Earlier quoted context omitted.
What is aquascaping?
Making aesthetically pleasing fishtanks, typically with live plants.
It does sound interesting
Thanks!
Basic Social Skills Guide (2012)
41–50 of 440 posts
Re: Basic Social Skills Guide (2012)
#42I fundamentally disagree with the thesis of the "Overcoming Fear and Social Anxiety" page. For example, laugh at a dongle joke in front of a journalist or some other influencer who's sneaky with a camera and a million followers, your career is over, if not your life depending on how nuts their followers are. Nearly everyone you meet is out to get you, and a social misstep is a fabulous casus belli. We're all politici…
> For example, laugh at a dongle joke in front of a journalist or some other influencer who's sneaky with a camera and a million followers, your career is over
You should laugh at these people anyway. Appeasement doesn't work, never has - whereas standing up to their abuse and pointing out how foolish they are just might.
Re: Basic Social Skills Guide (2012)
#43Why are social skills always focusing on the positive? A lot of programmers often seem to be more nice guys than anything else, and need to be able to be more assertive / aggressive.
Everyone tries to distinguish these two, it's mostly just in the eye of the beholder - IMO aggression is just assertion when it's judged to be inappropriate or incompetently done - a drill instructor being assertive looks different to a police officer in a stand-off which is different to how you talk to co-workers - the distinction is highly contextual and subjective.
I think a lot of people with poor social skills thinks the aggression / assertion line is all about being angry or shouty or rude. Assertion uses a bunch of tools (including potentially - a louder or quieter voice, appearing angry, threats, manipulations, etc) to achieve a goal. Doing so in an inappropriate way is seen as aggressive (e.g. threatening to quit over a minor issue). Overusing any given tool (e.g. swearing a lot instead of realising a different tool is needed) is seen as incompetent (or losing control) thus it's seen as aggressive. But fundamentally there's no real objective difference.
Re: Basic Social Skills Guide (2012)
#44This community consistently poo-poos MBAs and business people who, it says, don't contribute and just shuffle paper or find ways to lay people off.
I felt that way when I started my first company, finishing my physics degree. I figured, I helped launch a satellite, I can do what we needed. A couple patents later, we got our first funding and I knew how to solve what problems came our way. I could break down any problem into simple parts, each of which I could solve, for example.
I was blindsided when we went into a recession and my company neared bankruptcy. Years later I realized the importance of teamwork and leadership based in social and emotional skills, especially in difficult times. Difficult times always happen.
The investors squeezed me out of that company. It didn't have to be that way. I went back for an MBA and learned you could learn leadership skills, though I also found that the way they taught them wasn't as effective as active, experiential, project-based learning. I spent the dozen years since refining how to teach them effectively, consistently hearing from my NYU students and coaching clients, including senior executives, that they never knew they could learn skills like how to inspire people, to speak authentically, to find mentors, and so on, let alone in a structured class http://joshuaspodek.com/this-is-one-of-the-greatest-classes-....
I wish I had learned this stuff before I needed it instead of after. I made my courses available in book form http://joshuaspodek.com/initiative and http://joshuaspodek.com/leadership-step-by-step. Whether from my resources or others', these skills can be learned, they are valuable, and you learn them, like any skills, through practice. You have to practice.
Incidentally, the skills improved my relationships throughout life besides business too -- family, friends, girlfriends, etc.
Re: Basic Social Skills Guide (2012)
#45>In a nutshell, you inspire me when something that you share makes me want to share something, too. Notice the word "want" in that definition. Inspiration does not make your partner feel obligated to share. It makes them want to share.
This is the part that I've been stuck at for years. And I imagine other technical people hit this roadblock as well. Being able to talk with people when you have little in the way of common interests is a skill in and of its itself. Finding intimate relationships becomes particularly difficult when you can't achieve the inspiration since most young women aren't exactly excited to talk about code, or tech, or any of the things HN types tend to dedicate our lives to.
I don't think any of these self help references can really solve this problem, short of advising one to be "more open", which really means force interest in uninteresting topics.
Re: Basic Social Skills Guide (2012)
#46I fundamentally disagree with the thesis of the "Overcoming Fear and Social Anxiety" page. For example, laugh at a dongle joke in front of a journalist or some other influencer who's sneaky with a camera and a million followers, your career is over, if not your life depending on how nuts their followers are. Nearly everyone you meet is out to get you, and a social misstep is a fabulous casus belli. We're all politici…
Corrections:
In that incident:
* the "influencer" was fired from their job because of their public troll behavior
* the laugher was not fired (and was publicly supported by their CEO
* the joke-teller was fired for something shortly after the incident, but the CEO and the joke-teller won't say exactly what the justificaiton for the firing was.
Re: Basic Social Skills Guide (2012)
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am coming to the conclusion that social skills are probably more valuable than coding skills. I don't think I am especially productive in my current job due to a lot of context switching, but I think they like me for my attitude.
"Engineering is a team sport" - me You need to be able to work with others to produce things, unless you always work alone. Social skills are a very important part of that.
The ability to partition work into independent chunks is way more important than social skills when you work as a software engineer with other software engineers. Then they can work on their things and you can work on yours with little need for further communication.
And don't come saying that divvying up technical tasks is a social skill, it really isn't.
Re: Basic Social Skills Guide (2012)
#48My version. 1. Be polite 2. Ask questions. (Interesting people like to talk about themselves) Elicit more than Yes/No answers. 3. Answer questions put to you with more than Yes/No answers. (Interesting people like to learn more about interesting people)
| Interesting people like to talk about themselves That, or they love hearing themselves talk.
I would venture that people who only like to hear themselves probably don't fit my definition of interesting...
Re: Basic Social Skills Guide (2012)
#49I fundamentally disagree with the thesis of the "Overcoming Fear and Social Anxiety" page. For example, laugh at a dongle joke in front of a journalist or some other influencer who's sneaky with a camera and a million followers, your career is over, if not your life depending on how nuts their followers are. Nearly everyone you meet is out to get you, and a social misstep is a fabulous casus belli. We're all politici…
> Nearly everyone you meet is out to get you
I'm truly sorry that you feel that way. That definitely isn't the case in any general sense, though. Most people are absolutely not out to get anyone.
Re: Basic Social Skills Guide (2012)
#50I fundamentally disagree with the thesis of the "Overcoming Fear and Social Anxiety" page. For example, laugh at a dongle joke in front of a journalist or some other influencer who's sneaky with a camera and a million followers, your career is over, if not your life depending on how nuts their followers are. Nearly everyone you meet is out to get you, and a social misstep is a fabulous casus belli. We're all politici…
Corrections: In that incident: * the "influencer" was fired from their job because of their public troll behavior * the laugher was not fired (and was publicly supported by their CEO * the joke-teller was fired for something shortly after the incident, but the CEO and the joke-teller won't say exactly what the justificaiton for the firing was. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5398681
According to the link:
> As a result of the picture she took I was let go from my job today. Which sucks because I have 3 kids and I really liked that job.
Did he get his job back? I sure hope so, or a better one.