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Basic Social Skills Guide (2012)

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Re: Basic Social Skills Guide (2012)

#161

Post by wisty »

pavas wrote: post #116
kempbellt wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand your perspective. Unfortunately, however idealistic, I don't see that being a great benefit in the long term for anyone. I prefer environments that teach you how to advocate for your ideas. Build you up as a good self-advocate. Environments that say "Hey everybody! It's Timmy's turn to speak. Pass him the talking stick" are patronizing and disgust me at the onset. Better to have someone by your side sayi…

I think you're actually missing his point, which is not so much a matter of perspective but rather a direct application of Goodheart's Law. When you are trying to incentivize by proxy (e.g. promote good ideas by rewarding vocal and assertive people), you better hope that there is a very tight correlation between the two. His point is that there isn't much correlation between good ideas and assertive personalities, so…

> Goodheart's Law

A man of culture!

I think we can call in the Pareto Principle here. After a certain point, assertiveness / aggressiveness becomes zero-sum (or worse). But getting to the point where everyone worth listening to has had a chance to speak gives you a lot of bang for your buck. You can either have an environment which enables this (everyone gets the talking stick) or train everyone to have a baseline of assertiveness skills.

The baseline shouldn't just be "excuse me, I have a question" scenarios though. The baseline has to be sufficient to handle stuff like "I think my boss is screwing up big time".

Re: Basic Social Skills Guide (2012)

#162

Post by rubidium »

therealcamino wrote: post #85
x2f10 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> or someone who reads. Can you please elaborate? I don't follow.

Often, mispronouncing a word means you've seen it in print, but haven't heard it said aloud. So I've heard some people say that they mentally frame it not as an embarrassing mistake but as a sign that the speaker reads a lot.

Totally me. I’ve read far more than I’ll ever hear. And I’m terrible at pronouncing things correctly because it’s almost pure visual memory.

Re: Basic Social Skills Guide (2012)

#163

Post by altonzheng »

Another perspective (I learned from a therapist), is that we might already possess the innate ability to be great conversationalist, it's just performance anxiety that gets in the way. So for me, as someone who consumed loads of self-help material without much improvement, it wasn't about learning more skills or anything, it was about giving myself permission to be dumb, boring, lame, and still accepting myself at the end of the day. And once I'm able to do that, there's no more anxiety, and then everything becomes much easier. I feel like this is a path to a more natural sort of confidence, although you might get there by practicing social skills directly too. Very painful though, and I'm still working on this.

Not saying this applies to everyone, but I think it's helpful for people who approach their social anxiety with a type-A mentality.

Re: Basic Social Skills Guide (2012)

#164

Post by darkmighty »

gherkinnn wrote: post #125
wisty wrote: post #43

Why are social skills always focusing on the positive? A lot of programmers often seem to be more nice guys than anything else, and need to be able to be more assertive / aggressive. Everyone tries to distinguish these two, it's mostly just in the eye of the beholder - IMO aggression is just assertion when it's judged to be inappropriate or incompetently done - a drill instructor being assertive looks different to a…

Yes. That’s why I find dev.to and to be a rather uninteresting place. It’s 90% niceties and explaining .map over and over again. Similar things can be observed in many meetups and some companies. Everything is awesome. Everybody is nice. People shy away from deciding anything . Even the simple act of two people wanting to go through the same door at the same time is an impossible conundrum. No matter how important ps…

I think the main danger is when truth and improvement is compromised in favor of niceness. Sometimes you are wrong, and that's definitely not a comfortable position to be in. It's not going to feel good to have it pointed out. And yet it's imperative that it is communicated. Wise individuals should not attribute the discomfort to the person pointing things out, but to mistakes themselves of course.

There are cases where marking errors is done to belittle, offend, portray incompetence, etc.; however it shouldn't be too hard to avoid those perils -- it's just a matter of showing how mistakes are (mostly, and to a measure) inevitable, not disqualify the person for the mistake (i.e. recognize it's something that is not inherent and can be fixed). Avoid broadcasting mishaps (communicate one-to-one), be supportive when pointing things out, and the environment is going to be better for everyone.

Superficial niceness might be worse than sincere harshness indeed. But the best is bold sincerity and support, which ultimately creates trust and robust, enduring relations.

Re: Basic Social Skills Guide (2012)

#165

Post by rosybox »

I do have goals to change things about myself: being kinder, being more patient, listening more, being more self aware and courteous, but I'm doing that for me, to be a better person, not because I care about how people think of me. My goal is to not add to other people's misery, it's not about improving my social interactions.

Ultimately though, I just am who I am and if it doesn't work for people, I'm not going to change in ways I don't want to, and I'm not going to follow a how to list of how to interact with people, because I don't a give a shit. I'm growing at my own pace.

Re: Basic Social Skills Guide (2012)

#166

Post by jodrellblank »

spodek wrote: post #44

This community consistently poo-poos MBAs and business people who, it says, don't contribute and just shuffle paper or find ways to lay people off. I felt that way when I started my first company, finishing my physics degree. I figured, I helped launch a satellite, I can do what we needed. A couple patents later, we got our first funding and I knew how to solve what problems came our way. I could break down any probl…

Possibly your client senior executives who don't have - and never knew they could learn - the leadership skills they're employed to wield, are the same senior executives this community is consistently poo-pooing.

"just find ways to lay people off." [..] "The investors squeezed me out of that company."

If that isn't sadly ironic, what is.

Re: Basic Social Skills Guide (2012)

#167

Post by [deleted] »

wallflower wrote: post #53

While some of you may make light of the fact that I am giving you advice, my single most important piece of advice to people who are highly analytical and/or always solving problems is to not give unsolicited advice to friends, family, acquaintances, or even strangers. People will ask for advice if they really want it. People are not “broken pieces of code” begging to be fixed. I’ve lost friends over this, until one…

[deleted]

Re: Basic Social Skills Guide (2012)

#168

Post by cwkoss »

I read some "pick up artist" literature in college: about two thirds of it is misogynistic garbage, but the remainder has some good tips on general platonic social interaction (and a major issue with insecure men is learning to interact with women in a casual platonic way without acting odd and creepy because they are hoping for more).

- If you aren't good at speaking in a captivating way, literally write out your best stories. People who are good at telling stories get this way from practice: introverts naturally get less practice and thus tend to be less talented at speaking. You can do a significant amount of practice on a story without a partner - develop a few 2-3 minute anecdotes about yourself that have a clear beginning, middle and punchline, and cut all extraneous information that doesn't enhance the listeners enjoyment or teach them something positive about your character. If the conversation with a new person touches on something from one of your anecdotes, you will be able to quickly go into your anecdote and be engaging. The process of editing a couple stories will teach you to revise future stories without writing them down explicitly.

- The Cube is a really great icebreaker when meeting new people and conversation is petering out. https://oliveremberton.com/2014/how-to-connect-deeply-with-a... A couple times, I've captivated groups of 4-6 strangers for about an hour with this. Everyone likes talking about themselves, and it gives people a framework to discuss their self perceptions in a fun way, and everyone learns some things about each other. (The mappings are somewhat arbitrary, I learned it with ladder as work and flowers as friends)

Re: Basic Social Skills Guide (2012)

#169

Post by LVB »

wallflower wrote: post #53

While some of you may make light of the fact that I am giving you advice, my single most important piece of advice to people who are highly analytical and/or always solving problems is to not give unsolicited advice to friends, family, acquaintances, or even strangers. People will ask for advice if they really want it. People are not “broken pieces of code” begging to be fixed. I’ve lost friends over this, until one…

One instance of this I've struggled with (mainly b/c online comms is hard) is when people publicly post that they're annoyed about a confusing thing. "OMG why does it take 10 clicks to do X". This often prompts solutions ("If you turn on Y, then it will only take 2 clicks"), but can sometimes then be followed by irritated rebuttals ("Yes yes I know it's configurable but the point is...").

On the one hand I get the desire to just vent. But if you're going to post certain types of problems (esp technical) very publicly, IMO the expectation should be for unsolicited feedback, especially since others might benefit. Nonetheless, I still usually err on the side of not replying.

Re: Basic Social Skills Guide (2012)

#170

Post by x220 »

babadabada wrote: post #147
SkyBelow wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How? Most people don't want to talk code. Thus, given a demographic breakdown that relates neither positively nor negatively with talking code, one can assume the general pattern applies. Most old people don't want to talk code. Most young people don't want to talk code. Most left handed people don't want to talk code. None of these are discriminating. They are stating that a pattern true of the general population al…

How? Because making broad assumptions about 50% of the population isn't a cool thing to do. Especially given the excessive amount of nonsense women in tech (and not in tech) have to deal with on a daily basis. Talk like this leads to women feeling excluded from the tech community. Also, specifically calling out "young women" as not being interested in tech really makes a lot of assumptions. Generally, people will tal…

Do you never make generalizations or broad assumptions?
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