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When your coworker does great work, tell their manager (2020)

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Re: When your coworker does great work, tell their manager (2020)

#241

Post by allarm »

gabereiser wrote: post #4

>Ask if it’s ok first… This is very astute. Not everyone likes getting praise in public settings or they might not want their micromanaging manager to know they helped you outside the scope of their work. You should be cognizant of when praise should be given (i.e. when is it appropriate) and in what context as mentioned in the article. That said, if you aren’t thanking and praising your colleagues for doing good wor…

> I really liked how you tackled this, have you thought about this approach?

I would slightly rephrase it like this: I liked your approach, because (reasons), though I believe there’s a better one, because (reasons).

If you put it this way you show that you actually understood the approach and not just saying “do it my way”. It gives the opportunity to learn something and it invites to a discussion - “hey, I thought about your approach but I decided to use mine because…”

Re: When your coworker does great work, tell their manager (2020)

#242

Post by gabereiser »

johnnyanmac wrote: post #198
thegrimmest wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a very stylistic and subjective take. Not all workplace cultures and not all people prefer to communicate this way, and many of us resent the "YTA" label that is applied to a direct communication style. I don't work for praise, and I maintain high standards as a matter of personal professionalism. I couldn't care less whether my colleagues recognize me, and business leaders don't care about your effort; they…

>Did you notice that "Why didn't you do it this way?" is rather less verbose than your alternative? "your code sucks" is even more concise. We can take a minute out of our time to elaborate and clarify, and of course not result to insults. >Managing emotional state should be the responsibility of the listener/reader, while the communicator's job should be to get their idea across as clearly and concisely as possible.…

“FU” is even more concise. I don’t want to work in an environment where engineers actively put each other down instead of helping achieve goals.

Re: When your coworker does great work, tell their manager (2020)

#243

Post by dahwolf »

eweise wrote: post #157
ori_b wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you are calling out your colleagues for doing bad work, or not the way you would do it work, you should try to rephrase into praise w/ direction. “I really liked how you tackled this, have you thought about this approach?” Instead of “Why didn’t you do it this way?” I don't want to work with people that communicate this way.

I do. Having worked with so many engineers with almost no social skills, I think there's a lot of room for improvement in their communication style. "Why didn't you do it this way?" is aggressive and critical. "have you thought about this approach?" makes them feel like you have their back and are trying to help. I agree there's not a huge need to the "I really liked how you tackled this" part but even never praising…

It's not aggressive and being critical of work deliverables is the very point of quality assurance.

It doesn't mean you have to be mean about it, but you can just spit it out.

Re: When your coworker does great work, tell their manager (2020)

#244

Post by playing_colours »

ori_b wrote: post #76
gabereiser wrote: post #4

>Ask if it’s ok first… This is very astute. Not everyone likes getting praise in public settings or they might not want their micromanaging manager to know they helped you outside the scope of their work. You should be cognizant of when praise should be given (i.e. when is it appropriate) and in what context as mentioned in the article. That said, if you aren’t thanking and praising your colleagues for doing good wor…

> If you are calling out your colleagues for doing bad work, or not the way you would do it work, you should try to rephrase into praise w/ direction. “I really liked how you tackled this, have you thought about this approach?” Instead of “Why didn’t you do it this way?” I don't want to work with people that communicate this way.

I think it is a matter of culture. I personally would prefer a straightforward approach, and I think many of my German colleagues, but I think my British colleagues would prefer that indirect way of communications.

Re: When your coworker does great work, tell their manager (2020)

#245

Post by gabereiser »

rewmie wrote: post #140
gabereiser wrote: post #4

>Ask if it’s ok first… This is very astute. Not everyone likes getting praise in public settings or they might not want their micromanaging manager to know they helped you outside the scope of their work. You should be cognizant of when praise should be given (i.e. when is it appropriate) and in what context as mentioned in the article. That said, if you aren’t thanking and praising your colleagues for doing good wor…

> If you are calling out your colleagues for doing bad work, or not the way you would do it work, you should try to rephrase into praise w/ direction. “I really liked how you tackled this, have you thought about this approach?” Instead of “Why didn’t you do it this way?” Why are you telling your colleagues you "really liked" how they did something when you feel the need to call them out for "doing bad work"? It comes…

You wouldn’t. You are either telling them you liked it or telling them they did it wrong. My comment was, if you are telling people they aren’t doing it right, rephrase it into something constructive instead of off-putting.

Re: When your coworker does great work, tell their manager (2020)

#246

Post by jpadkins »

Madmallard wrote: post #86
grey-area wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your assertion that this sort of linguistic hedge is a lie is itself based on a few false assumptions: 1. That there is one correct way to do something 2. That you know that way, and they don't 3. That they didn't consider and disregard that way in early planning due to something you're unaware of What you see as lying is intended to avoid an arrogant disregard for their time and thought, and also to avoid having ego…

nah people know when they’re sucking and you just look patronizing talking like that ever play any competitive games? theres nothing you can say directly to a person when they screw up. you have to just have to ignore and focus on the gameplay. saying anything to them raises the likelihood of a negative outcome.

Mike Tomlin (coach of the steelers) is a master motivator. I really like what he said to his rookie QB after a bad loss https://twitter.com/sdextrasmedia/status/1585807604277657600

"There's going to be better days. Head, high, fighting all the time." You can see Kenny Picket visibly lift his head up as they walked back to the locker room.

Re: When your coworker does great work, tell their manager (2020)

#247

Post by AlecSchueler »

system2 wrote: post #106
AlecSchueler wrote: post #70

Apologies for not commenting on the content of the article, but just wanted to say it's great to see the use of a gender neutral pronoun at the top of HN this evening.

Is there a way to write that title with genders?

"When your coworker does great, tell his manager."

Re: When your coworker does great work, tell their manager (2020)

#248

Post by anon84873628 »

qwytw wrote: post #194
gretch wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I would like people to be straight with me But you understand that people can genuinely like you right? Perhaps that person is trying to not throw the baby out with the bath water. “Hey I’m glad you patched the bug, but can you give the SREs a heads up next time? They p0’ed on an expected traffic spike” The person is actually happy with you for fixing a bug. They don’t want to you take away that in the future, to n…

"Hey I’m glad you patched the bug, but.." To me that just sounds passive aggressive and sort of like "you should mind your own business". I'd feel better you if someone just told me: "I saw you patched a bug, could you do X" or even just "can you give the SREs a heads up next time?" alone. Then again I'm used to a culture where any praise is ussually implicit and criticism tends to be quite explicit so it's easy to i…

Because the example is oversimplified for the sake of HN commentary. In the real world it goes more like this:

"Hey, I saw you patched that bug that was causing traffics spikes. That's awesome work and I appreciate your proactivity! The Ops team thought we had to work late tonight to implement mitigations for the problem.

In fact, it looks like we had a communication breakdown and they didn't realize you had fixed the issue until 6 hours later. In the future do you think you could let them know when this sort of problem is fixed, just to make sure we're all on the same page? We'll have to look at a solution for automated alerts too -- maybe an integration with the ticket system or build system. Do you have any ideas for that so we don't have to rely on manual communication? We're moving so fast that it's hard for everyone to keep up! Thanks again for the great work."

Re: When your coworker does great work, tell their manager (2020)

#249

Post by thegrimmest »

johnnyanmac wrote: post #198
thegrimmest wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a very stylistic and subjective take. Not all workplace cultures and not all people prefer to communicate this way, and many of us resent the "YTA" label that is applied to a direct communication style. I don't work for praise, and I maintain high standards as a matter of personal professionalism. I couldn't care less whether my colleagues recognize me, and business leaders don't care about your effort; they…

>Did you notice that "Why didn't you do it this way?" is rather less verbose than your alternative? "your code sucks" is even more concise. We can take a minute out of our time to elaborate and clarify, and of course not result to insults. >Managing emotional state should be the responsibility of the listener/reader, while the communicator's job should be to get their idea across as clearly and concisely as possible.…

> "your code sucks" is even more concise.

It doesn't convey the same meaning at all though. One is a constructive criticism, one is not. Asking about reasoning for discarding alternative solutions is a perfectly standard part of any review process. It doesn't need to be further elongated and stylized to reduce directness.

> "it's not my fault you feel bad about my abuse"

Nowhere in my post did I justify abuse. Ad hominem is generally out of bounds in professional communication. I'm defending a more direct style that communicates the same message, not a difference message all together.

I'm not saying that praise isn't useful feedback, only that it shouldn't be used in place of criticism as the parent post suggested. A submission is either adequate or not, and a review finding a submission inadequate should lay out its reasoning as clearly as possible.

If you're consistently authoring inadequate contributions, the onus is on you to figure out why, and negative emotion is a powerful tool to motivate an individual to do so. The same applies to teams and organizations that fail to meet their objectives. After all these emotions didn't evolve for no reason or in a vacuum.

> People still want to generally feel like they belong

Some people do, some people understand that they're fulfilling a professional function in exchange for compensation and don't see that their feelings have anything to do with it.

Re: When your coworker does great work, tell their manager (2020)

#250

Post by mulmen »

johnnyanmac wrote: post #217
AceJohnny2 wrote: post #116

The comments here really demonstrate how this is a culturally-nuanced topic. FWIW, the author comes from a North-American background.

The comments here show they need to get a job that doesn't abuse them. You shouldn't be so scared of a compliment because it will be used against you by your boss or coworkers. You'll never get work done if you spend all your time looking over your back. EDIT: looking through the 2020 thread, it's intersting how different the conversation went, especially wrt stack rankging. It felt like it was focusing more on proce…

The issue here is that you are making a decision for someone else.
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