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Root for your friends

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Re: Root for your friends

#121

Post by bastawhiz »

One of the best things I've ever done for my own career is being mindful of celebrating the wins of my coworkers. Call out a good refactor that would have gone unnoticed. Email someone's manager or skip level in the lead up to performance reviews and tell them how they made things better. Publicly thank the person that took notes or groomed the backlog or had a noisy on-call rotation.

Everybody appreciates getting celebrated. Managers love hearing that their reports are being appreciated. Leadership loves to hear about wins that are normally invisible to them. You're directly benefiting the people around you, and it reflects well on you as someone who cares, pays attention, has empathy, and has a focus on career growth. Maybe it's just because it's normally a behavior associated with senior ICs, but people hear this stuff and start to look to you as an authority and example.

Re: Root for your friends

#122

Post by awinter-py »

pwdisswordfishz wrote: post #79
diggan wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, I'll bite. Why? You happen to have a sort of antagonistic relationship with HN?

I'm not the poster, I'm Stavros, I just wanted to see if his username was accurate. I wonder how many people have actually done this before me.

pw is a diss word, fishz?

Re: Root for your friends

#123

Post by pwdisswordfishz »

awinter-py wrote: post #122
pwdisswordfishz wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not the poster, I'm Stavros, I just wanted to see if his username was accurate. I wonder how many people have actually done this before me.

pw is a diss word, fishz?

I feel like if you don't get the password, you don't deserve access.

Re: Root for your friends

#124

Post by Sammi »

neom wrote: post #111
cootsnuck wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds like he has a very "zero-sum" type of mindset and views most people around him as potential competition instead of potential collaborators. Scarcity mindsets taken to extremes make people focus only on what they can lose. If I'm being charitable, maybe your friend has been struggling with things behind the scenes? But honestly it sounds more like a personality thing. And all of that being said, none of us a…

We used to enjoy drinking together, but now I'm sober, we don't do that anymore. I suspect that was the thing we had in common, we loved getting smashed together... :\

Sound like you're capable of reflecting and growing, which is awesome. You don't need to be hard on yourself or your friend. You might just be becoming mindful that you need other friendships that have other qualities to them, than the friendships you've had in the past had. This is just growth. Also making new friends is super fun. It's a bit challenging to "put yourself out there" and all that, but all of the best things in life are hard. I really like cheering for my friends, and lots of other people do too. You can find these people now that you know what you're looking for.

Also I've never had much luck with work friends. Work seems to get in the way. These days board games are my best strategy for maintaining friendships. You need some sort of "third place" for maintaining good friendships: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_place

Re: Root for your friends

#125

Post by actuallyalys »

lapcat wrote: post #98

The nominal subject of the article is "friends", but it appears that the article is best understood as about work friends. Perhaps "allies" would be a more appropriate term? I hope that the author has some work/life balance and can feel the difference between these two categories. I would define a friend as someone with whom you enjoy spending time. There doesn't need to be a goal except to "hang out". Do you really…

It feels like it’s probably most applicable to people who do similar work as you and who you talk shop with. I wouldn’t consider these work friends, which to me are people at the same place of work that you wouldn’t hang out with if not for work.

Re: Root for your friends

#126

Post by actuallyalys »

miracoli wrote: post #90

I think this post really shows cultural differences in the term 'friendship'. Where I grew up (in Germany) most people I know would not abandon friendship because they read a blog post. a real friendship is something special that you maintain also in difficult times and sometimes people are jealous, but that can change and I think the understanding of friendship as a kind of 'success accellerator' is something that s…

Personally, I wouldn’t normally think of a friendship as a “success accelerator” because that reduces a friendship to its material benefits. I think you can have strong and meaningful relationships without this aspect at all.

Still, I do want to acknowledge that if I’m in a position to help accelerate a friend’s success, I will. I don’t know whether I’d say I expect my friends to do the same for me since it’s so contextual. At the same time I would expect a certain level of reciprocity if they’re in the position to reciprocate, although I admit I’m struggling to articulate my expectations clearly, since they’re not simply one to one.

Re: Root for your friends

#127

Post by tough »

darkwater wrote: post #119
neom wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm going through a really really difficult time right now, 3 major areas of my life have broken down simultaneously over the past five months. I was ranting to this guy I've known for years about it (who is very successful but was once jr to me at work) - I would have called him a "good friend" - he was drunk and giggled out something along the lines of "makes me feel strong" - I reacted as you would expect "uh.. re…

It is normal if you are a petty person. There is a saying in Spanish that goes along "a thief always thinks everyone is a thief" that clearly depicts this kind of people.

Cognition is a mirror

Re: Root for your friends

#128

Post by tough »

darkwater wrote: post #120
zo1 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think a big factor of that is that usually most people just do the positive feedback and don't say anything negative or constructive. So when someone does do so, it's seen as "wow, this must be so bad that they just had to say something, no matter how delicately or toned-down it is being phrased as". These days I just mention the problems and concerns to the people making the decisions because yearly review time is…

> I think a big factor of that is that usually most people just do the positive feedback and don't say anything negative or constructive. You are most certainly right. But whose fault is this? HR and CxO.

Theres a nice chinese saying

Nail that stands, gets the hammer

Re: Root for your friends

#129

Post by tough »

foobarbecue wrote: post #96
mystifyingpoi wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For real. I have bought a car and the same day discovered a minor issue, I had to get it fixed next day. I rated the service 8/10, it was excellent otherwise. Next day I get a very apologetic call, begging me to change my rating, because anything less than 9/10 triggers some kind of investigation process. I said screw it and took the survey again, I'm not going to ruin someone else's work because of this.

I bought a mouse on Amazon that didn't fit my hand and was uncomfortable to use. I gave it a 3-star review. The company immediately refunded me and told me I didn't need to return the product. I was shocked. I get "the customer is king" but I think it's gone too far. A review system where everything is expected to have a perfect rating is not a useful system!

There's scammers gaming the amazon review system to put fakes in highly reviewed (previous) ad posts.

so you where messing with their real-state i guess

Re: Root for your friends

#130

Post by Profan »

noduerme wrote: post #86
ketzo wrote: post #4

For a long time, I’ve been this person for other people, but don’t feel like I have anybody to do this for me. That’s okay — I don’t feel bitter about that or anything. And I don’t wanna overstate what a good friend I am or whatever, I just do this a decent amount. But some part of me does wish I had someone celebrating my wins. This: “No one comes to mind? Maybe you haven’t really trusted anyone with your wins yet.”…

There's nothing wrong with being humble. It only takes one small display of pride to make most people quietly hate you. For example, I opened this blog post and within 20 seconds I loathed the person who wrote it. I find your approach to be much more decent.

Damn, why not just be happy for people? We're all different, and I might be an outlier here but I think very few people actually "hate" people, unless they've wronged them in some very particular way, at least for me personally someone has to have gone very far in wronging me or my friends for me to "hate" anyone!
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