate you sharing the experience, it made me reflect on how I have changed.

Good point on caring differently about the outcome, you reminds me that I might be caring too much on winning the conversation much of the time.

> it might not matter all that much if you can't get your ideas across to the other person this particular moment.

Yeah, I have always been eager to get my ideas through (because I want to get things done), with your words I see now I don't need to rush getting ideas through all at once, it should be done in a timely manner.

I guess this is why some people describe me as being too eager or impetuous, I see the reason now.

Socratic approach really seems to be a good suitable way around this, thanks a lot for the tip.

I needed to learn that others are interesting even though they have nothing to say about what's on my mind right now.

From that came everything else.

READ THAT LAST AGAIN.

beautiful. and well put. thank you.

a suggestion to everyone: read that last comment again.

beautiful. and well put. thank you.

Perhaps a good start would be to read "How to win friends and influence people" by Dale Carnegie. It doesn't address your concern directly but in the book you will find the pattern you seek for being perceived as kind by other people.

http://www.amazon.com/How-Win-Friends-Influence-People-ebook...

This is a fantastic post and hits really close to home. I'm currently going through almost the exact same situation, where I'm effectively being demoted due to my general lack of kindness.

It's also important to note that if boz is anything like me, he probably had to be almost fired for the lesson to go through. For most of my life, people have been telling me I need to be kinder (especially my parents), but I've never cared until now. It's certainly held me back socially, but never professionally. I never received a worse grade for being unkind. I never lost out on a job opportunity (being unkind is different from being an asshole). Until getting demoted, I never felt kindness was relevant to success.

It stings, but I've finally realized that I need to act on this. I'm re-reading Dale Carnegie and am, more importantly, trying to deliberately consider the emotional impact of everything I say. (If anyone has advice or resources, I'm all ears.)

-----

I probably should have posted this on a throwaway, but decided to be transparent. Please be kind.

I find it easier to be kind when I try to see things from the perspective of the other person. I quickly put myself in their position & try to understand what would be helpful and what would be counter-productive.

Observing and listening to others goes a long way.

That needy coworker that's annoying may be craving affirmation: smile when appropriate and avoid blaming their identity for their actions ("you failed" vs. "your stuff doesn't work").

Or that boss who's asking for stupid reports all the time may in fact be under intense pressure from above. While handling the pressure is technically his job, giving him some ammo to help reduce uncertainty helps reduce his headache.

Most religions have codified kindness as "do to others what you want them to do to you".

From a networking / interop perspective, it's "be strict in what you provide and lenient in what you accept".

> Most religions have codified kindness as "do to others what you want them to do to you".

I actually think the Golden Rule is very ineffective. Personally, I'd prefer if everyone got quickly to the point with me and said things quickly and plainly. While this is great for many engineers, some other people prefer a lot more subtlety.

Agreed. Anything else is a waste of time, and usually leaves me with more questions than answers.

At the same time, the quick and efficient version can still be presented in a positive - or at least nonnegative - way, which I think OP mentions: "callous indifference" is indistinguishable from "mean", for many people, which makes it difficult to work together.

Agreed @ perspective-hopping. It definitely helps to consider every stakeholder's viewpoint when making a decision.

Also: I've heard the "kindness version" of the religious saying:

"Do unto others as they would have you do unto them."

Of course, taken to extremes this is a bad idea. But it definitely helps to get into that mindset.

> "Do unto others as they would have you do unto them."

The problem with this version is that it requires interpretation of another person's intentions and attitude - something we're exceptionally bad at and which is causing a lot of drama simply through misinterpretation.

The version that says "Do unto others as you would have done unto yourself." does not have this problem. Furthermore it scales better because you have to perform the underlying calculation only once as opposed to once per encounter. I get that this approach does not provide any guidance for handling abusive people, but I would argue they can be dealt with on a case-by-case basis. In all other cases, treating people like you would like to be treated should be a reasonable default.

> I'm effectively being demoted due to my general lack of kindness

I am posting on a throwaway and I'm going to offer some unsolicited advice:

You need to change jobs now.

If you want to do a better job at politicking, you've already poisoned the well at your current company.

Once you've been branded as being unkind and it's stuck, you can't recover from that with the same people.

Sorry if that comes across as unkind, but I feel it's worth pointing out explicitly in case you haven't discovered it on your own yet.

I had a completely different interpretation of the incident at Facebook.

He had developed some key features that were now important. Instead of mentoring him to work better with others, his boss demoted him.

The boss was giving someone else a favor, making them the lead of this now-important project, some up-and-coming hotshot. He made up an excuse about "bad attitude", while just using it as cover for backstabbing him.

The OP probably had big $$$ in unvested options, so he had to play along and play nice, instead of quitting on the spot.

I'm going to write a follow up about how I wasn't mad about the feedback as much as I was mad nobody had told me sooner. We were a young company and didn't really have a management or mentorship skillset yet. We would all develop that together in the ensuing years and this was a major part of my motivation for pushing for it.

I still say that someone gave you a shit sandwich, and tricked you into believing that it tasted good.

I'm a lot happier. If that's a trick, I'm not mad about it.

Are they making you say this? Blink once for yes, two for no.

Sounds like there weren't any grownups around, honestly. I'm also getting the feeling that it's a fire-happy kind of place, maybe I'm wrong but that could explain the note-passing childishness. Maybe they were afraid of getting canned if they talked back to you.

I don't know if this is a lesson about being nice or a lesson about dealing with different personality types, I guess it depends on how much of an asshole you actually were. Personally I'd prefer an environment where you call my work "shit" and I say you have your head up your ass, it saves time and it's better than passive-aggressive weirdness and underhandedness but not everybody is like that.

Any place where people are arbitrarily fired is going to be toxic though, the reaction from the CTO and a few other things I've heard about Facebook kind of makes me think that's what's going on.

> The boss was giving someone else a favor, making them the lead of this now-important project, some up-and-coming hotshot. He made up an excuse about "bad attitude", while just using it as cover for backstabbing him.

so, basically someone who was competent and agreeable was favored by his boss to get a promotion, and the person who acted like a know-it-all dickhead 24/7 got sent to the basement.

that's a real shocker.

You're confused about how the dickhead non-dickhead spectrum works.

From the viewpoint of a dickhead, an honest and intelligent person is a dickhead. The honest and intelligent person has the potential to expose the dickhead as a dickhead, so the dickhead will do everything he can to convince everyone else that the honest and intelligent person is a dickhead.

A dickhead would see an honest and intelligent person as a dickhead, and be able to lie convincingly enough to establish it as fact in the eyes of others.

In fact, a highly skilled dickhead can convince an honest person that "standing up for yourself" is a dickhead behavior.

I have no way of telling if the OP is a dickhead or not, because I haven't met him. My guess is "not a dickhead, he was just convinced by dickheads the he actually was the dickhead".

So, he learned to act in a manner least likely to offend dickheads. I don't want to work with dickheads, so I don't bother with that skill.

seeing as how there are, in this very thead, people that consider OP to have been a dickhead, i think i'm going to go with the primary source on this one.

Considering how the OP is the mythical 10x-100x programmer, I'd lean towards him not being a dickhead. He singlehandedly implemented several key features for FaceBook.

If FaceBook had an average employee instead of the OP, they might not have been as successful.

It's possible to be highly skilled in one area and very weak in another, and the median is almost always more important to the long-term success of a business. Look at it from the perspective of a CEO: is a hot-shot programmer nobody wants to work with more or less likely to be productive than a well-integrated team with a dozen people? Would you want to bet your company on that one person staying healthy, employed by you, never making a mistake, etc. or do you want to bet on a long-term model more sustainable than “Make sure this person never leaves”?

This is why the 10x mythologizing is so annoying. There are a few people who are 10x in specific areas or who might have periods of intense productivity but it's never true across the board for significant periods of time, and it's used to excuse a lot of bad behaviour by 1.2x programmers — not to mention the larger mistake of assuming that the limiting factor on projects is rarely absolute programming ability. In most cases, you see far better results from someone who might be maligned as a .8x programmer who communicates well with the team & users and relies on solid tools and practice rather than assuming sheer skill will save the day.

On the one hand, I've been in situations where dickheads would undermine me behind my back to management, tell me other people were undermining me, act like I was I a dickhead if I responded to a direct question from management directly instead of clearing it through them.

On the other hand, the dickhead always thinks he's a non-dickhead.

If everyone you meet is a dickhead, you're the dickhead.

So be kind to everybody, dickhead or non-dickhead.

Indeed. We should be under no illusion -- employment is a popularity contest. In non-startups, the only thing that matters is how much the people around you, especially the high-ranking people, like you. Other things matter only in the most extreme circumstances -- every normal value can be hand-waved away if the boss likes you enough.

If you want to be a successful employee, view yourself as a politician and run a successful campaign: minimize anything that will be viewed negatively, blatantly exploit peoples' biases to emphasize a positive image. Don't talk about divisive subjects, regardless of their relevance to your job. Anyone smart enough to see what's going on but naive enough to call you out will immediately be viewed badly, the only real threat to your power is someone who is smart enough to see the manipulation and experienced enough to respond to it through his own counter-manipulations.

Why bother learning how to write software? I should have focused on sales if that's the only skill that matters.

Welcome to Life 101. It's all about sales + skill. Skill is one part of the equation, necessary but not sufficient. Sales is the other part - unfortunately a great salesman can go very far without hard skills (to be fair, a great salesman has unique skills).

This is a hard fact about life and something a lot of talented people realize way too late. Now you know. Focus on your pitch - ABC - always be closing. Every interaction in life is a transaction of some sort - your sales strategy will determine if you get a good deal or a raw deal.

"Every interaction in life is a transaction of some sort."

What about when a mother kisses her baby's head? What about when a friend offers a hug to someone who has just lost a loved one? What about when a kid gives a friendly smile to the kid who always gets bullied?

Are those transactions? Did those people get "good deals"?

Now I'm just some hyperbole-prone kid who isn't qualified to give advice to a Life Veteran like yourself, but I find myself wondering what you might learn if you stopped keeping score for awhile. In my experience, treating every interaction as a little game to maximize profit is a great way to scare away anyone who is interested in anything more worthwhile than profiting off of you.

Of course those are all transactions. The helping hand, the caring kiss from the depths of motherly love, etc - they are win-win transactions. The baby gets comfort and love and the mother gets a dose of oxytocin to encourage further bonding. The friend offering a hug provides comfort and gets the good feelings of helping/offering comfort. Win-wins, but still a transaction, an exchange of value. Time, attention, love, care - these are all benefits that can be given and received.

Same with business - win-win transactions are best. When you provide something that others find valuable and you receive something valuable in return (loyalty, money, hype, etc) it's a good thing.

Surely you would agree that the amount of oxytocin the mother gets is not determined by the quality of her "sales strategy."

Thank you for clarifying that you were not advocating the rather shallow, exploitative, and depressing approach to life that I misinterpreted from your previous comment.

> What about when a mother kisses her baby's head? What about when a friend offers a hug to someone who has just lost a loved one? What about when a kid gives a friendly smile to the kid who always gets bullied?

Well, there are the obvious ones: evolutionarily beneficial responses. Still transactions, unconsciously working for the benefit of the species.

The others are more selfish. Obviously not angry or malicious, but they convey certain clear benefits for little to no effort. Definitely transactional.

Just because they are transactions, however, doesn't mean you have to weigh them in terms of some sort of emotional "profit", or they're in any way unwanted. It's just a way of talking about them, even modelling them for study.

chances are you're not nearly good enough to warrant being a torvalds-esque dickhead.

Nobody is good enough to warrant being a torvalds-esque dickhead.

"get away with" is entirely different.

I think the world would be a better place if Torvalds took a couple martial arts classes and 1) got his ass handed to him a couple of times and 2) felt physically self confident enough that he no longer felt the need to verbally beat every body else up before they got a chance to do it to him.

There are a lot of successful sales people who'd agree with you. Choosing a non-sales field makes it so you don't have to focus on this as much since much of your work is non-social and you have a good excuse to be in a corner staring at the screen, but the social element is still the most important part of maintaining and improving your employment status. Your social status is much more important than the quality of your actual work product.

I'm a lifelong techie, and your remark resonates.

An old and dear friend, who started out as a brilliant civil engineer but moved to marketing where she has spent most of her professional life, would completely ratify your second sentence.

Unfortunately, I find it harder and harder to refute her assertion that in the end, it all comes down to marketing.

If your goal is to have a glorifying career and make lots of money, you should have focused on sales skills.

The best manager I ever had (and continues to be my inspiration today) was also one of the kindest, genuine, and empowering people I've ever met. Not necessarily nice, but kind.

The worst manager I ever had once told me "you're too kind to your team". He wore his ability to bring fear to a room like a badge of honor.

I never worked harder and more passionately than under the first and I never felt more apathetic and unmotivated from work than under the second. A single data point, but something I'll never forget.

Surprisingly, the kindest manager I had (and still have) at the same time wears his ability to bring fear to a room in an impressively efficient way. I have never experienced a room transitioning from theoretical daydreaming to practical results so fast, just because someone enters it. Amazing skill if you use it appropriately and if it emanates from knowledge rather than being mean.

Did the second manager fire you?

He doesn't sound so unkind letting an apathetic unmotivated lead keep his or her job. It doesn't seem like we're getting the whole story here. That second manager might have been an ass, but it seems like he got the job done.

No, the second manager didn't fire me - my apathy and lack of motivation didn't keep the team from shipping or themselves being demotivated. A key thing the first manager taught me was that a good leader is able to keep their team motivated and moving forward in spite of problems above - shielding the team, etc.

And the second wasn't an ass - he just used fear as a management technique. As opposed to the first manager that used empowerment and encouragement.

I do see a fair share of managers that use fear/authority/power as a technique to get results, but for me (and I see for many other peers) it is counter productive in the long run.

Respect earned from fear/position is short-lived. Respect earned from trust and empowerment will stay with people their entire careers and pay dividends.

Not disagreeing with you, but there are also leaders like Jobs, Gates, Ellison etc. How come they are able to get amazing results, while being really nasty to their people?

Sheer charisma? Also, different people respond better to different kinds of leadership and motivation. This gets talked about a lot in the context of coaches of professional sports teams.

When you're running a business, you can probably afford to be a jerk as long as the small group of people closest to you can tolerate it.

Outliers, lucky, Right place, right time.

The problem is with the people that try to emulate leaders like that - they try to play Steve Jobs in meetings and end up causing all of the damage without any of the greatness.

They aren't outliers.

Can you explain why you say that? It seems you're suggesting that there is in fact a correlation between genius, or at least effective management, and unkindness. Is that what you meant? If so, why?

I can see how high high achievers could tend to be extremely focused and driven, which in some cases would present in this way. I wouldn't expect it to be the norm though; do you believe otherwise? How do you know?

I guess the parent is saying that there are lots of people with nasty behavior who are successful - may be not bill gates level successful, but successful nevertheless. Just a guess though

There is a Bill Gates quote (I read it on the "Becoming Steve Jobs" biography that was recently published) : "Lots of people want to be like Steve. They have got the asshole part down pat. All they are missing is the genius part.".

We'll probably never know the truth of the management styles of Jobs, Gates, et al. Only those that worked for them directly will know, and even then the memory will be colored by later events. Something to keep in mind.

Positions of power have a lot of leeway. If you're the big boss, people can't do much to remove you. It's different if you're trying to climb the corporate ladder; there are a lot of people ready and able to stomp on your fingers and knock you down a few rungs at the slightest offense.

It's so unfortunate that being nasty works for those guys. I've seen so many people who effectively equate Apple's success to "the leader of Apple being an arsehole" and decide they too want to be Steve Jobs.

I am of the (entirely uneducated) opinion that Jobs wasn't successful because he was an arsehole, but that he could only get away with being an arsehole because he was so successful.

"Being kind is fundamentally about taking responsibility for your impact on the people around you. It requires you be mindful of their feelings and considerate of the way your presence affects them."

I think this advice is so apt and so needed. There's a perception that to be effective or powerful, one must also be harsh, stern, a little bit mean. That stems from a misunderstanding of what kindness is. Hopefully people will heed his advice!

Notice how it was OK for him to be mean while Facebook was growing up it's infrastructure. Being right unfortunately is a necessary evil for the first wave in any project. In the nascent stages a project often needs firm almost machine like guidance. As the project matures the sense of stability trickles down organically to it's members. Some make the transition well while others dont. Often the best of our champions don't make the cut. The author has rightly pointed out the importance of Kindness, but that's not enough. The leadership should also be kind and help these mean incumbents make the transition.

I disagree. You can absolutely be a powerful leader with a powerful vision without being mean or being, for lack of a better term, an asshole. That doesn't mean you acquiesce or agree with everything everyone else says, it just means you lead by example and with a keen understanding of how what you say and do affects those around you, rather than ignoring that.

It's similar to taking medication to treat the causes of an issue without being concerned with the side effects. It's totally cool if your headache goes away, but less cool if you then have seizures for 2 years. It's even worse if it makes those around you have seizures for 2 years, while your headache has gone away.

I think being always right in this context means being less open to consensus and taking up more responsibility of execution. This could be very crucial in a fight or flight situation. Most of the time this is a very natural response to adverse situations. Like I said such a response has a very short shelf life. But being persistently in the same state long after the crunch time has passed is definitely not ok.

Maybe this is a low blow but if there's one place that needs a little less kindness and a lot more truth it's the Facebook News Feed. It's real nice that they only show you news they think you'll like but it seems pretty irresponsible.

If they really want to make the world a better place they should come up with some way of spotting some of the verifiably false news stories that get posted there. They could do it nicely, maybe: "Hey did you know this story may contain many factual errors? Check it out on Snopes.com!" Facebook could even set up their own fact checking service if they wanted to, it would be good PR for them.

And it's important to be nice but you have to be able to say "this sucks" sometimes too. With a guy like this Boz who's doing a good job but has a natural inclination to steamroll people maybe they should have set him up with some sturdier folks and let them fight it out instead of creating an atmosphere where he's afraid of being fired for being direct. That sounds like poor management, IMO.

That is an interesting perspective; "have set him up with sturdier folks". Coming from a construction background myself, I find I need to work on my behavior, as engineers are much more sensitive than construction workers and actually anyone I have ever worked with, even sales people. I work with another guy, who was a previous auto-mechanic and we get along great. Might make sense to add a study as to personalities, dynamics of these teams and what personality combinations make for the most successful teams.

Yeah programmers can be delicate. Maybe they used up all the sturdy folks they could find. "Dammit Boz that's the third dev you've broken this week! This time it's coming out of your salary!"

I'm currently re-reading the classic "How to Win Friends and Influence People" by Dale Carnegie, and one of the principles he outlines to win people over to your way of thinking is to "show respect for the other person's opinion. Never say 'you're wrong'." He tells a story from Ben Franklin's autobiography outlining how insolent and opinionated he used to be, to the point that nobody could stand being around him. One day, someone wiser and older pointed this out to him and from that moment, Franklin made it a point to never directly contradict people or positively assert his own opinions. Instead, he'd say things like "I may be wrong. Let's examine the facts." This warmed people up instead of immediately putting them on the defensive and completely changed the success he had in dealing with people. A little tact and diplomacy goes a long way towards persuading others towards your way of thinking. And you never have to say "you're wrong."

An amazing story, when you consider that later in life Benjamin Franklin was a diplomat.

I had almost that exact conversation with my boss a few years back (except for the part about almost getting fired). I was completely stunned that people thought I was indifferent to their ideas and bent on finding flaws, because I had actually made an effort not to do that for quite a while before the conversation. It turns out that, at least for me, navigating through people's sensitivities while having a technical discussion and making sure the truth is discovered is extremely difficult.

The effect it had on me was to basically make me clam up, because I decided that pointing out issues that would eventually crop up was not worth the risk of alienating my coworkers. It's hard for me to say whether this was a net positive or negative in terms of overall productivity, because if my shutting up makes the team more cohesive, I can see how finding the problems for themselves would grow their strengths over time. On the other hand, we often make decisions now that I would have questioned before in the process of talking it out (that includes my own decisions often enough because the whole discussion process is chilled). Ultimately, we seem to have a more congenial team (at least on the surface) at the price of having more bugfixes to deal with. Very unclear to me whether I did the right thing, but I can't really think of another way to handle it.

Edit to add:

The other big effect I noticed after learning to let stuff go was that I generally feel a lot less invested in the projects now. Before, I would treat every project I was on like it was my baby, and now I feel much more like I'm just working on somebody else's thing. That's not necessarily a bad thing (my phrasing is poor above, but I'm too tired to fix it at the moment), because it probably more accurately represents the real situation. The sense of detachment does tend to mean that I don't push as hard to go beyond expectations though.

While the author may have been a very talented engineer, there are also a lot of mediocre engineers (and members of other professions) who happen to act like jerks.

Don't assume that just because someone is crotchety, indignant, or combative that he/she is intelligent.

I generally assume the opposite.

If an engineer is outstanding, their actions can speak for themselves, and they won't have to put on airs; if an engineer is mediocre, their only option to hide it will be arrogance.

There's a third type: the engineer who is outstanding but is addicted to being perceived as brilliant, so they layer extra arrogance on top, never conceding points, overstating facts and contributions, etc. to make themselves appear even more brilliant. When I encounter these types, I think to myself "If you just didn't feel compelled to overstate things, you'd be truly awesome."

I am not sure I agree 100% with this. If both people are working on a really hard problem and the argument is based on theory, then yes, you should be kind. But if a colleague routinely creates more work for you and he thinks he is a competent programmer when not, then being kind will only further stroke his ego.

I am literally facing this at work. One of my colleague has an opinion on everything. Its quite frustrating because he is neither the most experienced person in the topic nor is he any good. I literally caught him using an if else statement for check whether a dictionary contained a key when one line would have done. Its programming 101, pick up a book and you will learn it in chapter 3. But he goes on saying he has 5 years in this industry... I am like okay bro. How he got a job is beyond me.

In the end, kindness is a tool in EQ. You should use it when needed and be stern when another approach calls for it. Hiding your dissatisfaction just to be kind will do the company long-term dis-service. Especially to the code base.

Oh, the engineerian contrarian. A legend as old as time itself.

Happy to be a data point:

If you couldn't have guessed from my HN personality, this is me, as well.

Different companies have had different ways of putting it; in the current incarnation, with Erin and Patrick, I'm called "Kanye", as in, "I'ma let you finish".

Working on it!

I wouldn't have guessed that. I find your comments measured and thoughtful.

Don't change too much. Your comments are usually very critical and very technically correct, even if they might offend a project owner.

Based on your HN personality, I know that you're a no-bullshit kind of guy, and that means that your company is at the top of my list for when I start looking for my next gig.

I agree with joebeetee, I don't perceive your comments as rude.

For what it's worth, in the book "On assholes, a theory" the author states at some point, "How do I know if I am an asshole?". And the answer is that if you ask yourself this question, then very probably you aren't an asshole.

Author's 'before' picture is me very often. I'm nearly ego-less in pursuit of the truth--more than ready to be shown wrong myself--but that doesn't mean that coworkers and loved ones end up feeling good about the conversation.

I hope he will write a "how to" follow up, because I would like to change, but I don't see how to do it in a way that doesn't sound impossibly exhausting.

I'm hopeful that it actually is possible, though, because for 30+ years I had never been able to keep any space well-ordered for more than a few weeks, nor had any reason to think I ever would be able to. I read "the life changing magic of tidying up" and it turns out I can do it--I just needed to be taught how. This may not seem relevant, but it's been life-changing not so much to have a tidy office, but to learn that what I assumed was a fixed personal trait was changeable after all.

I think reading, "How To Win Friends and Influence People " from Dale Carnegie helps.

Took me years to understand soft skills are as much or more important than technical skills.

(Fixed book's name)

It's "How to Win Friends and Influence People", and it's one of Paul Graham's recommended books (see http://www.paulgraham.com/startupfaq.html ), along with the Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin.

There's also "7 Habits of Highly Effective People", which is often recommended in the same breath.

Shoot, I wrote it correctly at first, and after checking for the authors correct name with google, I screwed and put it wrongly.

That search is still open and the text is correct there. Actually, I don't know how I managed this screw up.

I did a lightning talk a while back called "7 Habits of Highly Effective DevOps", adapting the habits and the organization of them to doing DevOps well.

Would you mind sharing your notes on that, if you have any?

Here are the slides, at least. http://www.slideshare.net/davestagner/seven-habits-of-highly...

Thanks. Maybe I'll try it again. I've read it once, and my memory of what I read is a major contributor to the entire enterprise seeming beyond exhausting.

fsniper made a good recommendation with "How to Win Friends and Influence People."

I'd also put in a recommendation for a book I stumbled upon when searching through Hacker News called "Difficult Conversations."

http://www.amazon.com/Difficult-Conversations-Discuss-What-M...

I got the same feeling from reading the book as the original recommender ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7762266 ): reading the book made me feel instantly better at being able to communicate when having difficult or tense conversations. I can't recommend it enough.

Has anyone tried Loving Kindness meditation? "Empty your mind" type of thing never did much for me but Loving Kindness meditation featured in New Scientist so I gave it a go out of curiosity.

I found it remarkable. If you spend deliberate concentrated time imagining someone you know or might meet and them becoming happy, you later get a weird sense of joy when you do meet them. You anticipate and look forward to nice things happening to them and unconsciously strive to make that happen. What's fascinating is that it works with people you dislike/have trouble with. It really does foster empathy.

Kindness when treated as just a behaviour will be an uphill struggle, there will be conflict between what you want to do versus a correction. However when your first instinct, your desire without thinking about it, is to be kind - its no bother.

Don't know boz, but would probably like him. Hopefully I will bump into him someday.

Somehow, I seem to get along with all of these "raging assholes" that everybody complains about when I meet them. They tend to do interesting stuff, are interesting to talk to, and, generally, aren't attempting to do active harm to you because they're too busy doing stuff.

Of course, if they accidentally do something that harms me or ticks me off, I WILL TELL THEM. Normally, they are the first to apologize and help fix the issue they caused.

I only flip someone into the true asshole category when I tell them what they did to cause me grief, and they don't try to make amends somehow.

I've also been holding the same view as you since teenage, I believe the world operates by continuous contradictions and compromises or amendments. I expect myself to honestly directly pointing out the wrong of others, but also to proactively recognize and amend my own faults when others point out.

From my own recent experience and Boz's article, I am forced to realize that not just all people operates this way, I should simply adjust. Though I still genuinely believe this is the most efficient way for people to grow and improve, because this way eliminates all the overhead of misinterpretations.

I guess Boz's personality is close to "the debater" http://www.16personalities.com/entp-personality and so do you and I.

I dunno. I'm not a big fan of the "be kind" angle on things. Too often that translates to, "Withhold the feedback you have for fear that you'll upset the other person." Or, "Don't tell anyone that you think you have a better idea than the one someone else is championing."

I generally think that people are "too kind" at work in a lot of ways, and it leads to a lot of grousing and internal stress on the part of the people who have to bite their lip rather than contribute to their fullest.

Rather than "Be Kind", I prefer the duo of, "Be Honest, but Be Thoughtful First".

>>Withhold the feedback you have for fear that you'll upset the other person.

No, that is you failing to have a voice.

The appropriate thing to say is, in a calm a non-emotional manner, "I've got something to say on this but the strength of your communication is leading me to feel I'm not allowed to speak. That's not healthy so lets communicate better.".

It's passive aggressive behaviour to say nothing then snipe from covert position of resentment because you feel you have not been listened to.

You can take responsibility and speak without fear of the other person.

I once worked with a very senior software developer who controlled the outcomes of the technical conversations by getting annoyed and shouting down what the other people thought. As a result people were cowed and did not want to say anything for fear he would get even more annoyed. I eventually had enough of it and whenever it happened I said "I'm sorry but I'm not okay with things going the way you say through being overbearing. I have just as much experience and knowledge as you so my opinion is just as valid on this stuff. If you want it to be your way you'll have to get there a different way than just being overbearing." He kept doing it, I kept saying it calmly. Eventually he started to become aware that he isn't the smartest, just the most overbearing.

It would be useful if people carefully considered their real motivations for their feedback, and whether it was really all correct and relevant. Feedback which hasn't passed a strong internal filter for whether it is basically constructive, objective and well-informed isn't worth voicing and really should be withheld. So I like that you say "be thoughtful."

Yeah, I'm a big proponent of the thoughtfulness you describe. I don't like it when people shroud rudeness & cognitive miserliness as "just calling things like they see them." I prefer "See it, think about it, then call it."

I really value honesty, but not every emotion-laden thought that passes through our heads deserves airtime.

Spot on. I think it's tough, particularly as a young guy, to hold back on being overly confrontational. I used to be horrible to be around, not just professionally, but in nearly every way. Super fighty and abrasive.

I'd like to think that it was through mindful practice that I've managed to tame my aggression. Perhaps it is, partly. But the real reason that I'm a lot easier to get along with now probably has to do with aging out of the testosterone-flooded decade of my 20s.

I think it is mindful practice; I'm in my mid 30s and probably more abrasive than in my early 20s, despite having much less testosterone-fueled aggression.

Ha! Perhaps. I'm sure it's a lot of things. I also grew up working on fishing boats in Alaska and what passed for civil discourse out there would be fighting words in most professional environments.

Mindfulness is tough though. I've actually had to work pretty hard on being aware of my reactions and the intentions behind them. If I find myself getting upset, my face getting hot or my fingers tingling, then I ask myself what it is I want out of the situation I'm in. Usually the best way to get that is to take a deep breath and try to understand _why_ the other person doesn't understand my point of view.

Of course, being aggressive is a very useful trait at times. Learning when to use that trait is the tricky part.

IDK, maybe I'm forgetting what it's like to be earlier in a dev career (I'm 30), but how much I see "this resonates me" more than "duh" is a bit scary.

I suppose we're all on a scale of ability to be empathetic (and can learn be more emphatic), but who goes into a job with this attitude?

Cheers for learning! I just wish all of our upbringings could bring us this lesson earlier in life. Because...it should. You graduated Harvard, and got a job where you acted like you knew everything. I suppose that's typical of college grads everywhere though, I'm not trying to be too harsh.

I've been blown away by the thoughtfulness on this thread. For those who are interested, here is the first in a series of follow up posts about the same period of time in my life that gets into some of the very fair issues raised in this thread (namely, that Dustin really should have given me this feedback long before it got to the point of nearly getting fired)

http://boz.com/articles/give-hard-feedback-fast.html

I am sorry I did not come across this submission sooner today. There are lots of opinions being passed around here, and all of those opinions are being framed from the point the OP focused on: kindness.

I am not sure if kindness is the right remedy. In fact I don't know what the right remedy is. But my insight is a little different here. These past couple of years I have been slowly reading a book called "The Multiplier." It has been a very difficult read, mostly because every page of every chapter has been a slap in the face. I am constantly having regrets over the past. The book is related to management, and in essence, it says that intelligent people get miscarried by their intelligence. And then the book gives situations upon situations and examples upon examples of how intelligent people are terrible managers.

The book also says that the best possible thing for a team is to remove its most obnoxiously intelligent person. Similar to when you remove a queen from a chess board, the weight of winning and accomplishing great things now equally rests on the shoulders of all players, positioning everybody for growth.

And if you are still reading, some quotes: one guy makes you feel like he is the most intelligent person in the world; his rival makes you feel like you are the most intelligent person in the world. I started off reading the book to know how to multiply my skills across my team, but the book was about how to multiply people to do more than they've ever done before.

Hi this sounds like a really interesting book. Would you mind sharing the link to the book on Amazon, searching for the "the multiplier" gives three possible books you might be talking about :D.

Thanks in advance.

I think this is the book he's referring to:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Multipliers-Best-Leaders-Everyone-Sm...

Yup that is the one.

Thanks!

Thanks, added to my reading list.

On of my co-founders advised me starting my first role as a CEO - "Listen." That one word changed how I perceive the world around me.

Sidenote: this is one of the most beautiful sites I have ever seen

It leaves me great ponder after reading the comments. After all, is "being kind" the general rule? Should it be a general rule? Or is it just an attitude towards certain kinds of personality (or the belief by people who have these personalities)?

Recently read about the 16 personality types of psychology http://www.16personalities.com/personality-types, I guess Boz is more of a "debater", like myself, who doesn't care much about the attitudes, instead we focus on the idea itself that is being conveyed, to fully understand it, and to dig out all implications and foundations.

The article seems to encourage us to become more like the "diplomats", to understand people's feelings.

Should I change? should we change? or should we just "be kind" to the sensitive people, and be ourself, ie. direct, honest but probably not kind, around other people?

The doubt I have on being kind boils down to overhead, it leaves a huge hole to misinterpretations, and just as people say in the comments, sometimes people see your kindness as unimportance.

For myself, I'd rather be offended then to be "protected by (mis)interpretations" of others on me. I hate to find out people specially crafting their speech in order to convince me. I am intelligent and mature enough to seperate the attitudes and the ideas of speech.

Nevertheless, I do see the value of what's Boz suggesting, I guess being kind is maybe an overstatement, instead, being thoughtful is more conservative, and thus, a more general rule.

It's hard for me to say that being overly upset about someone else's argument winning over yours is not as significant a character flaw as sounding like a know it all.

Should we be always singling out those born and developed with little empathy to appease those born and developed with high emotional sensitivity? It would serve both to put forth effort in improving their flaws.

Totally agree with the premise of this article. Being kind involves being empathetic and putting yourself in the other person's shoes. Most times, this involves taking a step back and not reacting in the moment (to the best of one's ability). Passion can be a good thing, but not without restraint and self-awareness.

Well written. Some companies have "no asshole" or "no brilliant jerks" policies to stop hiring or tolerating such behavior. Eg, it's included in the Netflix culture deck: http://www.slideshare.net/reed2001/culture-1798664/35 . That slide deck is promoted during the hiring process, and you are encouraged to study it.

As Boz writes, you might not have thought it through before, and if you do, you can realize that being kind can mean being more productive than just being right. So perhaps having it in a culture deck, given to job applicants, could help some people make that realization before they walk in the door.

This is hard. It's something I struggle with because once you get the hang of it, it's actually pretty easy to convince other people to like you; it takes time to learn that too, but once you have the patterns down it's not that bad.

What is infinitely harder is /actually/ respecting other people's opinions and beliefs, rather than simply making them think you are. These aren't the same thing, and are easy to confuse, in my experience. Be really careful, on your journey, to be watchful of that. I screwed that up and am still trying to figure out where the line lies.

I came to the realisation about a year ago that I was pathologically obsessed with being right about everything.

I discussed this with a good friends who pointed me at this stuff about phases of adult development:

http://www.slideshare.net/mobile/MargoBoster/how-being-an-ex...

Great read. I was in a similar boat; reading Dale Carnegie's "How to Win Friends and Influence People" changed the way I interact with people a lot.

Sasha Laundy's talk at PyCon 2015 is a great example of how to interact with other engineers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hY14Er6JX2s

People seem to underestimate this but I've learned this lesson myself the hard way. Your absolute most important skill is not to make a dick of yourself next to your co-workers. Even if it means doing things wrong for a while, it is essential you don't hurt feelings while slowly pushing for things to change.

We get so caught up in what is the "correct" answer. We forget software is made by humans and almost always meant to make human lives better (in some cases make life even possible). So it makes sense to put humanity ahead of the work. Otherwise, isn't this the grandest conflict of mission?

Good for you Boz! Some people go their whole lives without learning that lesson. One of my favorite pieces of advice I ever received was "be direct, be specific, and be non-punishing." At the time, I thought it was trite advice, but its one of the more useful tidbits I've heard.

From my experience there are a few people in IT who can learn from this and start self-reflecting. They are NOT the majority but there are angry white sociopathic nerds.

The monoculture is often criticized in the programming departments and being nice would be the first thing for diversity happen sooner.

They may forget what you said — but they will never forget how you made them feel. —Carl W. Buehner

I wonder how much of this inability to be nice to others/empathize is due to tech selection bias and how much is due to lack of socialization as children? Before computer games, etc., kids spent a lot more time playing outside with their friends in person.

I really like a presentation from Jeff Hackert in the subject:

https://twitter.com/jchackert/status/330674979198861314

>> I’m still not as good as I’d like to be at any of this...

...

>> But believing deeply that I am responsible for how I make others feel ...

...

Don't make a guilt trip out of this.

You're cool, smart and capable.

Go ahead and conquer higher heights.

Pleasing others neither been a winning nor beneficial strategy for anyone.

Several well-known people in tech are notorious jerks. So I don't think being kind is a necessary condition for career success (though it can't hurt). But I suspect it's necessary to have a happy life.

Many of such said 'jerks' are often the ones at the top, however: i.e. nobody above them to be put off their ability to communicate or display typical good teamwork.

If you're great at what you do, you can afford to be an asshole. But it doesn't mean you have to be one.

Being well-known also means your worst moments get more attention than might be deserved. Even kind people have bad days, but a bad day for a Fortune 10 CEO can follow them for life. Maybe unfair, but it's one of the (more reasonable) reasons for the inflated paycheck.

Imagine what they could achieve if they were kinder to people.

Or what they couldn't if they were. Sometimes being an asshole contributes to success rather than stymies it, see Linus and Linux.

"Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle".

Something unfortunately, we all have to keep reminding ourselves off (Yes, I know it's difficult to remember that when dealing with a jerk!).

Funnily enough, his about page is entitled: "Who Are You and Why Should I Care?"

Link: http://boz.com/about.html

Not being kind also blinds you to other people's achievements.

I wonder how the community would evolve if commenting was simply turned off for a month? If karma could only be gained through up votes, you might see better submissions.

The author is self aware and empathetic. But even if he wasn't or his natural inclination was not to become more kind, it's a really good thing to fake (and will hopefully become natural over time). Being kind is the right thing to do even if you're selfish/looking out only for yourself. A lot of really smart jerks are held back because other people don't want to work with them. Even if they're promoted for their individual contributions, they will always be limited by how much they individually can achieve vs. as a team.

Japan already does this (yes I mean the whole country)

It requires courage and wisdom to openly accept feedback and reflect on yourself instead of playing the blame game in situations like this.

Well said. This is especially useful to some of the nice geek/nerds. I'm printing it out and put it on the wall for a while.

An excellent article. Unfortunately, you can't comment on it on the site without a Facebook account, and that I don't have.

I dunno. There's a balance. Kindness in some situations just isn't the right thing. But it certainly is in most situations.

Don't they also call this empathy. I think it's critically important to resist the temptation to fire back at someone the moment you think you disagree. Take a few seconds, repeat in your head what the other person has said, then repeat that back to the person, then formulate a response. Remember, the hardest thing to do is to control your emotions, especially during times where most people can't help but get defensive.

I don't necessarily think I'm 'that great engineer', but I sure could take this advice.

But do you be kind to some of your coworkers all of the time, and all of your coworkers some of the time?

Working at Facebook does not make you an authority on any of the things he's talking about...

I wonder how this could be news to someone? Usually you learn this at kindergarten.

And yet the opening paragraph of the about page is still fairly pretentious.

This guy has a 3 letter domain for his personal blog. How did he land that?

WHOIS shows this:

Registered On February 08, 1999

I guess availability was better then, or he made some good cash in the .dot era and bought it outright from someone else?

Domain Name: BOZ.COM Updated Date: 2014-04-25T14:55:25.00Z Creation Date: 1999-02-08T05:00:00.00Z

In 1999 things were much, much different.

First registered in 1999.

It used to be pretty easy to get random little .com domain names before they got real cheap and every single word, short string and misspelling got bought.

eg I own a three letter .net that I don't even use.

I have two different friends with 3 letter .com domains. It's all about being an early adopter.

bug report: In the article search type in some non English chars like : "אאא". JavaScript exception then breaks the search for good, this must be the first search you make.

Whoa, this hit a little closer to home than I would have liked...

There is such a fine line between "hearing" and "listening". In the same respect there is such a fine line between someone "being taught" something, and that same person "wanting to learn".

Nice article. When did the golden rule get invalidated?

I don't know Boz, but having known others like him, I would say that many didn't actually violate the golden rule; people who are efficient and brash often not only don't mind, but expect others to act the same way.

The Golden Rule (treating others as you want to be treated) isn't actually very good. I prefer the Platinum Rule (treat others as THEY want to be treated)

Yes, the Golden Rule is good, because it assumes that you are the same as the other person (generally most people want to be treated with kindness and respect), rather than assuming that they are somehow different from you.

Agree with the Platinum rule. If you meet a big variety of people you'll learn fast that they want to be treated differently. There's a lot of room for social or cultural differences in humanity.

Just as an obvious example, the golden rule is why a lot of guys send dick pics.

The Platinum Rule isn't very good either. My preference is the converse of the Golden Rule: DON'T treat others as you would have them NOT treat you.

How is the Platinum rule good? When would treating someone how they want to be treated go wrong?

Your converse golden rule suffers the same problems as the golden rule - everyone should be treated individually, treating others the same as you expect people to treat you will not always work out as intended.

Took a long time for me to learn this important lesson. You can be right and someone else be wrong and get the right outcome without hurting them.

OT, but I want to thank everyone for their comments. I've found them unusually thoughtful and challenging. Merci.

I've heard this feedback from time-to-time - generally a very nice guy, but I strive to be rational, ego-less and results-oriented. "Be Kind", I couldn't agree more, but here are 3 nuances I've had trouble reconciling when applying this mindset, maybe you've had experience that could be helpful?

1. Stress & Results. Sometimes being kind can get in the way, and directly lead to a loss of results or respect from others. You wouldn't be kind to someone trying to convince you not to run out of a burning building. As the author says "when I'm under stress.."

"Because a lot of his value, when you’re making giant decisions for huge amounts of money, is saying, ‘Why aren’t you f-ing considering this and this and this?’" - Ben Horowitz on his A16Z partner from "Tomorrow’s Advance Man" in The New Yorker.

There are times when we weight effectiveness above feelings when we think about impacting others, so where's the right line? What if one person's stress threshold is higher than another's? What if one employee is less stressed because they just don't care about your company that much?

2. Passive Aggressiveness. "but more inhibited members of the team avoid any discussions with him". In an ideal growth culture, every member is giving open feedback in context, in real-time. For someone seeking the "truth", nothing is more unkind that passive aggressive behavior.

imo, the CTO f-ed up here.. instead of pointing the finger at Boz, should have focused on creating an environment where the process for resolution is true candor and real-time feedback for team improvement. That letter arose from a process of gossip, rolling into back-room conversations, rolling into a secret, anonymous survey, which led to a HR meeting w/ Boz. A better process is to set expectations for interactions and behavior amongst the whole team. It is cool that the CTO found a way to give some direct feedback and spur Boz's own thinking, just not best process outcome for team.

Everyone needs to know how to respect one another's feelings.. both the guy who is callous, and the guy who is sensitive. A manager responding to the passive aggressiveness of a sensitive team member is naturally going to sympathize more, but the squeaky wheel doesn't point to the root cause and is, in fact, rewarding unkindness.

3. "Kids Crying for No Reason" - google it. Is it kind to take pictures and laugh at kids crying? Have you ever been in a situation where you felt your co-workers emotions were perhaps unwarranted, unnecessary, or misapplied? Does your employer screen employees for the appropriateness of their emotional reactions in the kinds of situations you will interact with them?

How can you take responsibility for how your actions affect others if you have a co-worker who is upset about the workplace equivalent of "I flushed my poop before I could look at it"?

Passive aggressive behaviour is the direct outcome of someone being on the receiving end of dominating or controlling behaviour. If you don't want people to avoid saying what they think to you then you cannot crush them under the weight of your overbearing manner.

This is a phenomenal read and a great reminder to be nice.

tremendous. truly.

amen

I'm definitely more patient than I was a decade ago, but I still have little use for useless people.

I don't feel like I have to be kind to those who aren't motivated to contribute and do thoughtful work.

I empathize with you. But be careful, the trouble is that those people fill their time at work with political games. They are dangerous to someone who wants to be head down doing great work.

If you read the article, the author is talking about his relationship with coworkers, so I'm going to assume we are talking about one's relationship with coworkers. That being the case, I certainly hope you don't think any of your coworkers are "useless."

You don't have to be kind; you don't have to be anything. On the other hand, if you want to be a good engineer, with goodness defined as how much one contributes to the team/company, then you probably should be kind. If you feel like your teammate is unmotivated then it seems like if you want to be a good engineer you would do your best to motivate that person.

Having an uncaring attitude towards your coworkers could well lower their motivation which would mean your net contribution to the team is lessened as well.

"I still have little use for useless people"

The trouble with this is that you could be wrong. They might be "useless" to you but not the rest of the world.

The problem with useful/useless is how often you have to re-run the function with people you see more than once.

Run it only once, and perma-store the info? Their state could change and you miss out on opportunities.

Run it each time and behave accordingly? That doesn't work, either. People know when they're being used.

Honestly, being kind all the time sounds like a lot less work.

It depends on how they are useless. If they put genuine effort into trying not to be useless, I will still be kind to them.

Have you considered the possibility that some of your people are unmotivated because you act like a jerk to them, and you're perpetuating the problem?

If you'll forgive me quoting my own post (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9117035): A couple of jobs back, I met with a supervisor to proudly tell him that a gigantic, exhausting project I'd been working on for the last nine months was finally ready to deploy. His response, almost verbatim, was "Cool. Here's what I need you to do next..." I found it nearly impossible to care about what he wanted for the rest of my time there. 60 seconds' worth of interest and congratulations would have gotten dozens of hours of extra productivity out of me.

Yes you are right, you don't have to be kind, but kind people are advancing in their carrier faster. If you want to play this purely based on logic, and you want to advance in your carrier than you have to be kind. :)

This hits so close to home for me personally. I recently got some feedback that seemed very similar (it seemed much more useful and constructive than what boz got) and I recently had a similar realization about my friends putting up with me.

Thanks for writing and publishing this. It's very good.

If you received or find good ways to actually make these changes, please write about it.

Thanks for the encouragement, I think I might.

Good post, but since learning how to be kind isn't on Google's list of things you need to know before becoming an engineer, it's not an important skill. Right, HN?

The older I get, the more amazed I am at how truly difficult it can be to be consistently kind.

Baloney. What we have is a culture that has largely undermined the concept of constructive and well structured argument. One should read the exchanges between friendimies GK Chesterton and George Bernard Shaw. They respected each other and were friendly but if you read their output about each other they would be fired today. Why?

We are pansies.

We assume, wrongly, that argument about ideas and even light jabs at the person are tragic. They are not.

Worse we have enshrined that into law in most places with "hostile work environments". Some ideas deserve to die and you only discover that through _vigorous_ debate.

Do we have to be pricks about it? Probably not. Should we fire pricks that are often right? Absolutely not.

> Some ideas deserve to die and you only discover that through _vigorous_ debate.

Patently false.

You should provide more insight. I understand that you disagree with the statement, but you aren't really doing anything to prove your point. Granted, the original poster didn't do much to prove their claim either.

I thought it was obvious on its face that "vigorous debate" isn't the "only" way that bad ideas end up dying. In fact, plenty of bad ideas have come out of vigorous debate.

The poster never said vigorous debate is the only way that bad ideas die.

They said that vigorous debate is the only way that some bad ideas die.

That would work if people could disregard their feelings and considered only the logic of arguments. But that's not always possible, as much as we try feelings can't always be controlled (though learning to control them is definitely a worthy pursuit). By trying to be kind we're minimising the potential for feelings to get in the way of the logic. Sure it adds overhead but the advantage of this is that opinions and view that might otherwise not get expressed do.

Also how many of those pricks that are often right actually are often right and how many are just so much of a prick no one wants to challenge them?

This guy wants to be super cool and cover just everything. Be kind, be super programmer, have tattoo, write blog ... Thinking about the post, I quite understand why people don't want to work with such superheroes. Kind will not make it if it is one other thing you want to be good at. Don't show off too much will do.

That's kinda...uncalled for. Seems like you have personal issues with him? What does having a tattoo have to do with anything, or am I missing something?

Personal? No sir.

Yep, that post has lots of humblebrag in it.

Glad somebody said it...

I agree with the idea, maybe, but not the phrasing. You're quick to judge people you don't know, and shame them when they have the courage of sharing. At the end of the day, his post is on the front page, and it's doing good.

Whoa, this hit way too close to home...

Having never heard of this person before, I've done about ten minutes of research into who he is and why (in the words of his own about page) I should care.

I've come up empty. It seems like he's got enough money now that he feels like engaging in some verbal philanthropy. That's fine, but does anyone have any concrete reasons I should prioritize reading his output over others?

That his article has over a 1000 points on HN is probably a pretty good reason if you tend to enjoy reading HN.

Perhaps, just judge the content.

I don't agree with the author.

Did that my first sentence above just hurt the feelings of the author or or many of the readers over here? Please read on.

This kind of philosophies (be kind-hearted, be tolerant etc) are the ones making humanity loose their natural vigor and push people into unnatural soft-minded, lame and vulnerable population.

These self-restricting rules makes you neutral and weak against someone who goes by natural and wild instincts. This is what is happening in the case of extremism of different kinds. The natural attitude always wins.

Be yourself. Be natural. Don't let your supremacy go without gains. Don't impose restrictions on yourself, just to please others.

Look at this. The author says that the other people didn't like him because the author was always right and winning without regard to the feelings of the people who lost the argument. But still those people complain about the winner and forces the winner to mend his ways, just by holding team work to ransom, instead of improving their own thinking. And the author and his boss asks us to give in such unfair play.

Sometimes I feel most of the men in the developed world are feminized (weakened or neutralized) by their schooling and social restrictions. They are forced to present themselves always in a very pleasant form to others, instead of their natural form. Being social and well-mannered is taken to a little too far, and creating the lame populations all over world.

Please, let the better thought win and prevail. Don't let it loose to the unfair demands by the weak minds who don't want to accept the legitimate supremacy of others.

I don't think anyone thinks disagreement should lead to hurt feelings. There's a difference between being right and KIND and being right and a total ass.

We live in a civil world and as much as you promote "natural vigor" as an anthesis to kindness, there are ways to have vigor and drive while also being kind and respected. Difficult? Yes, but as a society we should aspire to do great things while also having a regard for the feelings of the other people we share this planet with.

My point is, you should not be unjust to others. And you should not be unjust to yourself. But you need not pretend to appease others just because they expect it. This messes up the whole communication. You are hiding your real feelings. They loose opportunity to learn and grow up. Infact this is more serious in case where the communication is across different cultures. People can't read the unsaid stuff.

As a scoiety, we should learn to not get offended easily, not depend on kindness from others, or beg for regard. That's the strong and ideal society. That makes it easy to achieve great things, because we are not burdened by the task of checking if it hurts anyone's feelings and to modify our work to make everyone happy.

BTW, whether somneone is being ass or not, also depends on your own expectations and pampering.

Think again, about the roots of necessity for pleasing everyone.

Disclaimer: I didn't downvote you, I just comment to offer some insight (unrequited perhaps).

You said:

  >> People can't read the unsaid stuff.

Buy many people CAN read the unsaid stuff, so maybe I'll spell this one out for you: You said:

  >> feminized (weakened or neutralized)

So I think you might have gotten downvoted for comparing femininity to weakness.

And not sure about this one, but maybe also for sounding a bit like a nazi supremacist.

Being kind is not about displaying inferiority.

I don't think you're a bad fellow, but it sounds like, for you, it feels cool to consider yourself superior because you are "right" most of the times and you "win" a lot of arguments.

Many times you can end up thinking you were right because no one present was able to overthrow your reasoning, and sometimes you end up thinking you were right because you stated your arguments with "natural vigor" and people just lost motivation on engaging with you in conversation.

You might be of the opinion of "who cares about downvotes if I'm superior because I know I'm right", but you might consider caring about the message those downvotes entail in this particular case.

Why? To make it relevant to you: Because learning to read the unsaid stuff is powerful.

Also, consider the Dunning–Kruger effect.

I don't agree with you.

I don't know what your environment is like, but I notice a lot of people who are pointlessly aggressive and competitive, or who premise their aggression on being right about something they're actually wrong about. That doesn't make these people stronger and it doesn't make the world better. It would work better if everyone just focused on doing their own best job, and constantly checked themselves for correctness, rather than acting like they're never wrong, tearing other people down and trying to make themselves look better than they are. Those activities are not producing anything real.

Most of the time we are really all just trying to get by and perhaps achieve some shared goal, there is no game to win, and the people who are acting that way are just being asshats. It is not somehow clear-minded and objective to constantly strive for "supremacy" by aggression toward others, it's just messed-up and insecure.

(And what gives with implying that weakness is inherent to women? That's something that has no proof at all.)

Women are not weaker? Ofcourse, physically they are. Otherwise why do we have sport events segregated by sex? There is a reason why they are weaker sex.

This one more instance how everyone has been educated/trained to pretend that women are not weaker. And how women are educated to feel offended if they are called weaker sex.

That has nothing to do with the earlier discussion, which wasn't about physical strength and wasn't about women being offended. You made a claim, and you were challenged to provide any support of that claim. You have not provided any support for it; and where you could have admitted you were unsure or withdrawn the claim, you tried to change the subject.

This is silly, and I'm done with this thread.

Remember, you have stated that women are not weaker and even asked for a proof. When I provided a proof for physical strength, you say something incoherent.

Ok - So let's see if women are equally strong mentally at least. How many great thinkers, world leaders, mathematicians or philosophers are out there who are women? You might say - oh they were suppressed through ages, which again proves that point that they are weaker. No point in not taking things at their face value. What's wrong for someone to accept they are weaker if they really are?

We're talking about this mainly in the context of software development, physical strength is irrelevant to ability and as a dev.

Speaking as someone who has been painted with this brush from time to time:

I try to limit myself to getting into arguments over things that will at some point become my responsibility to fix. On some projects, with certain people, that can be a pretty big fraction of the code and so I'm, well... pretty damned nosy. I try to be rough the way you'd expect a good coach to be rough. Not like some snotty know-nothing asshole. But some people don't see it.

The way I see it is something like this:

Think back to the last four or five Big Emergencies you had. Split everybody into two groups. Team A is all the people who were still working hard on a fix right up until the end. Team B is all the people who gave up, or merely looked on with concerned expressions instead of being helpful.

You listen to the people on Team A. Even the people who were part of the problem in the first place (unless there's a pattern of "Test it in Production"). Why? Because Team A is living with the consequences of the bad decisions. The people on Team B get to raise concerns, offer suggestions, and disagree, but they're really spectators.

The people who are on Team B -and- who are involved in the problems are the people you really have to watch out for. They have poor judgement and don't clean up after their own messes. Honestly these people should be on performance review, but for reasons I'll never fathom we always seem to forget these indiscretions at annual review time. I honestly wish I knew why. If anyone has a theory, I'd love to hear it.

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