The 5% Rule • Hacker News Board

Re: The 5% Rule

#131

Post by thewebcount » Sat, Dec 31, 2022, 10:36 PM UTC

IanCal wrote: post #125

sodapopcan wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None of the examples given in the article make me think it would consider screaming at a representative of a company that’s wrongfully cost you thousands of dollars after you’ve spent months trying to rectify it as part of the “5%”. That’s totally reasonable, even if it want directly the representative’s fault. Screaming at a service worker because of a hair in your food isn’t—that’s psychotic.

No, screaming at a worker whose job is to answer the phones is not reasonable. It shouldn't have cost them anything either - you shouldn't be paying incorrect bills. Had they filed official complaints? Gone to any regulator? Had the issue escalated?

I will say that I have since grown and become more emotionally intelligent and am far less likely to do that now. My comment about being raised by wolves was intended to convey that I was brought up poorly and not taught how to handle myself in situations like this without yelling.

> Had they filed official complaints? Gone to any regulator? Had the issue escalated?

At the time I wouldn’t have known how to file an official complaint or even that there were regulators who could do anything. What fixed it was that my screaming got it escalated to an appropriate person who could actually do something. I didn’t know the term “escalate” in that context at that time, and customers shouldn’t have to know how customer support works to get things escalated. That should have just happened when I described the problem the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, or 5th times.

Re: The 5% Rule

#132

Post by magic_hamster » Sat, Dec 31, 2022, 10:38 PM UTC

The silly thing is to assume that since you had a bad experience with someone they are like this all the time. When you work sales, some people will enter your store on the day they got dumped, their family member died, they got kicked out of school. You never know why people are acting out. Chances are it's nothing about you.

Other cases, it might not be the person's first time in the store. If they tried several times to fix a problem they are frustrated and and angry. I've had this happen to me multiple times and no matter how patient and nice the representative is, it doesn't change the fact I've wasted way too much time on this problem and you can't make me happy. Even if you solve my problem, it will not make up the lost time and energy.

The only thing I'd recommend is to try and be more empathetic. You never know what the person has been through. If you think they suck and you see them at their worst, they could probably use some empathy.

Re: The 5% Rule

#133

Post by frellus » Sat, Dec 31, 2022, 10:40 PM UTC

Beltalowda wrote: post #25

frellus wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spot on. It's a shame that we haven't prioritized (and de-stigmatized) mental health, especially at a young age, so horrible children don't grow up to be horrible ego-centric adults.

Arguably these kind of personality disorders aren't really "mental health" issues. Or, certainly not in the same way that something like ADD, schizophrenia, depression, anxiety, etc. are. It's basically a nice way of saying "your personality sucks so much that we've decided to label it".

I disagree, I believe they are mental health issues because they're highlighting a process breakdown in how someone is perceiving the world, relationships and challenges.

Is that to say that people don't have personalities which suck? Of course they do. That being said, there are many ways of balancing a person's tendencies towards negative outcomes, but ONLY if they can admit they have a problem and they're willing to put in the effort to re-balancing themselves.

Re: The 5% Rule

#134

Post by frellus » Sat, Dec 31, 2022, 10:42 PM UTC

PuppyTailWags wrote: post #19

frellus wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spot on. It's a shame that we haven't prioritized (and de-stigmatized) mental health, especially at a young age, so horrible children don't grow up to be horrible ego-centric adults.

This probably also raises if you incorporate people who were traumatized as children. Someone having a trauma response can definitely look like horrible ego-centric behavior, when actually they're having an internal meltdown where they're emotionally re-experiencing their trauma with no coping mechanisms because we basically never teach adults to recognize when this is happening. A lot of hyper-toxic fiddly freakouts…

Absolutely agreed, and I hate to sound like a Scientologist here, but I think a lot of people's struggles have roots in some trauma in their past. We're all shaped by bad things which happen to us, and for some people -- the ones especially with low Emotional Intelligence -- they can be re-balanced quite a bit in their thinking and patterns but ONLY if they're willing. That's like 80% the battle.

Re: The 5% Rule

#135

Post by frellus » Sat, Dec 31, 2022, 10:44 PM UTC

fbdab103 wrote: post #39

frellus wrote: post #12

I've found that a lot of people in our industry (higher than 5%, probably much higher the smarter they are) have BPD or are on the spectrum which causes anger issues when things don't fit the pattern or outcome they're expecting. I'm not saying that to disparage these people, but I've learned to be careful in how I interact with certain people, especially as that top tier of brilliant engineer are the ones I want to…

The House personality - where technical brilliance so outshines their behavior that they can be awful to those around them. I will take an average but nice person over a genius asshole every time.

Agreed, on a personal level, a little less so on a professional level (within reason) in that I want smart co-workers. I don't need to invite them all over to dinner to meet the family.

That being said, we try to hire for low ego, high humility and good communication skills plus technical. Very hard in Silicon Valley.

Re: The 5% Rule

#136

Post by lostlogin » Sat, Dec 31, 2022, 10:46 PM UTC

magic_hamster wrote: post #132

The silly thing is to assume that since you had a bad experience with someone they are like this all the time. When you work sales, some people will enter your store on the day they got dumped, their family member died, they got kicked out of school. You never know why people are acting out. Chances are it's nothing about you. Other cases, it might not be the person's first time in the store. If they tried several ti…

> The silly thing is to assume that since you had a bad experience with someone they are like this all the time.

The post mentions doctors and seems to indicate that they would put a higher percentage of humans in the ‘terrible’ category.

Add stress and people act poorly. There also seems to be a thing where people can’t always articulate what they are feeling (eg a specific phobia they have) and act out in response to the stress.

Once the stress has gone they are different people.

Don’t get me wrong, I also think that more than 5% of people are terrible.

I work in healthcare as a radiographer.

Re: The 5% Rule

#137

Post by switchbak » Sat, Dec 31, 2022, 10:54 PM UTC

msrenee wrote: post #100

galangalalgol wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, this was my question. Are 3-5% of people horrible all the time, or are we all horrible 3-5% of the time? Or more likely at any given time 3-5% of us are horrible, with some of us entering the group more often than others.

Off the top of my head, I can think of a half dozen people I've known who are just horrible all of the time. Nasty to their family, nasty to coworkers, nasty to strangers. I can think of another half dozen who are just in the habit of mistreating service workers. Some people you're just catching on a bad day, but there is definitely a portion of the population that are just crappy people.

Disagreeable personalities are definitely a thing, and some have some other stuff stacked on top that can make for persistently unreasonable people.

Off the top of my head I knew someone who had a really hard loss that they couldn't cope with, and you could basically just see them reeling it in all the time, and that was expressed outwardly as anger. Really tragic situation though, and if you didn't know the details you'd just assume they're a raging prick.

I find it hard to mine compassion when I don't know someone's backstory, and I usually default to filling in the details with some kind of dismissive story about them just being self centered and belligerent (probably true some of the time though). I find life goes better when I try to fill in the blanks with some kind of reasoning that would explain that behaviour better (while still not excusing it).

Re: The 5% Rule

#138

Post by adapteva » Sat, Dec 31, 2022, 11:05 PM UTC

From personal experience it's at least 1%. I had a Kickstarter project 10 years ago that had approx 6,000 supporters and 50 were simply awful human beings. Everyone else was ok. Anonymity brings out the worst in some people.

Re: The 5% Rule

#139

Post by gnicholas » Sat, Dec 31, 2022, 11:06 PM UTC

AussieWog93 wrote: post #128

semireg wrote: post #95

I handle 100% of my indie app's email and telephone (yes, telephone!) support. My app is designing/printing labels. Printers in general, and label printers specifically are awful and inconsiderate robots, unable to perform the simplest printing job when you need it most. Sure, 2-5% of my users are nasty/mean, but let me tell you a little secret: They are immensely frustrated with their life situation and they know ho…

My experience (e-commerce) is similar to this. A lot of people contact support half-expecting that they'll get fucked around, and you see a complete 180 in their tone as soon as you offer a decent solution to their problem. Of course, there are still those people who just want an excuse to be a cunt (maybe 1% or less, from my experience). I don't push them too hard to reach a solution, and just graciously accept the…

> A lot of people contact support half-expecting that they'll get fucked around, and you see a complete 180 in their tone as soon as you offer a decent solution to their problem.

I occasionally get rude customer service emails at my startup, and in nearly every case the person apologizes after receiving a personal reply (from the founder, in my case) within 24 hours.

In many cases, the customer actually becomes an advocate for us. Once they understand that what they want (to be able to use our text enhancement within Kindle/gdocs/iBooks/Nook) is not something that my startup can do on its own, they will offer to reach out to the relevant BigCo and ask for them to build an integration.

Basically, people who will take the effort to reach out to complain to me are more likely to be willing to reach out to another company as well.

Re: The 5% Rule

#140

Post by jamesliudotcc » Sat, Dec 31, 2022, 11:11 PM UTC

I used to work in food service. I didn't keep track, but I don't think it was 3-5%. More like a tenth that. Maybe it's just coffee, and so even a great majority of the really terrible people could manage to pay and leave without exposing their terribleness.