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Comment by sillysaurus3 | Hacker News Reader

It takes a lot more work to get your point across while being kind. Sometimes I'm not sure it's worth it. Especially when it seems like no manager qualifies as "kind." So if you want to advance, what do you do?

It's still annoying that becoming a manager is correlated with advancement, but that's life.

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I disagree. My favorite career and life moments have been in cultures that are direct and assertive, but also respectful and caring. I draw a distinction between confrontation and combative.

Confrontation is critical when you have important information or perspective that can change the current course or result in a different decision. It's your duty to be assertive (when it's important, not for trivial things).

Being direct doesn't mean being a jerk or being rude. There's no excuse for combativeness. The point isn't to pick a fight or attack a person, it's to attack an idea and to do the right thing. Combativeness is a sign of immaturity or inability to deal with high stress.

It can take practice. It's liberating once you get in the habit of it.

EDIT: This saying: "You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with," sums up the the importance of work culture (same with choosing a partner and friends too).

I don't consider kindness and directness to be at odds, and I've found that it comes rather naturally if you take as a premise that the person you're speaking to should be treated decently.

> Especially when it seems like no manager qualifies as "kind." So if you want to advance, what do you do?

Stand out by being kind, watch as the people you work with are shocked by the contrast, and try not to get whiplash at the speed at which you're propelled upwards by a large crowd of enthusiastic supporters.

Or, if the culture of not caring about other people seems too pervasive, find a company where kindness is valued, rather than derided. People who value kindness will select for it. And the resulting teams work very well together.

In a technical leadership positions, communication is by far the most critical skill. The job isn't solely to "get your point across". Kindness makes a great impression on people, and builds a reputation. A lack of kindness (or a lack of empathy, or toxic behavior, or any number of other descriptions) makes an impression as well, and also builds a reputation.

All of this. I'm still digging out from twenty-odd years of my life where I did not prioritize kindness. That approach does has its advantages even when I'm trying to be decent about things; I can, today, go pretty hard at people who are used to getting their way through abusing people because it doesn't affect me (I know the game). But the legacy of it is more guarded relationships and ones that could be better, both personal and professional, if I just hadn't been so damned brusque beforehand.

I don't really think it requires more work to get your point across while being kind, I really don't. At least, not when all other things are equal, and one of those things is "have I exercised the parts of my brain that lead to acting kind sufficiently?". Once you've gotten into the habit, it's pretty reflexive. And it's more effective, too, not just because of the good feelings engendered but because when the shit really hits the fan and you drop it because somebody needs to do X right now, the tonal shift and the urgency will leverage your social credit to get it done--and that can really matter in an emergency.

As someone who tried to be kind for years while trying to get my work done, it's not. Would not recommend.

Kind doesn't mean let everyone walk all over you. It's possible to kindly tell someone to fuck off. I've even seen people use those exact words and still appear kind.

Edit: Mildly interesting. 50 minutes after this comment, I was searching for how to calculate the intersection points of collinear line segments which brought me to Stackoverflow [1]; where someone linked to this sketch [2] about drawing red lines with green ink, all perpendicular; which then brought me to this sketch [3] involving politely telling someone to fuck off.

[1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/24511962/calculate-inter...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKorP55Aqvg

[3] https://youtu.be/sxCWB47ZCLQ?t=1m53s

I still don't know how to calculate the intersection points of collinear line segments.

This was not possible in the environment I was operating in.

This guy delivers the goods

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