151–160 of 322 posts
That is the author’s real intention is to assert engineers should deliver what their bosses ask.
> I don’t mind the ways in which my job is dysfunctional, because it matches the ways in which I myself am dysfunctional As a fellow traveller, I offer one caution: learn to turn this down in personal relationships as it can be counterproductive. It took decades for my wife to finally get through and explain not every problem she voices is something that needs a solution. Some times people just want to be heard. It b…
I frame it not as turning a dial down, but as switching channel from practical problem-solver to emotional problem-solver. Often when someone wants to talk about a situation involving difficult feelings, they're actually trying to process those feelings: to understand where the feelings are coming from, to be validated, and to be able to take a broader perspective. You can help by being curious about what they're say…
This perspective was a good stepping stone for me, but then I realized I needed bigger changes to keep growing. However I defined the problem to be solved, I was still setting up a dynamic that was arrogant. I thought I was air traffic control when others were looking for a copilot. Somebody along for the ride with them, not just requesting information about them and offering commentary from the ground.
Reading _How to Know a Person_ helped me a lot.
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It's great that this is a case for you. I actually enjoy process of writing code, understanding deeply the system I work on, finding elegant solutions to business problems - not just a list of checkboxes with features for a given sprint that agent churns in background. Sure, practically I understand that business doesn't care how well something is written as long as it works somewhat reliably. I might eventually adap…
You can still understand a system deeply and find elegant solutions, and use LLMs to translate your idea into code, then review the code. It's still much faster than writing everything by hand in a lot of cases, if done properly.
If you only care about number of features Copilot implements for you or lines of code Claude Code gave you - you must be a manager.
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> they're actually trying to process those feelings: to understand where the feelings are coming from, to be validated, and to be able to take a broader perspective. If you’re speaking to a rational person with good intentions and good self-management this can help a lot. If the other person doesn’t have good emotional regulation and is prone to catastrophizing, exaggeration, or excessive self-victimization then vali…
> then validating and reinforcing their emotions isn’t always helpful I think you might misintrepet what "validating someone's emotions" is/should do. It's not "You're absolutely right for feeling completely sad and broken down because the cafe wasn't open", but more "That must be such a horrible feeling, to feel so sad and broken down", without saying "yes/no" to if you think it's "justified or not". The point is th…
> I don’t mind the ways in which my job is dysfunctional, because it matches the ways in which I myself am dysfunctional As a fellow traveller, I offer one caution: learn to turn this down in personal relationships as it can be counterproductive. It took decades for my wife to finally get through and explain not every problem she voices is something that needs a solution. Some times people just want to be heard. It b…
I feel the same way. I retired last summer, but that only means that I found a place that needs me, where I can work part time without worrying too much about money. I remember, decades ago, reading an article about some African politician visiting the UK. He was given a tour, which included some of the social housing. The UK bragging about how they took care of their people. He saw people sitting around with with th…
I'm skeptical of this perspective as most social housing in the UK and the USA have stiff REQUIREMENTS that housing residents be either either employed OR be showing proof of interviewing OR enroll in a job placement program (which requires active training participation). If you fail these, you are generally kicked out of these social housing programs. Maybe there are some exceptions here and there, but it's generall…
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> then validating and reinforcing their emotions isn’t always helpful I think you might misintrepet what "validating someone's emotions" is/should do. It's not "You're absolutely right for feeling completely sad and broken down because the cafe wasn't open", but more "That must be such a horrible feeling, to feel so sad and broken down", without saying "yes/no" to if you think it's "justified or not". The point is th…
> In the end, you can validate someone's feelings without validating what they're feeling those about, by just saying "that sucks". If you say "that sucks" the other person is going to assume you're agreeing with them that the thing they're angry about sucks. They're not going to think you're saying "that sucks" that they have an emotion, as an isolated feeling that happened for no reason. This is where the overly ac…
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I quite like the definition on Wikipedia: > Emotional validation is a process which involves acknowledging and accepting another individual's inner emotional experience, without necessarily agreeing with or justifying it, and possibly also communicating that acceptance. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotional_validation It sounds perhaps like your family member's former partner was going further than validating the e…
I understand the academic concept, but the word "necessarily" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that definition. In real human conversation, when someone is expressing an emotion they aren't looking for other people to confirm that they are indeed experiencing that emotion. That's not even a question up for debate. They're looking for people to share in that anger, sadness, or frustration and confirm that it's a val…
Emotional processing, in my experience, is completely separate from action. I hear that your family member had her actions validated - what she decided to do.
An emotion itself can be complex, scary and counter-intuitive. In my experience, always valid - but that doesn't mean you have the right reasons. It's often very difficult to get the right environment to actively explore where an emotion is coming from - purely because of the reactions in other people - which try to suppress, deflect, minimize, etc.
Strangely, simply agreeing or validating someone's outcome is actually a way of minimizing or deflecting the scary expression. Let's not go deeper, let's not figure out where this is coming from - you just go with your gut and act.
Getting to the root of an emotion can come in waves and many iterations. It can be incredibly useful to try and completely unhook action from it.
I've had very strong emotions from events that were almost always "right emotion, wrong reason/story" and I've slowly corrected the 'why' multiple times over.
A lot of those corrections took removing people from my life that made it hard to feel or have access to those difficult emotions.
I wonder if you value that family member or just the idea of them. Value them only when they're 'stable'? Want to get in the muck with them to find where instability comes from? It's okay to not. It's less okay IMO to stay connected to someone you require change from. If you don't like behavior, say it and leave/create much space. Give them agency to choose, agency to fail, agency to be someone you don't like, agency to not be okay.
> I don’t mind the ways in which my job is dysfunctional, because it matches the ways in which I myself am dysfunctional As a fellow traveller, I offer one caution: learn to turn this down in personal relationships as it can be counterproductive. It took decades for my wife to finally get through and explain not every problem she voices is something that needs a solution. Some times people just want to be heard. It b…
1. Do you want to be Helped? 2. Do you want to be Heard? 3. Do you want to be Hugged?
I'm still trying to get in the habit of using this approach more often with my partner, and as I do, it has noticeably improved our relationship. It turns out most of the time, she just wants to be hugged.
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I understand the academic concept, but the word "necessarily" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that definition. In real human conversation, when someone is expressing an emotion they aren't looking for other people to confirm that they are indeed experiencing that emotion. That's not even a question up for debate. They're looking for people to share in that anger, sadness, or frustration and confirm that it's a val…
The emotional world is vast. From what I hear here, there is a collapsing of a couple things all under 'validation'. Emotional processing, in my experience, is completely separate from action. I hear that your family member had her actions validated - what she decided to do. An emotion itself can be complex, scary and counter-intuitive. In my experience, always valid - but that doesn't mean you have the right reasons…
A lot of people in this comment thread are trying to rewrite this situation. That's not what happened.
The problem was that she would have a strong emotional reaction to something and her partner would go along with it: Validate her emotions, offer comfort, not question the validity of responding that way.
This is the problem with the overly abstract notion of validating emotions without endorsing them. If you consistently "validate" the way someone is feeling even when it's obviously harming them, you're not actually helping. You're implicitly agreeing and condoning.