Earlier quoted context omitted.
Please don't play it emotionally and report it to HR. Folks from HR are there to take care of the manager and employer. Such a step could be suicidal.
That is such a bullshit meme that needs to die. HR's exact goals vary between companies, but unless the company culture is toxic all the way to the top, part of their job is usually to reduce staff turnover (which is very expensive for the company), and in pretty much any company their job is to protect the company against lawsuits. Abusive managers are not well liked by HR.
Ask HN: What lessons did you learn from your best or worst colleagues?
91–100 of 270 posts
Re: Ask HN: What lessons did you learn from your best or worst colleagues?
#92Best: It was a lesson I got as a fresh grad. I was losing sleep over stress from work. "This is just a job," an older colleague told me. In reality, he really did his job -- he was always on time, his code was impeccable, and he used cool logic to solve any problem. And yet, he was never too emotionally attached to work. He always welcomed criticism of his work. He had the demeanor of a cool-headed hitman finishing h…
Re: Ask HN: What lessons did you learn from your best or worst colleagues?
#93I regret looking back at my worst moments.
Re: Ask HN: What lessons did you learn from your best or worst colleagues?
#94Best: Office politics is more about perception of doing work and less about actually doing work. Worst: Apparently knowing how to use excel efficiently isn't better because manual calculations prevent errors.
the damage from 1 excel error can be so risky that its better for the company to pay a person to do the entire thing manually and derisk. infuriating from the perspective of technics, but not from that of incerto
Re: Ask HN: What lessons did you learn from your best or worst colleagues?
#95Best : My manager who appreciates everyone's time. He puts in efforts to immediately reply to anyone, takes quick decisions and acknowledges quite often. If anyone is dependent on you, unblock them immediately. Worst : Many of the co-workers/ department heads etc. etc. have moved ranks above me exponentially and yes because of their hard work. Congratulations to them. But sometimes if I have to reach out to them or t…
This is anecdotal of course, but I've addressed people as Sir and have been addressed that way it's always in a friendly way. Usually it's just a sign of respect, you may think they're mocking you but they might just see you as one of the "old crew". It may even be a cultural thing, I've noticed that a lot of my Indian colleagues tend to use it as well. Anyway, when in doubt I'd just ask, otherwise next time someone…
Re: Ask HN: What lessons did you learn from your best or worst colleagues?
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
A sudden change in the tone is obviously noticeable. You can feel it when some one else is being called by their first name and you are being addressed as Sir.
That’s different then. I did call some people Sir but it was out of respect. Mostly I appreciated that they were easy to get along with. If you did nothing wrong I would say it’s still a sign of respect even if done theatrically every time.
Re: Ask HN: What lessons did you learn from your best or worst colleagues?
#97Re: Ask HN: What lessons did you learn from your best or worst colleagues?
#98From worst colleague: Succeeding in our modern economy has nothing to do with ability, intelligence or work ethic. It's about luck and intimidation. From best colleague: 10x, 100x, 1000x... developers are real. I also learned that making bold, controversial claims will yield respect dividends in the future when they turn out to be true. For one of my past startups, I was working closely with the CTO who was at least…
Could you teach us some of his best lessons please?
One of the lessons I learned in my junior years is that I used to write CSS with a lot of nesting and relatively short class names (I used SCSS which made nesting easier) - The CTO kept telling me that I should avoid using more than 2 levels of nesting and to use long descriptive class names. I felt that was against the whole point of "cascading" in CSS. I soon discovered (during the first redesign) that when you have a lot of nesting in the CSS, it becomes extremely difficult to refactor the layout of the application; moving containers around breaks the layout every time. Whereas if you have a relatively flat CSS, you can move around components easily without breaking anything. It seems so obvious in retrospect.
I also learned the importance of having one source of truth and the importance of making sure that each kind of data flows through the system in a single, clear direction (or else you can get glitchy behaviour with certain kinds of realtime data). A common one is to make sure data flows from the source of truth. For example, when you click a component, it should update the URL hashbang, then other components should react to the change in the URL... Don't make the components react to the click directly and only update the URL hashbang as a side effect (because the click event could conflict with the URL change event in some edge cases; e.g. cause the UI to be rendered twice is a common issue). The URL has to be the source of truth.
Another critical lesson was about separation of concerns and the importance of being able to justify all technical decisions using simple non-technical language.
But there are so many lessons. I was fullstack so I learned a lot of backend tricks as well. A different one seems to come up every day when I work with other developers on a complex project. I try to explain the reason as much as possible because sometimes they sound counterintuitive (or I should say counter-narrative) and they're not usually silver bullets so it's important to convey the nuance as well.
Re: Ask HN: What lessons did you learn from your best or worst colleagues?
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
No offense taken. Your questions are valid. 1. Would he be informed of the/a bug(s)? Absolutely. We monitor bug tickets submitted to our team throughout the day. It's a main part of our job. 2. Was there a strict code ownership per individual contributor? No. This team's culture was such that once one contributor's code was committed to the main repository, it is part of the team's responsibility, not just the origin…
Thanks for following up. Because I wanted to ask why he would be so mean to you. That insecurity part answers that.
I don’t enjoy being corrected by my team members either, but that’s more out of frustration that I did something wrong in the first place.
The act of correction may be annoying at times, but you absolutely shouldn’t punish the initiative.
Re: Ask HN: What lessons did you learn from your best or worst colleagues?
#100And it was solved in one go.