Do not try to be the smartest in the room; try to be the kindest
jorgegalindo.meEver since that back and forth about "East Coast being kind vs West Coast being nice" thing a while back[1], I think it's important to distinguish the two. Because they are noticeably different (at least to me) and shouldn't be used interchangeably. I want someone to be kind to me in a meeting. I think niceness could seriously inhibit progress. A kind person will tell me that an idea I have won't work, but they'll offer to help me work through it. A nice person will tell me that a bad idea is good, just to avoid conflict.
[1] https://www.upworthy.com/nice-vs-kind-are-east-coast-people-...
To summarize the idea in a work concept for those who won't read through -
East Coast "kind" would be to tell the person working for you about their performance issues early, in a constructive feedback manner such that they could course correct or find a role they are better suited for. The hope is they either improve in the role, find a new role internally, or decide to move on before having to stomach a firing.
West Coast nice would be to let the person working for you continue to perform poorly without feedback, being "nice" to them, but privately considering them incompetent. Eventually you will end up firing them without much warning when a cut actually has to be made. Think Amazon PIP.
I am from Florida, where there is a lot of southern hosptiality and east coast “kind”. We tend to be a bit more aggressive in our language and openly expressive but it tends to come from one of empathy and support. We tend to understand and communicate well, small talk is easy and normalized. People also will greet you even if you are a stranger, its really nice
Going to the west coast - it is weird. People arent genuinely empathetic or rather, its a foreign concept to them. Empathy is always done through some indirect means, through hobbies for instance. I do feel people on the west coast and midwest arent really used to community collaboration either near as much as the east coast either. Also they are not used to openly expressing themselves, I suspect this has to do with fear of being negatively judged
I also just went to LA. It is such a foreign concept to me how black and white everything is. A lot of people will believe there are truly evil or good people - its such a weird thing for me to hear coming from the east coast - we just think of people as like people.
I think at least on the west coast, alot of this artificial niceness has to do with rising CoL, asian influence, and homeless problems
Mid west is more so like less exposure to international culture compared to east coast
Conformity is like rewarded a lot more in the midwest and west coast, people imo struggle to be individualistic and most resort to some sort of pseudonym to express themselves
I do feel people on the east coast are just in general, simpler people used to simpler things and overall just happier people
I have some friends that moved from seattle, they do tend to express themselves better in text then verbally
I think you nailed it. However, as someone that grew up in the midwest, then spent 5 years living on the west coast, I would say that lumping the midwest in with the west coast for this statement is wildly inaccurate:
> I do feel people on the west coast and midwest arent really used to community collaboration either near as much as the east coast either. Also they are not used to openly expressing themselves...
If you spend some time in Chicago, I think you would find that it isn't much different from the east coast, based on your description. I can assure you that we have no issues openly expressing ourselves :)
I have been to Chicago as well! I will say though Chicago is a bit of an outlier though - it is technically the midwest but its also not entirely culturally the midwest either
People are definitely community oriented there - theres alot of polish community events, open friendliness towards sports outings and open pickups (basketball volleyball etc)
I will say though I think in Chicago it tends to be a bit more like clique-y though - culturally and sportswise comparitvely to something like NYC.
Like in NYC theres alot more international / individualism though, in Chicago the city itself enforces a good number of rules on what you should and shouldnt be (example is the pride colors painted in boys town)
That's totally fair. There are large parts of the Midwest that I haven't spent enough time in to making sweeping generalizations. I've only driven through the states west of Illinois. I also haven't spent much time on the east coast, but most of the people I have worked with over the past 4 years live there. I felt comfortable around my east coast colleagues immediately versus feeling that "weird" you described in your original comment when I lived on the west coast.
My wife and I refer to the latter as "Smile F'ing"
I became familiar with this term in the mid 2000s and took it to be a Britishism, though I may have been wrong on its origin.
Usually it was used in the context of some devious ladder climbing political hack manager in corporate that we'd refer to as a "smile f'er" as he (always he) would be smiling while he secretly f'd you.
>Eventually you will end up firing them without much warning when a cut actually has to be made. Think Amazon PIP.
I would bet managers on the east coast keep under performers around just to have people to cut also, doesn’t take a genius to figure out the strategy. You invest in people you think can improve and help you, you get rid of the ones that hurt you, and you keep the so so ones for when you need to sacrifice.
Most companies don't run an Amazon style PIP program where you HAVE to cut X% annually on every team.
Therefore, keeping around people who genuinely deserve firing is a drag on delivering. As a result it is always in your interest to get improvements out of your team members, whether by upskilling, role changing, hoping they leave on their own or worst case actually laying them off.
I've worked in financial service tech for nearly 20 years across 6 companies and only 1 I would say did a "5% every year" thing, and even that got paused for years at a time when market conditions pushed that way.
Even if your statement is true, it is a matter of framing. Obviously you keep your best staff, and fire the actively negatively contributing staff. The people in the middle aren't just "for when you need to sacrifice".. they are simply the middle 50%. You obviously want to see them improve as well.
>Most companies don't run an Amazon style PIP program where you HAVE to cut X% annually on every team.
I cannot comment on pervasiveness, but I thought the "fire bottom x%" (or stack ranking or yank and rank) strategy started on the east coast, with businesses like GE, hence it would not be a trait isolated to either coast.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitality_curve
>The people in the middle aren't just "for when you need to sacrifice".. they are simply the middle 50%. You obviously want to see them improve as well.
Everyone wants to see everyone improve, but time and energy are a scarce resource, so it is just a matter of how much you want to bet on each person.
It's still not most companies. But it's maybe the top N public companies — the ones that are all "headless" in corporate-vision terms, and so hire the same few management consultancies to tell them what to do.
Ignoring those few largest companies and focusing on the other 99% of businesses that don't hire management consultancies, this is definitely a "thing" with businesses on the west coast.
Just want to correct something here. Management consultancies are *rarely* hired for expertise. They're functionally a form of career insurance for senior leadership's proposals and an internal political tool to allow unpalatable or political challenging things to be executed.
Yes, management consultancies are not hired because anyone expects them to know what they're doing.
But they are hired for a certain specific kind of "expertise" they uniquely possess — that being the internal knowledge about management decisions being made in other companies (perhaps with their guidance; or perhaps just with them there at the time to witness those decisions.)
In other words, management consultancies can tell you how to "copy the success" of companies you personally think are worth copying, provided the management consultancy you hire has records of their consultants working at that company. (You won't actually be "copying their success", because you'll be applying your mental schema of what would make for success to deciding which of their internal practices and decisions should be copied. So it's more a "cargo-culting of success." But executives still want that!)
A CEO won't trust the thinking of a fresh 20-year-old sent over by Bain. But they will trust the thinking of a CEO they admire. And they're willing to pay big bucks just for Bain to send them the 20-year-old rather than Bain's best, not only because the 20-year-old is a political tool; but also because the 20-year-old is a channel through which the CEO can tap into Bain's institutional memory of private leadership meetings held by their most-admired CEOs!
(And this creates an active transmission vector for the spread of business-management-theory memes. "Return To Office"? It may have started because a few bigcorps like Apple had big albatross investments of commercial real-estate in the form of massive HQ buildings. But it spread throughout the Fortune 500 via their shared reliance on the management-consultancy grapevine.)
Management consultancies know that this is half the reason companies hire them — or at least the consultants who've been around the block know this. And this is why there's any place at all for senior management consultants, rather than it being strictly a "get in, make your money, retire early" sort of job. It's not that the senior consultants know more about business. It's that their field experience has enabled them to internalize and distill the current corporate zeitgeist — and so they can just tell you off the top of their heads what you should be doing to be the management-theory equivalent of "fashionable." (And this doesn't look outwardly any different than the "best practices" advice the 20-year-old will give you based on what they learned in their MBA program. So there's plausible deniability in this, in a way there isn't in asking the 20-year-old to dredge up records from your competitors.)
I have to say: It's really annoying that some idiot who wrote a book in the 90's has resulted in everyone redefining "nice", when they should have invented a new word.
As far as the English language goes, what you define as "kind" is also "nice".
Well, unfortunately nobody did invent a new word. Considering a cursory search of the definitions of both words:
Kind: of a sympathetic or helpful nature
Nice: pleasing, agreeable
I would argue that they are actually different.
Merriam Webster literally lists "kind" as one of the definitions of nice.
The point is that nice is a pretty broad term. It can mean agreeable but that's merely one use of the word. You can be nice and not agreeable.
I think you're misunderstanding the point they were making.
The given example for nice
> nice would be to let the person working for you continue to perform poorly without feedback, being "nice" to them, but privately considering them incompetent.
Is actually being hypocritical, not nice. The nice person would still tell the under performing person what's what, they'd just not be rude about it.
You can also create a scenario in which being kind becomes detrimental if taken to the extreme. However, the author of that book decided that being nice was bad, and being kind was good. This understandably continues to annoy people when this frankly dumb definition is brought up.
Most people are nice (convention, norm, culture, etc.) to conform to a set of rules, being kind is the exception to the rule.
Yet another faulty categorization and coopting - this time of both words.
Kind is only the exception to the norm if you're in a crappy culture. In some places the ethic is such that kindness is the norm.
there's already a word for using a specific type of soft language regardless as to intent, and it's "polite"
don't know why we need to quibble about the meaning of "nice" or invent a new word when polite will do
politeness, unlike kindness or niceness, has no implication of intent, only tone, which is what's trying to be conveyed
The comment above and a recollection of the sub-title of Pratchett & Gaiman's Good Omens prompted me to look up the etymology of "nice" and it seems that it has had a surprising number of unrelated meanings: https://www.merriam-webster.com/wordplay/nice-multiple-meani.... Maybe that's not the right word to object to regarding changes in its meaning.
I get that it has multiple meanings. And others should get that if someone is a nice guy he's probably not like the archetype in that book.
Considering how many different things "nice" has meant over the past few hundred years, I doubt one more meaning will make a difference!
This is real.
When the car broke down in a turn lane in the rain: lots of honking behind me
When the hazard lights came on: honking stopped, people materialized to help push it back out of the road
I don’t understand the relevance of this example. Without the hazard light, there’s a 99% chance the person is simply looking at their phone, needlessly delaying everyone else, hence the honking to alert them to move. What else is another driver supposed to do?
A hazard light means there is a problem that can’t be solved with honking.
I think unmentioned is that this is the east coast style. In Seattle we just let you sit there indefinitely because honking wouldn’t be “nice”.
Nice people wouldn't honk at the stationary car without it's hazards on.
I would not categorize that as a “nice” people thing to do. Unless nice somehow means quiet and willing to be walked all over.
"Tough love" is kind but not nice. There doesn't seem to be a good phrase for the opposite in English but there should be.
Unfortunately "though love" as practiced is mostly just an excuse to be an asshole.
Same with “brutally honest”, where the one saying it is more about the “brutally” than the “honest”.
The book Radical Candor calls the opposite "ruinous empathy".
Feeding my dog as much as ...
tough love: I think she needs. ruinous empathy: she thinks she needs.Definitely a good book. As someone who is very prone to ruinous empathy, the mantra, “it isn’t mean, it’s clear” has been very helpful for giving me the courage to raise issues earlier, when they are not a big deal.
Thinking of cats/dogs - euthanasia seems to also be a good fit for "kind, but not nice"
Virtue signaling is definitely adjecent
Which of the two would say nothing in the public meeting to let you save face, but then would pull you aside for a "quick chat" afterward, and tell you your idea is bad then?
The one who is both nice and kind. :P
And smart
> Ever since that back and forth about "East Coast being kind vs West Coast being nice" thing a while back
Missed the thing but what a front-loaded mess. What we want to say is
The rest feels unhelpful. Kinder to state the principle and let folks chew on it.Nice sucks, be kind.A person can be both...though that might just be skilled kindness.
You're right. Doubly so because either-or scenarios are usually false choices.
The pithiness works in presentation but past that...
I agree with you but your delivery could have been... kinder.
You aren't wrong. The one-liner serves to isolate the goal from negative associations.
But my delivery came with it's own neg assoc (against whoever came up with the E/W coast theory).
Honestly, I think it’s a mistake to try to retroactively impose a technical distinction between two words that have been synonyms for quite a while.
The intent is probably to clarify and communicate better. But with that word choice you end up confusing and muddying. The problem is, people have to know exactly what you mean already (which means you probably don’t have that much to talk about on that topic anyway).
Work is hard and stressful. If we're sweet and kind to one-another, we get through it more easily, no matter how smart each of us is individually. Being kind is an investment, and its dividends pay out enormously as your organization grows. Like the article says, it's infectious. I believe that. I believe that if I show kindness, especially to people who are new to the organization, they'll mirror it right back, and try to show it to everyone else, too.
Sweetness and kindness are not necessarily the same thing. Just like how “nice” can be a toxic trait.
His list of points is fine. It’s mostly the servant leadership mentality, which I’m all for. But sometimes to be an effective leader you have to make hard decisions. You’ve got to know your personal boundaries and know when to yield and when to hold them, or other less sweet people are going to steamrolling you, or you’re going to get overloaded by taking on too much, etc. And sometimes you have to be direct and blunt and not so sweet to show true kindness. Confrontation is hard and it’s not something most people really want, but I believe it’s sometimes necessary to embody kindness. For yourself, your teammates, the customer, the organization. Because at the end of the day if you are not effective, that’s going to hurt everyone.
Kindness fosters a sense of trust and camaraderie among team members
Exactly! When I look forward to working with people, we get more done and I don't come home burned out and discouraged. Even if the work is hard, at least you are in it together.
Will you be kind as well to the people who repeatedly fuck up and don't care about delivering good processes or products?
Yes. They’re still human and they deserve to be treated with respect. But part of being kind is being direct and honest, and holding people to account. If you ignore it, or let it fester you’re being unkind to other people
There's a lot of kindness in clarity, even when it comes to bad news. Imagine a doctor has to deliver a terminal diagnosis; it would be very unkind to avoid or sugarcoat the news, just as it would be to trivialize the issue by joking "don't bother buying green bananas."
There's a great deal of nuance to how kindness is defined. It's very easy for one set of actions to be either very kind or very unkind, depending on definitions.
Listening, being respectful, and being empathetic may drive one person to bite their tongue and silence feedback that someone is performing poorly out of fear of hurting them or the morale of the team. Another may be driven by the very same things into giving candid feedback.
This article does not do a good job of exploring the difference. It just asserts "Being nice is the new punk".
Yes. Not being kind leads to defensiveness and not owning up to their errors.
I've worked in very competent teams and very incompetent teams. There were two types of incompetent teams. The type that always denied making mistakes, and the kind that owned up to their own incompetence. Being kind leads to the latter.
It still sucked being in an incompetent team, but when they admit their weakness, they get out of your way and defer to you. When they don't admit it, you'll face barriers all the way.
What would being unkind accomplish here?
It's not about being unkind, it's about not being kind; these are not the same.
Being kind to a person that behaves as described in the grandparent comment could communicate that you find this kind of behavior helpful. Fine if that's really the case; problematic for everyone if not.
Kindness and enabling are also not the same thing.
This entire discussion needs to come to a screeching halt while people get together and hammer out some definitions. It's clear we're all working from different and contradictory assumptions about what these words mean.
I think people are conflating “kind” with a range of other behaviors. You can be kind while addressing poor performance, etc. You address the behavior, you might even have to fire someone, but those are not incompatible with kindness - if you’ve given someone ample opportunity, and clarity, then you’ve been kind. It’s unkind to let someone get to the point of firing without being clear that their job is at risk. It’s not unkind to take action when their performance threatens the organization, team, etc.
I think most people would agree Fred Rogers was kind - but I have to imagine he had to fire people from the show over the course of its run.
What would be kind accomplish there?
Not being an asshole in your own eyes. If that's not worth anything to you, then Idk, guess we live on different planets.
Not make things worse, for example? Or maybe it can help convey the message across and make things better?
Yes. A person's performance on the job does not change how I treat them as a human.
Yes. I will. And I upvoted you because I think it is HN duty to help you out, and not bury you.
If someone is fucking up, they are in the wrong position. People need to work for a living, and shouldn't be under duress constantly. It is up to them and their manager to find a position that is rewarding and engaging for them.
If they don't care, they are also in the wrong position.
It is no reason to not treat them with kindness. You don't have to blow them, but you don't need to be UNkind, as several have said below.
The only people I don't treat with kindness are people who are legitimately trying to hurt me and people I love, or promote hateful ideas with glee. People who are failing at their job need help.
And if they still annoy you, then I think the problem might be in how you view the situation. Compassion helps with anger. Try to think about why you are so angry, and if it really matters or helps to be so angry. Especially if you are not the manager. If you are the manager, consider that maybe the job isn't for you. You shouldn't be pissed at work all day!!
Why would you invest time and effort in solving someone else's problems? As a manager your responsibilities are to the shareholders.
A business is not a charity.
Because we are all humans doing our best and we are forced to work our lives away by an elite ruling class.
(I don’t know you but you sound like every white male teenager who discovers Ayn Rand.)
That sounds like a borderline insult, but I'm not familiar with American literature so I can't really feel targeted by it.
If you're a leader with a strategic role, time is your most important and limited resource. You just cannot afford to spend time on something that doesn't further the goals of the business, even if you're a hippie or a communist.
Yep. You have to be. You can provide feedback to them or their manager if possible but the reality is that the employment status of your incompetent coworker is not under your control.
You're speaking under the assumption that "you" can't be a team lead or manager able to make the bad performer redundant.
Moreover as an IC there is a lot you can do; most importantly you can quit if you feel the team you're in is being mismanaged.
Well yes but you certainly can’t become a lead if you’re getting mad at people. At least in many situations you can’t. And yes you could quit, but the job market isn’t the best right now. And sometimes the jobs that pay more require dealing with less competent people so sometimes there are tradeoffs.
You have to be careful, though: there is no shortage of people who will happily take advantage of someone who shows them kindness.
While I believe you should show a baseline level of kindness to people when you first meet them much like you should give people a baseline level of respect, there are actions which can and should lose both.
Sad to say that my experience is exactly opposite
When I’m kind to people, especially in other departments, they don’t mirror it: they’re stressed, they’re pressured by their boss or it’s just not the culture of that department… even after months of cooperation
I love reading discussions of people to whom following the social norms comes naturally and they can't fathom the idea that behaving in a way that makes other people feel good is something I need to consciously put effort into.
It also requires conscious effort for me. It takes a lot of energy, but like a lot of things, the more I do it, the easier it becomes.
>I love reading discussions of people to whom following the social norms comes naturally and they can't fathom the idea that behaving in a way that makes other people feel good is something I need to consciously put effort into.
It takes less effort, becomes easier, and in time will come naturally to you as well.
So you want to be kind only for utilitarian motives, not because it’s a good thing in principle ?
Good that does not sustain itself is quite sad - you can see the efforts going down the drain. Aligning good and sustainable (utilitarian) is worthwhile imho.
That's not a very kind interpretation of the parent comment - a bit reductionist, don't you think?
I personally don't believe it's possible to "give out" kindness, compassion, friendship solely from an utilitarian position. It would either be fake, and people feel the difference and the desired effect does not follow, or your utilitarian position is a front, in order to justify being kind to unkind people around you judging you.
It sounds like you're saying it's far better to be kind for altruistic reasons. Is that right?
Some persons (me included) suspect that humans rarely if ever act with true altruism; that it's actually a nicely dressed up form of self-serving hedonism.
And so for us, the challenge becomes how to get ourselves to act good / kind despite that. One way is to find ways to intentionally tie kind behavior to our own self-interest.
gp is refering to a morality that is deontologically grounded, not just one based on altruism. Here it is not necessarily for one "reason" or the other, but rather acting the way some ideal person would in a perfect world (famously for Kant within the "kingdom of ends" where every person is an "end to themselves").
It's a rather huge theoretical distinction that at least in the West goes all the way back!
In general, one shouldn't confuse ethics itself with the whatever one might think is the most viable ethical system! It isnt a product to market. Utilitarianism is no less silly the anything else, and has its own ridiculous edge cases and all that.
Thanks for introducing me to the concept of deontological ethics!
It's been fascinating to read up on something about which my thoughts were only half-formed.
What does it mean for a thing to be good in principle?
I don't understand why they got down voted because this question has a rather obvious answer. Do you motivate a person to behave a specific way because it's instrumentally good for a higher purpose, or because the behavior itself is inherently valuable? That's a perfectly coherent, it makes a real distinction, and it's a legitimate question in this context.
fun experiment: let's try to have the most charitable interpretation of this comment ^
My best is: they are saying it is worth taking a step back and making a prioritized list of our values. If we do this, we may place "being kind" over "being productive"
I think their warning here is about: what happens in a situation where being kind is NOT productive? Will you just drop it?
I think I agree with the broad strokes of this. My rebuttal is: the comment above this was just pointing out, for people who do not value kindness over productivity, that they are not in opposition. That you don't have to pick one or the other. You can have both.
We can get mad and turn away from people who do not share our values/priorities. Or we can show them ways that our value systems do not clash and it can be win win
Great sum up ! You can have both, but for me being productive is more important than not offending others
No.
If we tallied up all technical projects in the Western world that failed, how many would be failing due to lack of kindness versus, say, straight-forwards incompetence? Because 100% fall in the latter category in my experience.
One of the problems with engineers counter-signalling engineering values (like actual technical competence) is that we live in a world where those values are extremely underrated while every manager, HR-bot etc. are already pushing values like kindness.
E.g. if you ever wonder why government doesn't work it's because they're absurdly skewed towards HR-values and opposed to engineering-values.
Huh! If I reflect back on my involvement in projects that had difficulties, there was rarely a dearth of competent people, and in fact it was often political and communication concerns that led to suffering.
Look at Conway’s Law: “any organization that designs a system (defined broadly) will produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization's communication structure.”
The “kind” people are the people who optimize an organization’s communication structure by helping competent people to have a voice and not be impeded by political wrangling.
In short, I think it’s the ‘kind’ people who can help an organization realize an architecture that is less warped by political considerations and more true to the customer’s needs.
Of course an organization needs both kindness and competence. In my decades in tech, competence was over-valued in my early years (the worship of the trope of the rockstar-but-asshole programmer), so if there is an overindication towards kindness right now, it is probably a counterbalance.
I would also question your conclusion about the government. While I have not worked in the government myself, I come from a sort of “federal government family”, in that I have multiple close family who have spent decades in federal government roles, and they are full of stories of incompetent managers undermining their employees, politically fighting one another, etc. To your point, they also have plenty of stories of crass incompetence, Nepotism, etc. But I think it’s an easy and incorrect answer to say it’s simply due to “HR-values” as opposed to “engineering-values”: it’s multi-faceted in both directions.
> not be impeded by political wrangling
All that need for political wrangling was created by incompetent kind people. Getting more of those just creates more of those issues, if not at your place its at others, its an arms race.
Personally, I find a team seems to be healthiest if a mixture of personalities are on it. They should all be competent.
When it comes to incompetence, people can hide that behind kindness, or behind bluster and bullying. Both are certainly unhealthy. I wouldn’t say one leads to issues over the other.
I actually agree with you but at the same time, being unkind in those situations is only going to hurt yourself. The reality of many workplaces is that the technical aspect as not the main focus. Appearances and politics run the show at most companies. You can either accept that and work with the system or engage counterproductively with your colleagues in a misguided attempt to force them into technical competence (never gonna happen). Eventually I want to find a place to work full of technically competent people. I thought I would find that in my current company because it was so competitive to get a job here. Let’s just say that was not the case. It think it can be very hard for employees to filter on this without knowing someone on the inside.
Opposing view - most large scale projects fail because of political and financial reasons rather than technology. Even the bad tech decisions are usually downstream of politics.
If you’re wanting to build a high speed rail line, space rocket or nuclear power plant; a propaganda specialist is probably going to be more useful than an engineer.
> If you’re wanting to build a high speed rail line, space rocket or nuclear power plant; a propaganda specialist is probably going to be more useful than an engineer.
And then it runs 10x over budget due to incompetence. The propaganda specialists creates more issues than they solve, they might solve this issue but they make many other issues not get funded in its place overall increasing incompetence by moving money from competent to incompetent people.
And how many would be from incompetence in terms of execution vs poor planning and a lack of knowledge about what's actually needed to complete the project?
Feels like the majority of those well-known failures (the 'we spent $5 billion+ and spent 10 years on something that should have taken a few years and maybe a tenth of that budget ones) come from either management who has no idea what they want, planning that hasn't taken into account even half the obstacles the project will need to overcome, or dozens of leaders all trying to make their mark.
Actual technical/work incompetence probably plays some part, but it's probably less of a matter of "people weren't honest enough about the quality of other people's work" and more of a matter of "we hired the cheapest possible team to do the work, and they weren't qualified in the slightest".
Bonus points for the leader of that team being the nephew/niece/relative of some guy in charge of the project.
I didn't mean to imply that engineering-values only pertain to things like code-quality. Project management emerged from engineering and it was a lot better when it was done by engineers who embraced engineering-values.
If you look at mid-century project management, when it was engineering-based, a lot of the focus was on things like optimising resource inputs, identify the critical path so scheduling could be done to minimise blocking, figuring out approaches to accurately calculate time and money estimates (i.e. making sure estimates were not uniformly biased towards being underestimates as that demonstrates a failure to make empirically-informed predictions).
While I totally agree that nowadays most projects fail due to bad management, I'd go further and say they fail because management is HR-values based. None of the above has anything to do with kindness, or indeed social skills in general.
Engineers, having systematically deprecated engineering-values, now have their projects managed by non-engineers who go around screwing things up.
> how many would be failing due to lack of kindness versus, say, straight-forwards incompetence?
Kindness and incompetence are orthogonal. You can be kind and still give honest, direct feedback. And your feedback will probably be received better because of your kindness.
I think you could argue that long term lack of kindness at all levels of an organization leads to organizational technical incompetence. It creates hostile work environment where employees don't feel valued which leads to talent attrition.
Yes, only valuing kindness with valuing technical competence is not ideal but so is the inverse. You want both.
Yea I’d like to see some actual studies on that assertion, it has been the opposite in my experience.
Technical competence requires a certain amount of self-discipline and sacrifice. You don’t become competent just by doing the same things over and over, so experience alone is not competence. With self-discipline comes a healthy habit of self-motivation. You don’t need your employer “making you” feel valued, you derive a sense of accomplishment from doing good work. You know you’re valued because you’re literally valued (in dollars).
It's possible to be technically competent and kind. They're not mutually exclusive traits. One doesn't even need to be kind. Just don't be an asshole.
The trouble is "asshole" is relative. As an engineer, I value disagreeable people. I want someone to tell me I'm wrong and disagree with me whenever appropriate. But to many HR types just the mere fact you're disagreeing and not blowing smoke up everyone's arse all the time makes you an asshole. People should also feel ok with calling out incompetence which, again, can make you seem like an asshole to some.
That's what an asshole would say
Calling someone an asshole could also be considered being an asshole. See how it works now?
One can disagree without being disagreeable. “From my experience, this approach will have the following downsides…” is disagreeing. “Only an idiot would suggest that approach” is being disagreeable.
Too many engineers take the 2nd approach, and then tell themselves that everyone else is the problem when they get labeled as “disagreeable”. At best, they mean well but are sorely lacking in social skills. At worst, the cruelty is the point, and “I’m just telling it like it is” is their attempt at gaslighting others.
I feel like there's a language problem with agreeable/disagreeable and people take the words to mean "nice"/"not nice" primarily. But you'll notice the word "agree" is embedded in there and I didn't say nice/not nice.
Perhaps I should have said conformist instead. Basically I'm taking about what PG is talking about here: https://www.paulgraham.com/conformism.html
Incompetence isn’t a root cause though. You have to go deeper… why were the people involved in the project incompetent?
If you find a project was held back by infighting, siloed groups, major shifts in direction or key people leaving, kindness will help with all of these things.
The reality is, people working as individuals, no matter how competent those individuals are, can only accomplish things within the scope of a single person. There are some things like that, but there are many things that are not. To accomplish any of those things, people need to work together, in a complementary way, toward a common goal. That just won’t happen if they don’t get along. Social competence can become just as important as technical competence. Kindness is part of that.
Actually the most dysfunctional engineering orgs I've worked in had unkind hardos in charge who would yell & scream at people. More of it was because they were poorly emotionally regulated than because they were right in whatever they were yelling or screaming about.
Government projects stand apart because things like cost are balanced against the inherent jobs-creation objectives of funding them.
Kindness doesn't mean to let incompetent people sit in roles they are incapable of indefinitely. That's more "niceness", using all sorts of HR speak about family/win together/blah blah blah while waiting until the budget cuts come to surprise fire people who were never performing in their role.
Kindness is to give people feedback that helps them improve. It is sometimes a poorly socialized engineers impression that people simply do their jobs poorly on purpose. In reality it's a mix of skills and awareness. Eventually everyone gets put into a role they aren't truly capable of and either grows into it or moves on. Feedback helps that happen sooner rather than later.
The biggest problem with government organizations is that they're monopolies.
The lack of competition means that (1) if the organization is dysfunctional, it won't be beaten by a better one, and (2) it has little incentive to improve.
>if the organization is dysfunctional, it won't be beaten by a better one, and (2) it has little incentive to improve.
Source? Ever heard of elections? Sounds like a braindead libertarian software developer take on a topic you have no idea about to me
Elections replaces the government, not the state. Most people working at the state stays regardless who wins. Elections is like changing the CEO, it doesn't mean replacing the company.
Elections can replace a government.
They can't control each of the individual organizations within it.
If the Pest Control Section of the Department of Agriculture has a badly run subsection, the single vote of each voter can't independently influence it and the thousands of other organizations within the state.
I don't know if kindness is the right word you have used here. HR is not kind. At the end of the day they don't care about you. But they speak to you nicely. Same for the government too I guess
Ive also seen cases where business people truly don’t believe there is an underlying reality to a problem. They evaluate approaches and people purely from a sociability stand point.
You make a good point about government, there are so many big problems including bad incentives about working hard, taking risks, etc, it’s hard for to see that as the main one.
I don't think anyone has yet worked out a way to convince people to live in reality and follow science and engineering and also be kind to people who are opposed to those ways of thinking. Being fake kind to people who are genuinely obstructing things getting done is unproductive but so is being unkind and it seems most people value being cordial even if it means things fail.
Almost all problems on projects boil down to a people problem in the end many of which are made intractable by company and wider culture.
Government works just fine when you let them do things in house instead of going with "we just need to pay one more private contractor". Also pay more.
The article reads like kindness is only a correlated trait to what the author is actually trying to convey. To me this article is the same as any other basic "collaboration" explainer. I guess in cultures where a lot of external and internal pressure is put on exhibiting certain virtues, maybe framing it as kindness can override whatever other goals have made someone forget how to collaborate.
> If we tallied up all technical projects in the Western world that failed, how many would be failing due to lack of kindness versus, say, straight-forwards incompetence?
That's like saying a company didn't fail because it ran out of money. It failed because no one was around to operate it.
A lack of kindness can lead to mistakes not being rectified, as well as the wrong type of folks doing the work.
(Classic case of false dichotomy).
i would say yes, a lot of things fail from a lack of kindness.
Tesla self driving Tesla robotaxi Tesla park summon Tesla cybertruck Tesla solar roof tiles Boring company etc etc
One of the main things that Toyota Production System brings to manufacturing is the concept of respect, everything is supposed to be based on respect for each other. Maybe people fall short of that alot of the time, but that is the goal and intrinsic to all their other techinques like genchi genbutsu, kanban, just in time, waste elimination, etc.
Technically correct is the best kind of correct.
and the kindest best of correct)
Nice article. Definitely need more kindness in this achievement society. One small crib, though:
> In Spanish, we have a saying, "Maestro Liendre: De tó sabe, pero de ná entiende." I don't really know (and don't want) to translate it because it loses its punch, but it fits perfectly here.
Wait, why mention it if I, the reader, cannot understand the saying or how it is even relevant to the article, but leave me with the tease that "but it fits perfectly here". Very puzzling, to say the least. Google Translate tells me "Master Niendre: He knows everything, but he understands nothing". Now I'm even more confused. That is so pithy and unambiguous that I really have to ask: what is it about the Spanish version that "loses its punch" when translated to English?!
Google Translate is being too literal. It just means “jack of all trades, master of none”.
A more literal translation (with some liberties for the rhyme) would be “handyman nit: knows a bit of everything, but understands jack shit”.
Side note: I find ChatGPT to be a much better translator. It doesn’t just do literal translations. Here’s how it explained this phrase:
The saying "Maestro Liendre: De tó sabe, pero de ná entiende" generally means that someone appears to know a little bit about many things but doesn't have a deep understanding of any of them. It's used to describe someone who pretends to be knowledgeable but lacks true expertise.
TIL: Spanish has a sort of written contractions. I speak conversational Spanish so I’ve heard people talk this way, like Puerto Rico or Dominican Republic speakers shortening things, just hadn’t seen it written before. tó = todo ná = nada
https://www.spanishdict.com/guide/shortening-of-words > There are a few apocopes of very common words that are pronounced and written in informal Spanish as monosyllabic words. These popular apocopes include na, pa, and to, that stand for nada (nothing), para (for), and todo (all). You may find these words written with an apostrophe at the end, but spelling experts advise against it.
Interesting, thanks!
It hits better with the rhyme
Makes sense, thanks
"A know-it-all who doesn't understand anything" sounds fine in English to my ear.
from the context in the article, this seems to be the Spanish equivalent of “jack of all trades, master of none”
I think it has more of a negative connotation in the context of thinking you are a "master of all trades" despite not.
“Knows about everything yet understands nothing.”
Spanish version is much more compact and can be pronounced quicker so it can be used as pun.
This English version, you cannot just punch it, there has to be a pause like after "yet" or a comma before yet and then punch is delivered but still "understands nothing" is a mouthful compared to "pero de ná entiende" even though my Spanish is non existing, still feels like I could pronounce it much faster or much easier.
Funny, to me this English translation is very close in form and spirit to the Spanish one. I don’t know if I agree that “understands nothing” is comparatively a mouthful, considering that it’s 2 vs 4 words. But I do agree that the Spanish one packs a punch that is hard to get in translation. Part of that is the short words with strong accents, and a certain rhyming to the whole phrase.
I enjoy a lot the process of translating very idiomatic phrases, one way or another. I feel like I get to know both languages better.
I am generally considered to be a kind and helpful person.
There are many situations where a kindness turns to an expectation, which leads to entitlement: suddenly you are the bad guy if you don't go above and beyond.
Being helpful around people who view work as a zero sum game is a recipe for disaster.
This article also reframes "things you should do because it's an advantage to you" as kindness.
Agree with this wholeheartedly. I think where kindness really plays a key role is not passing snap judgements on people and their motivations. It's easy to interpret people's actions or intentions in a negative light, thinking they don't care or are incompetent. I would also like to add that kindness is not just being kind to other people, but to yourself as well. It's easy to beat ourselves up about the mistakes we make, or blaming ourselves for outcomes that sometimes are beyond our control. We can't be perfect.
For the most part, I like to live in a world where the default position is that we're mostly well-intentioned, rising apes rather than fallen angels (RIP, Sir Terry Pratchett). This is clearly not always the case, and it's important to accept that, but it shouldn't stop me from still aspiring to be as kind as possible in my own life.
100%. I'd also add that it doesn't mean you don't have to make tough decisions that some people won't like. But there's a way to do that that leaves those people knowing that your decision-making process was fair and not capricious. That it's in the best interests of the team, project, organization, company.
These kind of over-generalist advice are pretty meaningless (especially the title, content being more specific).
You do not always want to be perceived (because that's what you're going for) as kind, it is situation specific.
You do not want to be kind during negotiation, because that means you're usually missing out on a better deal.
You do not want to be kind when dealing with bad behaviour. I've too often seen missing stairs running loose for far too long due to "kindness" from HR, whether it was sincere or rather an expression of cowardliness .
What do you want to aim at all time is respectful behaviour, because that is what could undermine your current position in the conversation. People do not listen to jerks.
A stair is an inanimate object that other people step upon in order to move upwards.
Perhaps the human beings in question refused to participate in that game and therefore went "missing"? People using the term "missing stair" are very often sanctimonious, obsessed with power, and just do enough of faking kindness to fly under the radar. And they treat others like inanimate objects.
> People using the term "missing stair" are very often sanctimonious, obsessed with power, and just do enough of faking kindness to fly under the radar. And they treat others like inanimate objects.
That's a lot of assumption to make from the use of one illustrated idiom, that were by no means intended from my side.
Wouldn't say You have to choose one over another. Smartness without kindness makes you a dick. Kindness without some smartness makes you 'fake', or at least 'valueless'.
Would kindness without intelligence (discernment) be more like naïve and easy to take advantage of?
Not sure why it makes you fake, there's lots of nice, simple people that are authentic
You're choosing one over another. You said kindness with some smartness, which implies kindness = 1.0, and smartness = some value between 0.0 and 1.0.
The author never implies that one should be kind to the exclusion of being smart.
I definitely agree with this article. I’m at the stage of my career where my primary limiting factor is my inability to tolerate situations where it’s clear co-workers aren’t pulling their weight, don’t have the same philosophy I have about a project, or when they disagree about how to implement a solution. And nothing makes me angrier than when the tech lead or director in charge is clueless, which happens more often than not.
Accepting that this is just the way things are is difficult the more emotionally invested you are in your technical work, if you happen to be on a non-technical or semi-technical team. I think this article is helpful for situations where either the pay compensates for bad work culture, or where you’re simply stuck on a team where maybe you are the “smartest” person in the room and it makes you hate your job. At least that’s how I’m interpreting it for my situation.
I feel like I am struggling with the same thing in my current role and point in my career. On one hand, I feel like I just need to come to terms with the fact that different people have different standards. On the other hand, I just desperately want to work with people who hold themselves to high standards and also get stuff done. In the meantime, I'm finding I'm running out of kindness. I often wonder if it's just me thinking I know more than I do and everything is always this way, that some people just don't care about what they produce and how, or if there teams out there who _do_ care and I just need to find one of those
I have found myself feeling similar things. Something that I've done that has helped me is to find ways to nudge people further along the path of "hold[ing] themselves to high standards". That's easier said than done, but I hoped the thought might help you a little.
Yeah you really just have to learn to accept the situation. If you find an opportunity to jump ship to a place with competent people, take it. But in the meantime I just remind myself that I’m lucky I’m not breaking my back outside to make a living.
That is the ideal but the results depend on the work place or the OSS project. I have started out like that twice and was walked over by other people.
Kindness with true reciprocity is very hard to find (I do not mean CoC compliant fake kindness that just keeps the actual power structures in place while everyone is backstabbing.)
This visits a hard coordination problem.
I'd suggest the solution is coming and it will decentralize culture decisions the same way capitalism decentralized spending decisions.
Another way of putting it might be that there’s very little you can do to will yourself to be smarter, but you don’t have to go far out of your way to be kind.
(Personally I’m not sure “kindness” is necessarily the right word that encompasses the four qualities listed. Resolutive? Seems like that’s something independent.)
And, really, it's self-congratulatory. It says only, "be like me, i'm great". And in refusing to translate "De tó sabe, pero de ná entiende" -- how empathetic is the writer really?
All together, it comes across a little smug.
The problem with content like this is it’s not realistically actionable for most people: it really amounts to saying (if you’re not already a temperamentally kind person), “fundamentally change your personality”, without offering actionable steps to accomplish that.
It also doesn’t wrestle at all with the complexities and tradeoffs of how we deal with people in different scenarios. Be kind to bullies and assholes? There’s a way to do it, sure, but there’s a lot of technique and nuance involved, and this post doesn’t scratch the surface.
4 day work work, 6 hour days, better pay, the freedom to spend as much time with the people you want, doing the things you want, without fear of financial ruin or bodily injury. Thats what workers want... not for the work place to replace their family. We do not need to be friends, I do not need to be nice to you. This whining comes from people who place work over all else and need work to be something other than it is. A means to an end.
Now, I do not mean passion projects... I mean wage slavery work hell holes... My passion projects and companies are made up of people I trust, have verified their experience. We are nice to each 60% of the time- we understand the other 40% is necessary. We don't take it personally, we brush it off. We are mature professionals, not whiney day care adults.
I’m guessing you work at a startup where you are nice 60% of the time? And I’m also guessing your coworkers actually give a shit about the job vs just trying to game the FAANG compensation algorithm?
I run a co-op consulting group.
Very cool concept! Is it software engineering focused, and do you have to invest in sales or marketing to get clients?
Basically, we all have specifics, I focus on RF/Wireless Security projects for government... so you can imagine the sales cycle... sometimes there is overlap and we work together.
Very cool. One day I would like to become a data science / engineering consultant. And I can see the upside of building a co-op business.
In full transparency, we are not formally structured as a coop, the US makes that annoying... We are structured for maximum protection, but operate under a coop operating agreement.
Rarely does one accomplish great things in life alone, or on the first try.
Life is often a game of making sure you have enough at bats to eventually succeed.
From a self interested utilitarian view, people will remember you warmly for being kind and be happy to work with you again / give you another shot, far more than they will if you are smart & difficult.
Being incompetent and kind isn't my suggestion here. It is simply that if you are as smart and hard working as you think you are, it's not that hard to also be a little kind. If it is so hard for you, you may want to try working on it.
While I think the points the author makes are sage advice, I think the blog post would have been a lot stronger against criticism if they had added a paragraph similar to the following:
"That is not to say you shouldn't come prepared and knowledgeable to meetings you attend. You should provide clear value to each and every meeting you attend from a knowledge perspective. However, the human value of kindness is far more important in the eyes of attendees."
Some people here are confused. Kindness towards people doesn't preclude you from being assertive. It doesn't preclude you from being a shrewd negotiator. It doesn't preclude you from provide feedback to an employee who needs to improve performance. It doesn't preclude you from laying off an employee.
Being too kind can also be negative, I prefer honesty and reality above the rest.
I too think that being too x, where x is any adjective, is a bad thing. I much prefer people being just the right amount of y, where y is any adjective.
Honesty doesn't conflict in any way with kindness, but with being "nice". Actually I think is a requirement of being genuinely kind.
Being smart also doesn't conflict with kindness - if anything, they go together.
This seems to misunderstand kind
Kindness reduces barriers to accepting the honest truth and is thus part of maximizing honesty and realism.
...now let's call person who understands it all a smart person. Now it's all clear – being smart is the best.
You could say that hiding or refraining from giving critical feedback is not kindness.
This article readily conflates niceness and kindness. It would be very easy to read this and take away the understanding that critical feedback that leaves a person feeling in any way negative is not kindness.
If this phrase can mean anything, it doesn't mean anything anymore.
Ie. you could also say that egoism is being kind to yourself etc.
I see "being kind" as towards others in the context of this discussion.
If I feel I'm doing a disservice to the person by not speaking up, but still stay silent because I don't want to be confrontational or harsh, I don't think I'm being kind to the person. I'm only protecting the relation or myself, as I don't have the tools or a path to convey helpful information while making clear I'm having the person's good in mind.
I see it as a failure in communication (it usually can be blamed on both parties), and clearly not a character quality.
I can also argue that "being smart" means I recognize feelings of others, because not doing it is stupid - so that implies kindness.
I interpreted it to mean that lying to someone isn't actually being kind, even if that was the intention.
Seems like good common sense. Listen, be respectful, keep an open mind.
To be fair does it not depend on the audience. There's a balance between the audience and an idea you want to push.
Here in YC you can probably go full on with your tech/science knowledge/ideas/theories/whatever and people will judge you purely on your points made, and the people listening are in the same boat.
In another context you may be the smartest person in the room by a long way on a topic and have something constructive to say, but no one else in the room is as competent so you cannot go full on with your YC-like comment and have to balance the knowledge/empathy available of the audience.
I guess in the end it's about ignorance busting and offering some new insights into a thing that other people can appreciate.
>Here in YC you can probably go full on with your tech/science knowledge/ideas/theories/whatever and people will judge you purely on your points made, and the people listening are in the same boat.
I would disagree with this, even here it is important to be kind. Too often I find the comments on a given thread are full of self importance or worse disdain for the "shortcomings" of the topic in question. Whether or not that disdain might be due to a wealth of knowledge and experience, it brings the general experience of being here down, and in my opinion lowers the quality of the site and the person doing the disdaining.
I'm not asking for fawning over every submission like it is a new revelation, but the adage that "if you can't say anything nice, don't say anything at all" springs to mind. HN is going to be full of people from differing experiences and walks of life. Tech is too big now for us to all be on the same page, or even within the same general age range. When someone drops a "Show HN" link to some hobby or passion project of theirs, and the comments are full of "experienced" people critiquing the project as if it were supposed to be a google scale web service or even as if it needed to be a viable commercial product – no matter how correct those assessments may be – that's damaging to our shared sense of community.
My own philosophy over time has been to only offer critique if it is also accompanied by my own efforts at providing what solutions I can directly (code, documentation whatever). If it bothers me enough to think I should say something, then it should bother me enough to also put in the effort to be/submit the change I want to see. Anything less is at best a piling on of cheap criticism ("cheap" in this case in the sense of "a dime a dozen"), and at worst unkindness for the sake of showing off knowledge. Absent something to contribute beyond criticism / critique, the goal I set for myself is either to engage with the subject and the creator on the assumption of earnest passion for the project, or if I'm disinterested for whatever reason, to not engage at all.
I definitely don't always succeed in this endeavor, but over the decades I've grown increasingly tired of the airs of cynicism that permeates the "smart" spaces I've been in. Be kind in all audiences, whether peers, betters or lay people and you will usually avoid being pretentious, confidently incorrect or condescending respectively. And those are 3 things I think we could do with less of in most communities.
I can't disagree with your philosophy and think you have a well considered approach to it.
When it comes to social etiquette, empathy, agreeableness, there are definitely a lot of people 'on the scale' around here and that's absolutely fine. There are smart well-balanced people and there's uber-smart people who know more than most about a thing but perhaps lack that social etiquette- and that's fine to me. If they can communicate their point, I don't mind so much their lack of grace on it.
The point isn't that we should be anyone other than ourselves. We can only be ourselves and we are out best version when comfortable with that. It's simply that learning to express ourselves with kindness and understand the importance of it will make us even more effective.
At least being formerly graceless and continuing to develop grace, that has been my experience.
While I can't disagree with your general candour, you might find that I will challenge you on anything else :-) There it is, the allowance to do so.
I agree that if you want to persuade people and be successful in the business world, being the smartest person in the room isn't the most important quality. Being the loudest and most confident is. Just say your opinions as though they are obvious facts, and if someone disagrees, ignore them and say your thing again with even more confidence. I do not do this—heaven forbid, I'm too kind to do that—but it's the characteristic I see most successful people sharing... if success is defined as organizational prominence and compensation, rather than more trivial heuristics like a history of your claims coinciding with reality.
"Being nice is the new punk"
yes, this is a huge adjustment for me as old Gen X trying to work with Gen Z / Millenials. I feel like Michael Scott sometimes to be honest... raised in an environment where bigoted jokes, brutal insults, shouting, were the norm and expected, adjusting to being around the new generation which was raised on anti-bullying and therapy. I am glad things are changing, the old ways were very dysfunctional and counterproductive.
Maybe its just the lead poisoning.
Glad to see that kindness is finally going viral.
I'm Gen X, raised feral like the rest. Movies like The Lost Boys, The Goonies and Explorers feel like biographies. We were vicious to one another before the arrival of political correctness in the early 90s, which received backlash like today's woke. But kindness is always on the right side of history.
I agree though about feeling like some kind of crass <expletive> around young people today. I have a hard time staying domesticated as I watch society crumble under the guise of gentrification. I just want to act out so badly sometimes, deface something, watch it all burn like the good old days, SLC Punk style. But the real punk is to be ruthlessly human to one another.
There's a certain thrill in sacrificing one's ego to help someone achieve their dreams that just can't be replaced. The biggest baddasses are teachers, nurses, your mom, and everyone knows it.
To be kind is one of my specialties. I firmly believe that it's a requirement of any human group so people collaborate at heart. Yes people can be productive anyway without any kindness, but if people really collaborate then they actually multiply their forces and the result is incredibly powerful. If people fight each other that energy is terribly wasted.
I really disagree with the quote at the end `just a few people are going to miss the smartest in the room, but everyone is going to miss someone kind.` This is true if the smartest person in the room is a jerk, but I don't find that to often be the case. In every group I've worked in, the smartest, most talented people are often _also_ confident in their abilities to the point where they don't have to _prove_ it to anyone. They help the team succeed. The people I am never sorry to see go are the insecure people with a chip on their shoulder who constantly try to prove that they are the smartest, most talented person in the room. They often are not.
The kind or nice person, sure if they are some kind of glue to the team that helps the entire group work together, they don't need to be the highest performers. But incompetent nice people also are a problem.
To be honest I’ve come to see these posts as part of the “war”. If you’re not very smart, what’s your best move? Change the rules. Now you can be the most noteworthy person in the room, by being the kindest.
With that said, of course you should be kind. But don’t be afraid to be smart too. The world needs smart.
"Being nice is the new punk"
I would say helping others is incredibly punk. Such as responding to chat messages requesting help in some particular coding problem. So many people will direct them to a support queue, but I love taking time to understand their issue and help them out.
I direct my coworkers to the documentation that I wrote and that they clearly never read, despite my providing it to them repeatedly in the past and despite my anticipating their exact questions/issues in it.
What is interesting about that is the an aspect of original punkers was a desire for respect as individuals. The come as you are was very welcoming. The repulsionist look I saw as an attempt to see only inner beauty in humans.
Punk was the reaction of the individual vs. the global machine. The global machine’s surface is nice but the machine is not kind.
I’m wondering if this is really about life and not just meetings.
Meetings are really about getting things done. The kindest act is to not have the meeting if it’s unnecessary. And if it is, outline what you want to get out of it at the start. During the meeting, yes, you should be kind.
Learning not to take everything personally, and not being easily offended are two valuable life skills. I've come to value intent much more than when I was younger. "Did they ignore me because they're mean, or were they simply too distracted to say hello?"
I struggle with being "kind" when under pressure. I don't mean to be unkind, but it can seem that way. People who don't know me well sometimes get offended by that. People who know me a little better don't get offended, they know I'll be more approachable when the deed is done (whatever the deed may be). It's ok to be a hedgehog sometimes. Not being kind sometimes is ok. Just don't be mean, that's much more important.
Never judge a man until you've walked two full moons in his moccasins.
bows
Edit: OK well you guys two full moons have definitely not gone by since I've made this comment I'm starting to think y'all ain't as kind as you make yourselves out to be..
There's a variant of of that phrase:
Don't get angry at a man till you've walked a mile in his shoes. By then, you will have had time to calm down. And you will be a mile away. :)
Listening is indeed the hardest thing to do if your organization's metrics places immense pressure on you to be (or at least appear to be) the smartest person in the room.
Luckily there are other organizations out there that encourage kindness rather than penalizing it.
Only catch is, you probably won't make it through the first interview if you don't start practicing being kind right where you are. Soft skills are hard and take sustained effort to internalize.
As I usually say, be competent, not competitive. No one likes the uber competitive guy who always tries to stand above the rest at all cost.
Which, by the way, screams insecurity.
Whenever I hear the term insecurity used in a derogatory manner the caller often feels that it mitigates understanding more deeply in this area.
There are personality types that thrive on competition, they get renewed passion and commitment by having others also better themselves, this is not an ego or alpha complex, instead of the mental models they work in.
Or we can just call them insecure and be done with it.
Depends on how you define competitiveness. The one I’m referring to, the truly bad kind, is not just about trying to stand out, it also involves trying to put others down, as that helps their goal. Those also tend to be overly sensitive whilst also being insensitive to others. That, to me, screams insecurity (hence the over the top sensitivity). Also they couldn’t care less about others becoming better, actually they’d prefer if they don’t.
And yeah, nobody likes those guys.
The title was worded wrong, I think engineers (at least me), would make more sense out of: "The world needs more good people, the world does not need more smart people." Engineers often confuse "good people" with "smart people". But they are not related at all. And no, we don't need more smart people optimizing ads. We need more good people helping.
Disagree with the title.
What one should try to avoid being, is a dick. Help people improve. Point out their weaknesses and how they can improve, but get your ducks in a row beforehand - don't be a hypocrite. He who lives in a glass house and all that....
Have empathy, and understand your surroundings, as well as reading the room with context. Be direct with people, don't waste their time, but don't be rude or crass with them. Pleases and thank you's.
If someone is falling behind at work, talk to them and understand why - don't just fire them (perhaps something outside of work that is serious is weighing them down - if that is the case tread with caution, and don't be so quick to make a decision that could cost you or your organization socially or fiscally down the road). If you must cut ties with someone, make sure you do so in a direct, honest and respectful way. If YOU were to be fired, how would you like to be treated? There's your baseline.
Don't act like an HR drone trying to use flowery language around everyone. Be respectful of everyone as well as their time, and have a baseline level of professionalism that is applied to EVERYONE regardless if they are above or below you on the org chart. Every organization I've worked in, everyone from the janitor to the CEO got a "good morning" and a "yes sir/no sir" on a daily basis. Respect in life is earned, but there's a baseline of where it should be a given. Treat people with dignity.
Nothing you mentioned here disagrees with the title or the article
Rather than try to be the smartest in the room, I try to learn from the smartest person in the room, but when I find I’m the smartest i start looking for a room with smarter people to learn from.
Some people can teach others or be the smartest in the room, but I’ve not found those to be as rewarding. I like the challenge of getting to the top more than I do sitting at the peak.
I come from a culture where being kind is understood like a weakness. Sadly, this is a double-edged sword on certain situations.
What culture would that be?
The 4 points the author listed is not the same as being kind. Listening, Being respectful, Being empathetic, Being resolutive.
The reason people sometimes need to be "unkind" is to prevent some cost from being incurred. (Another conceivable reason is personality disorders, but let's assume normal healthy people.)
For normal healthy people, kindness is the default state when it is free. When there are costs, it becomes a luxury only some people can afford.
Hot take - all these articles (telling employees how to be) are crap for one simple reason:
If the management chain wants X, they need to incentivize X. In my experience 9/10 times, then management chain claims they value some set of values abstractly - but what they really mean is "Make me more money, and don't upset the order of things. There is no skill you can have in any quality that will ever make me think you should have my job or better."
If the management chain values kindness, let them communicate that request, then prove it by promoting people on that trait rather than nepotism/beauty/years/profitability/whatever.
My two favourite quotes regarding kindness:
“Choose being kind over being right, and you’ll be right every time.” — Richard Carlson
“When I was young, I used to admire intelligent people; as I grow older, I admire kind people.” — Abraham Joshua Heschel
People who try to be the smartest person in the room never are. The only thing I try to do in meetings is be helpful. Whether that's kind or not is not for me to decide.
If you're looking for an intro to mindfulness and meditation, the practice of mettā [0] is a truly a great way to start, and frankly, end with as well.
Commonly translated as "loving-kindness", applicable to the post, but even more simply as "friendliness" to yourself and others. It's crazy the feelings that can come when you sit, say, and feel the effect of phrases like "may I/you be happy", "may I/you be at ease". This isn't a game where we try to get points for being nice for an afterlife, but somewhat of a compounding way of looking at life and interactions with others.
There are many quick start posts, but this is a good one [1] to follow along. Rob Burbea has many talks about mettā, and these [2] are a good intro series.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maitr%C4%AB
Forget your “values”, it is always best to be kind. It’s rarely evident the value you produce, because it may take generations. But it is real.
I think the advice given by the author is a bit simplistic and obvious, but not wrong. I just wouldn't sum it up as being "kind"
As someone who works in a "kind" culture (Taiwan) - there is an infuriating flip side
If everyone is constantly worried about being kind, it becomes very difficult for people to say "unkind" things.
- It's hard for people to give you important critical feedback
- People will not give their half baked thoughts (which are the start of good discussions), and only bring stuff up when it's already a problem
- People have a complete inability to tell you "Hey when you do that thing A and B, I really don't like that"
The end result is that people end up masking a bunch of stuff in an effort to be kind which results in
- People having huge blow ups when things boil over
- Insane amounts of office gossip and people saying shit behind each other's back (bc they can't say it to your face and resolve it)
I wonder if the middle ground is when one needs to be "unkind" in words, they should be "kind" in action. I worked on a team that had been moved to a project, in part because that project was behind schedule, haphazard and under-staffed. In our first months we were often (and to my dismay) unkind in words without kind actions to follow through. All of our critiques were correct. All of them were important and needed to be addressed. All of them were real problems. And often the critiques were blunt for the sake of being clear to management. But being right didn't stop that unkindness from stinging the other teams that were there before us. We were resisted and drew quite a bit of (understandable) animosity from those other teams. When we changed tack (partially in response to realizing we were being unkind, partially because we'd finally built up the knowledge we needed to do so) and started accompanying critique with solutions or at a minimum viable demonstrations of the solution, things were received much better. We still said hard things, we still brought in half bakes thoughts. But because we were being kind in bringing more than criticism to the table, it was much more effective.
I honestly it's just a "people skill" that's on the individual level. I just think it's in the devilery and it takes practice. I'm not really sure structural organizational changes can fix it - though maybe they can help a bit
In my own experience it's possible to tell people anything as long as you're friendly and strike the right tone. The key is to not get worked up or emotional. Even something extreme like telling someone you don't like working with them - there is a friendly way to tell someone that with a smile on your face
Every unkind "truth" can be wrapped in the right packaging. The usual crux is to not get emotional and not get worked up and to lay out the facts, no matter how painful, in a way that shows you're not boiling over
On a team level I'm not sure what you can do. Especially with a group of low EQ nerds :). Maybe if one or two people set the examples then it's easier for others to catch on?
I agree it's a "people skill", but I think phrasing it that way has two road blocks. The first is that the self-help industry of "people skill" books and their "phone tag" translations through the media and general population has turned "people skill" into a word that I think to a lot of people sounds like manipulation or dishonesty. There's a friendly way to tell people anything, the key is getting people to understand that "friendly bad news" isn't manipulative in and of itself. In my opinion, it's being more realistic than any "just telling it like it is" approach can be.
The second is that "people skill" covers a lot of things, where "be kind when communicating" is still broad, but a more actionable instruction. For "low EQ" (and I include myself in that category) people, it's those actionable things that really matter.
You want to be smart to gather attention, you need to be kind to sustain attention and transform it into meaningful relationships !
It's work. It's not where I make friends. It's far more worthwhile to have meaningful relationships with your neighbours than your colleagues.
just a few people are going to miss the smartest in the room, but everyone is going to miss someone kind
On that topic, I’d rather have people trying to not become offended for little things, seems easier than faking kindness for personal benefits
People don't like working with jerks. I don't.
It's hard to achieve business goals if no one wants to work with each other.
That’s your problem if you are offended too easily. They might not be jerks but you too sensible
Maybe, maybe not. We're talking about hypothetical examples here.
As the jerk, you might not think it is your fault, but it is your problem if you are the common thread between other people not wanting to engage with you to meet "business objectives".
Generally, I think it's useful to reflect on how your behaviour impacts the work of yourself and others around you. Even if you want to be as utilitarian as possible, work happens better around people who get on better with each other.
In general, the kindest people will be the ones who have the maturity to not be offended
How is that related?
Maybe you're right. Deleted my continuing stream of thought. I just woke up so not at my smartest
The idea is to be genuinely kind, not to fake it.
Right, Im just assuming this kind of idea would push someone to look for environment with kind people over productive ones
Prioritizing kindness and empathy over showcasing intelligence. Sometimes it is smarter to be kind
That's not gonna work when people conflate team work with competition
I personally think being fair trumps being kind / nice / smart.
For most people, ego dominates and comes far ahead of empathy.
Nice guys finish last.
There's not being a dick, and then there's being a doormat. You don't want to be close to either of those extremes.
Polar opposite advice frequently posted here is How to Ask Questions the Smart Way: http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html
No single article on the internet has irritated me as much as this. Being a 'hacker' does not mean someone gets special privileges to be a scumbag.
I'd say just do whatever you think is the best for yourself and take the consequene.
Thanks for schooling us.
Disagree with title.
This is another way of saying "behavioral skills matter". Doesn't matter how smart you are, if you're an complete asshole you will find a lot of paths closed off to you. I'm really glad this generation is rejecting the notion that you have to be toxic to succeed. It's such bullshit.
> "Maestro Liendre: De tó sabe, pero de ná entiende." I don't really know (and don't want) to translate it
I think it translates to "knows everything, understands nothing" or "jack of all trades, master of none".
- "In this world, Elwood, you must be oh so smart or oh so pleasant." Well, for years I was smart. I recommend pleasant"
More coastal exceptionalism throughout the comments. Wait until you find out how superior Chicago is.
I think one of the difficulties is that someone can, say, adopt this "The Kind Framework", and appear aligned on values and awarenesses with someone who appears the same way.
Then the second person is blindsided when the first person goes and does something utterly selfish, as soon as the opportunity presents itself.
And the first person is baffled that anyone wouldn't expect someone to do that, since they assume anyone would do the selfish thing. And they still think of themselves as a kind person. Where their definition of kind is presenting a certain vibe exterior.
I call the first person a "sunny sociopath", after characters we'd often see in TV shows set in California.
why try? just be
To me, this article seems designed to train junior employees to be more exploitable by the tech sector’s psychopathic managerial class.
No, please, I come to Hacker News to get away from platitudinous, short, vague LinkedIn advice.
I was very confused for a moment, as I misread the title as "Do not try to be the smartest tv in the room"
I was so kind at all YC meetings and in other places. That's how got one of the biggest funding and investor attention. That's how it works, right? Did you know that Steve Jobs was so kind so Apple fired him. Also Elon is kind and all founders just kind. etc. Great content
Sarcasm is definitely the road to success!
(Oh shit)
In my latest blog post, I highlight the value of kindness over intelligence in the workplace. I talk about how being kind—through listening, respecting others, showing empathy, and focusing on solutions—can significantly enhance team dynamics and productivity. While being smart is important, I believe that kindness leaves a lasting impact and creates a more positive and effective work environment.
Listening and focusing on solutions is being smart though. If you’re only looking for people who are ‘respecting you’ and ‘show empathy’ you might not find competent people with whom you’re gonna produce useful things to trade with the rest of society
I’d go further and assert that kindness usually aligns with intelligence.
Demonstrating that you’re the smartest guy in the room is an ape-like expression of dominance. The IQ is a distant second.
how is focusing on solutions a kind act?
Those actually do sound like smartness. Emotional intelligence is as important as any other.