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No Time to Be Nice at Work

nytimes.com

31–40 of 130 posts

Re: No Time to Be Nice at Work

#31

Aggressive behavior is the norm when working as a consultant. You have to know that it's not personal and that part of it is negotiation on the part of the client, part of it is anger on the part of the client, some of it is just due to poor personality, some of it due to your misunderstanding of the situation and culture. Most people are not fit to work in a high-stress, aggressive environment, but some of us are. A…

> Most people are not fit to work in a high-stress, aggressive environment

Yep, that's me, and I have no shame admitting it. I absolutely cannot handle that kind of environment. The less interpersonal interaction I have to deal with, the happier I am.

Luckily, as a grad student I can work by myself and spend my time creating and learning all kinds of interesting things. But I'm a little worried that once I graduate I won't be able to find a job that has this much freedom...

Re: No Time to Be Nice at Work

#32

From the article: But insensitivity or disrespect often sabotages support in crucial situations. Employees may fail to share important information and withhold efforts or resources. Sooner or later, uncivil people sabotage their success — or at least their potential. Payback may come immediately or when they least expect it, and it may be intentional or unconscious. It's a bit weird how the article paints this as a f…

While the people taking illegal or immoral actions are responsible for their own reactions, it's possible for someone to call others to action through nothing but speech. If someone actively goes around pissing off as many people as possible, how is it not in someways "their own fault" when someone reacts poorly to this?

Also, as another poster said, calling the pissed-off employer a "sabotager" is not actually what the article is saying. The manager may "sabotage" their own success by causing all of the employees under themselves to quit en masse. Is this a "bad" action that only the employees are responsible for, leaving the manager as the poor and helpless victim?

Re: No Time to Be Nice at Work

#34
post #8

This is to be expected when the working environment gets as cut-throat as the American workplace has become. Blame it on inequality, blame it on the puritanical drive to overwork, blame it on the zeal to squeeze every last bit of profit. It's just one other symptom of how anyone who is not an oligarch in this society is meant as an expendable resource to be crushed by the ubermensch. My only hope is that the USA fail…

The United States is the way it is because this is the only way to survive within the framework of competitive capitalism. European attempts at cultural protectionism will fail as market pressures force them to adopt American customs and habits. This is just basic economics. American companies ruthlessly optimize for profit. Any attempt to optimize for anything else will take away from the potential for profit. In a…

Economic protectionism has been an integral part of U.S. policy since the 1850s or so. Politicians were pretty big on tariffs and land law acts for nearly a century, though they have since declined in favor of gunboat diplomacy.

Re: No Time to Be Nice at Work

#35
There's a school of thought among "economic leftists" that the disconnect between US productivity and average US worker wages since the 1970s, is due to a decline in "outrage constraint."[0] Executives didn't pay themselves that much more than their workers because it would essentially be considered "uncouth" to do otherwise. They might be rich, but they would be condemned and considered pariahs among their peers. You could optimize your personal gain, but the reputational damage would be be so suboptimal for your firm that you'd wind up in a net worse position.

Social norms and conventions have significantly shifted since then. It is now entirely acceptable for executives to pay themselves several hundred times the average worker compensation[1]. There is no longer any real cost, reputational or otherwise, for optimizing for your personal gain So you might as well get yours, and fuck everyone else. Sure, some people with "Sanders 2016" bumper stickers will whine on Reddit about you, and maybe they'll even get together and yell at some buildings until they collapse due to a combination of in-fighting and tear-gas. But for the most part, you'll just shrug, order another round of layoffs, and think about how much your RSUs will appreciate in the inevitable stock price bump.

And if you're truly concerned about reputational risk, and can't reconcile that some people in society will still think you're a "bad person" for this, and the thought of being a bad person causes too much discomfort for your liking, then you can literally compare them to Hitler and find a sympathetic audience.[2]

I have to imagine -- and yes, I literally have to imagine, because I don't have any quantitative evidence and don't pretend otherwise -- that this is essentially a sociopath mindset (perhaps best explained by the Gervais Principle[3]) that then trickles down at every level of most professional organizations. When you're optimizing for your personal gain, you don't have a lot of time to consider things like "empathy" or "fairness." This is unfortunate to those disposed to such personality traits like the OPs father, because they essentially get eaten alive in the modern American workplace. At many professional organizations, the approach is binary. If it's not "fuck you, got mine" then it's "fuck! you got mine."

HN is known for having a significant population of those who that there is nothing wrong with this, and if the most productive members of society happen to be sociopaths, then they should be rewarded as such as their productivity is what drives the human race forward. But what's unfortunate to me is that this means some of our society's most brilliant and productive people will essentially get marginalized in their professional (and indirectly, their personal) lives, not because they lack some level of competence, self-reliance, productivity, etc, but because they're incapable of embracing a sociopathic mindset to professional advancement.

I have no problem with those who want to make their fortunes in any way possible, so they can retire to Galt's Gultch with their fortunes. I suppose I only question why they're so hell-bent on having only assholes for neighbors.

[0] http://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/23/opinion/the-outrage-constr...

[1] http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2014/09/25/t...

[2] http://www.politico.com/story/2014/03/the-rich-strike-back-1...

[3] http://www.ribbonfarm.com/the-gervais-principle/

Re: No Time to Be Nice at Work

#36

Aggressive behavior is the norm when working as a consultant. You have to know that it's not personal and that part of it is negotiation on the part of the client, part of it is anger on the part of the client, some of it is just due to poor personality, some of it due to your misunderstanding of the situation and culture. Most people are not fit to work in a high-stress, aggressive environment, but some of us are. A…

Are you able to share a few?

I share the opinion of the parent comment, pretty much exactly.

Some of my comrades call this a layer-8 problem. (hint: there is only 7 technology levels, 8 is the human one).

One story in particular my firm was hired to come into a startup that had failed to scale, both technology wise, and personnel wise. They had hired up to 25 engineers, hoping to fix their stability issues, and almost going bankrupt doing it. I am at no liberty to say which company this is publicly unfortunately.

It was stressful, but you can't take things personal. You have to put aside feelings, to get useful data out of these people to make the platform work. You can't possibly care about someone's ethics, approach, and often even coding style on these missions. The goal is to try and not piss off as many people as you and, and go ahead not worry if you do have to piss someone off to get the job done, and not lose sleep at night if someone does not get along with you.

The end result was that they had to shed, through various reasons the great majority of their internal team. We stabilized things and bought them lots of time, while they slowly brought in new senior tech management and rebuilt their internal team from the ground up.

It was a multi year affair, and involved working on over 12 codebases and consolidating applications from 3 different hosting providers into AWS.

They got very close to running the ship into the ground. If you think staying up late and pulling the occasional all-nighter is unhealthy, or having a job that has extremely high expectations and leave you no time for a personal life is bad, this is about one hundred times worse. Since my team is small and highly skilled we can get a lot done in a short amount of time, and occasionally we are terse even with each other. But the amount of sleep deprivation that comes with a task of gargantuan size, where your dealing with hundreds and thousands of requests (sometimes per second), the company is going for broke, and a single code change can improve monetary situations in instantaneous, tractable ways, it gets super intense.

You have the CEO, the COO, the CFO all breathing down your neck. One day they see light at the end of the tunnel from fixing the currently broken problem, and then the next day, you discover another codebase lost in git that powers commerce for android, is starting to experience issue, and you don't even know where to find credentials to log into its production systems since it was setup by some employee in the middle of the night a year ago that is no longer there.

I can go on and on and on. But honestly, please don't read this as a recommendation. Being a digital mercenary is fun in your 20s, but it got old quick. Of course I still do it, but I have a much healthier way of saying NO, more often now. You can make a very lucrative living doing this sort of work, but its hard to earn the reputation to get these clients, and you may end up forgetting what your family looks like by the end of a 2 year job that is 365/24/7.

The story did have a happy ending though. The company does well today. Extremely well. A new era of management has come in over the last year, and I think everyone learned a lot. They are a household brand and I hear about them in the news it seems like monthly.

Cheers

Re: No Time to Be Nice at Work

#37

Aggressive behavior is the norm when working as a consultant. You have to know that it's not personal and that part of it is negotiation on the part of the client, part of it is anger on the part of the client, some of it is just due to poor personality, some of it due to your misunderstanding of the situation and culture. Most people are not fit to work in a high-stress, aggressive environment, but some of us are. A…

Are you able to share a few?

I think there's only one that I'm comfortable talking about since it was long ago and the people involved have all moved on from their parent companies.

Louis Vuitton was relaunching their public-facing website, which was tightly integrated with their back-end systems - inventory, manufacturing, etc. IOW, it wasn't just a regular website.

They hired a consulting company here in Europe who sold them a solution that was the epitome of using the wrong tool for the job - it was a non-relational database solution for what was obviously a pretty traditional relational db application. (except the product content - images, movies, etc, had to be tied to their back-end db systems)

Louis Vuitton rented out the Louvre for the launch party, hosted by the CEO. But no one took it upon themselves to let the CEO know that the rewrite would not be done in time for the launch. Not even close. The launch party happened but the new site wasn't ready. There was nothing to present at the launch.

The CTO was fired of course. We were hired to help bring the project back on track along with a couple of other consulting companies - it was about 5 senior developers and a few dozen junior developers.

However, the work was being done in France where the norm is to not work under pressure like what we had to do. And the senior consultants where all american, swiss, and german, and only one very good and amazing french developer. I spent most of my time working on politics and very little time developing. We managed to get some of the work away from the managing French company to be done by Swiss and German companies. And then I was transferred to another project with another desperate client.

I was in Hyderabad a couple of years later and met the fired CTO at a party - he was starting a consulting company in India to provide consultants to Europe. Nice guy but meeting him made me understand why what happened happened.

Re: No Time to Be Nice at Work

#38
I'm guilty of workplace incivility. I was oblivious how much I was negatively impacting my colleagues. I read No One Understands you and What to do About it and the No Asshole Rule. Both helped me to improve.

Re: No Time to Be Nice at Work

#39

This is to be expected when the working environment gets as cut-throat as the American workplace has become. Blame it on inequality, blame it on the puritanical drive to overwork, blame it on the zeal to squeeze every last bit of profit. It's just one other symptom of how anyone who is not an oligarch in this society is meant as an expendable resource to be crushed by the ubermensch. My only hope is that the USA fail…

> Europe should stay civilized, for the sake of its people.

Yeah, what a shame those driven over-working puritans went and exported their Americanism to those civilized Europeans in 1944.

Edit: I'll make the point more explicitly in response to the downvoting. (1) It's easy to decry efficiency and hard work in times of peace. But liberté, égalité, fraternité requires not having your society conquered by Hitler or Stalin. France failed that test and would've been a Nazi puppet state if not liberated by a harder-fighting more determined force than the Germans. (2) Anti-Americanism is really lame; America's achievements in the last 80 years have done so immensely much good, while being probably the most benevolent, cooperative, and pro-social world hegemon of all time -- it's not even particularly close. America has its problems, but is an amazing country and our citizens should be proud of our achievements.

Re: No Time to Be Nice at Work

#40

Aggressive behavior is the norm when working as a consultant. You have to know that it's not personal and that part of it is negotiation on the part of the client, part of it is anger on the part of the client, some of it is just due to poor personality, some of it due to your misunderstanding of the situation and culture. Most people are not fit to work in a high-stress, aggressive environment, but some of us are. A…

> Most people are not fit to work in a high-stress, aggressive environment Yep, that's me, and I have no shame admitting it. I absolutely cannot handle that kind of environment. The less interpersonal interaction I have to deal with, the happier I am. Luckily, as a grad student I can work by myself and spend my time creating and learning all kinds of interesting things. But I'm a little worried that once I graduate I…

They are certainly out there, they just aren't as common as one would like. Finding a good small business or startup (I don't mean a Silicon Valley "Facebook for Cats"-esque venture) with the right people can be a game changer.

After leaving my first job, I went to a, purported, "real startup" which wound up being run in a manner that was very corporate. Sure, you get the no-dresscode and flexible hours (which isn't really all that unique to startups nowadays anyway) but being treated like a petulant child with a Slack channel masquerading as a time clock, a bot that monitors the tone of speech, and being lied to about compensation, duties, etc. It was clearly wrong as could be.

Moved on to job #3, and the difference is night and day. Sure, the ability to work remote and set hours are very nice, but what makes the job amazing is working with folks who are dedicated, and treat you like an adult and an integral part of the team.

Coming out of your first, idyllic environment, you might not yet be cognizant of all the things that are important, but do be careful to try to distill your thoughts and be wary of what the folks hiring tell you.

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