241–250 of 363 posts
This about the non verbal communications of tone and gesture. No amount of rewording will substitute for a smile.
Not everyone knows how to use non-verbal communication, either. Hopefully most of the people discussing this get that non-verbal is Plan A; and careful re-wording is Plan B, for when Plan A falls through.
I would feel offended if anyone would feel the need to go easy on me, just say what you think. And if you are right I will be eternally grateful for being taught a new efficient trick. Do I look like such a weak person to you that you feel like you have to handle my self esteem with silk gloves? Thanks for the insult. And what is it with this 2 intentions? The third is the obvious correct one where I'm not familiar w…
So I'd say regardless of how powerful you feel, personally, the same fortitude should not be assumed to exist in everybody, all the time. It's not about the strength of a person, but about avoiding harm wherever possible.
Harming people, whether intentionally or not, is just never worthwhile. If that means "silk gloves" and "weakness", so be it.
The real issue is that if you don't know how to smile and be friendly and respectful in your body language, minor rephrasings won't help.
Is the author a Lead? Manager? Architect? On the same team, or department? A direct peer?
All of this matters in order to better answer the main question presented in the article.
Why wasnt more than one dev involved in discussing a design or possible solutions before the work was performed? If that was the case, where was the author when that happened?
Why didn't you just already know they weren't using sshd?
I’m just thinking about how in Medicine, lots of people would suffer if the helpers had trouble asking the basic questions. “Did you submit cultures?” “Why did you choose to ignore the liver enzymes in this case?” “Did you ask about a family history of X?” To a large extent, becoming professional is about becoming less sensitive to being wrong.
I agree, but there's nothing to lose in trying to become a better communicator, you're not responsible for other people's sensitivity, but you are definitely in control of what and how you communicate.
There's no reason to be jumping straight in with "why" in this situation at all, one can perfectly reasonably ask "have you tried using sshd". Why doesn't the author just try putting it that way?
He mentions that there are complaints about even that approach.
My go-to would be "Do you know if sshd would work?" To me, framing it directly as a knowledge question, and to not appear as if you're coming from a place of authority (unless you know both their problem and your solution both well enough to solve it without running into edge cases, and how often does that happen?). They either know or they don't, or potentially have a reason for not trying in the first place. If the…
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Yes! I’ve looked through these responses exasperated. This is the only one that I agree with. The people who say “why didn’t you just” often have a very limited understanding of the new thing, and naively reduce it to a problem they do understand.
To me, both responses are the same. Orwell's "Politics and the English Language" comes to mind. You're saying exactly the same thing but in a bureaucratic form. Reading other posts here the message I get is that a lot of people work in dysfunctional environments in which everyone's at each other's throat or something. My default assumption would be that obviously my colleague isn't being an asshole...
Because the tech environment has become so complex that there is probably a simple API I could have used but I wasn't aware of it.
How about we stop assuming people are out to hurt us, and start assuming everybody is well-meaning but they have social issues just like me? Just like every other nerd in tech!
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Favoriting your comment here. You just gave 2 "learn within 1 minute social skills" lessons within one HN comment. There's a lot to unpack here. 1. Your way of analyzing on how it could be less threatening 2. The final answer to it being less threatening 3. Praise in public, criticize in private I'm normally not a fan of simple sentences, but the sentence of (3) is one I'll keep in mind when I'll start my career. Tha…
Praise in public, criticize in private In my (considerable) experience of working in large organisation (private and public), whether this works or not depends strongly on the power differential between praiser/criticiser and praisee/criticisee. Basically this is the most likely outcome: - Powerless praises publicly and criticises privately: criticism will be ignored, praise will be milked. - Powerless praises privat…