Hacker News Reader

Comment by j_baker | Hacker News Reader

I have to say: working in a civil work environment makes a huge difference in terms of job satisfaction and job performance. Civility works for the business, the worker, and the customer. Nobody really benefits from incivility except for the arrogant power-monger over the very short term.

View on HN

Most of these "safe space" environments are filled with arrogant people who, while not being outright rude, can belittle you passive aggressively and it can sometimes be worse than someone just calling you out on your bullshit.

A friend of mine worked for a startup that's mentioned on HN quite a lot, (I won't say the name). The lead developers used git and IRC chat a lot. After being hired my friend began to test a new product they were working on and submitted some changes to github, they accepted the pull request and my friend submitted a few more finding all sorts of bugs. At this point the lead developers started to argue about how the changes were unnecessary and that my friend needed to learn more about how their product worked, what was rude is that they were publicly arguing while leaving him out of the conversation. No words directed at him, just conversation about him. A few weeks later they realized their project really did have a lot of bugs and pushed through a large change with many of my friends bug-fixes in it without giving him credit or even so much as a thank you.

The lead devs would pal around and make inside jokes and ask my friend to do all sorts of work while leaving him "out of the loop" as if he were some "lackey" for them to boss around and not really part of the team.

Not too long after he started working there the team told him he needed to attend a "conference on sensitivity in OSS" halfway across the country. My friend couldn't make it and then he was basically interrogated by the lead devs as to how he feels is the proper way to treat people. He said he was treated as if he was in trouble and felt like he was being accused of a crime. About a month later he left the company after being continually snubbed by his superiors and not receiving any appreciation for his work.

Personally I get this feeling with a lot of "safe space" organizations I've contributed too. The leaders are arrogant and passive aggressively rude, treat you like crap and belittle your work, then act high-and-mighty because they've never said a curse word.

I get the feeling there's a lot more to this story, would be interesting to hear the other side. Were they really that doughy?

Sounds like an organization that won't scale.

Re. civility, I've had very good results in reducing stress between both parties by clearly separating the defects in the work from the person / people involved. I think that's the key because I've had terrible experiences when that did not happen, when I was either blaming or blamed (seemingly) by teammates personally for any mistakes. Still, I'd rather receive any honest feedback than none at all, even if it is presented incorrectly and callous. Holding back feedback to be nice can grow problems and erode trust.

I think this is a great point. I try to stick to a philosophy of "support the person, critique the idea".

The vast majority of my friends and acquaintances that are in the tech industry have changed jobs with work environment (co-workers they like, friendly environment, etc.) as among the most important factors, even above compensation. That seems to be universally true of almost every developer or engineer I've come across. Work environment is a huge factor in where someone works and how long they decide to stay there or whether or not they decide to leave. Given that, engendering a friendly work environment seems like one of the most cost-effective ways to bring in and retain talented engineers.

I totally agree. Working in a nice/friendly environment makes you more motivated and therefore more efficient.

This is a personal anecdote - my dad used to run a company that sorted second hand clothing. He had a huge warehouse, where people would stand in one place and literally pick clothes out of one basket and then sort them into several smaller ones, by colour or type. The atmosphere in the warehouse wasn't exactly perfect,but employees could talk to each other and they had a radio playing music. Based on some observations, he introduced a complete ban on casual talking and he took away the radio. Sure, for the employees it must have been much worse. But the productivity increased by 50% - an average amount sorted per day per employee was 400kg, after the change it went up to 600kg, which in the scale of things made a HUGE difference at the end of the month. The company could process a lot more with the same number of people. And yes, sure - people would get unhappy and leave, but it being rather easy manual labour - there were always 50 other people willing to take the position. I'm not defending my father, I think the way he ran the company was horrible for the employees, but it's just the personal anecdote showing that working in a nice/friendly environment doesn't necessarily make you more efficient. They could chat, so they spent time chatting,not doing what they were paid to do.

Did they get a raise as a consequence of the higher output ?

Since we are social animals then preventing talking between us make things harder for us at some points, ie the job gets harder, so that could be an argument for higher wage.

He stated that for every employee his father could find 50 other people to do the job. So I guess they didn't get a raise :/

This seems like an ideal situation for pay by the piece, which would have probably increased productivity per hour (not necessarily per dollar of pay) even more. Also it would have rewarded specialists and reduced the turnover implied by 50 people in line. I wonder why that wasn't attempted.

You can get away with treating your employees like that if they only need to do menial work. But still, I wonder how sustainable was the increase in productivity? Because one explanation for that increase could be the fact that the employees felt they were being punished and were afraid to lose their only source of income, thus having to show work. Otherwise they would have left immediately under those conditions.

Another question is, could your father had had the same increase in productivity, or even more, if he had used other strategies, like productivity bonuses for the team?

Being nice and respectful is not something that you try to do despite the relentless market competition. It's something that you must do precisely because of that competition. The reason being, unless you can have a good working culture, you'll end up with a group of desperate people that have no where else to go. Good luck trying to come up with any creative work or idea with a company full of desperate people.

This is what you get for extremely unskilled labor. These people are about as unskilled as you can get.

This is a very well known and researched phenomena.

You can make any change in a workplace and see productivity go up.

This is related to the Hawthorne Effect. It even jas a wikipedia page.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect

Reply on news.ycombinator.com