I've never met the guy and I don't like him.
I don't like you very much
21–30 of 49 posts
Re: I don't like you very much
#22I see Daniel's point. He's right. There are people who don't like you for bizarre reasons, for the same reason there are plain crazy folks out there you can never hope to understand. Like one of his commenters, though, I think these people are worth forgetting about rather than analyzing. Some people you'll just never get - and life's too short.
I tend to avoid confrontation and haven't had many incidents like Daniel's (this is a big part of why I work solo) but even I've hit into it. I positively reviewed a book on Amazon yet some third party guy I've never heard of (and unrelated to the book) went crazy in the comments how he didn't like me. Like.. WTF? So, yeah, let's write these people off to just being the crazy side of life we'll never understand - life's kinda fun like that :)
Re: I don't like you very much
#23As I've said over there, but will repeat here: I don't understand how someone declining a request to write a recommendation gets you to assume he dislikes you. He just doesn't want to recommend you. I know plenty of people that I like and work with, but that I wouldn't want to write a recommendation for. This is largely because I do not believe in lauding someone's good sides without also addressing their shortcoming…
yeah. I dono. I mean, a lot of my verbal recommendations are "S/he is really good at X, but has problem Y, and Would probably work well for the position you have." I dono how that would always translate in 'on your permanent record' type things. It's probably not even the best in person, sometimes.
I remember a few years back I was vacating a position as a contractor, and I was asked for recommendations. So, at the time my business was contracting, and I didn't really need as much help as I had. I recommended they hire one of the guys who was working for me but it was a "well, he can do the job, but here are what's wrong with him. I recommend you hire him"
The client didn't bite. later the body shop/recruiter who had gotten me the gig asked for recommendations, and I said the same thing. Apparently he talked the client into hiring my guy, and the client was pretty happy with the guy for a year or so. (the client hired me again when the guy left.)
Would it have been better for the client if I was good at sales and able to directly sell the guy? maybe.
(my other minor nit was that nobody gave me a kickback. Eh, I did get the guy to work for me at way below market wages for a year or two, so I got something out of it.)
But the upshot is when I give a recommendation, I see it as doing a favor to the company or person that has the open position more than a favor to the person I'm recommending. I mean, if I didn't think you were qualified, I wouldn't have recommended you for the gig, right? sometimes my recommendations are in the format "person X is perfect for the job, but you are unlikely to catch his interest"
On LinkedIn, though, it is different. the recommendations are setup as if you were doing a favor to the person you are recommending, which makes it much harder for me. I mean, how much of the negative stuff do you put in? hell, change the situation and a massive flaw becomes a massive advantage.
Re: I don't like you very much
#24I've never met the guy and I don't like him.
Honestly? Would you actually go up to him and say "I don't like you" if you saw him, or are you just being an Internet Tough Guy?
Re: I don't like you very much
#25This seems related: http://www.scottberkun.com/blog/2009/how-to-keep-your-mouth-...
"No matter how right you are, if you care about effecting change, you should never open your mouth without some sense of who will agree with you and who won’t."
Re: I don't like you very much
#26I've never met the guy and I don't like him.
I've never met the guy and I like him a lot. This is probably why I gave him the benefit of the doubt when reading the blog entry and why I think the detractors calling it "ham fisted" and "unsatisfying" and "inconclusive" and "lacking empathy" must be people who did but skim over it before spraying their unhelpful personal attacks.
Re: I don't like you very much
#27As I've said over there, but will repeat here: I don't understand how someone declining a request to write a recommendation gets you to assume he dislikes you. He just doesn't want to recommend you. I know plenty of people that I like and work with, but that I wouldn't want to write a recommendation for. This is largely because I do not believe in lauding someone's good sides without also addressing their shortcoming…
yeah. I dono. I mean, a lot of my verbal recommendations are "S/he is really good at X, but has problem Y, and Would probably work well for the position you have." I dono how that would always translate in 'on your permanent record' type things. It's probably not even the best in person, sometimes. I remember a few years back I was vacating a position as a contractor, and I was asked for recommendations. So, at the t…
My understanding is that you need to be very careful about saying anything negative at all in a reference since it opens you up to a potential defamation lawsuit, and that it's therefore prudent to either give a positive reference or none at all.
Re: I don't like you very much
#28Overly wordy and self-indulgent, and for all the navel-gazing, doesn't come to a satisfying conclusion. It's hard to say that communication problems are "a little bit of me, and a little bit of them" if you go and say things like "Wow, you're a tall fucker!" to new clients when you meet them. Y'know? I can see how that might lead to a long dark night of the soul, but who wants to read about it -- when it's written so…
but who wants to read about it And why here?
I'd argue some fraction of HN readers are, despite their brilliance, not incredibly good with people. It's just more "It's not me, it's them" thinking, and sort of masturbatory.
People love to upvote things that make them right, but I guess that's kind of the idea.
Re: I don't like you very much
#29I want to highlight this paragraph:
I think the worst attribute any team member can have is not wanting to make waves. In fact, I think it's the number one attribute I would actively seek out to exclude from a team. Everybody has to work without nets on an agile team. If we're not taking emotional chances and communicating, we're losing ground.
Is this wisdom born from long experience or is it unwise naivety? Is there any grounds for saying "if you want to encourage waves then you have to have an environment where people wont fear being fired for sticking out. At all."?
I think actually having such an atmosphere and acceptance that everyone believes would be a lot harder than it sounds. Perhaps that's something that startups have - the founders have equity in the company, they can't fire the other founders and they can't be fired, so they have the freedom to do whatever they think will make the company progress, and no particular benefit (e.g. "not being fired") for not rocking the boat.
Re: I don't like you very much
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
As the author, I've done a poor job of communicating. For that, I apologize. Nobody is at fault here. Let me be perfectly clear about this. The question is what types of lessons to learn from interactions with other people. You're never, ever going to learn the exact motives of everybody you interact with. In each of these cases, multiple attempts were made to understand and communicate motives, paradigms, and worldv…
OK, perhaps I didn't phrase my objection very well. > The purpose is to review various people that didn't like me and explore why. I guess my problem with the article was that the tone implied that most of these people weren't justified in not liking you, or that it was some natural effect of a bad situation, rather than something caused by your own actions.
I don't mean to put the boot in too much, but what comes across is not just lack of empathy but lack of self-knowledge. The fact that the OP has to think why people don't like him strikes me as... troubling. This is not a personal comment on the OP - everybody has people who don't like them (hey, some of us more than others) - but if you really don't know at this stage in your life what it is you do that puts those who dislike you off, I suggest you collar some of your good friends and ask them straight up, because you really need a hint.
Note: I am not suggesting that one has to "fix" things other people dislike; every (sane) character trait is a trade-off between good points and bad points. But one should be aware what they are.