I really like these two paragraphs towards the end:
Being kind isn’t the same as being nice. It isn’t about superficial praise.
It doesn’t mean dulling your opinions. And it shouldn’t diminish the passion
with which you present them.
Being kind is fundamentally about taking responsibility for your impact on
the people around you. It requires you be mindful of their feelings and
considerate of the way your presence affects them.
This get's missed a lot here on Hacker News. Many people are often hostile towards content creators or other commenters.
It's perfectly OK to disagree with someone; but please consider doing so in a respectful and thoughtful tone. Remember that others often shut-down when they read criticism, even when well warranted. The way you phrase and present yourself defines whether you're giving criticism or critique.
Yes, totally this. Moreover, I'd like to add anonymously down-voting / reporting someone's opinion just because it's not yours is just as mean-spirited as calling someone names.
Every internet message board has its own culture with its own take on what's "right" and what's "wrong", and on HN (and reddit) the institutionally accepted way of being mean is misusing the downvoting / flagkilling system to attempt to bleep out someone else's opinion because you disagree with it and labeled it as "toxic" from your perspective.
I mean, it's one thing to downvote someone because of spam or noise (e.g. one line posts of "lolwtf" or "this is dumb"), but every time I scroll through the comments and see discussion chains of folks arguing some valid points (about say referrals and paywalls or the ever controversial issue of sexism) under a flagkilled or completely invisible down-voted-to-hell post, I think to myself "this shouldn't be how our community operates."
> It's perfectly OK to disagree with someone; but please consider doing so in a respectful and thoughtful tone.
The problem I've found is I literally get ignored and end up repeatedly dealing with the same mess until I stop being "kind" about it.
I generally have to do literally 10x as much work to be "kind" than when I'm less generous about it. The problem with kindness is its frequently taken [in IT, in places I've worked] as it not being a serious problem that actually needs to be addressed except as a favor to you. It eventually, frequently, gets to the point where serious problems are repeatedly introduced and you end up having to clean it up.
Because from their point of view, if it really was a problem, you would have stopped being nice after the first or second time.
Two of my favorite quotes about being 'nice' come from the musical, Into The Woods.
The first is Red Riding Hood's quip, "Nice is is different than good", which is then fleshed out later by the witch: "You're so nice. You're not good, you're not bad, you're just nice. I'm not good, I'm not nice, I'm just right."
I think "kind" and "good" are reasonable synonyms here, and Boz and Sondheim express very similar sentiments.
This is very evident in the styles people do interviews. For example, Bill O'Reilly is loud, calls names etc when his guests disagree with him - to the point that some of his conversations end up being loud shouting matches and the only thing left to do (as a viewer) is to turn it off. Jon Stewart on the other hand - he disagrees with his guests in a kind, calm and funny manner - it is interesting to watch him and his guests go back and forth on ideas. I'm guessing that attitude probably spills into other areas of their lives too
I visit HN not to argue about the right or wrong, but to get more informed and educated. The more you know, the more you'll be humble and kind to those who you disagree with.
The notion that there is not absolute correctness even for a most trivial problem may be hard for engineers to understand, but I've learned it the hard way. I've learned a lot and working better with others since I started reading more on non-technical books and articles. It's a lot easier to being kind socially than to being kind on technical discussion and decision times. I think every engineering major should take courses in philosophy and psychology or read some related books.
I'm really glad that he worded that so well; it's really easy to disguise "being a jerk" as "just being right," and I often see it justified as such (at times by myself).
Being right and being kind aren't mutually exclusive.
If someone has to wonder wether they are kind; I have found they are just Not kind. They don't change unless they have a nervous breakdown, major health scare(like a TBI), or become poor(really poor).
Capitalism seems to cater to selfish individuals? A lot of selfish individuals get far financially in life. Think about some of the "successful" people, some of us, idolize here on HN. Think about that person before they became rich and famous. I can usually bring up a list of retched things they did to become financially successful.
That's the rub. They become comfortable in life and are in complete denial over how they carved their way to the top of their version of success.
That's all I have--I have a headache, but kind people know they are kind. They don't need to advertise it. They don't need an audience in order to give to the suffering (human, animals, environment). They are just kind!
Now, the Fakers--well that's what makes me unkind. Oh there are so many Fakers.
(I have a sister who stepped on family members in order to become financially successful, and her journey was ugly. I might be a little over sensitive when it comes to people and kindness.)
Exactly this. IMHO, the first paragraph quoted above is especially important to understand.
This post reads like someone discovering the line between aggressive and assertive. Aggressive is most definitely unkind. Assertive is often confused with unkind, but it isn't really that: it's about demonstrating respect both for yourself and for those around you.
Of course it costs nothing to address people in a way that they feel comfortable with, so you should do it. But, in a Postel's law sort of way, in terms of critiquing argument I don't think it's worth dwelling on the tone. Two plus two is four no matter how many times the person arguing it uses the word "fuck", to put it crudely. And often, addressing tone is a way of eliding real argumentation.
To be fair, this is also incredibly exhausting. Most peoples' reactions to things are arbitrary at best and constant worrying about how they will take something is just way too much BS to put into my day. I bought pretty deeply into this philosophy once and it just made me neurotic and quiet at a time of my life where those things very much hurt me.
I think being selectively kind makes a lot more sense. I'm kind to children and animals and my loved ones. People at work, retail staff, etc should be prepared to not have their emotions constantly validated and deal with disagreement and other things that are unpleasant.
I'm not one of those "grow a thick skin, jerk" types, but there's this cheap sentiment I see about how everyone needs to be more kind and compassionate, and when its not phoned in, it usually ends up as a way to take advantage of others. Its easy for celebrity millionaire Kurt Vonnegut to write about compassion and be quoted by tumblerinas and its totally another thing for some kid no one gives a shit about trying to make his way in the world try to live it.
I find high-concept philosophies are often the playthings of the well-off and comfortable. If you're fighting for your living, its not a luxury most of us can have. Sadly, this often justifies hostility, but I think there's a sane middle-ground here, but curt statements like "be kind" just seems so classist and off-putting to me. Like a soccer mom telling me how wonderful the Maharishi is or how relaxing doing 4 hours of Yoga is (no, she doesnt work, her husband does) and after I got off a long shift and dealt with a lot of shit and a crappy commute.
Cheap sentiment just doesn't resolve the fundamental issue facing humanity today and probably until our final extinction event: we are all competing for the very same resources and competition can sometimes be ugly. It doesn't need to be truly awful and we shouldn't be encouraged to be overly negative and vindictive, but conflict and disagreement happens on a certain level and pretending we can kindly make it go away is just being unrealistic about our fundamental economic beings. Kindness is often taken advantage of as one party feels obligated to engage in it moreso than the other. This is a fairly large problem in gender politics where we raise women to be kind and then they find themselves at a disadvantage to men in the workplace who don't have these values.
Considering everyone here is visiting a hard-nosed libertarian-leaning entrepreneur forum about becoming wealthy quickly, but the second something pseudo-spiritual gets posted suddenly we're all Siddhartha under the Bodhi tree. We're not. If anything, the personality types here are very, very far from any sort of selfless ideal. Patting ourselves on the back because our six-figure salaries let us rise above the struggle doesn't mean the struggle doesn't exist and that struggle means acting in a rational, usually unkind way. High class pseudo-spirituality is such a hilariously hypocritical thing its a running gag on HBO's Silicon Valley, yet here we are Gavin Belson'ing it up. At least I'm honest with myself to say that, no, I'm not "kind" by these standards and that I will argue and fight with you when I feel its appropriate and more importantly -- I will not feel bad about it afterwards.
Sadly, most of the replies to my comment are fairly unkind responses telling me how much of a horrible person I am, especially to retail staff even though I gave no concrete examples of how I act. How ironic. If anyone is truly interested, I meditate daily and follow Buddhist ideals. I just refuse to go to the yogi-like extremes of insincere self-love in an attempt to con my way out of the struggle of Samsara. Accepting the reality of who I am is real mindfulness and liberating, and that person is not this uber-kind enlightened being who is 'above it all' and I doubt anyone here reading this is either. If anything, if we're buying into cheap manufactured sentiment that just happens to be self-complimentary, I'd say we're fairly far from that ideal. The same way we point at the nasty evangelicals will hearts full of hate who pat each other on the back for being so pious. Lets not go that route, as tempting as it is. All the technology is showing you this message was made by sweatshop-style labor. We're just not kind.
> Being kind is fundamentally about taking responsibility for your impact on the people around you.
Totally agree, especially in regard to when people share their projects on HN. The HN community moderation always seemed to be based on a very superficial rules - don't swear, don't mention banned keywords X Y or Z. Never have they seemed to seriously consider the impact that words have on other people, instead of just the words themselves.
This is a fantastic article from Boz. I have to be blunt in my criticism, however, as I imagine Boz would expect and appreciate. I had a few run-ins with him in the early 2010s and I don't see much evidence that he learned from these experiences or changed his basic working pattern. Or maybe he was even more raw before I met him. :) I learned very early on not to have anything Boz wanted nor to cross him. It's hard to judge the impact of what people don't say, once they get into the habit of not saying certain things around you.
Yup, this post is about the start of a journey that is still ongoing for me. It still takes work and I still lose focus and do poorly and tried to call that out at the end.
To your specific point, I probably was even worse in 2008 than what you experienced in 2010. That's probably true at every point since. I'm getting better, but I am sure you can find people even in the last year who would say this post doesn't reflect the Boz they met. I believe those people are getting fewer and their experiences less bad, but I am definitely not great at this yet so the post should be taken as a belief I hold and a behavior I aspire to.
I've heard so many horror stories about Boz and the extremely toxic work environment that he apparently cultivated. Good to see that at the very least, he's self aware.
I am an Engineering major(I have been programming since I was 13), and I have a bad habit of over-analyzing everything. I never skim over the details, and I always try to dig into a topic as much as I can to make sure my interpretations are correct.
Because of this attitude, I can not enjoy fantasy novels. They ask me to bridge the gap between multiple paragraphs with insufficient information. But at the same time, I am really comfortable with technical writing; no matter how complicated they are.
My girlfriend tells me I am mean to people, and I am not very kind. But it can't be furthest from the truth(from my perspective). I have never had any intention to hurt anyone. Gosh! I don't even hurt an ant. All she tells me is that I am `good person`.
So I asked her to demonstrate me some of the variants of conversation where I don't come of as an unkind person. I thought with enough examples, I'd able to extract a pattern.
She has been trying this for the last couple of years. But it's not working. I am yet to find a pattern, and unless I find a pattern I don't know what the anti-pattern will be.
The best solution I've found thus far is to smile and remain silent. But that can't be the only solution. So my question to HN crowd,
I had problems with this when younger, and I can point you in two directions:
1. Empathy. This is about understanding others. I think this is 80% of "being kind". It's a learnable skill. I learned through books and trial and error, though lately I suggest this book "Empathy: why it matters and how to get it". http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B00HDMMEP2
2. Observe/Listen. Many conversations we are planning our next point rather than really deeply observing and listening to the other person: their eyes, body language, voice timber, gestures, and phrasing of the words they use. Huge amounts of information is on display in the shortest of phrases. Playing back observations to another is one of the simplest acts of kindness: it validates, affirms, shows interest, admits nuance, etc.
There are a few references on how to pick up on this stuff, though for entertainment value I'd recommend the more mainstream PUA books such as "The Game" or "Rules of the Game" as it is good information on non verbal communication even though the purpose is seedy.
Perhaps a good start would be to read "How to win friends and influence people" by Dale Carnegie. It doesn't address your concern directly but in the book you will find the pattern you seek for being perceived as kind by other people.
This is a fantastic post and hits really close to home. I'm currently going through almost the exact same situation, where I'm effectively being demoted due to my general lack of kindness.
It's also important to note that if boz is anything like me, he probably had to be almost fired for the lesson to go through. For most of my life, people have been telling me I need to be kinder (especially my parents), but I've never cared until now. It's certainly held me back socially, but never professionally. I never received a worse grade for being unkind. I never lost out on a job opportunity (being unkind is different from being an asshole). Until getting demoted, I never felt kindness was relevant to success.
It stings, but I've finally realized that I need to act on this. I'm re-reading Dale Carnegie and am, more importantly, trying to deliberately consider the emotional impact of everything I say. (If anyone has advice or resources, I'm all ears.)
-----
I probably should have posted this on a throwaway, but decided to be transparent. Please be kind.
I find it easier to be kind when I try to see things from the perspective of the other person. I quickly put myself in their position & try to understand what would be helpful and what would be counter-productive.
Observing and listening to others goes a long way.
That needy coworker that's annoying may be craving affirmation: smile when appropriate and avoid blaming their identity for their actions ("you failed" vs. "your stuff doesn't work").
Or that boss who's asking for stupid reports all the time may in fact be under intense pressure from above. While handling the pressure is technically his job, giving him some ammo to help reduce uncertainty helps reduce his headache.
Most religions have codified kindness as "do to others what you want them to do to you".
From a networking / interop perspective, it's "be strict in what you provide and lenient in what you accept".
I had a completely different interpretation of the incident at Facebook.
He had developed some key features that were now important. Instead of mentoring him to work better with others, his boss demoted him.
The boss was giving someone else a favor, making them the lead of this now-important project, some up-and-coming hotshot. He made up an excuse about "bad attitude", while just using it as cover for backstabbing him.
The OP probably had big $$$ in unvested options, so he had to play along and play nice, instead of quitting on the spot.
I'm going to write a follow up about how I wasn't mad about the feedback as much as I was mad nobody had told me sooner. We were a young company and didn't really have a management or mentorship skillset yet. We would all develop that together in the ensuing years and this was a major part of my motivation for pushing for it.
> The boss was giving someone else a favor, making them the lead of this now-important project, some up-and-coming hotshot. He made up an excuse about "bad attitude", while just using it as cover for backstabbing him.
so, basically someone who was competent and agreeable was favored by his boss to get a promotion, and the person who acted like a know-it-all dickhead 24/7 got sent to the basement.
The best manager I ever had (and continues to be my inspiration today) was also one of the kindest, genuine, and empowering people I've ever met. Not necessarily nice, but kind.
The worst manager I ever had once told me "you're too kind to your team". He wore his ability to bring fear to a room like a badge of honor.
I never worked harder and more passionately than under the first and I never felt more apathetic and unmotivated from work than under the second. A single data point, but something I'll never forget.
"Being kind is fundamentally about taking responsibility for your impact on the people around you. It requires you be mindful of their feelings and considerate of the way your presence affects them."
I think this advice is so apt and so needed. There's a perception that to be effective or powerful, one must also be harsh, stern, a little bit mean. That stems from a misunderstanding of what kindness is. Hopefully people will heed his advice!
Notice how it was OK for him to be mean while Facebook was growing up it's infrastructure. Being right unfortunately is a necessary evil for the first wave in any project. In the nascent stages a project often needs firm almost machine like guidance. As the project matures the sense of stability trickles down organically to it's members. Some make the transition well while others dont. Often the best of our champions don't make the cut. The author has rightly pointed out the importance of Kindness, but that's not enough. The leadership should also be kind and help these mean incumbents make the transition.
I disagree. You can absolutely be a powerful leader with a powerful vision without being mean or being, for lack of a better term, an asshole. That doesn't mean you acquiesce or agree with everything everyone else says, it just means you lead by example and with a keen understanding of how what you say and do affects those around you, rather than ignoring that.
It's similar to taking medication to treat the causes of an issue without being concerned with the side effects. It's totally cool if your headache goes away, but less cool if you then have seizures for 2 years. It's even worse if it makes those around you have seizures for 2 years, while your headache has gone away.
Maybe this is a low blow but if there's one place that needs a little less kindness and a lot more truth it's the Facebook News Feed. It's real nice that they only show you news they think you'll like but it seems pretty irresponsible.
If they really want to make the world a better place they should come up with some way of spotting some of the verifiably false news stories that get posted there. They could do it nicely, maybe: "Hey did you know this story may contain many factual errors? Check it out on Snopes.com!" Facebook could even set up their own fact checking service if they wanted to, it would be good PR for them.
And it's important to be nice but you have to be able to say "this sucks" sometimes too. With a guy like this Boz who's doing a good job but has a natural inclination to steamroll people maybe they should have set him up with some sturdier folks and let them fight it out instead of creating an atmosphere where he's afraid of being fired for being direct. That sounds like poor management, IMO.
I'm currently re-reading the classic "How to Win Friends and Influence People" by Dale Carnegie, and one of the principles he outlines to win people over to your way of thinking is to "show respect for the other person's opinion. Never say 'you're wrong'." He tells a story from Ben Franklin's autobiography outlining how insolent and opinionated he used to be, to the point that nobody could stand being around him. One day, someone wiser and older pointed this out to him and from that moment, Franklin made it a point to never directly contradict people or positively assert his own opinions. Instead, he'd say things like "I may be wrong. Let's examine the facts." This warmed people up instead of immediately putting them on the defensive and completely changed the success he had in dealing with people. A little tact and diplomacy goes a long way towards persuading others towards your way of thinking. And you never have to say "you're wrong."
I had almost that exact conversation with my boss a few years back (except for the part about almost getting fired). I was completely stunned that people thought I was indifferent to their ideas and bent on finding flaws, because I had actually made an effort not to do that for quite a while before the conversation. It turns out that, at least for me, navigating through people's sensitivities while having a technical discussion and making sure the truth is discovered is extremely difficult.
The effect it had on me was to basically make me clam up, because I decided that pointing out issues that would eventually crop up was not worth the risk of alienating my coworkers. It's hard for me to say whether this was a net positive or negative in terms of overall productivity, because if my shutting up makes the team more cohesive, I can see how finding the problems for themselves would grow their strengths over time. On the other hand, we often make decisions now that I would have questioned before in the process of talking it out (that includes my own decisions often enough because the whole discussion process is chilled). Ultimately, we seem to have a more congenial team (at least on the surface) at the price of having more bugfixes to deal with. Very unclear to me whether I did the right thing, but I can't really think of another way to handle it.
Edit to add:
The other big effect I noticed after learning to let stuff go was that I generally feel a lot less invested in the projects now. Before, I would treat every project I was on like it was my baby, and now I feel much more like I'm just working on somebody else's thing. That's not necessarily a bad thing (my phrasing is poor above, but I'm too tired to fix it at the moment), because it probably more accurately represents the real situation. The sense of detachment does tend to mean that I don't push as hard to go beyond expectations though.
While the author may have been a very talented engineer, there are also a lot of mediocre engineers (and members of other professions) who happen to act like jerks.
Don't assume that just because someone is crotchety, indignant, or combative that he/she is intelligent.
I am not sure I agree 100% with this. If both people are working on a really hard problem and the argument is based on theory, then yes, you should be kind. But if a colleague routinely creates more work for you and he thinks he is a competent programmer when not, then being kind will only further stroke his ego.
I am literally facing this at work. One of my colleague has an opinion on everything. Its quite frustrating because he is neither the most experienced person in the topic nor is he any good. I literally caught him using an if else statement for check whether a dictionary contained a key when one line would have done. Its programming 101, pick up a book and you will learn it in chapter 3. But he goes on saying he has 5 years in this industry... I am like okay bro. How he got a job is beyond me.
In the end, kindness is a tool in EQ. You should use it when needed and be stern when another approach calls for it. Hiding your dissatisfaction just to be kind will do the company long-term dis-service. Especially to the code base.
If you couldn't have guessed from my HN personality, this is me, as well.
Different companies have had different ways of putting it; in the current incarnation, with Erin and Patrick, I'm called "Kanye", as in, "I'ma let you finish".
Author's 'before' picture is me very often. I'm nearly ego-less in pursuit of the truth--more than ready to be shown wrong myself--but that doesn't mean that coworkers and loved ones end up feeling good about the conversation.
I hope he will write a "how to" follow up, because I would like to change, but I don't see how to do it in a way that doesn't sound impossibly exhausting.
I'm hopeful that it actually is possible, though, because for 30+ years I had never been able to keep any space well-ordered for more than a few weeks, nor had any reason to think I ever would be able to. I read "the life changing magic of tidying up" and it turns out I can do it--I just needed to be taught how. This may not seem relevant, but it's been life-changing not so much to have a tidy office, but to learn that what I assumed was a fixed personal trait was changeable after all.
I got the same feeling from reading the book as the original recommender ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7762266 ): reading the book made me feel instantly better at being able to communicate when having difficult or tense conversations. I can't recommend it enough.
Has anyone tried Loving Kindness meditation? "Empty your mind" type of thing never did much for me but Loving Kindness meditation featured in New Scientist so I gave it a go out of curiosity.
I found it remarkable. If you spend deliberate concentrated time imagining someone you know or might meet and them becoming happy, you later get a weird sense of joy when you do meet them. You anticipate and look forward to nice things happening to them and unconsciously strive to make that happen. What's fascinating is that it works with people you dislike/have trouble with. It really does foster empathy.
Kindness when treated as just a behaviour will be an uphill struggle, there will be conflict between what you want to do versus a correction. However when your first instinct, your desire without thinking about it, is to be kind - its no bother.
Don't know boz, but would probably like him. Hopefully I will bump into him someday.
Somehow, I seem to get along with all of these "raging assholes" that everybody complains about when I meet them. They tend to do interesting stuff, are interesting to talk to, and, generally, aren't attempting to do active harm to you because they're too busy doing stuff.
Of course, if they accidentally do something that harms me or ticks me off, I WILL TELL THEM. Normally, they are the first to apologize and help fix the issue they caused.
I only flip someone into the true asshole category when I tell them what they did to cause me grief, and they don't try to make amends somehow.
I've also been holding the same view as you since teenage, I believe the world operates by continuous contradictions and compromises or amendments. I expect myself to honestly directly pointing out the wrong of others, but also to proactively recognize and amend my own faults when others point out.
From my own recent experience and Boz's article, I am forced to realize that not just all people operates this way, I should simply adjust. Though I still genuinely believe this is the most efficient way for people to grow and improve, because this way eliminates all the overhead of misinterpretations.
I dunno. I'm not a big fan of the "be kind" angle on things. Too often that translates to, "Withhold the feedback you have for fear that you'll upset the other person." Or, "Don't tell anyone that you think you have a better idea than the one someone else is championing."
I generally think that people are "too kind" at work in a lot of ways, and it leads to a lot of grousing and internal stress on the part of the people who have to bite their lip rather than contribute to their fullest.
Rather than "Be Kind", I prefer the duo of, "Be Honest, but Be Thoughtful First".
Spot on. I think it's tough, particularly as a young guy, to hold back on being overly confrontational. I used to be horrible to be around, not just professionally, but in nearly every way. Super fighty and abrasive.
I'd like to think that it was through mindful practice that I've managed to tame my aggression. Perhaps it is, partly. But the real reason that I'm a lot easier to get along with now probably has to do with aging out of the testosterone-flooded decade of my 20s.
I think it is mindful practice; I'm in my mid 30s and probably more abrasive than in my early 20s, despite having much less testosterone-fueled aggression.
IDK, maybe I'm forgetting what it's like to be earlier in a dev career (I'm 30), but how much I see "this resonates me" more than "duh" is a bit scary.
I suppose we're all on a scale of ability to be empathetic (and can learn be more emphatic), but who goes into a job with this attitude?
Cheers for learning! I just wish all of our upbringings could bring us this lesson earlier in life. Because...it should. You graduated Harvard, and got a job where you acted like you knew everything. I suppose that's typical of college grads everywhere though, I'm not trying to be too harsh.
[+] [-] mankyd|11 years ago|reply
It's perfectly OK to disagree with someone; but please consider doing so in a respectful and thoughtful tone. Remember that others often shut-down when they read criticism, even when well warranted. The way you phrase and present yourself defines whether you're giving criticism or critique.
[+] [-] ffn|11 years ago|reply
Every internet message board has its own culture with its own take on what's "right" and what's "wrong", and on HN (and reddit) the institutionally accepted way of being mean is misusing the downvoting / flagkilling system to attempt to bleep out someone else's opinion because you disagree with it and labeled it as "toxic" from your perspective.
I mean, it's one thing to downvote someone because of spam or noise (e.g. one line posts of "lolwtf" or "this is dumb"), but every time I scroll through the comments and see discussion chains of folks arguing some valid points (about say referrals and paywalls or the ever controversial issue of sexism) under a flagkilled or completely invisible down-voted-to-hell post, I think to myself "this shouldn't be how our community operates."
[+] [-] fweespeech|11 years ago|reply
The problem I've found is I literally get ignored and end up repeatedly dealing with the same mess until I stop being "kind" about it.
I generally have to do literally 10x as much work to be "kind" than when I'm less generous about it. The problem with kindness is its frequently taken [in IT, in places I've worked] as it not being a serious problem that actually needs to be addressed except as a favor to you. It eventually, frequently, gets to the point where serious problems are repeatedly introduced and you end up having to clean it up.
Because from their point of view, if it really was a problem, you would have stopped being nice after the first or second time.
[+] [-] JshWright|11 years ago|reply
The first is Red Riding Hood's quip, "Nice is is different than good", which is then fleshed out later by the witch: "You're so nice. You're not good, you're not bad, you're just nice. I'm not good, I'm not nice, I'm just right."
I think "kind" and "good" are reasonable synonyms here, and Boz and Sondheim express very similar sentiments.
[+] [-] JoeAltmaier|11 years ago|reply
Maybe we can read comments more kindly, and give terse words the benefit of the doubt?
[+] [-] vijayr|11 years ago|reply
Example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=URHPD6AJ5Fg&t=2m (Bill ends up calling his guest a fascist)
[+] [-] donlzx|11 years ago|reply
I visit HN not to argue about the right or wrong, but to get more informed and educated. The more you know, the more you'll be humble and kind to those who you disagree with.
The notion that there is not absolute correctness even for a most trivial problem may be hard for engineers to understand, but I've learned it the hard way. I've learned a lot and working better with others since I started reading more on non-technical books and articles. It's a lot easier to being kind socially than to being kind on technical discussion and decision times. I think every engineering major should take courses in philosophy and psychology or read some related books.
[+] [-] austenallred|11 years ago|reply
Being right and being kind aren't mutually exclusive.
[+] [-] marincounty|11 years ago|reply
Capitalism seems to cater to selfish individuals? A lot of selfish individuals get far financially in life. Think about some of the "successful" people, some of us, idolize here on HN. Think about that person before they became rich and famous. I can usually bring up a list of retched things they did to become financially successful.
That's the rub. They become comfortable in life and are in complete denial over how they carved their way to the top of their version of success.
That's all I have--I have a headache, but kind people know they are kind. They don't need to advertise it. They don't need an audience in order to give to the suffering (human, animals, environment). They are just kind!
Now, the Fakers--well that's what makes me unkind. Oh there are so many Fakers.
(I have a sister who stepped on family members in order to become financially successful, and her journey was ugly. I might be a little over sensitive when it comes to people and kindness.)
[+] [-] candu|11 years ago|reply
This post reads like someone discovering the line between aggressive and assertive. Aggressive is most definitely unkind. Assertive is often confused with unkind, but it isn't really that: it's about demonstrating respect both for yourself and for those around you.
[+] [-] serve_yay|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rdudekul|11 years ago|reply
http://www.wikihow.com/Be-Kind
[+] [-] edpichler|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] drzaiusapelord|11 years ago|reply
I think being selectively kind makes a lot more sense. I'm kind to children and animals and my loved ones. People at work, retail staff, etc should be prepared to not have their emotions constantly validated and deal with disagreement and other things that are unpleasant.
I'm not one of those "grow a thick skin, jerk" types, but there's this cheap sentiment I see about how everyone needs to be more kind and compassionate, and when its not phoned in, it usually ends up as a way to take advantage of others. Its easy for celebrity millionaire Kurt Vonnegut to write about compassion and be quoted by tumblerinas and its totally another thing for some kid no one gives a shit about trying to make his way in the world try to live it.
I find high-concept philosophies are often the playthings of the well-off and comfortable. If you're fighting for your living, its not a luxury most of us can have. Sadly, this often justifies hostility, but I think there's a sane middle-ground here, but curt statements like "be kind" just seems so classist and off-putting to me. Like a soccer mom telling me how wonderful the Maharishi is or how relaxing doing 4 hours of Yoga is (no, she doesnt work, her husband does) and after I got off a long shift and dealt with a lot of shit and a crappy commute.
Cheap sentiment just doesn't resolve the fundamental issue facing humanity today and probably until our final extinction event: we are all competing for the very same resources and competition can sometimes be ugly. It doesn't need to be truly awful and we shouldn't be encouraged to be overly negative and vindictive, but conflict and disagreement happens on a certain level and pretending we can kindly make it go away is just being unrealistic about our fundamental economic beings. Kindness is often taken advantage of as one party feels obligated to engage in it moreso than the other. This is a fairly large problem in gender politics where we raise women to be kind and then they find themselves at a disadvantage to men in the workplace who don't have these values.
Considering everyone here is visiting a hard-nosed libertarian-leaning entrepreneur forum about becoming wealthy quickly, but the second something pseudo-spiritual gets posted suddenly we're all Siddhartha under the Bodhi tree. We're not. If anything, the personality types here are very, very far from any sort of selfless ideal. Patting ourselves on the back because our six-figure salaries let us rise above the struggle doesn't mean the struggle doesn't exist and that struggle means acting in a rational, usually unkind way. High class pseudo-spirituality is such a hilariously hypocritical thing its a running gag on HBO's Silicon Valley, yet here we are Gavin Belson'ing it up. At least I'm honest with myself to say that, no, I'm not "kind" by these standards and that I will argue and fight with you when I feel its appropriate and more importantly -- I will not feel bad about it afterwards.
Sadly, most of the replies to my comment are fairly unkind responses telling me how much of a horrible person I am, especially to retail staff even though I gave no concrete examples of how I act. How ironic. If anyone is truly interested, I meditate daily and follow Buddhist ideals. I just refuse to go to the yogi-like extremes of insincere self-love in an attempt to con my way out of the struggle of Samsara. Accepting the reality of who I am is real mindfulness and liberating, and that person is not this uber-kind enlightened being who is 'above it all' and I doubt anyone here reading this is either. If anything, if we're buying into cheap manufactured sentiment that just happens to be self-complimentary, I'd say we're fairly far from that ideal. The same way we point at the nasty evangelicals will hearts full of hate who pat each other on the back for being so pious. Lets not go that route, as tempting as it is. All the technology is showing you this message was made by sweatshop-style labor. We're just not kind.
[+] [-] solve|11 years ago|reply
Totally agree, especially in regard to when people share their projects on HN. The HN community moderation always seemed to be based on a very superficial rules - don't swear, don't mention banned keywords X Y or Z. Never have they seemed to seriously consider the impact that words have on other people, instead of just the words themselves.
[+] [-] brongondwana|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|11 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] aristus|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thisisboz|11 years ago|reply
To your specific point, I probably was even worse in 2008 than what you experienced in 2010. That's probably true at every point since. I'm getting better, but I am sure you can find people even in the last year who would say this post doesn't reflect the Boz they met. I believe those people are getting fewer and their experiences less bad, but I am definitely not great at this yet so the post should be taken as a belief I hold and a behavior I aspire to.
[+] [-] testingonprod|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] iamcreasy|11 years ago|reply
Because of this attitude, I can not enjoy fantasy novels. They ask me to bridge the gap between multiple paragraphs with insufficient information. But at the same time, I am really comfortable with technical writing; no matter how complicated they are.
My girlfriend tells me I am mean to people, and I am not very kind. But it can't be furthest from the truth(from my perspective). I have never had any intention to hurt anyone. Gosh! I don't even hurt an ant. All she tells me is that I am `good person`.
So I asked her to demonstrate me some of the variants of conversation where I don't come of as an unkind person. I thought with enough examples, I'd able to extract a pattern.
She has been trying this for the last couple of years. But it's not working. I am yet to find a pattern, and unless I find a pattern I don't know what the anti-pattern will be.
The best solution I've found thus far is to smile and remain silent. But that can't be the only solution. So my question to HN crowd,
How do I learn to be kind?
[+] [-] parasubvert|11 years ago|reply
1. Empathy. This is about understanding others. I think this is 80% of "being kind". It's a learnable skill. I learned through books and trial and error, though lately I suggest this book "Empathy: why it matters and how to get it". http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B00HDMMEP2
2. Observe/Listen. Many conversations we are planning our next point rather than really deeply observing and listening to the other person: their eyes, body language, voice timber, gestures, and phrasing of the words they use. Huge amounts of information is on display in the shortest of phrases. Playing back observations to another is one of the simplest acts of kindness: it validates, affirms, shows interest, admits nuance, etc.
There are a few references on how to pick up on this stuff, though for entertainment value I'd recommend the more mainstream PUA books such as "The Game" or "Rules of the Game" as it is good information on non verbal communication even though the purpose is seedy.
[+] [-] kaeluka|11 years ago|reply
From that came everything else.
[+] [-] kabouseng|11 years ago|reply
http://www.amazon.com/How-Win-Friends-Influence-People-ebook...
[+] [-] morgante|11 years ago|reply
It's also important to note that if boz is anything like me, he probably had to be almost fired for the lesson to go through. For most of my life, people have been telling me I need to be kinder (especially my parents), but I've never cared until now. It's certainly held me back socially, but never professionally. I never received a worse grade for being unkind. I never lost out on a job opportunity (being unkind is different from being an asshole). Until getting demoted, I never felt kindness was relevant to success.
It stings, but I've finally realized that I need to act on this. I'm re-reading Dale Carnegie and am, more importantly, trying to deliberately consider the emotional impact of everything I say. (If anyone has advice or resources, I'm all ears.)
-----
I probably should have posted this on a throwaway, but decided to be transparent. Please be kind.
[+] [-] athenot|11 years ago|reply
Observing and listening to others goes a long way.
That needy coworker that's annoying may be craving affirmation: smile when appropriate and avoid blaming their identity for their actions ("you failed" vs. "your stuff doesn't work").
Or that boss who's asking for stupid reports all the time may in fact be under intense pressure from above. While handling the pressure is technically his job, giving him some ammo to help reduce uncertainty helps reduce his headache.
Most religions have codified kindness as "do to others what you want them to do to you".
From a networking / interop perspective, it's "be strict in what you provide and lenient in what you accept".
[+] [-] 0throwaway0|11 years ago|reply
I am posting on a throwaway and I'm going to offer some unsolicited advice:
You need to change jobs now.
If you want to do a better job at politicking, you've already poisoned the well at your current company.
Once you've been branded as being unkind and it's stuck, you can't recover from that with the same people.
Sorry if that comes across as unkind, but I feel it's worth pointing out explicitly in case you haven't discovered it on your own yet.
[+] [-] fsk|11 years ago|reply
He had developed some key features that were now important. Instead of mentoring him to work better with others, his boss demoted him.
The boss was giving someone else a favor, making them the lead of this now-important project, some up-and-coming hotshot. He made up an excuse about "bad attitude", while just using it as cover for backstabbing him.
The OP probably had big $$$ in unvested options, so he had to play along and play nice, instead of quitting on the spot.
[+] [-] thisisboz|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] beachstartup|11 years ago|reply
so, basically someone who was competent and agreeable was favored by his boss to get a promotion, and the person who acted like a know-it-all dickhead 24/7 got sent to the basement.
that's a real shocker.
[+] [-] eclipxe|11 years ago|reply
The worst manager I ever had once told me "you're too kind to your team". He wore his ability to bring fear to a room like a badge of honor.
I never worked harder and more passionately than under the first and I never felt more apathetic and unmotivated from work than under the second. A single data point, but something I'll never forget.
[+] [-] slvv|11 years ago|reply
I think this advice is so apt and so needed. There's a perception that to be effective or powerful, one must also be harsh, stern, a little bit mean. That stems from a misunderstanding of what kindness is. Hopefully people will heed his advice!
[+] [-] realrocker|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] borski|11 years ago|reply
It's similar to taking medication to treat the causes of an issue without being concerned with the side effects. It's totally cool if your headache goes away, but less cool if you then have seizures for 2 years. It's even worse if it makes those around you have seizures for 2 years, while your headache has gone away.
[+] [-] hellbanTHIS|11 years ago|reply
If they really want to make the world a better place they should come up with some way of spotting some of the verifiably false news stories that get posted there. They could do it nicely, maybe: "Hey did you know this story may contain many factual errors? Check it out on Snopes.com!" Facebook could even set up their own fact checking service if they wanted to, it would be good PR for them.
And it's important to be nice but you have to be able to say "this sucks" sometimes too. With a guy like this Boz who's doing a good job but has a natural inclination to steamroll people maybe they should have set him up with some sturdier folks and let them fight it out instead of creating an atmosphere where he's afraid of being fired for being direct. That sounds like poor management, IMO.
[+] [-] dcpdx|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aethertap|11 years ago|reply
The effect it had on me was to basically make me clam up, because I decided that pointing out issues that would eventually crop up was not worth the risk of alienating my coworkers. It's hard for me to say whether this was a net positive or negative in terms of overall productivity, because if my shutting up makes the team more cohesive, I can see how finding the problems for themselves would grow their strengths over time. On the other hand, we often make decisions now that I would have questioned before in the process of talking it out (that includes my own decisions often enough because the whole discussion process is chilled). Ultimately, we seem to have a more congenial team (at least on the surface) at the price of having more bugfixes to deal with. Very unclear to me whether I did the right thing, but I can't really think of another way to handle it.
Edit to add:
The other big effect I noticed after learning to let stuff go was that I generally feel a lot less invested in the projects now. Before, I would treat every project I was on like it was my baby, and now I feel much more like I'm just working on somebody else's thing. That's not necessarily a bad thing (my phrasing is poor above, but I'm too tired to fix it at the moment), because it probably more accurately represents the real situation. The sense of detachment does tend to mean that I don't push as hard to go beyond expectations though.
[+] [-] grandalf|11 years ago|reply
Don't assume that just because someone is crotchety, indignant, or combative that he/she is intelligent.
[+] [-] 20andup|11 years ago|reply
I am literally facing this at work. One of my colleague has an opinion on everything. Its quite frustrating because he is neither the most experienced person in the topic nor is he any good. I literally caught him using an if else statement for check whether a dictionary contained a key when one line would have done. Its programming 101, pick up a book and you will learn it in chapter 3. But he goes on saying he has 5 years in this industry... I am like okay bro. How he got a job is beyond me.
In the end, kindness is a tool in EQ. You should use it when needed and be stern when another approach calls for it. Hiding your dissatisfaction just to be kind will do the company long-term dis-service. Especially to the code base.
[+] [-] tptacek|11 years ago|reply
If you couldn't have guessed from my HN personality, this is me, as well.
Different companies have had different ways of putting it; in the current incarnation, with Erin and Patrick, I'm called "Kanye", as in, "I'ma let you finish".
Working on it!
[+] [-] midnightmonster|11 years ago|reply
I hope he will write a "how to" follow up, because I would like to change, but I don't see how to do it in a way that doesn't sound impossibly exhausting.
I'm hopeful that it actually is possible, though, because for 30+ years I had never been able to keep any space well-ordered for more than a few weeks, nor had any reason to think I ever would be able to. I read "the life changing magic of tidying up" and it turns out I can do it--I just needed to be taught how. This may not seem relevant, but it's been life-changing not so much to have a tidy office, but to learn that what I assumed was a fixed personal trait was changeable after all.
[+] [-] fsniper|11 years ago|reply
Took me years to understand soft skills are as much or more important than technical skills.
(Fixed book's name)
[+] [-] dustincoates|11 years ago|reply
I'd also put in a recommendation for a book I stumbled upon when searching through Hacker News called "Difficult Conversations."
http://www.amazon.com/Difficult-Conversations-Discuss-What-M...
I got the same feeling from reading the book as the original recommender ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7762266 ): reading the book made me feel instantly better at being able to communicate when having difficult or tense conversations. I can't recommend it enough.
[+] [-] duncanawoods|11 years ago|reply
I found it remarkable. If you spend deliberate concentrated time imagining someone you know or might meet and them becoming happy, you later get a weird sense of joy when you do meet them. You anticipate and look forward to nice things happening to them and unconsciously strive to make that happen. What's fascinating is that it works with people you dislike/have trouble with. It really does foster empathy.
Kindness when treated as just a behaviour will be an uphill struggle, there will be conflict between what you want to do versus a correction. However when your first instinct, your desire without thinking about it, is to be kind - its no bother.
[+] [-] bsder|11 years ago|reply
Somehow, I seem to get along with all of these "raging assholes" that everybody complains about when I meet them. They tend to do interesting stuff, are interesting to talk to, and, generally, aren't attempting to do active harm to you because they're too busy doing stuff.
Of course, if they accidentally do something that harms me or ticks me off, I WILL TELL THEM. Normally, they are the first to apologize and help fix the issue they caused.
I only flip someone into the true asshole category when I tell them what they did to cause me grief, and they don't try to make amends somehow.
[+] [-] pellaeon|11 years ago|reply
From my own recent experience and Boz's article, I am forced to realize that not just all people operates this way, I should simply adjust. Though I still genuinely believe this is the most efficient way for people to grow and improve, because this way eliminates all the overhead of misinterpretations.
I guess Boz's personality is close to "the debater" http://www.16personalities.com/entp-personality and so do you and I.
[+] [-] jasonwocky|11 years ago|reply
I generally think that people are "too kind" at work in a lot of ways, and it leads to a lot of grousing and internal stress on the part of the people who have to bite their lip rather than contribute to their fullest.
Rather than "Be Kind", I prefer the duo of, "Be Honest, but Be Thoughtful First".
[+] [-] weeksie|11 years ago|reply
I'd like to think that it was through mindful practice that I've managed to tame my aggression. Perhaps it is, partly. But the real reason that I'm a lot easier to get along with now probably has to do with aging out of the testosterone-flooded decade of my 20s.
[+] [-] aidenn0|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fideloper|11 years ago|reply
I suppose we're all on a scale of ability to be empathetic (and can learn be more emphatic), but who goes into a job with this attitude?
Cheers for learning! I just wish all of our upbringings could bring us this lesson earlier in life. Because...it should. You graduated Harvard, and got a job where you acted like you knew everything. I suppose that's typical of college grads everywhere though, I'm not trying to be too harsh.