Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Don’t point out something wrong immediately

blog.the-pans.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 180 posts

Re: Don’t point out something wrong immediately

#101

Post by codesnik »

the_duke wrote: post #8

This is the hardest lesson I had to learn in my consulting work. It is is especially important if you are not familiar with the full context - which is almost never the case. The main insight for me was that yes, things can be "wrong" due to lack of knowledge or incompetence. Sometimes. But more often than not there is a good reason. Like: * we know this is stupid, but we had immense time pressure and this was the on…

calling many of those a "good reason" is.. I don't have a word. Something brittish probably.

But yeah, just calling it out straight away sometimes shuts down communication, people become combative, and that's not good if you want to fix something eventually.

Re: Don’t point out something wrong immediately

#102

Post by philsnow »

This "blue tape walkthrough" approach is one concrete way of introducing the delay between stimulus (hearing/seeing something obviously wrong) and response ("correcting" them on it):

https://randsinrepose.com/archives/the-blue-tape-list/

> It’s a surprise when a month passes, and you review your blue tape list and discover how items that seemed urgent at the time now seem entirely irrelevant.

Re: Don’t point out something wrong immediately

#103

Post by harry8 »

codesnik wrote: post #101
the_duke wrote: post #8

This is the hardest lesson I had to learn in my consulting work. It is is especially important if you are not familiar with the full context - which is almost never the case. The main insight for me was that yes, things can be "wrong" due to lack of knowledge or incompetence. Sometimes. But more often than not there is a good reason. Like: * we know this is stupid, but we had immense time pressure and this was the on…

calling many of those a "good reason" is.. I don't have a word. Something brittish probably. But yeah, just calling it out straight away sometimes shuts down communication, people become combative, and that's not good if you want to fix something eventually.

> calling many of those a "good reason" is.. I don't have a word.

I'm going with "Heroically empathetic"

Re: Don’t point out something wrong immediately

#104

Post by HWR_14 »

alexashka wrote: post #99
HWR_14 wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whether someone's feelings are hurt should be a primary concern. That doesn't mean you cannot correct people making errors, you definitely should. But if you're hurting people's feelings regularly you are bad at providing feedback. I notice the only "softening" of the message you suggest is to allow pushback if you happen to be wrong. It seems you are more likely to cause persistent fixes by treating people as people…

> Whether someone's feelings are hurt should be a primary concern No. Whether shit gets done is the primary concern, when the primary reason we get together, is to get shit done.

I said a primary concern and I stand by it. Yelling or being unpleasant in the name of getting people to agree with you is counterproductive to getting stuff done. People, at least competent people, don't have to put up with your ego and can go do just as interesting things with people who are more pleasant to be around than you. I mean, unless you are Elon Musk or Steve Jobs reincarnated.

Re: Don’t point out something wrong immediately

#106

Post by SpaghettiX »

hyperpallium2 wrote: post #14

Chesterton's Fence https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Chesterton%27s_Fence reforms should not be made until the reasoning behind the existing state of affairs is understood

What's the difference between this and "don't change things you don't understand".

It would make it clearer that this is a type of approach rather than a law. Sometimes, that legacy system or class is replaced without fully understanding it, because it's cheaper to reimplement it's interface than fix it.

Re: Don’t point out something wrong immediately

#107

Post by boldslogan »

jodrellblank wrote: post #63
fjorde wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I appreciate the sentiments. i think the cert for https://cieloconnects.com/ is expired.

It isn’t expired, look more closely at it. (And, cough, see thread topic)

Maybe saying something like hey we’re you aware the browser throws this error NSURLErrorServerCertificateUntrusted

To point out the issue but maybe not say exactly what was wrong?

Re: Don’t point out something wrong immediately

#108

Post by [deleted] »

HWR_14 wrote: post #104
alexashka wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Whether someone's feelings are hurt should be a primary concern No. Whether shit gets done is the primary concern, when the primary reason we get together, is to get shit done.

I said a primary concern and I stand by it. Yelling or being unpleasant in the name of getting people to agree with you is counterproductive to getting stuff done. People, at least competent people, don't have to put up with your ego and can go do just as interesting things with people who are more pleasant to be around than you. I mean, unless you are Elon Musk or Steve Jobs reincarnated.

[deleted]

Re: Don’t point out something wrong immediately

#109

Post by arvinsim »

DoreenMichele wrote: post #100
alexashka wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Whether someone's feelings are hurt should be a primary concern No. Whether shit gets done is the primary concern, when the primary reason we get together, is to get shit done.

As long as that's a two street and you can take it as well as you dish it out. But often it's not. Often the people who like dishing it out are the most easily affronted if you tell them they are in the wrong. Don't get me wrong: I actually agree with you. It's just an unfortunate reality that working with people means dealing with people and feelings are a part of that. It's hard to establish mutually respectful rel…

One of the early disappointments I had with software engineering was that I thought that I would be mostly working to formulate elegant solutions and implement them.

Didn't expect software development to need so much people management.

Re: Don’t point out something wrong immediately

#110

Post by alexashka »

HWR_14 wrote: post #104
alexashka wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Whether someone's feelings are hurt should be a primary concern No. Whether shit gets done is the primary concern, when the primary reason we get together, is to get shit done.

I said a primary concern and I stand by it. Yelling or being unpleasant in the name of getting people to agree with you is counterproductive to getting stuff done. People, at least competent people, don't have to put up with your ego and can go do just as interesting things with people who are more pleasant to be around than you. I mean, unless you are Elon Musk or Steve Jobs reincarnated.

Who said anything about yelling...
Post reply on HN