I would do the exact same thing if I were her co-worker.
She clearly states that this is a project she came up with that no one else on the team wants. If no one wants it, or is engaging with it, why would you expecting your colleagues to get excited to work on this?
There is nothing more annoying in corporate that co-workers who start trying to give you projects and tasks you didn’t want, didn’t ask for and micro-managing you horizontally.
Some of my worst job experiences came from people like this. They come up with a dumb project, then “clear it with management” then come and try to make me do it for them.
Your co-workers are not your friends, especially not if you try to start assigning them work. Because who gets the credit?
You do, not them. Suddenly they have another layer of management.
I would both avoid and add friction to anyone doing what she is trying to do in this situation. I’m not paid to help my co-workers get promoted into management or do their pet projects for them.
Nowhere in the post does it mention the author asking anybody to do any work. Their coworker showed up asking questions about something they're working on.
It sounds like the coworkers don't care about this project, though:
> You've mentioned it multiple times in different venues with very little uptake from the rest of the team. It's pretty clear they are more concerned with other things.
That's ok, and happens frequently. "I don't have time to fully comprehend everything that's happening over there, but COWORKER is handling it and I don't see any obvious problems with their approach. :+1: and moving on".
Maybe some teams don't work this way, and require more direct participation and signing-off from members, which is fine too.
If you were on my team you actually do. I'm a senior+ engineer and other engineers work on the projects I lead. They get to pick their day to day work, but most projects are driven or approved of by me. We also have a manager which has a totally different set of responsibilities.
No, the article is not demanding that co-workers are excited about the project at all. Nor is the author giving tasks to anyone.
It literally starts with coworker complaining about lack of documentation, being given documentation, complaining about lack of wiki, being given like, complaining about missing info on wiki and then being shown it is there.
Author is asking people to ask for docs before complaining about lack of docs and to read existing wiki before complaining about missing info on wiki.
I guess you're really notdoingthework. Someone needs to be assigning you work, and she never presented it as if she just came up with a project and threw it at another co-worker. If it wasn't her project, where did the documentation come from, and group discussion?
This attitude sounds at least as toxic as the person who is unable to help themselves before reaching out for help to others.
There is the management career track and the individual contributor career track. Advancing along either of them should depend on growing scope of influence. That means ICs need to drive projects across larger and larger groups of people.
Of course the people who show they can do that get promoted. Try it!
That's not really how it's done in practice though, fwiw. Large tech firms mostly try to quantify "impact" and that can mean a lot of things. You could have very large name recognition by doing a lot of outreach, like talks. Being a bit reductive, that's like promoting someone for their sense of celebrity. Then there's folks who save quantifiable dollars or improve some process by some nominal percentage of $success_metric for their impact. Wrangling a large project usually is pretty arbitrary and not on a single engineer - in fact, most of them are committee based.
So the comments that were disagreed with enough to be downvoted to obscurity or sometimes even moderated out of sight entirely represent the entire community?
This happens a lot with comments like "HN is toxic" or in a more mainstream sense "gamers are toxic", and it just makes me sad.
Please don’t misrepresent what she said. She said “At the time, I was mostly referring to the open sewers that are certain web forums on certain days of the week and certain hours of those days. For some reason, when the regular people are out doing whatever they do, the haters have nothing better to do than run unchecked on the web. With no sensible people there to set them straight, they feed off each other, and pretty soon you have some straight-up nuclear waste in those forums.”
I think that is saying HN is usually a good forum, but at some limited times it is not.
I instinctly want to agree. I remember quite a few examples of that.
On the other hand. This post can be weaponized as a argument towards: 'I did enough documentation. If you disagree you are unreasonable.'
Or from people that don't do documentation but spam. With that I mean people who do not think about what to put into the documentation, but throw in everything, mostly unsorted. Like: 'It is in there. On page 756, section C, subsection 1.3.3.4. Easy to find. Just look.'
In the end I think it all comes down to the question how reasonable people work together and with respect for each other.
> On the other hand. This post can be weaponized as a argument towards: 'I did enough documentation. If you disagree you are unreasonable.'
I don't think that's what she's advocating. Her point, as I am reading it (and her post aligns quite well with some of the worst experiences I have had), is that a reasonable person isn't going to come with "there's no docs" or even "there's not enough docs", they'll do a reasonable amount of searching find the docs, and instead approach with something concrete like, "Hey, I have $question about $system. I did see the docs here $link, but they don't seem to answer that." "Oh, yeah, not clearly enough. $answer" "Thanks! Do you mind if I send a PR to add that to the docs?" "Please, by all means!"
I feel like the whole 'docs' angle of this story is kind of a distraction. The bottom line (IMHO) is that reasonable coworkers, with a reasonable interest in coming to an amicable decision quickly, will not engage in this kind of behaviour.
The anti-social person can be the consumer of the docs, or the producer of the docs. In both cases they will find a way to pick a fight. The important thing is for the reasonable person to learn to recognize what is reasonable behaviour, and not fall into the trap of making protracted concessions in a futile attempt to be reasonable themself.
I think the point being made is that you will encounter unreasonable people at work over the course of your career, and this is an example of one particular type of unreasonable. The examples you mention are very real as well! At some point even if you act in good faith, there will be situations in which you absolutely cannot bridge the gap.
This hits home really hard. I’m currently in my 2 weeks notice period after 6-7ish months at a company where this was (is?) a regular occurrence. At some point you have to chalk things up to willful ignorance and move on.
I totally know that feeling. This is why I really cherish my current, by now 3 years old, job because sort of the opposite exists here. In fact, if I forget sometimes or make a mistake, my coworkers are more likely to fix it for me in the wiki or docs than they are to use it to complain or stop me from doing something. Working in a helpful and collaborative environment has had an enormous quality of life improvement for me. It is also the most productive teams I've ever worked on. I'm not writing this to gloat or anything but offer up something I didn't know before working here: Don't just hire for talent; do not hire jerks no matter how good they are as individuals. Software engineering is an inherently collaborative venture. When building an engineering team, really do build a team instead of a collection of individuals. It's fine for engineers to be critical but don't just stop there. Find fault but also offer up a solution to help the project move forward. I can't work in the type of environment the author described anymore. Now that I know functional, collaborative teams exist I will always want to be on one.
I think programming attracts a certain type of perfectionist and controlling personality that has trouble admitting that nothing is ever going to be perfect. It’s basically narcissism where the only source of truth is whatever this person says it is, and they judge other people for not doing things the same way they would.
In reality no documentation is ever complete and all code has major flaws. Using that to tear down other people and raise yourself up is counter productive to everyone.
Indeed, perfect is the enemy of good! Once worked with a purist (think uber-perfectionist) and there is just no way to handle that. Somewhat related, managers often think things are more simple than they really are, it takes a lot of effort to make them understand.
Should add that this sort of character may or may not be a competent engineer, so not only the competent type who makes stringent demands for perfection, but also the incompetent type who fights tooth and nail to maintain the status quo that they have a grasp on and feel empowered by.
I'm painfully aware of this type of developer. Usually they really are very smart and talented, which is what allows them to act this way. In my experience, they are initially respected, then they eventually lose that through constant conflict and then leave with a bad reputation.
That sums up pretty well how I acted right out of school. Immature, controlling, impatient and off putting. It took a lot of humble reflection to see that I was being a pain in the ass, and to take the steps to be a better team mate.
In my case it didn't help that our Dev manager was insufferable himself, but that's no excuse.
Now people complain that I'm not assertive enough, go figure :)
> In my case it didn't help that our Dev manager was insufferable himself, but that's no excuse.
Maybe it did. I seem to make the most progress when confronted with the same behavior that I exhibit, which sooner or later leads to asking “is this really how I make other people feel when I act like this person?” (The answer is almost always yes)
Agreed. A brilliant jerk is definitely worse than a below average good person. I can deal with lazy, I can deal with lack of skill, I can deal with lack of education. Jerks or liars, though, they're net negatives, sometimes greatly so.
Posts and comments like this scare me.Not being a social person, while talking to others, my worst nightmare is when I ask someone a question, and they already have some presumptions about why I am asking that, and I would occasionally end up being scolded and not even know why.
In this case, because I asked about not being able to find the docs, I am already a hater because of the line of conversation others have had already.
Not at all! As I take it, the sentiment being expressed is against an individual who repeatedly, over the course of time, critiques and accuses without making an attempt to bridge the gap of understanding on their end.
For instance, in the article “There are no docs for [this thing you're doing]” would be significantly better posed as a question. “Where can I find documentation for [this thing you’re doing]?”
You can tell the author’s frustrations aren’t one off, from: “ Basically, with them, something's always wrong, and if you refute their points, they will pivot to find something else. This will go on for a while” and I think this is the general sentiment.
Everyone takes an accusatory tone now and then, or has a bad day, or whatever, but if you’re doing it consistently and refuse to be pleased that’s when it becomes “hater behavior”
I did not read that same interpretation of the article. The first question was not the problem, but the sum of the incessant questions. Sure, the first question can be a good indicator for what is to follow, but I would politely suggest not letting this article stoke your confirmation bias.
It's pretty easy to tell when someone is genuinely curious/unknowledgeable/whatever vs. when they're just hunting for something they can complain about (or something they can use to fire you, if that's the power dynamic). Another comment here brings up a waiting tables analogy which I think is really great. Asking for 3 things at once (parallel) is much different than asking for 3 things separately (serial).
And truthfully, any question that shows you've actually looked for whatever you need helps 99% of the time.
1) Talk therapy can also just be "social interaction tutoring". 10/10 would recommend
2) "There aren't any docs" is accusatory and aggressive because it's about them / their work. "I couldn't find the docs" isn't, because it's about yourself. (Edit) "“Where can I find documentation for [this thing you’re doing]?” (thanks @
rattlesnakedave!) then goes the next step by actively inviting assistance.
2a) Tone definitely matters / helps, but that's a lot harder to coach / communicate over text.
I appreciate that on point 2 you add the question "Can you help?" I find it upsetting when people make a statement and you have to infer that it's a request for help.
I had a boss who would often send Slack messages stating something like "[Coworker] is on vacation today" or "The release is out" or "Our sales are down today". It was always some statement with no reason for me to think that he wants me to do something. Of course, I assumed he wanted me to do something or else he wouldn't have contacted me. Then I had to dig out of him what he expected of me.
For everyone reading this: If you want help, please make an explicit request and make it as specific as possible.
It may interest you to scroll through your chat logs with other people to see how much you or other people do what my old boss did (i.e. make a statement and expect someone to know what you want done). I just review the logs with my current boss and was pleased to see none of my previous boss's behavior from me or him. I did, however see that kind of behavior from one of my coworkers.
Following on in a similar vein, the usage of "soft" wording can result in the same kind of misunderstanding, and this is something I'm working on improving myself.
"Should", "Might", "Potentially". Just fucking say what you think instead of mincing words (my advice to myself).
Hey, thanks for the tips. I realize the different ways to communicate also plays a role. Somehow, I did not make that distinction as in my mind, there were very similar. Thank you for laying it out like that.
(and also thanks to the child comment, which makes it explicit about asking for help, so as to remove any confusion. That is something I will apply immediately)
It's one thing to be trying to act in a constructive manner but lack some social graces. It's another thing to be a person who expresses hostility by being unreasonable and difficult.
I think this article is about the latter, not the former. Consider that a person with highly polished social skills can still be hostile and difficult. In fact, they can be worse because they can use those skills to create the illusion that they aren't doing anything wrong.
> “expresses hostility by being unreasonable and difficult”
Sadly I’ve seen well-intending ASD/Asperger’s folks be
written off as hostile. It’s a tricky balance to build culture of positivity without blocking neurodivergent folks from amplifying a team with their unique gifts.
The easiest way to not be that person is to tell people what you've done already followed by your problem. Instead of
> Coworker: There are no docs for [this thing you're doing].
Say
> "I looked at company.xyz/wiki/app/docs and don't see the docs for [this thing you're doing]. Can you help me find them?"
I'm way more understanding if someone has given an attempt to solve their problem but failed and are now coming to me. If you come out the gate with "facts" I know aren't true like [x doesn't exist] or [y isn't working] I'm more likely to be annoyed at you.
I learned a similar lesson in a simpler form when waiting tables.
Some people will run you ragged, asking for more napkins, then when you return with them, more ketchup, then when you return with that, there’s an issue with the food, then so on and so on.
If you don’t check yourself, you will actually leave your other tables without any of their basics, or their food will get cold waiting in the window, because you’ve developed tunnel vision to please this one needy table.
Sometimes things really do stack up, but there are strategies to avoid or deal with that. These strategies will fail with the Truly Needy table. And then they won’t tip well, or at all.
I learned it’s better to deprioritize that table and pay the normal amount of attention to everyone else. Better for those all to tip at a standard rate and give them a good experience than to let one group drag down the whole floor.
That super needy table didn’t need half the things they asked for anyways. Those napkins are sitting there unused when they leave. The glass of water they asked you to fill at halfway is still almost full. Life goes on.
Fortunately, for restaurants and perhaps for everything, I don't seem to notice anybody caring about yelp reviews or ratings anymore, and that's been the case (in Austin, Texas where I live, anyway) for years now. I mean, how often do you check on Yelp before deciding to check out a restaurant? I think it's been over a decade since I did such a thing, if I ever did. It may be precisely the tendency you mention, that is the reason people stopped caring about yelp reviews.
I'd imagine you're also getting a pool of more impulsive reviews than Yelp, for what that's worth. People are more likely to already have an account, and you can leave reviews directly from a Google search page.
Yelp is still plenty good as a rough approximation for quality for me. Anything under a 3.5ish is buyer beware and anything above a 4 is a pretty safe bet the restaurant is good enough.
6 or 8 years ago I used Yelp often. But when they began to insist on showing me e.g. 12 McDonalds when I searched for $Specific_Local_Burger_Place, showing sponsored results up top to obscure the restaurant I just clicked on, and tried to force me to use their app instead of their web site, I began walking toward the exit.
When I found out later how they were running a protection racket to shake down restaurants, I ran for the exit.
Nice restaurant review service you have there, Yelp. Be a shame if something happened to it. Especially if that something was your own damn fault.
Yelp is the default restaurant rating display in Apple Maps. Between that and Google Maps, a lot of people are going to see those ratings and it does have some impact even if people don't trust them absolutely — otherwise businesses wouldn't feel that they needed to pay Yelp to hide bad reviews.
I search on Yelp when looking for a restaurant to go to. I’m more likely to go to places that show up higher in the search ranking, and the rating seems to be a big component of that.
Other the other hand, I don’t actually read the reviews at all. I do sometimes look at the user-uploaded photos.
> I learned it’s better to deprioritize that table and pay the normal amount of attention to everyone else. Better for those all to tip at a standard rate and give them a good experience than to let one group drag down the whole floor.
The correct business response is to petition management to staff more accordingly so that no table has to be de-prioritized (going by the book on customer service)... Also other measures can be taken, like stocking napkin dispensers and condiments on tables so that trivial requests don't over-burden staff.
Applying attention rules to customers is a hallmark of bad customer service environments, while people are already paying a set price on the goods and/or service a restaurant delivers that should be planned for by management properly. A bad customer service environment only serves to ruin business.
If we create rules like this for how to deal with customers, based on assumptions about them, it can also wrongfully reinforce bias and discourage customers from returning which often drives even some of the most popular businesses (Denny's for example) down.
Management too often plays the training tape for employees without reading their own training book properly.
Without attention rules you're constantly rewarding people who seek out unneeded attention. You need to give employees an out when they perceive someone is abusing their attentiveness.
I really have a hard time believing that you have actually worked in a job that requires customer service. The way you frame your argument is divorced from the reality of these kinds of jobs.
This poster isn't doing bad customer service.i have no idea how you got that idea. What they're doing is stoping one bad customer from ruining other customer's experiences!
People who deal effectively and positively with difficult customers often find the best success in business, and endure best through bad economies.
If you understand human nature, you also understand that sometimes people are just having a bad day, or feeling ignored, or on their last leg.
Ignoring, or being dismissive to, any paying customer is simply bad business. If a company does that as a practice, they're probably in the wrong business.
An employee that thinks ignoring customers is a good practice likely ends up working in customer service at Comcast as the pinnacle of their career.
Those are not just my words, they're words from the bible of doing good business, and a lot of successful CEOs and business people would agree, except for the CEO of comcast perhaps.
While it's true that putting up with overly-difficult people can be good for business, this creates a race-to-the-bottom situation and there's no reason it shouldn't change. Someone's bad day is never an excuse for abusing service workers.
For what it's worth, I was a service employee who deprioritized these people and I can tell you I'm certainly not working customer service at Comcast now-a-days... which is a reference I don't even understand (I know what Comcast is but ya...).
Tangentially, I feel that there should be a form of conscription where everyone is forced to work at year or two of customer service in their teens. While I'm sure it wouldn't discourage everyone from being a prick, it could certainly help.
> If you understand human nature, you also understand that sometimes people are just having a bad day, or feeling ignored, or on their last leg.
A more thorough analysis of human nature reveals that a double-digit percentage of humanity suffers from a serious personality disorder. Some of these disorders involve taking perverse pleasure in ordering others around for no good reason.
Most experienced wait staff that I know can tell the difference pretty quickly between someone having a bad day and a bully. The latter do not deserve good customer service.
>Those are not just my words, they're words from the bible of doing good business,
Yeah, that's kind of the problem with your whole argument: it reads like your entire understanding of the field is from an undergrad business textbook.
For one, you keep equating a job having a customer service component with the specific job of customer support as you have it in the tech field.
>An employee that thinks ignoring customers is a good practice likely ends up working in customer service at Comcast as the pinnacle of their career.
Waitstaff to Call Center is not a career path I've ever seen anyone take. Too orthogonal to be a desired career change (if not downright worse if you're in a good market for service industry), doesn't build upon the skillset you've already built, and doesn't have the allure of long downtime that draws people into Security and Reception work.
Another solution is “fire the bad customers”. You can’t do that in a literal restaurant while a party is eating, but in most businesses, there’s a slice of your customer base that isn’t profitable to serve, never will be, and when you find them rather than staffing up to serve them, consider sending them away.
If you can gift them to a competitor, you can double the win.
> Another solution is “fire the bad customers”. You can’t do that in a literal restaurant while a party is eating
You can absolutely do that in a literal restaurant while a party is eating, though that's normally for customers who harass and disrupt other patrons, not karens.
In about 6 years of waiting tables I cut off exactly one party from alcohol… they threatened to shoot me in the parking lot later. Probably was the right decision, but not an easy one to make.
You have misunderstood the article. The problem wasn't the lack of napkins, the lack of ketchup or a problem with the food. The problem is with the customer. Even if you got all of those things correct, they would be upset with some other aspect of their service. If you had brought everything out ahead of time they would have complained "Why have you put so many things on my table? I never asked for any of this!"
Nah, working with the public enough shows you some people are never satisfied. The "Correct business response" may be to completely cut people like that. Your definition seems to rotate around your personal morality rather than profit motives or even other people's wants and needs.
As a former waiter I agree with both OP and you.
Yes there are people that are difficult to deal with, and yes a system ought to account for that possibility.
It's funny how that is playing itself all over again over a varieties of issues where people seem to be holding opposing views where in fact they don't have to be. Proponent of better systems can acknowledge indivual's flaws without renouncing to reforms. Morals-oriented people can acknowledge that shaming and or moral postures do not actually work without having to renounce to their feelings.
Of course here, it's about economics. Better overworking employees rather than paying one more salary. That is the economic incentive is stronger than the "aim at the most efficient system" one.
>> The correct business response is to petition management to staff more accordingly so that no table has to be de-prioritized (going by the book on customer service)... Also other measures can be taken, like stocking napkin dispensers and condiments on tables so that trivial requests don't over-burden staff.
Not so sure. Trying to accommodate the worst case customer seems a fools game. You're suggesting escalation, from running the server around to running the management around (and more work overall). Adding napkin dispensers at the tables may go against the entire aesthetic they're looking for, while not doing anything about the ketchup, water, and other frivolous requests.
>> If we create rules like this for how to deal with customers, based on assumptions about them...
There is no choice but to make assumptions about them (even just a generic model of a customer) unless you want to form some kind of relationship with them, which is not really possible in a restaurant setting (with the exception of regulars). Besides, the idea of simply deprioritizing them is quite sound - keep the other customers happy but don't deliberately insult the difficult one. You can not please everyone, so have rules that allow you to please the majority and let the others go.
> The correct business response is to petition management to staff more accordingly so that no table has to be de-prioritized (going by the book on customer service)... Also other measures can be taken, like stocking napkin dispensers and condiments on tables so that trivial requests don't over-burden staff.
Nonsense. Such customers are a huge cost and will always find reasons to overburden services.
The correct business response is to find ways to identify and eliminate them as customers, but that is rarely possible, so barring that you absolutely have to limit them to avoid their power of nuisance.
They are not people you can satisfy, or even want to: doubling staffing requirements in case one of those head cases swings by is not affordable.
> Applying attention rules to customers is a hallmark of bad customer service environments
That’s exactly what you’re advocating for, and what GP is advocating against.
> Also other measures can be taken, like stocking napkin dispensers and condiments on tables so that trivial requests don't over-burden staff.
Condiments and napkin dispensers on the table are hallmarks of fast casual and otherwise down-market restaurants, aren't they? Last time I waited tables, I had a few customers like the ones the GP described, and the best you could do was give them whatever time you could spare after giving your other tables the attention and service you would normally give. If I had asked the chef/owner to put ketchup bottles on every table, I would have gotten a long lecture on the joys of fine dining and the importance of maintaining a luxurious atmosphere.
different tiers of restaurants come with different implicit SLAs. you don't get to monopolize the attention of one out of three employees working at a pizza place just because you spent $3 on a slice of pizza. the restaurant simply can't afford to appease this kind of customer. if it's a fancy restaurant where you're paying $100+ per person, things are different.
If you do this kind of work, sometimes you will meet people that are completely unreasonable and there is no satisfying them.
Try working at a Toys R Us at Christmas and get shouted down by a parent because you ran out of the hot thing that season. For a concrete example, it was Tickle Me Elmo for me. It is not your fault, or the business' fault, but you can reset assured you will be the lightning rod for this.
As for serving, you can bet the people causing the most trouble are the least likely to tip. And at BEST they will tip nominally. There is some division that I don't understand between certain diners and servers that these diners consider their servers to not be their peers.
The customer is not always right, the entitlement of customers is off the charts in the past ten years. Expectations of online shopping applied to real life are very extreme. "I just want to have a good experience" style reasoning, when sometimes, things just don't go your way, and that is life. Deprioritizing a table is a survival strategy, to keep the plates moving.
How we solve this, I don't know, but I would say top down thinking is assuming that customers are 100% rational all the time, and I can assure you from the trenches it is not.
I upvoted your comment however I disagree with the first part of your statement - it’s not an assumption when you see “abuse of service” happening already.
If you had a client that insisted on uploading terabytes of data to your small “unlimited” text storage app, you’d likely tell them to knock it off, instead of buying more servers. This is a similar case
The service industry truth is that some customers are jerks. That doesn’t excuse poorly ran restaurants, but the good ones will occasionally fire the customer. It saves your mental health, and helps keep a healthy client base.
The super needy table may not be likely to tip well no matter how much you bend over for them anyway. Though they are unfortunately also the most likely to leave exaggerated (or even half or more completely made up) bad reviews over the smallest detail that they see as having been wrong.
Well, if you're talking about a 4.4 restaurant, they are probably meaningless. There's probably a couple of TRUE negative reviews in there.
If the restaurant is a 3.1, then yeah, try to find a different place - there IS hair in the food, the cockroaches are real and the waitress DID stick the hotdog up the you know what.
Do you not find the dispersion of ratings more interesting than the averages? Within most sites that promote ratings there is often a standard-ish dispersion, and an outlier is of far greater concern to me than the average. A solid 3 for a budget restaurant is of far lower concern than a bathtub distribution, which suggests your visit is a crapshoot.
Is this really a thing? I know that I'm much more likely to share a negative experience and completely forget a positive.. I'd always assumed we were all like that!
I find the negative reviews the most useful, not individually, but in aggregate. If several people complain about the same thing, it might actually be an issue. A well written and thoughtful negative review can also contain useful information. If the negative reviews all seem to be random bitching, however, I know the place/product/service is probably fine.
I find the negative reviews are usually the most informative. If all of a restaurant's bad reviews are about service or exceptional situations, that's a strong endorsement for the quality of the food.
Pictures of health code violations and stories of health code violations usually raise some red flags (especially if recent). Those are too easy to fake.
The most useful ones are when they go through exactly what they thought was right/wrong with the food (and a pattern emerges across the pictures and multiple reviews about different dishes).
As a startup founder, I've realized that people who send very angry missives are usually people who can be very strong advocates. Although it can be tough to bite my tongue and not respond sharply to someone who sends a profanity-laced email, it's definitely the right thing to do.
Nearly everyone who curses in their first email will apologize upon receiving an email from the founder. They were probably just having a bad day and assumed that $Company was some corporate powerhouse trying to nickel and dime their customers.
There's about 5% of people who persist in nastiness.
But almost everyone ends up being happy about the interaction, many end up renewing their subscriptions, and some will even email other companies asking them to integrate our technology. Sometimes the root of the frustration was that our service didn't work better with other platforms, which is something we can't control on our own.
So having these very excitable folks sending emails on our behalf can be a powerful thing. It just requires biting your tongue instead of replying in the heat of the moment!
> There's about 5% of people who persist in nastiness.
The thing with real stores is that all the assholes are from this group. The ones that are having a bad day may react badly to something, but do not go out of their way to create problems.
What means that real stores have many fewer problem customers. But they can't count on them changing either.
Yeah, change is harder when the timeframe is limited. I can reply to an email a couple hours later, when someone might be in a different mood. In a store, there's much less time for a change of attitude.
Yeah, the population of angry people that public-facing workers have to deal with is different than the group who writes angry emails that reach the founder. Immediate reactionary anger vs focused and articulated anger.
Having worked in a few startups and waited tables, I'm confident the angry tech customers are not the same people who are demanding in a restaurant. It sounds similar but you're talking about entirely different people.
The angry tech customer generally cares about a problem they're trying to solve. The demanding restaurant patron is focused on the feeling of exercising power over someone subservient to them.
Any overlap between those groups of people is random.
I can echo this. I run a smallish app with a decent following, and once in a while I'll get a "Your worthless app lost all my data, @#$% you!" email. A simple, "Hey, sorry to hear your having problems...tell me what's going on" does wonders.
I try to remember this when I interact with people in any medium (including in-person). Snark/anger/sarcasm are often just the envelope for the content of a message. If you don't let it affect you, you can respond to the content of the message, not the delivery, and break down a number of walls instantly. And as a bonus you're not giving someone else control over your emotional state.
That said, some people are just abusive idiots and you kind of have to have a sense for when you're wasting your energy.
There is quite a bit of difference between someone caring about what is, to them, a significant inconvenience, which is I think what you are describing with those who send angry missives about services, and those who nitpick everything constantly, in many small complaints, like the overly needy customer in a services industry.
The angry message to a tech service provider can often be a last ditch attempt at resolution. An angry review of a restaurant is usually little more than a public “fuck you”: they aren't getting further business from that customer.
The trouble with that though is that you are never quite sure which type you are dealing with until you are done serving them and the bill has been paid.
I'd really love to see tipping go away forever, at least as an expectation
> If you don’t check yourself, you will actually leave your other tables without any of their basics, or their food will get cold waiting in the window, because you’ve developed tunnel vision to please this one needy table.
o/~ I guess it's true what they say about the squeaky wheel / always getting the grease o/~
> I learned a similar lesson in a simpler form when waiting tables.
This is something everyone should be required to do. Try to last a month at it. I sure couldn't. But I'll be damned if it didn't make me 1000x more considerate towards just about everyone. We all have a choice whether to cause a fuss over stuff that hardly matters, or whether we blame someone for circumstances outside their control. There's no clearer way to see these problems and decide what kind of person you're going to be than there is from the ground level.
I worked at a place that had a customer ... it was Walmart.
They bought some equipment, captured the imagination of the sales team with stories of massive purchases, bought one moderate purchase and then for over a year RAN OVER the support team in an effort to get what they wanted. Problem was they wanted the world and bought an island of equipment, and claimed we should provide them free the appropriate equipment because they might just buy more.
Their IT staff was so unprofessional / prone to delivering insults rather than providing data I started hanging up on them. Fortunately my boss was supportive. This was an environment where we never had abusive customers, stressed customers but no personal attacks.
Finally someone got in the CEO's ear and demonstrated how much time and money we were throwing at a customer who was not happy, would not buy the appropriate equipment, and had never paid a dime on their support contracts. He cut them off.
Total waste of time and money dealing with Walmart. Nearly 20 years later now when old coworkers get together folks say they still won't shop there because of the calls they took...
If the customer is always angry, sometime the best thing is for everyone to move on.
We actually had some other customers we did that with where they were invited to move on (we supported them in the meantime of course).
For some of those customers after they realized the lay of the land moving to other systems, they came back and things were good (not Walmart).
Hah, I had exactly the same experience with Wal-Mart when working at an enterprise software company about 2-3 years ago. They scheduled a weekly meeting with a top support member and constantly asked for changes to the software.
(Not my main account because it would be inappropriate to speak about a customer of a past business)
I just had to chime in here, 2 is coincidence but 3 is a trend. They did the exact same thing to us, spending months telling us to solve an issue that was clearly a result of issues on their end, and despite repeated proof would push us into meetings at really unkind times, not doing the steps we recommended and being increasingly rude and accusatory while demanding time with the product team simply to express discontent.
I've been in food service so I know the pain of horrible customers (pizza delivery!). But, IME, that situation where a waiter must go back and forth is sometimes of the waiter's own doing.
Ex: The waiter only hears the first person at the table and then runs off before anyone else can speak. Or, they only bring one thing asked for and forget the rest. Or, they outsource bringing the things to someone else and those people do not bring them, and the waiter never checks again.
From the waiter's perspective, the customer seems unreasonable, but when making that assessment, they are missing information.
Tying this back to the article, people aren't perfect at expressing things. When this design doc situation arises, it really is on the author to figure out why that person objects no matter how it's approached. Fresh ideas are often hard to express and for people to process. Sometimes the objector just has a lingering sense the design isn't right but it's not quite identifiable yet. Obviously, sometimes they are unreasonable, but starting there unless they act like the perfectly logical person in the second example is a bad idea.
TL;DR: in all situations, it's best to try to identify the source of whatever's going on, not immediately assume a person is unreasonable.
> When this design doc situation arises, it really is on the author to figure out why that person objects no matter how it's approached. Fresh ideas are often hard to express and for people to process
Sure, I think I would do that for one or two rounds. But at some point I realize this is just someone who is being willfully ignorant or lazy and trying to make it seem like it's my fault.
Also, somebody starting with "this has no documentation" rather than "where's the documentation?" is probably a fairly reliable heuristic as to where things are going to end up.
This is the key aspect for me in my assessments of reasonability in another person.
I immediately see red flags when someone presents themself as absolutely certain of their pronouncements and more so when they repeatedly show that there is little or no correlation between their confidence level in making a particular statement and the amount of evidence they have or the amount of work they put into determining their conclusions. The truly unfortunate part, in my experience, is that managers typically see this confidence as a surface level indicator that these people know what they're talking about and give these unreasonable people the authority act on their over-confidence.
This resonates a lot with me. Early on, I had a good mentor when going into a leadership position who basically told me: "Screw the biblical saying about the sick who need the doctors. Try to spend 80% of your time with the good ones. You'll have more fun and be more productive"
It sounded very harsh and emotionally wrong at the time, but I've learned the hard way that at least for the purpose of building a working team and business, he was spot on.
As a lead, I've learned my most precious resource is my time and attention and one thing I didn't realize until very recently is that I'm rewarding the high performers by spending it on them.
But negative attention is attention as well, and if my team gets the impression I'm rewarding the ones who don't pull their own weight with excessive nurturing and pampering, they will get demotivated and eventually move on.
This is still distinct from abandoning, as I try my best to give everyone an equal chance to get started. But I've regretted more than once investing heavily into employees who ended up quitting anyway over their perceived complaints.
Wanters will always find a way. Not-wanters will always find a reason.
you see that a lot on hacker news. you make a comment and they attack you without taking a position of their own. This way they can pivot to anything that suits them and continue attacking you.
There's a tangent behavior where people are difficult because it gives them power/control. You add just enough interpersonal friction and people will do it your way. It's similar to the described scenario - nothing is good enough and there's always a justification.
I've found it an incredibly hard behavior to manage with no good outcomes. People acting in good faith just need to align on the allowed variance and the issue's done.
> There's a tangent behavior where people are difficult because it gives them power/control.
Another common one, which I've hit a few times, is that people who are being difficult are doing it mainly to get out of doing what they've been asked to do, or at least one particular detail of it, because they see it as a chore or they are simply incapable. They hope that by badgering you for every tiny detail, you'll eventually get exasperated and do that step for them because it is quicker and easier than dealing with them as they do their best not to get it done.
Sometimes management is quite savvy to the problems this causes and when reported they deal with it. Though in one example they didn't take the matter seriously at all until I was actively interviewing for other positions, because one way or another I was going to stop having to deal with that person (and the overtime I was doing to get my own work finished having spent large chunks of time trying to stop him make the project fail). This was far from his only flaw as a colleague: having massively lied about both ability and experience on his CV (which I didn't know about at the time, I was not involved with the recruiting) being the big one that was cited officially when they got rid of him.
This sounds a lot like the difference between communicating with a subordinate and with a superior (and those “on your level” often behave as superiors).
What? A coworker did these things? Saying that information is not clear, whatever you try? How 'bout if your project manager behaves like this. Because of a combination of being incompetent and trying to cover that up by shifting blame. Well that's the situation I'm currently in right now and it is very stressful, it feels there's nowhere out, apart from updating your LinkedIn profile...
Thanks! I will be dusting off my resume this evening and pimp it to the latest status. It is so sad, since I get along with most coworkers really well, and enjoy working with them. They even vouched for me but management seems not to understand the situation.
I was in this exact situation together with many colleagues. Just leave. It sucks that you have to leave what you've invested, but it's a fallacy to think that it will get better. The project manager needs to be punished and you need to find a better job.
Take it slowly and rationally though. Do not give them any hint that you are leaving at all and start a slow powerful search for your next adventure. My number one tip? Make sure you get a good manager which is both good to you as well as in control of their immediate environment meaning so that they make sure you can keep your sanity as well.
Indeed you are right! A month ago or so I had a one on one talk with him and explained that i felt targeted by him. I also gave him some examples of why I felt like that. He acted as if he had no idea, and said I was mistaken and gave some explanation that did not fully convince me. But it helped for a while though... he was more friendly up until a few weeks ago when things got rough. People's true nature doesn't change. I'm now convinced he is not to be trusted and does not have the courage to stand up for his people towards higher management, who seem to be using him as a puppet. I have to thank you for your tips! Thing is, you might start out with a good boss but positions can change quickly within a company. Luckily the job market is on our side. At least all the hard work resulted in new knowledge and skills.
Maybe it’s just me, but I notice a difference in response from the author that I personally try to avoid. To me these two things:
> There are no docs for [this thing you're doing].
And:
> Coworker: I have (specific concern) about [thing you're doing]. I couldn't find anything about it in that group post or on the wiki.
Would receive a somewhat similar response. Sure it’s annoying when people can’t find something, or when they don’t bother looking, but we also work in a field where someone might ask you something in a very hostile sounding way simply because they aren’t very skilled socially.
Telling them “yes there is”, sort of escalates the conflict in my book and while it’s totally understandable (and I’ll do this myself on my less good days) it’s also just asking for things to go south. Which is something I have learned not to waste time on.
If they continue being hostile after you respond openly, helpful and defusing, then sure, they can go fuck themselves. Just be sure that you use the corporate-speak fuck you instead of what you actually want to say to keep your hands clean.
Valid, but thats not the point of the article. The point of the article was broad vs specific and people having a predefined outcome for a conversation.
i.e.
Q: There are no docs for home page redesign.
A: They are right here
Q: I have question about the color choice of the header on home page redesign. I couldn't find anything about it in that group post or on the wiki.
A: Ah, yeah sorry, it is buried here. If it's still not clear, let's have a chat about it.
Yeah, but I think OC’s point is the first coworker isn’t impossible to deal with if you treat the first interaction with care.
If you get an off putting response, instead of hammering them with facts and trying to prove them wrong, maybe back up a minute and try to uncover what’s really going on.
Maybe you haven’t done your job on telling them why X is important to them or the company.
If I know how important something is, I don’t mind doing a little extra leg work to understand what you’re trying to tell me.
Personally it seems kind of rude to me to ask someone to review something that’s disjointed or missing info and expect them to search for the missing pieces. Most people I know are fairly busy at their jobs and you’re adding one more thing on their plate and you’re not even their boss.
If it’s really that important to you, take the time to communicate it to me clearly and simply. Otherwise, it’s like you’re passive aggressively asking me to do your work for you without giving me a good reason why I should stop what I’m doing and help you.
Again, this situation is when you ARE doing all of those things, treating the interaction with care, etc.
"Personally it seems kind of rude to me to ask someone to review something that’s disjointed or missing info and expect them to search for the missing pieces. Most people I know are fairly busy at their jobs and you’re adding one more thing on their plate and you’re not even their boss."
I feel like you're missing the point, this was just an example of someone who has taken a look and has a real question vs someone who hasn't looked at all. Of course, none of us are perfect and we will always miss things which means there will always be questions. This doesn't mean something is disjointed or missing info on purpose or maliciously. I would turn the table and say it's rude to come in, see a small mistake and assume the person didn't put effort into what they showed you.
Not saying that this doesn't happen, just saying the article was about a situation where the person DID put effort in and did their best and is having to say, essentially, "Here is the link to the documentation that is in the exact place that it is supposed to be that you chose to ignore"
> Telling them “yes there is”, sort of escalates the conflict in my book and while it’s totally understandable (and I’ll do this myself on my less good days) it’s also just asking for things to go south. Which is something I have learned not to waste time on.
no kidding. if you're going to be that abrupt, then just send them a link to the docs as the sole response.
i usually also ask "where did you try looking for it, so that i can put links there?". and then i put links there.
> i usually also ask "where did you try looking for it, so that i can put links there?". and then i put links there.
This is a seriously helpful move. When I remember to, if it takes me a while to find a link I will go back to the first place I looked for it and then add a link there.
And similarly, if I forget the password to something, after going through the password reset process I set the new password to the first thing I tried to guess initially, since apparently that's the password I already have in my head.
Thank you for this. This is why I tend to work alone. There has been a slow, steady cultivation of the perpetually helpless, antagonistic weiner personality over the last 10 years that is an absolute teeth grind.
That said, it's good to learn how to differentiate between people who are being genuine and just need guidance/attention and someone who's a wet noodle. It's easy to accidentally discourage the former mischaracterizing them as the latter.
It seems so unlikely to me that large swaths of people who act this way can make it to a place in any industry where they're surrounded by more resourceful peers. How does this even happen? I just want to make sure that I'm not creating a view out of reading exaggerated anecdotes, and that this actually reflects reality.
College degrees or plain salespersonship conferring an inappropriate amount of merit. This is the unfortunate corrolary of impostor syndrome: some people really are impostors.
I think if we want to start pushing more people into trades and de-emphasize college education: (1) we make it much harder to graduate college and (2) make college much cheaper so that pursuing that risk isn't ruinous. Then a student can explore a college path and pivot to something more suited to their attitude and skills to remain a productive member of society if it doesn't work out.
Combine that with the Pareto Principle and you start to get a fairly accurate picture of "why the world is the way it is." And this applies to all industries, not just tech.
If you look at it through a nihilist lens, it can bum you out quick. But, if you look at it like "I was given the gift/responsibility to do this well" (sans God-complex, elitist "useless eaters" attitude), it makes it a bit more fun/tolerable.
I've personally encountered this quite a bit circling around tech, in most of the cases I've seen it was due to _deeply seated_ insecurity more than anything else. Usually it corresponds with folks who find themselves in a position that they're a poor fit for but for whatever reason can't move on. They bounced into a position they can't exit and their 'value add' is applying this sort of tactic under the guise of being helpful externally.
Hmm, I suspect it’s best to decide upfront what you are willing and unwilling to do. Then others can have whatever “type” of personality they want, that’s their business.
The truth is, there are always return volleys you can make, depending on how petty you want to get, or how many cycles you feel like burning with a person like the article describes. For example any statement of the form “you should…” implies a belief in a particular policy, so you can then inquire why they think that should be so. Any question can be answered directly, or you can start asking questions about why they asked the question, or you can just answer a different question entirely. Et cetera.
At some level this stuff is war and if people aren’t going to bring their thinking caps, a change in tactic is appropriate.
Yea, here's how what you observed in your coworkers changed my behavior. I used to share my free time projects widely with coworkers. Stuff like arduino robotics projects, fun sites I would build for silly reasons, etc. Some coworkers wouldn't enjoy it and instead pick it apart for any reasons that usually starts with "why didn't you just..."
It wasn't everyone, but I started to realize that I was triggering negative feelings in some people.
I'm still trying to figure out how to explain it. Basically, take an IDL like proto/thrift. Then add in the ability to transform the data. Then add in a sense of privacy of who can see what. And boom, the foundation is laid for a document transform language.
The reason to do all of that is because the state of the board game requires a great deal of care. For instance, wouldn't it be great to offer Undo? What if you hook a socket directly up the document and then differentiate state changes after privacy checking?
Right now, it's a mess, and I'm forking efforts to work on a board game web ide where people can build board games online. Adama is the foundation for the IDE such that it starts collaborative from the get-go.
...multiplayer is hard, but some sort of replay-log of the messages is my current thinking of the only rational outcome. If you're looking to make an online boardgame IDE, then focusing on devising a game notation (which may include privacy) would be helpful.
I think the author is referring to a somewhat different personality type. While wet noodles will ask you to basically do their job for them, there is another personality that has a confrontational, zero-sum perspective where they are constantly trying to dominate other workers.
I've experienced it firsthand, and I eventually found a term for it: a "high conflict" personality [1]. There are a few ways google says you can deal with these personality types, the main one being: do not interact with that person.
If it's a persistent pattern and not just a result of stress and poor culture - not always easy to tell - they're likely on the Dark Triad spectrum.
Or at the very least they don't like you personally and are trying to bully you.
It's not usually about the presented issue. The relationship dynamics are the real truth.
Everyone has bad days. But if interactions consistently take this direction - especially to the point where anticipating them causes anxiety - it's time to consider moving on.
> It's not usually about the presented issue. The relationship dynamics are the real truth.
Absolutely. I was on the wrong side of such a dynamic until recently, by the end of it (thankfully I switched teams) it was a straight up bullying situation.
And much like an abusive romantic relationship, it escalated slowly in a way that was difficult to notice.
My point is, yes, do whatever you can to stay away from these kind of people.
If it's possible to take a positive out of it, it should mean that the signs are easier to spot earlier if, god forbid, the situation occurs again later in your career.
I'm currently (this weekend) going to be applying for jobs to extricate myself from what I recognise as the early stages of exactly such a situation.
I see it differently. At work, we have several bothersome but sorely needed issues that needs doing, but no one is volunteering to do them, because they mostly consist of loads of thankless work, that may drag on, and will distract you from tasks that earn easier praise. Eventually, one or more of us get sufficiently annoyed to clean up whatever the issue was, but that no one volunteered to work on it, does not mean they are not grateful someone eventually did. I have botb been the volunteer and the feetdragger at times, and have seen colleagues i appreciate in both roles too
The biggest difference between junior devs and senior devs is the ability to dig for answers and information and only ask when you are completely blocked. It seems like you've surrounded yourself with junior engineers and aren't interested in mentoring them into doing better. You should talk to your manager, or find a more technical place to work with fewer people to mentor.
I read this through a completely different lens. The people I've seen with this type of behaviour have been bitter or incompetent leads or managers. I too wished they would take a long hike of a short bridge, but chose to leave the company instead. Entitled and demanding people who offered very little value and had built their careers by trampling on others. No thanks for me.
There are certainly exceptions to every case, but I when I was first starting out my career, I was super guilty of doing this. Always asking my coworkers for help or information, even though I had all the access to information that I needed, or could just ask Google. It wasn't until the lead engineer kindly sat me down and told me that I need to be more responsible for my interruptions and only ask when you're completely stumped. Some of the best career advice I have gotten in this industry.
That is good advice! I got the same from my first manager: Research and try to find the answer first before reaching out for help. I had in fact already done that in the particular situation in which he commented, but he was right in principle anyway, so no harm done.
I have a very different feeling about the OPs situation though. This is not about junior people asking too many questions or being lazy or incompetent, it is about a personality of people who are just entitled and demanding and just generally bitter assholes. Not typically seen in juniors!
My last two positions have followed the exact opposite philosophy, and I prefer their take.
The general consensus at these places was that getting to the information faster is preferable. We have a team chat channel for a reason, ask their. Don't stop your search, and don't ask first thing, but after a cursory glance, ask. Then continue to search on your own. If someone knows the answer and sees the question, they should respond. If you find the answer first, update the thread and answer your own question in case it helps anyone else.
That said, I agree if the answer was easily found in a google search. That's the kind of basic info an engineer/developer should be able to answer on their own with research and self-exploration.
It's key to be able to tell quickly whether the answer/info you're looking for is likely to be a common/general piece of info or a company/industry specific piece of knowledge that might not be found widely.
Hard disagree, but obviously our mileage has varied. I find that junior devs are the most hungry and will comb through endless poorly organized docs and source code before asking a question that makes them look like they "don't belong".
Yeah I agree. "Only asking when you are completely blocked" definitely isn't a sign of seniority: it might mean losing a lot of time for little benefit. Maybe the person with the knowledge would be very happy spending 10min with you rather than you spending hours figuring things out by yourself.
I didn't see this as a hostile student, I saw it as a hostile co-worker who is trying to accuse you of something you didn't do.
A junior dev may ask a lot of questions but that would be like, "Where is that documented? How do I read that? I don't understand what it's saying." A senior person might have already grokked a lot of it but didn't realize there was hidden context somewhere else, so when they say they couldn't find the documentation you show them and they go back to read it. A hostile student (someone who wants to be force-fed info instead of reading themselves) would pepper you with questions showing they didn't in good faith read any of the docs, but they wouldn't lie and say the docs weren't there. This is someone who thought that you were slacking off or wasting time and want to show that, and they'll keep at it until they can find something to stick. And if they can't, they'll make you have two mutually exclusive things to be true in order to satisfy them.
This is just somebody blowing you off who probably isn't allowed to just ignore you, and they're buying time by sending you on errands.
edit: the solution is probably to make clear to others that they're blowing you off, maybe by publicly requiring that they follow up on the next errand they're sending you on with some sort of deliverable on their end.
edit2: and if nobody else cares that they're blowing you off, look for another job.
non-violent communication [0] and sales culture [1] both teach us that when someone makes a request, we can either take it at face value, or try to understand the underlying need. In Rachel's case, the requests kept on being red herrings, because whatever this person's underlying need, it wasn't for the design doc to be in the wiki or whatever. A process of discovery might have been a better track than continually trying to hit a moving target.
Then again, when I've been on the other side of a moving target -- when a supervisor kept coming up with things I was doing wrong that never quite jelled together -- it was because a decision about my continued employment had already been made in principle, but no one was acknowledging it head-on for political/legal reasons. In that situation, I don't think there's any way to get off-script except just to quit, which is exactly what your supervisor and HR department are probably hoping for.
The "bad" example in the blog post makes me think that the persons need might just to be validated about unhappy or frustrated they are at work. Someone to listen to them for a just few minutes. When I've seen this kind of behaviour in others or myself, it's usually because of deadlines, multiple blockers, not being able to get forward momentum, along with some time pressure.
The difficulties with non-violent communication I've found are:
a) it's hard to do well.
b) you have to be pretty calm and grounded yourself.
c) it feels like a lot of extra work.
I think it's worth it for important interactions such as with partners, family, and good friends.
I once worked for a manager like this for some fraction of a year. He was the deputy director of systems engineering, but it seemed to me that part of his brain was missing. During that time, the attrition in our group was over 50%/year. I got the worst performance review of my career from him and I was happy to move on to a better position elsewhere in the company.
A phenomenon I've never stopped seeing online is people asking a simple factual question ("what is X?") instead of just using a search engine which would get an answer instantly.
Or people who, when given documentation, insist on asking a series of questions which are all directly answered if you bother reading the clear, concise documentation at all.
The worst I’ve seen so far: people posting trackbacks, no comments or anything, (the sort of lack of effort that would get flagged even on stack overflow), in a massive slack channel asking for help.
I used to think this myself. I even got in trouble from my university professor when I complained about other students using our internal forum to ask simple googleable questions.
Now I think of it as a different style of knowledge seeking. In life, some people get answers themselves via physical artifacts and other people get answers by talking to more knowledgeable people. One involves more socialization than the other.
I think both styles are valid and have different pros and cons. I find it less annoying when I think about those interactions like this.
Simple obvious questions can be natterings about the "known unknowns". 1) Where do I order a beer? 2) Do they serve food? 3) Which tram do I take to get there? Progressively these three questions tell us more about the querant's location or context. But this can be quite unconscious. What about asking for summation: You've asked about beer, food and tram info, can you sum up for me what would make you happy? (Really want uncle Owen's fish and chips. Want a companion to eat with...)
Simple obvious questions can also be testing for "true facts" as opposed to "documented facts", although I would expect that behavior to subside with increasing acquaintance.
Eh, I'm one of those people sometimes. If it's a word I don't know that I want a definition for, sure I'll look it up.
If it's a concept, an event, or something more broad then I'll just ask because I find I often get more context from individual conversations than from consulting the hive mind. It can often open up avenues for conversation and learning that would have not otherwise happened.
I do the same for in-person in conversation. If I don't know what something is, I'm not going to whip out my phone and look it up, I just ask "what does that word mean?" or "toilet paper...what's that?"
293 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 294 ms ] threadShe clearly states that this is a project she came up with that no one else on the team wants. If no one wants it, or is engaging with it, why would you expecting your colleagues to get excited to work on this?
There is nothing more annoying in corporate that co-workers who start trying to give you projects and tasks you didn’t want, didn’t ask for and micro-managing you horizontally.
Some of my worst job experiences came from people like this. They come up with a dumb project, then “clear it with management” then come and try to make me do it for them.
Your co-workers are not your friends, especially not if you try to start assigning them work. Because who gets the credit?
You do, not them. Suddenly they have another layer of management.
I would both avoid and add friction to anyone doing what she is trying to do in this situation. I’m not paid to help my co-workers get promoted into management or do their pet projects for them.
> You've mentioned it multiple times in different venues with very little uptake from the rest of the team. It's pretty clear they are more concerned with other things.
Maybe some teams don't work this way, and require more direct participation and signing-off from members, which is fine too.
It literally starts with coworker complaining about lack of documentation, being given documentation, complaining about lack of wiki, being given like, complaining about missing info on wiki and then being shown it is there.
Author is asking people to ask for docs before complaining about lack of docs and to read existing wiki before complaining about missing info on wiki.
This attitude sounds at least as toxic as the person who is unable to help themselves before reaching out for help to others.
Of course the people who show they can do that get promoted. Try it!
Any ideas which forums they're referencing here?
http://rachelbythebay.com/w/2021/11/06/sql/
That got this response on HN:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29139902
And followed up with this post:
http://rachelbythebay.com/w/2021/11/07/select/
Turn on "show dead" in your preferences here on HN and check out the second page, in particular.
This happens a lot with comments like "HN is toxic" or in a more mainstream sense "gamers are toxic", and it just makes me sad.
I think that is saying HN is usually a good forum, but at some limited times it is not.
On the other hand. This post can be weaponized as a argument towards: 'I did enough documentation. If you disagree you are unreasonable.'
Or from people that don't do documentation but spam. With that I mean people who do not think about what to put into the documentation, but throw in everything, mostly unsorted. Like: 'It is in there. On page 756, section C, subsection 1.3.3.4. Easy to find. Just look.'
In the end I think it all comes down to the question how reasonable people work together and with respect for each other.
I don't think that's what she's advocating. Her point, as I am reading it (and her post aligns quite well with some of the worst experiences I have had), is that a reasonable person isn't going to come with "there's no docs" or even "there's not enough docs", they'll do a reasonable amount of searching find the docs, and instead approach with something concrete like, "Hey, I have $question about $system. I did see the docs here $link, but they don't seem to answer that." "Oh, yeah, not clearly enough. $answer" "Thanks! Do you mind if I send a PR to add that to the docs?" "Please, by all means!"
The anti-social person can be the consumer of the docs, or the producer of the docs. In both cases they will find a way to pick a fight. The important thing is for the reasonable person to learn to recognize what is reasonable behaviour, and not fall into the trap of making protracted concessions in a futile attempt to be reasonable themself.
In reality no documentation is ever complete and all code has major flaws. Using that to tear down other people and raise yourself up is counter productive to everyone.
In my case it didn't help that our Dev manager was insufferable himself, but that's no excuse.
Now people complain that I'm not assertive enough, go figure :)
Maybe it did. I seem to make the most progress when confronted with the same behavior that I exhibit, which sooner or later leads to asking “is this really how I make other people feel when I act like this person?” (The answer is almost always yes)
In this case, because I asked about not being able to find the docs, I am already a hater because of the line of conversation others have had already.
For instance, in the article “There are no docs for [this thing you're doing]” would be significantly better posed as a question. “Where can I find documentation for [this thing you’re doing]?”
You can tell the author’s frustrations aren’t one off, from: “ Basically, with them, something's always wrong, and if you refute their points, they will pivot to find something else. This will go on for a while” and I think this is the general sentiment.
Everyone takes an accusatory tone now and then, or has a bad day, or whatever, but if you’re doing it consistently and refuse to be pleased that’s when it becomes “hater behavior”
And truthfully, any question that shows you've actually looked for whatever you need helps 99% of the time.
1) Talk therapy can also just be "social interaction tutoring". 10/10 would recommend
2) "There aren't any docs" is accusatory and aggressive because it's about them / their work. "I couldn't find the docs" isn't, because it's about yourself. (Edit) "“Where can I find documentation for [this thing you’re doing]?” (thanks @ rattlesnakedave!) then goes the next step by actively inviting assistance.
2a) Tone definitely matters / helps, but that's a lot harder to coach / communicate over text.
I had a boss who would often send Slack messages stating something like "[Coworker] is on vacation today" or "The release is out" or "Our sales are down today". It was always some statement with no reason for me to think that he wants me to do something. Of course, I assumed he wanted me to do something or else he wouldn't have contacted me. Then I had to dig out of him what he expected of me.
For everyone reading this: If you want help, please make an explicit request and make it as specific as possible.
It may interest you to scroll through your chat logs with other people to see how much you or other people do what my old boss did (i.e. make a statement and expect someone to know what you want done). I just review the logs with my current boss and was pleased to see none of my previous boss's behavior from me or him. I did, however see that kind of behavior from one of my coworkers.
Making requests explicit rather than veiled by an invisible contract is a good practice at work and in basically any kind of human relationship.
"The trash is full" vs "will you take out the trash for me?" Is a world of difference.
"Should", "Might", "Potentially". Just fucking say what you think instead of mincing words (my advice to myself).
(and also thanks to the child comment, which makes it explicit about asking for help, so as to remove any confusion. That is something I will apply immediately)
I think this article is about the latter, not the former. Consider that a person with highly polished social skills can still be hostile and difficult. In fact, they can be worse because they can use those skills to create the illusion that they aren't doing anything wrong.
Sadly I’ve seen well-intending ASD/Asperger’s folks be written off as hostile. It’s a tricky balance to build culture of positivity without blocking neurodivergent folks from amplifying a team with their unique gifts.
> Coworker: There are no docs for [this thing you're doing].
Say
> "I looked at company.xyz/wiki/app/docs and don't see the docs for [this thing you're doing]. Can you help me find them?"
I'm way more understanding if someone has given an attempt to solve their problem but failed and are now coming to me. If you come out the gate with "facts" I know aren't true like [x doesn't exist] or [y isn't working] I'm more likely to be annoyed at you.
Some people will run you ragged, asking for more napkins, then when you return with them, more ketchup, then when you return with that, there’s an issue with the food, then so on and so on.
If you don’t check yourself, you will actually leave your other tables without any of their basics, or their food will get cold waiting in the window, because you’ve developed tunnel vision to please this one needy table.
Sometimes things really do stack up, but there are strategies to avoid or deal with that. These strategies will fail with the Truly Needy table. And then they won’t tip well, or at all.
I learned it’s better to deprioritize that table and pay the normal amount of attention to everyone else. Better for those all to tip at a standard rate and give them a good experience than to let one group drag down the whole floor.
That super needy table didn’t need half the things they asked for anyways. Those napkins are sitting there unused when they leave. The glass of water they asked you to fill at halfway is still almost full. Life goes on.
I asked them why they were filtering my reviews, and got the old "sorry, the algorithm has decided you're not to be trusted, nothing I can do" line.
So much for trying to warn people, I suppose. Though I've seen similar behavior with Google too.
When I found out later how they were running a protection racket to shake down restaurants, I ran for the exit.
Nice restaurant review service you have there, Yelp. Be a shame if something happened to it. Especially if that something was your own damn fault.
I just don’t give a fuck about Yelpers.
Other the other hand, I don’t actually read the reviews at all. I do sometimes look at the user-uploaded photos.
The correct business response is to petition management to staff more accordingly so that no table has to be de-prioritized (going by the book on customer service)... Also other measures can be taken, like stocking napkin dispensers and condiments on tables so that trivial requests don't over-burden staff.
Applying attention rules to customers is a hallmark of bad customer service environments, while people are already paying a set price on the goods and/or service a restaurant delivers that should be planned for by management properly. A bad customer service environment only serves to ruin business.
If we create rules like this for how to deal with customers, based on assumptions about them, it can also wrongfully reinforce bias and discourage customers from returning which often drives even some of the most popular businesses (Denny's for example) down.
Management too often plays the training tape for employees without reading their own training book properly.
This poster isn't doing bad customer service.i have no idea how you got that idea. What they're doing is stoping one bad customer from ruining other customer's experiences!
The customer is not always right.
One of my favorite daily visits, is a site called "Not Always Right," and it has many stories like this: https://notalwaysright.com/newest/
If you understand human nature, you also understand that sometimes people are just having a bad day, or feeling ignored, or on their last leg.
Ignoring, or being dismissive to, any paying customer is simply bad business. If a company does that as a practice, they're probably in the wrong business.
An employee that thinks ignoring customers is a good practice likely ends up working in customer service at Comcast as the pinnacle of their career.
Those are not just my words, they're words from the bible of doing good business, and a lot of successful CEOs and business people would agree, except for the CEO of comcast perhaps.
For what it's worth, I was a service employee who deprioritized these people and I can tell you I'm certainly not working customer service at Comcast now-a-days... which is a reference I don't even understand (I know what Comcast is but ya...).
Tangentially, I feel that there should be a form of conscription where everyone is forced to work at year or two of customer service in their teens. While I'm sure it wouldn't discourage everyone from being a prick, it could certainly help.
A more thorough analysis of human nature reveals that a double-digit percentage of humanity suffers from a serious personality disorder. Some of these disorders involve taking perverse pleasure in ordering others around for no good reason.
Most experienced wait staff that I know can tell the difference pretty quickly between someone having a bad day and a bully. The latter do not deserve good customer service.
Yeah, that's kind of the problem with your whole argument: it reads like your entire understanding of the field is from an undergrad business textbook.
For one, you keep equating a job having a customer service component with the specific job of customer support as you have it in the tech field.
>An employee that thinks ignoring customers is a good practice likely ends up working in customer service at Comcast as the pinnacle of their career.
Waitstaff to Call Center is not a career path I've ever seen anyone take. Too orthogonal to be a desired career change (if not downright worse if you're in a good market for service industry), doesn't build upon the skillset you've already built, and doesn't have the allure of long downtime that draws people into Security and Reception work.
If you can gift them to a competitor, you can double the win.
You can absolutely do that in a literal restaurant while a party is eating, though that's normally for customers who harass and disrupt other patrons, not karens.
This isn't a staffing issue.
As management “staff” are also your customers and you want to serve them as well.
Of course here, it's about economics. Better overworking employees rather than paying one more salary. That is the economic incentive is stronger than the "aim at the most efficient system" one.
Not so sure. Trying to accommodate the worst case customer seems a fools game. You're suggesting escalation, from running the server around to running the management around (and more work overall). Adding napkin dispensers at the tables may go against the entire aesthetic they're looking for, while not doing anything about the ketchup, water, and other frivolous requests.
>> If we create rules like this for how to deal with customers, based on assumptions about them...
There is no choice but to make assumptions about them (even just a generic model of a customer) unless you want to form some kind of relationship with them, which is not really possible in a restaurant setting (with the exception of regulars). Besides, the idea of simply deprioritizing them is quite sound - keep the other customers happy but don't deliberately insult the difficult one. You can not please everyone, so have rules that allow you to please the majority and let the others go.
Nonsense. Such customers are a huge cost and will always find reasons to overburden services.
The correct business response is to find ways to identify and eliminate them as customers, but that is rarely possible, so barring that you absolutely have to limit them to avoid their power of nuisance.
They are not people you can satisfy, or even want to: doubling staffing requirements in case one of those head cases swings by is not affordable.
> Applying attention rules to customers is a hallmark of bad customer service environments
That’s exactly what you’re advocating for, and what GP is advocating against.
Condiments and napkin dispensers on the table are hallmarks of fast casual and otherwise down-market restaurants, aren't they? Last time I waited tables, I had a few customers like the ones the GP described, and the best you could do was give them whatever time you could spare after giving your other tables the attention and service you would normally give. If I had asked the chef/owner to put ketchup bottles on every table, I would have gotten a long lecture on the joys of fine dining and the importance of maintaining a luxurious atmosphere.
If you do this kind of work, sometimes you will meet people that are completely unreasonable and there is no satisfying them.
Try working at a Toys R Us at Christmas and get shouted down by a parent because you ran out of the hot thing that season. For a concrete example, it was Tickle Me Elmo for me. It is not your fault, or the business' fault, but you can reset assured you will be the lightning rod for this.
As for serving, you can bet the people causing the most trouble are the least likely to tip. And at BEST they will tip nominally. There is some division that I don't understand between certain diners and servers that these diners consider their servers to not be their peers.
The customer is not always right, the entitlement of customers is off the charts in the past ten years. Expectations of online shopping applied to real life are very extreme. "I just want to have a good experience" style reasoning, when sometimes, things just don't go your way, and that is life. Deprioritizing a table is a survival strategy, to keep the plates moving.
How we solve this, I don't know, but I would say top down thinking is assuming that customers are 100% rational all the time, and I can assure you from the trenches it is not.
If you had a client that insisted on uploading terabytes of data to your small “unlimited” text storage app, you’d likely tell them to knock it off, instead of buying more servers. This is a similar case
If the restaurant is a 3.1, then yeah, try to find a different place - there IS hair in the food, the cockroaches are real and the waitress DID stick the hotdog up the you know what.
Pictures of health code violations and stories of health code violations usually raise some red flags (especially if recent). Those are too easy to fake.
The most useful ones are when they go through exactly what they thought was right/wrong with the food (and a pattern emerges across the pictures and multiple reviews about different dishes).
Nearly everyone who curses in their first email will apologize upon receiving an email from the founder. They were probably just having a bad day and assumed that $Company was some corporate powerhouse trying to nickel and dime their customers.
There's about 5% of people who persist in nastiness.
But almost everyone ends up being happy about the interaction, many end up renewing their subscriptions, and some will even email other companies asking them to integrate our technology. Sometimes the root of the frustration was that our service didn't work better with other platforms, which is something we can't control on our own.
So having these very excitable folks sending emails on our behalf can be a powerful thing. It just requires biting your tongue instead of replying in the heat of the moment!
The thing with real stores is that all the assholes are from this group. The ones that are having a bad day may react badly to something, but do not go out of their way to create problems.
What means that real stores have many fewer problem customers. But they can't count on them changing either.
The angry tech customer generally cares about a problem they're trying to solve. The demanding restaurant patron is focused on the feeling of exercising power over someone subservient to them.
Any overlap between those groups of people is random.
I try to remember this when I interact with people in any medium (including in-person). Snark/anger/sarcasm are often just the envelope for the content of a message. If you don't let it affect you, you can respond to the content of the message, not the delivery, and break down a number of walls instantly. And as a bonus you're not giving someone else control over your emotional state.
That said, some people are just abusive idiots and you kind of have to have a sense for when you're wasting your energy.
The angry message to a tech service provider can often be a last ditch attempt at resolution. An angry review of a restaurant is usually little more than a public “fuck you”: they aren't getting further business from that customer.
I'd really love to see tipping go away forever, at least as an expectation
o/~ I guess it's true what they say about the squeaky wheel / always getting the grease o/~
-- James Taylor
I don't remember where I first heard it, but it's rung true for me.
This is something everyone should be required to do. Try to last a month at it. I sure couldn't. But I'll be damned if it didn't make me 1000x more considerate towards just about everyone. We all have a choice whether to cause a fuss over stuff that hardly matters, or whether we blame someone for circumstances outside their control. There's no clearer way to see these problems and decide what kind of person you're going to be than there is from the ground level.
In high school I worked at a pizza place and it would not be an exaggeration to say it opened my eyes to a lot of things.
I'm very glad I worked there.
They bought some equipment, captured the imagination of the sales team with stories of massive purchases, bought one moderate purchase and then for over a year RAN OVER the support team in an effort to get what they wanted. Problem was they wanted the world and bought an island of equipment, and claimed we should provide them free the appropriate equipment because they might just buy more.
Their IT staff was so unprofessional / prone to delivering insults rather than providing data I started hanging up on them. Fortunately my boss was supportive. This was an environment where we never had abusive customers, stressed customers but no personal attacks.
Finally someone got in the CEO's ear and demonstrated how much time and money we were throwing at a customer who was not happy, would not buy the appropriate equipment, and had never paid a dime on their support contracts. He cut them off.
Total waste of time and money dealing with Walmart. Nearly 20 years later now when old coworkers get together folks say they still won't shop there because of the calls they took...
If the customer is always angry, sometime the best thing is for everyone to move on.
We actually had some other customers we did that with where they were invited to move on (we supported them in the meantime of course).
For some of those customers after they realized the lay of the land moving to other systems, they came back and things were good (not Walmart).
I just had to chime in here, 2 is coincidence but 3 is a trend. They did the exact same thing to us, spending months telling us to solve an issue that was clearly a result of issues on their end, and despite repeated proof would push us into meetings at really unkind times, not doing the steps we recommended and being increasingly rude and accusatory while demanding time with the product team simply to express discontent.
I would have loved to be able to just say no.
Ex: The waiter only hears the first person at the table and then runs off before anyone else can speak. Or, they only bring one thing asked for and forget the rest. Or, they outsource bringing the things to someone else and those people do not bring them, and the waiter never checks again.
From the waiter's perspective, the customer seems unreasonable, but when making that assessment, they are missing information.
Tying this back to the article, people aren't perfect at expressing things. When this design doc situation arises, it really is on the author to figure out why that person objects no matter how it's approached. Fresh ideas are often hard to express and for people to process. Sometimes the objector just has a lingering sense the design isn't right but it's not quite identifiable yet. Obviously, sometimes they are unreasonable, but starting there unless they act like the perfectly logical person in the second example is a bad idea.
TL;DR: in all situations, it's best to try to identify the source of whatever's going on, not immediately assume a person is unreasonable.
Sure, I think I would do that for one or two rounds. But at some point I realize this is just someone who is being willfully ignorant or lazy and trying to make it seem like it's my fault.
I immediately see red flags when someone presents themself as absolutely certain of their pronouncements and more so when they repeatedly show that there is little or no correlation between their confidence level in making a particular statement and the amount of evidence they have or the amount of work they put into determining their conclusions. The truly unfortunate part, in my experience, is that managers typically see this confidence as a surface level indicator that these people know what they're talking about and give these unreasonable people the authority act on their over-confidence.
It sounded very harsh and emotionally wrong at the time, but I've learned the hard way that at least for the purpose of building a working team and business, he was spot on.
As a lead, I've learned my most precious resource is my time and attention and one thing I didn't realize until very recently is that I'm rewarding the high performers by spending it on them.
But negative attention is attention as well, and if my team gets the impression I'm rewarding the ones who don't pull their own weight with excessive nurturing and pampering, they will get demotivated and eventually move on.
This is still distinct from abandoning, as I try my best to give everyone an equal chance to get started. But I've regretted more than once investing heavily into employees who ended up quitting anyway over their perceived complaints.
Wanters will always find a way. Not-wanters will always find a reason.
Spend the time saving those who can be saved with the resources you have, and don't waste time on those who can't.
It's an easy thing to talk about (once you discover the concept). It's much harder to put into practice.
If you do, it’s only going to squeak louder and longer.
But more generally, why would we require someone to put forth an alternative view as part of criticizing one that's already being discussed?
Something went down, contact X.
Coop: X isn't the same company. It should be Y.
No seriously, same person. Contact either will be same person.
Coop: Same name, different people. I need contact information for X.
No seriously, same person.
Coop: I called some absolutely third party and they didnt know who I was talking about.
So what are you going to do now? You really need to contact X. The sooner the better.
I've found it an incredibly hard behavior to manage with no good outcomes. People acting in good faith just need to align on the allowed variance and the issue's done.
Another common one, which I've hit a few times, is that people who are being difficult are doing it mainly to get out of doing what they've been asked to do, or at least one particular detail of it, because they see it as a chore or they are simply incapable. They hope that by badgering you for every tiny detail, you'll eventually get exasperated and do that step for them because it is quicker and easier than dealing with them as they do their best not to get it done.
Sometimes management is quite savvy to the problems this causes and when reported they deal with it. Though in one example they didn't take the matter seriously at all until I was actively interviewing for other positions, because one way or another I was going to stop having to deal with that person (and the overtime I was doing to get my own work finished having spent large chunks of time trying to stop him make the project fail). This was far from his only flaw as a colleague: having massively lied about both ability and experience on his CV (which I didn't know about at the time, I was not involved with the recruiting) being the big one that was cited officially when they got rid of him.
Take it slowly and rationally though. Do not give them any hint that you are leaving at all and start a slow powerful search for your next adventure. My number one tip? Make sure you get a good manager which is both good to you as well as in control of their immediate environment meaning so that they make sure you can keep your sanity as well.
> There are no docs for [this thing you're doing].
And:
> Coworker: I have (specific concern) about [thing you're doing]. I couldn't find anything about it in that group post or on the wiki.
Would receive a somewhat similar response. Sure it’s annoying when people can’t find something, or when they don’t bother looking, but we also work in a field where someone might ask you something in a very hostile sounding way simply because they aren’t very skilled socially.
Telling them “yes there is”, sort of escalates the conflict in my book and while it’s totally understandable (and I’ll do this myself on my less good days) it’s also just asking for things to go south. Which is something I have learned not to waste time on.
If they continue being hostile after you respond openly, helpful and defusing, then sure, they can go fuck themselves. Just be sure that you use the corporate-speak fuck you instead of what you actually want to say to keep your hands clean.
i.e. Q: There are no docs for home page redesign. A: They are right here
Q: I have question about the color choice of the header on home page redesign. I couldn't find anything about it in that group post or on the wiki. A: Ah, yeah sorry, it is buried here. If it's still not clear, let's have a chat about it.
If you get an off putting response, instead of hammering them with facts and trying to prove them wrong, maybe back up a minute and try to uncover what’s really going on.
Maybe you haven’t done your job on telling them why X is important to them or the company.
If I know how important something is, I don’t mind doing a little extra leg work to understand what you’re trying to tell me.
Personally it seems kind of rude to me to ask someone to review something that’s disjointed or missing info and expect them to search for the missing pieces. Most people I know are fairly busy at their jobs and you’re adding one more thing on their plate and you’re not even their boss.
If it’s really that important to you, take the time to communicate it to me clearly and simply. Otherwise, it’s like you’re passive aggressively asking me to do your work for you without giving me a good reason why I should stop what I’m doing and help you.
"Personally it seems kind of rude to me to ask someone to review something that’s disjointed or missing info and expect them to search for the missing pieces. Most people I know are fairly busy at their jobs and you’re adding one more thing on their plate and you’re not even their boss."
I feel like you're missing the point, this was just an example of someone who has taken a look and has a real question vs someone who hasn't looked at all. Of course, none of us are perfect and we will always miss things which means there will always be questions. This doesn't mean something is disjointed or missing info on purpose or maliciously. I would turn the table and say it's rude to come in, see a small mistake and assume the person didn't put effort into what they showed you.
Not saying that this doesn't happen, just saying the article was about a situation where the person DID put effort in and did their best and is having to say, essentially, "Here is the link to the documentation that is in the exact place that it is supposed to be that you chose to ignore"
no kidding. if you're going to be that abrupt, then just send them a link to the docs as the sole response.
i usually also ask "where did you try looking for it, so that i can put links there?". and then i put links there.
This is a seriously helpful move. When I remember to, if it takes me a while to find a link I will go back to the first place I looked for it and then add a link there.
And similarly, if I forget the password to something, after going through the password reset process I set the new password to the first thing I tried to guess initially, since apparently that's the password I already have in my head.
That said, it's good to learn how to differentiate between people who are being genuine and just need guidance/attention and someone who's a wet noodle. It's easy to accidentally discourage the former mischaracterizing them as the latter.
I think if we want to start pushing more people into trades and de-emphasize college education: (1) we make it much harder to graduate college and (2) make college much cheaper so that pursuing that risk isn't ruinous. Then a student can explore a college path and pivot to something more suited to their attitude and skills to remain a productive member of society if it doesn't work out.
Combine that with the Pareto Principle and you start to get a fairly accurate picture of "why the world is the way it is." And this applies to all industries, not just tech.
If you look at it through a nihilist lens, it can bum you out quick. But, if you look at it like "I was given the gift/responsibility to do this well" (sans God-complex, elitist "useless eaters" attitude), it makes it a bit more fun/tolerable.
The truth is, there are always return volleys you can make, depending on how petty you want to get, or how many cycles you feel like burning with a person like the article describes. For example any statement of the form “you should…” implies a belief in a particular policy, so you can then inquire why they think that should be so. Any question can be answered directly, or you can start asking questions about why they asked the question, or you can just answer a different question entirely. Et cetera.
At some level this stuff is war and if people aren’t going to bring their thinking caps, a change in tactic is appropriate.
It wasn't everyone, but I started to realize that I was triggering negative feelings in some people.
For example, I invented a programming language for board games and the #1 question I generally get is "why isn't that a framework".
The hard part in life is learning to embrace your quirks.
Go onnnnn? :D
Go happens to be both a programming language and a board game, so I promptly forgot about it also being a verb.
It looks like that's what they're referring to.
I even have a video: http://jeffrey.io/AdamaPlatformInTenMinutes.mp4
And I'm building it as a SaaS which I've made available: https://www.adama-platform.com/ for "early access".
I'm still trying to figure out how to explain it. Basically, take an IDL like proto/thrift. Then add in the ability to transform the data. Then add in a sense of privacy of who can see what. And boom, the foundation is laid for a document transform language.
The reason to do all of that is because the state of the board game requires a great deal of care. For instance, wouldn't it be great to offer Undo? What if you hook a socket directly up the document and then differentiate state changes after privacy checking?
Right now, it's a mess, and I'm forking efforts to work on a board game web ide where people can build board games online. Adama is the foundation for the IDE such that it starts collaborative from the get-go.
eg: chess has algebraic notation and that allows replay, undo/redo, save/load, etc.
If you were to come up with some notation for chinese checkers... blammo, same concept.
The "replay log" doubles as a relatively expensive save-game format (re-run the steps).
If you're doing something like texas hold'em, you might do:
Deal @ 1 => "XX, YY"; Deal @ 2 => "AA, BB"; Flop "AH, 2H, 3S" ; Bet @ 1 => $12.34 ; etc...
...and then "materialize" the XX,YY things at the end, while maybe keeping individual + central records.
eg: 1.json => (XX==4S, YY==5H) // 2.json => (AA==6H, BB==7H) // central.json == union(*.json)
...multiplayer is hard, but some sort of replay-log of the messages is my current thinking of the only rational outcome. If you're looking to make an online boardgame IDE, then focusing on devising a game notation (which may include privacy) would be helpful.
I basically translate document layout + transformation logic into JSON changes which can be joined under JSON merge.
The neat thing about basing everyone on JSON merge is that I have a way to deal with buffer bloat very easily with flow control.
I've experienced it firsthand, and I eventually found a term for it: a "high conflict" personality [1]. There are a few ways google says you can deal with these personality types, the main one being: do not interact with that person.
[1] https://www.highconflictinstitute.com/hci-articles/who-are-h...
Or at the very least they don't like you personally and are trying to bully you.
It's not usually about the presented issue. The relationship dynamics are the real truth.
Everyone has bad days. But if interactions consistently take this direction - especially to the point where anticipating them causes anxiety - it's time to consider moving on.
Absolutely. I was on the wrong side of such a dynamic until recently, by the end of it (thankfully I switched teams) it was a straight up bullying situation. And much like an abusive romantic relationship, it escalated slowly in a way that was difficult to notice. My point is, yes, do whatever you can to stay away from these kind of people.
I'm currently (this weekend) going to be applying for jobs to extricate myself from what I recognise as the early stages of exactly such a situation.
I have a very different feeling about the OPs situation though. This is not about junior people asking too many questions or being lazy or incompetent, it is about a personality of people who are just entitled and demanding and just generally bitter assholes. Not typically seen in juniors!
The general consensus at these places was that getting to the information faster is preferable. We have a team chat channel for a reason, ask their. Don't stop your search, and don't ask first thing, but after a cursory glance, ask. Then continue to search on your own. If someone knows the answer and sees the question, they should respond. If you find the answer first, update the thread and answer your own question in case it helps anyone else.
That said, I agree if the answer was easily found in a google search. That's the kind of basic info an engineer/developer should be able to answer on their own with research and self-exploration.
It's key to be able to tell quickly whether the answer/info you're looking for is likely to be a common/general piece of info or a company/industry specific piece of knowledge that might not be found widely.
A junior dev may ask a lot of questions but that would be like, "Where is that documented? How do I read that? I don't understand what it's saying." A senior person might have already grokked a lot of it but didn't realize there was hidden context somewhere else, so when they say they couldn't find the documentation you show them and they go back to read it. A hostile student (someone who wants to be force-fed info instead of reading themselves) would pepper you with questions showing they didn't in good faith read any of the docs, but they wouldn't lie and say the docs weren't there. This is someone who thought that you were slacking off or wasting time and want to show that, and they'll keep at it until they can find something to stick. And if they can't, they'll make you have two mutually exclusive things to be true in order to satisfy them.
edit: the solution is probably to make clear to others that they're blowing you off, maybe by publicly requiring that they follow up on the next errand they're sending you on with some sort of deliverable on their end.
edit2: and if nobody else cares that they're blowing you off, look for another job.
Then again, when I've been on the other side of a moving target -- when a supervisor kept coming up with things I was doing wrong that never quite jelled together -- it was because a decision about my continued employment had already been made in principle, but no one was acknowledging it head-on for political/legal reasons. In that situation, I don't think there's any way to get off-script except just to quit, which is exactly what your supervisor and HR department are probably hoping for.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21263894
[1] https://www.bizjournals.com/triad/stories/2001/12/03/smallb3...
The "bad" example in the blog post makes me think that the persons need might just to be validated about unhappy or frustrated they are at work. Someone to listen to them for a just few minutes. When I've seen this kind of behaviour in others or myself, it's usually because of deadlines, multiple blockers, not being able to get forward momentum, along with some time pressure.
The difficulties with non-violent communication I've found are: a) it's hard to do well. b) you have to be pretty calm and grounded yourself. c) it feels like a lot of extra work.
I think it's worth it for important interactions such as with partners, family, and good friends.
Some possible responses to that:
- "How was I supposed to know this the only way to get your attention? It's your fault for not publishing your protocol."
- "I have tried to get your attention in exactly the ways you prescribed, and it's your fault for not responding to any of them."
- "Your protocol is unreasonable and I have escalated to management to discuss better means of interaction."
- "Oops sorry, let me try that next time."
Or people who, when given documentation, insist on asking a series of questions which are all directly answered if you bother reading the clear, concise documentation at all.
The worst I’ve seen so far: people posting trackbacks, no comments or anything, (the sort of lack of effort that would get flagged even on stack overflow), in a massive slack channel asking for help.
I don’t get it.
Now I think of it as a different style of knowledge seeking. In life, some people get answers themselves via physical artifacts and other people get answers by talking to more knowledgeable people. One involves more socialization than the other.
I think both styles are valid and have different pros and cons. I find it less annoying when I think about those interactions like this.
Simple obvious questions can be natterings about the "known unknowns". 1) Where do I order a beer? 2) Do they serve food? 3) Which tram do I take to get there? Progressively these three questions tell us more about the querant's location or context. But this can be quite unconscious. What about asking for summation: You've asked about beer, food and tram info, can you sum up for me what would make you happy? (Really want uncle Owen's fish and chips. Want a companion to eat with...)
Simple obvious questions can also be testing for "true facts" as opposed to "documented facts", although I would expect that behavior to subside with increasing acquaintance.
If it's a concept, an event, or something more broad then I'll just ask because I find I often get more context from individual conversations than from consulting the hive mind. It can often open up avenues for conversation and learning that would have not otherwise happened.
I do the same for in-person in conversation. If I don't know what something is, I'm not going to whip out my phone and look it up, I just ask "what does that word mean?" or "toilet paper...what's that?"