Ask HN: What people skills do you wish you learned earlier in your career? • Hacker News Board

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

#291

Post by asdfman123 » Tue, Jul 23, 2019, 2:33 PM UTC

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 consider myself a thinker but it's actually very interesting to think about people. It's important to realize that everyone is way more fragile and vulnerable than they pretend to be. Primal fear drives all of us, at different levels and in different quantities. Everyone's got their gaping blind spots.

I'm shy and introverted like the rest of you, and I'm not a good small talker. But it's naive to think of challenges as just technical challenges. In any organization, making change is a people challenge. Think about people.

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

#292

Post by blaser-waffle » Tue, Jul 23, 2019, 2:35 PM UTC

sametmax wrote: post #252

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'll take a wild guess and say it's because your intellect is way more developed than your affect. Nothing wrong with that, but life is easier if you learn to use emotions instead of just living them. It helps with making friends, negotiating, having sex, taking care of your health and overall improves the feeling of well-being. After all, if you perceive the world through mostly logic, it's easy to become cynical or…

> I'll take a wild guess and say it's because your intellect is way more developed than your affect.

Interesting. I like that phrase.

> Meditation and psychedelics can help learning that if it's something you wish to invest in.

Meditation maybe, but I wouldn't recommend psychedelics to someone unless they knew what they were getting into. I knew some folks who had rough trips and were likely NOT BETTER people for the experience -- just DIFFERENT people.

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

#293

Post by sametmax » Tue, Jul 23, 2019, 2:37 PM UTC

blaser-waffle wrote: post #292

sametmax wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll take a wild guess and say it's because your intellect is way more developed than your affect. Nothing wrong with that, but life is easier if you learn to use emotions instead of just living them. It helps with making friends, negotiating, having sex, taking care of your health and overall improves the feeling of well-being. After all, if you perceive the world through mostly logic, it's easy to become cynical or…

> I'll take a wild guess and say it's because your intellect is way more developed than your affect. Interesting. I like that phrase. > Meditation and psychedelics can help learning that if it's something you wish to invest in. Meditation maybe, but I wouldn't recommend psychedelics to someone unless they knew what they were getting into. I knew some folks who had rough trips and were likely NOT BETTER people for the…

> From several sources, given the huge difference in nature and quality of the providers.

Set and setting is very important.

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

#294

Post by asdfman123 » Tue, Jul 23, 2019, 2:37 PM UTC

zimbatm wrote: post #238

Learn to relax. It was Bill Murray who was talking about this in an interview. If you relax, people are more relaxed, everything becomes easier.

Learning mindfulness and meditation can give you this superpower.

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

#295

Post by nf05papsjfVbc » Tue, Jul 23, 2019, 2:37 PM UTC

woliveirajr wrote: post #220

eight_ender wrote: post #38

Admitting I'm wrong or that I screwed up, and likewise praising others when they're correct or have ideas I agree with. You would not believe how much smoother everything at work is when you learn to recognize early the signs that you're holding on to a bad opinion, or that you're headed towards a fuckup, and just saying it out loud. The praising / agreeing thing is a bit more complex. I've noticed more recently that…

I regret praising others early in my career, being helpful and always looking for my mistakes. Those who didn't that got a headstart, went further, earned more, took some opportunities that weren't available to me and now, with more money, bigger houses, happier wifes and families, they like to say that they should have acted different in the past.

You have to weigh it against "If I had behaved like they did, would I be happy with myself?"

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

#296

Post by asdfman123 » Tue, Jul 23, 2019, 2:39 PM UTC

f00zz wrote: post #186

Spoken English, it's not my first language and communication is a struggle. This wasn't much of a hindrance on my career as I've mostly worked within my country and can read technical English just fine, but now that I'm working remotely for a foreign company I'm kicking myself for not having paid more attention to it earlier in my life. I'm a disaster at conference calls. Lately I've been extracting audio from YouTub…

FWIW, if you didn't say you weren't a native speaker here I wouldn't have known you weren't. Your grammar is totally fine (other than a few minor mistakes, but your grammar is better than most native speakers).

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

#297

Post by leppr » Tue, Jul 23, 2019, 2:39 PM UTC

chronic7382 wrote: post #128

elevenoh wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Start respecting the fact that intellectual development & progress is only one axis on the map that is the human experience. Excellent all too overlooked view IMO.

>> Start respecting the fact that intellectual development & progress is only one axis on the map that is the human experience. > Excellent all too overlooked view IMO. Intellectual development and logical reasoning serve as the basis for proper personal health, family nucleation, social improvement, and other axes on the human experience map. Without being able to think, how can you improve your health, friend, fami…

Logic only gets you so far, otherwise natural selection would've made sure it's the absence of Asperger's that's a disorder, not the other way around.

My theory is that the reason for these widespread ailings in American and other modern societies is that we're down in terms of average raw numbers of human interactions, compared to some centuries ago.

Emulation of successful people can guide a whole tribe towards the best path of action, no logic needed. But that mechanism is currently weakened because:

1/ There's only so much emotional understanding possible without face-to-face engagement. It's way harder to guess that someone is unhappy and "defective" despite an appearance of success without real-life meeting. It's way harder to know a certain way of life is detrimental if you've only seen that one. We have less "emotional" data points to pick from.

2/ Centralized dissemination of information (mass-media), isn't diverse enough for any kind of natural selection to occur. People instinctively know who to admire and emulate when they meet them, but unidirectional mass-media only pushes arbitrary success stories. Naturally selected role models are scarce.

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

#298

Post by pacoWebConsult » Tue, Jul 23, 2019, 2:40 PM UTC

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…

HTWFAIP is a book I have trouble remembering over time. I find that if I don't at least listen to the audiobook yearly I'll find myself slipping back into the shitty habits that made me unhappy enough to pick it up in the first place.

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

#299

Post by asdfman123 » Tue, Jul 23, 2019, 2:41 PM UTC

mparkola wrote: post #37

aszantu wrote: post #29

Marshall Rosenberg nonviolent communications

I found NVC super valuable for opening my eyes to new concepts but challenging to implement in real life. When I tried it for the first time the other person got super angry because they thought I was making fun of them by asking about their emotions.

That's my problem with active listening. I can't do it without it sounding ridiculous.

"My god, someone shut down the production server!"

"That sounds very upsetting. You must be quite angry."

"Are you making fun of me?"

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

#300

Post by neilv » Tue, Jul 23, 2019, 2:42 PM UTC

technofiend wrote: post #55

I hate to admit it but one of my bosses taught me that building consensus is a double edged sword and it can be used as weapon. Up until working with him I naively assumed we could all get in a room, hash out our technical differences and agree to a solution. That only works when everyone is (from your perspective) not a bad actor. But how do you deal with an Executive Director who will bald-faced lie and say whateve…

That there can be bad actors is not an intuitive concept for some people (say, if you were brought up on Mr. Rogers, warm-fuzzy schools, etc.).

I was fortunately(?) well into my career before I really encountered bad actors (somehow, I only worked with decent people, until then), and it was shocking where I finally did find it, which would've been the last place I would've suspected.

Another thing I learned, after the existence of bad actors, is that, AFAICT, there aren't really that many of them. (Well, outside of some pockets, including aspects of business and politics that expect and embrace a cutthroat environment, and in which professionalism involves calculating game theory of relationships and grabbing advantage.)

What's very, very common, however, and I think often mistaken for bad actors, is various kinds of arrogance. Most everyone has at least a bit, in some regards, (I do) and some have a lot.

Another way arrogance and bad actors can get conflated, or the lines blurred, happens when a very arrogant party gets in a mess because of that (imagine a powerful person who gets away with a lot, until they don't), or mistakes someone else for a bad actor, and then bad actor behavior is summoned to fix.