Essay: Too much 'niceness' is bad for critical thinking

I had a junior engineer once, a few years back, who could not take criticism.

He would get flustered, angry, sarcastic. His work wasn’t good. I did my best to help him — and even though I was polite, he always seemed to take a kind of deep, personal offense at whatever criticism I had for him.

There were many problems I had with his work — he wasn’t great at testing his code (at a surface level, sure, but rarely thought deeply about the implications of his changes. E.g., once he got a ticket to clean up some code throwing lots of warnings, and solved it by making the code not work at all. He tested that it wasn’t throwing warnings, but didn’t realize that it had an early escape condition that was being triggered inappropriately every time.)

He surprised me with his lack of basic knowledge that I would’ve expected from a CS graduate who’d also made an app or two outside of school. He didn’t know what a database index was, for example, among other issues.

He was also not great at communicating. When talking about his work, he’d use technical jargon incorrectly. His emails to outside vendors were meandering and difficult to parse. I coached him on these points extensively.

In the end, after 6 months or so of trying to help him, I asked our CEO to fire him. We gave him a month’s severance.

A couple months later, his lawyer got in touch with his, alleging racial discrimination. The allegation was that we fired him because of his accent. He interpreted my problems with his communication as being a problem with his (slight, barely noticeable) accent.

Our CEO told me to work on how I levy criticism of others. I mean, he’s right I’m sure. I thought I was being precise and polite, but perhaps I did give the wrong idea.

Or, maybe this hire just wasn’t used to criticism. He didn’t understand how to take advice. He didn’t know how to internalize it and act on those suggestions. When fired, he blamed an immutable quality about himself rather than something he could change.

It is hard to prove racism or sexist discrimination. It is just not easy at all and you need more then assertion.

Learning how to get along with "mean" people is more about learning how to not take things personally....although by the same token, you also need to learn how to stand up for yourself when you're right and they're wrong. One persons "mean" comment is another persons normal feedback, just like being nice can come off as condescending or patronizing in certain circumstances.

In the end most workplaces are a mixture of all types of communicators, and being able to handle those different types of people is far more useful than worrying about people being too nice or too mean.

> "My job compelled me to read the lede on your story; nothing can get me to read the rest of it."

> In this country, the late Nathan Cohen, theatre critic of the Toronto Star, was considered an absolute ogre by some actors and directors.

> But he helped Canadian theatre grow and thrive.

So sure, if you're working for Steve Jobs or Linus Torvalds, identify that fact and know the tradeoff you're making. But then they better deliver like so.