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Ask HN: What people skills do you wish you learned earlier in your career?

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Re: Ask HN: What people skills do you wish you learned earlier in your career?

#231

Post by snarf21 »

exabrial wrote: post #213

For the life of me, one thing I struggle with is pointing out issues that a non-technical person is causing. I think for the most part, engineers and the like are used to having their work critiqued and it's not a big deal to receive that sort of feedback; so being direct is the most efficient and frictionless path. I continuously struggle with how to present that to a non-technical person. Being direct almost always…

That is surely a challenge. It seems similar to the structure of how do you convince someone their position on a topic is mis-informed (not that they are wrong). Most things I've seen and read are usually focused on getting that person to explain it to you. You ask leading questions and see if they can get to a logical inconsistency thereby changing their own mind. I don't know what "issues" you are referencing but if it is a Product Manager, for example, you could try an approach of referencing external best practices. "Facebook released a template for how to perform and present market research for a new product. This was super cool. Is this something we could do for our products?"

Re: Ask HN: What people skills do you wish you learned earlier in your career?

#232

Post by spodek »

After my PhD in physics, I learned starting a company that I needed such skills and devoted myself to learning them.

Now I teach the social and emotional skills underlying leadership, entrepreneurship, and initiative at NYU (student reviews: http://joshuaspodek.com/this-is-one-of-the-greatest-classes-... and videos of them describing the courses: http://joshuaspodek.com/nyu-students-speak-joshua-spodeks).

I made book versions of the courses. Amazon makes the first chapters of each available free, which goes into more detail on what I learned and its value:

Leadership Step by Step: https://www.amazon.com/Leadership-Step-Become-Person-Others/...

Initiative: https://www.amazon.com/Initiative-Proven-Method-Bring-Passio...

Re: Ask HN: What people skills do you wish you learned earlier in your career?

#233

Post by pimmen »

username90 wrote: post #115
isoprophlex wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't you envy people that never overthink things? People that enjoy the sensory experience of slobbering on a glass of wine? Playing sports for the sake of it? Try empathy. These are humans too. They have their reasons for living their 'distasteful' lives. I think it's you who's only got one note on their tune, not everyone around you. If, in traffic, everybody is honking at you, do you think all of them are bad dri…

> Try empathy. Empathy sucks, I am pretty sure I would be a lot nicer and outgoing if I were less empathetic. You see people struggle with things all the time but you can't do anything about it. All empathy leads to in those situations is suffering because you feel their emotions. In my opinion people who are outgoing and friendly often have low empathy, they ignore basically everything and just put on their default…

Being very empathetic doesn’t mean that you have to be overly sympathetic. You can understand without feeling someone else’s emotions.

Re: Ask HN: What people skills do you wish you learned earlier in your career?

#234

Post by morphle »

lookathrwaway wrote: post #77
whiddershins wrote: post #19

“How to win friends and influence people” is an absolutely wonderful book I wished I’d read 10 or 15 years before I did. Some important ideas - Just, get along with people. A bit reductionist but if you don’t place a high priority on getting along with people you certainly won’t learn how. It really is a habit, and it’s incredibly effective to remember the Cognitive Behavior insight that when you don’t get along with…

Throw away for obvious reasons. I find almost everyone intensely boring. How am I supposed to get along with people without feeling like a complete fraud? Small talk, feigning interest in kids, in sports, in wine, in whatever useless dull, pedestrian thing a coworker is into. I find that anyone who isn't a PhD (or could easily have been if they hadn't gone into industry) might as well be a paper shell. I can put on a…

I tend to want to teach these people, point them to books and knowledge so they can learn and be less shallow. That is a sure way to piss almost all of them off (unless they become your students), which rarely happens.

Alan Kay describes and analyses why the majority of humanity act like you describe in many of his lectures. He answers and explains most of your points. Its hard to recommend these talks, the good bits are spread around 50 lectures. I'll be happy to discuss with you which bits you'll like. A first suggestion is [1][2].

>I really want is to talk to deeply self-aware people struggling with the boundaries of human knowledge.

I love to talk to such people also, so I search for them in the (scientific) crowd and befriend them so we can have those interesting conversations. Please contact me (morphle @ ziggo dot nl) and lets find out if we can have such a meaningful and satisfying exchange.

[1] http://esug.org/data/Videos/Alan%20Kay/StateFarm-Kay-2009-10... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N9c7_8Gp7gI

Re: Ask HN: What people skills do you wish you learned earlier in your career?

#235

Post by pimmen »

lorepieri wrote: post #201
lookathrwaway wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Throw away for obvious reasons. I find almost everyone intensely boring. How am I supposed to get along with people without feeling like a complete fraud? Small talk, feigning interest in kids, in sports, in wine, in whatever useless dull, pedestrian thing a coworker is into. I find that anyone who isn't a PhD (or could easily have been if they hadn't gone into industry) might as well be a paper shell. I can put on a…

I understand perfectly what you mean. Contrary to other comments, I think that this can be ok, you should spend the majority of your time with folks that you find interesting. Not easy, and indeed I'm working on something to make this simpler. Feel free to reach me for a chat. My Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lorenzo-pieri-a638b9a6/

That is however not what the parent asked about, the question was ”how do I cope?” not ”is this ok?”. Of course it’s ok to feel that way, most of the other comments are about how to cope instead of ”you don’t, give up and go someplace else”.

I often feel like talking about esoteric topics like math even though I’m surrounded by people who would gladly kill to never do math ever again. I however want to get along with these people, just like the original poster who wants to progress through people skills. If I was only surrounded by people who value the same things as me this would not be an issue, which is why answers like ”just go where other people are exactly like you” is not productive.

Re: Ask HN: What people skills do you wish you learned earlier in your career?

#236

Post by Bjartr »

james_s_tayler wrote: post #132
cannonedhamster wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Something I've had to learn with larger organizations is that the logic at the top isn't always conveyed to the bottom. Perverse incentives play heavily into this. An example of this is executive bonuses. Everyone knows that for long term health of a company short term gains should be subservient to long term gains. Bonus structures are typically structured for short term, which means that in order for an employee to…

This. I have several mental models for this. The first goes "most people are wrong about most things". You have to include yourself in that one or it just sounds arrogant, but it's true. Mostly we have a toy understanding of how anything really works if we are asked to scratch any deeper than the surface and the sheer amount of mental models required to begin to somewhat accurately map to reality vs. the search cost…

I say "I believe it is" because if I don't, then people will spend time criticising the strength of my statement rather than the content.

Re: Ask HN: What people skills do you wish you learned earlier in your career?

#237

Post by blablablerg »

spodek wrote: post #232

After my PhD in physics, I learned starting a company that I needed such skills and devoted myself to learning them. Now I teach the social and emotional skills underlying leadership, entrepreneurship, and initiative at NYU (student reviews: http://joshuaspodek.com/this-is-one-of-the-greatest-classes-... and videos of them describing the courses: http://joshuaspodek.com/nyu-students-speak-joshua-spodeks ). I made boo…

Cool! Will check out.

Re: Ask HN: What people skills do you wish you learned earlier in your career?

#239

Post by michaelmior »

lookathrwaway wrote: post #77
whiddershins wrote: post #19

“How to win friends and influence people” is an absolutely wonderful book I wished I’d read 10 or 15 years before I did. Some important ideas - Just, get along with people. A bit reductionist but if you don’t place a high priority on getting along with people you certainly won’t learn how. It really is a habit, and it’s incredibly effective to remember the Cognitive Behavior insight that when you don’t get along with…

Throw away for obvious reasons. I find almost everyone intensely boring. How am I supposed to get along with people without feeling like a complete fraud? Small talk, feigning interest in kids, in sports, in wine, in whatever useless dull, pedestrian thing a coworker is into. I find that anyone who isn't a PhD (or could easily have been if they hadn't gone into industry) might as well be a paper shell. I can put on a…

> I find religiosity

I find it interesting that you seem to contrast religiosity with your definition of intelligence. In my experience, the two are not inversely correlated.

Disclaimer: I have a PhD in computer science and I am a practicing Christian, so I'm clearly biased here :)

Re: Ask HN: What people skills do you wish you learned earlier in your career?

#240

Post by criddell »

analog31 wrote: post #10

An old saying among musicians: "Be careful how you treat people on your way up, because you'll meet them again on your way down." Compliment other people and good ideas. I've become conscious about things like mansplaining and talking over people. Don't let technology get in the way of human interaction. When you do something offensive (it happens, even if rarely), apologize.

> An old saying among musicians: "Be careful how you treat people on your way up, because you'll meet them again on your way down."

Speaking of musicians, I wish I had learned to play music. Every place I've worked there have been some very talented musicians working there and I wish I had the skills to play with them.

I currently keep an electric guitar in my office and picking it up and playing (unamplified) is a great way to break my concentration when I'm stuck on a problem. I still can't really play though...

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