The best employees are not the agreeable ones | Hacker News Reader

The best employees are not the agreeable ones

work.qz.com

> They’re more likely to fight for what they believe in, challenge the status quo, and push the organization to make painful but necessary changes, he says.

A long time ago, I had a new employer that wanted me to hotfix non-critical code changes to a live, popular website via FTP with no version control, no nothing. Like a single typo could crash a high traffic site. I told them this was extremely dangerous and irresponsible, and refused to do any changes until we got the system under version control with a reasonable way to deploy changes. This caused a huge standoff and I basically put my foot down and told them that I wouldn't be deploying any changes until I got the client's website under version control--they could dock my pay for the extra time it took, I didn't care. Anyhow, I set up version control and a deployment strategy that we could rollback (this only took a day or so). Then I made the changes and educated the team on how to safely push changes to the site.

A month or so later they decided to not renew my contract, but by then the feeling was quite mutual.

I told this story while interviewing at what would be my next employer and it worked as points in my favor.

EDIT: FWIW I consider myself a generally agreeable giver until a certain threshold is crossed. One such threshold is stuff that moves into what I consider to be ethically irresponsible behavior. Perhaps you would call this a "selectively agreeable/disagreeable giver." There are "disagreeable givers" that pick their battles wisely in terms of when to apply friction and when to go along with the team. On the flip side there are those that will apply friction to every little thing and might relish in complaining and "I told you so"s and cowboying up their own solutions for every small disagreement.

EDIT2: Clarifying that the "hotfixes" were non-critical, normal code changes.

I think there's a trade off there. There's something to be said for "getting shit done" in the short term, voraciously arguing why it was bad afterwards.

You have to decide for yourself how much you can tolerate and still respect yourself. I'd have made the same choice as OP, and because I know that about myself, I keep fuck-off money in my bank account in case I ever need to take a stand that gets me fired. Self-respect is more important to me than any one job.

Yeah, I'm with you there. Like at the end of the day, I don't want to work for a company that treats a client's site with such gross negligence. The client was trusting us to manage the site responsibly and we would have been majorly violating that trust with those actions. To me, it felt like an ethical issue, I wasn't even thinking of legal ramifications (which I imagine there are some). I was very young then.

Nowadays I'm in the medical field. If you let standards slip to "get shit done fast," you can kill someone.

I don’t yet have that luxury, but this is one of my big overriding goals - FI by early 40s.

I’ve been in one or two situations where I would have walked if not for my mortgage and being sole provider with a young family.

Absolutely hated not having that choice, remembering how disempowering that was keeps me on track to work towards that freedom.

(I am not in SV, and good options at my level in my location take a few months to find)

It's easier to stand your ground when you're young, single, and mobile (which I was at the time).

As a medical student you might see something unethical or negligent happen during rotations, but even speaking up could risk your career (superiors give you a bad eval, this affects residency applications down the line). This hasn't happened to me personally, but you hear stories from other students with all kinds of actions and outcomes. So I really feel ya there. There isn't a one size fits all walk off point because stakes are always different.

Good luck on your FIRE plans!

There's also a thing called negligence for which you can quite rightly be dismissed and sued for.

Then all you are left with is shit.

Weirdly enough, "getting shit done fast" were the exact words used in the meeting where it was explained why my contract wouldn't be renewed.

Like I said, the feeling was mutual. Every company and person can decide how deeply they're willing to cut corners. My speed-quality equilibrium and this company's speed-quality equilibrium did not match.

(But seriously can I get a show of hands on HN as to how many devs would be willing to accept FTPing non-versioned code changes to a live, high-traffic website as a standard of practice? I don't think my speed-quality equilibrium is extreme by any means.)

It's not a good practice, but I've done it. The thing is, most live high traffic websites are doing things that are absolutely pointless and the world would not be greatly harmed if they went down. It might even be improved!

It's not my job to prevent some assholes from taking whatever risks they want with their piece of shit non-critical website, once they're in full possession of the facts.

Actual critical systems where lives are on the line are another story completely.

I am impressed you stood your ground on a technical quality issue. One thing though - if you find yourself in this kind of situation in the future, try to inform your employer of the technical risks (data corruption, data loss, lack of accountability when multiple people edit files), and get them to sign off in writing that they agree to the risks. That way, they cannot blame you if the system ever becomes screwed up.

I'm I the only idiot who would back up the files and make the change, and thinks that the hero contractor's wrong here? Version control is nice, but it's not a prerequisite to shipping, and not using one isn't "extremely dangerous and irresponsible" unless you're working on control systems at a nuclear power plant.

Maybe you shouldn't make the change until you have a Selenium suite, automated rollback, blue/green deployments, a bulletproof status page, and an on-call rotation with a regularly tested runbook. Maybe we should just sit on our hands and make internal improvements until things are perfect.

Reductio ad absurdum. I shoved a code base into version control and set up a super simple but safe deployment strategy. No fancy anything. It put off non critical development for a day and made development faster because I could make sure my code worked locally and not just on the live site.

Some companies value hyper-compliance, some companies value employees that speak up in cases of negligence. You have the freedom to choose your own preferences.

Furthermore, it IS possible to respectfully communicate your concerns and position without being a heroic jackass. My manager on that project and I were on good terms when I left and he served as a recommendation for my next job. The situation wasn't nearly as exaggerated as you're making it.

Yes, the approach was, in practice, wrong. Make the backup, get the patch out, then put in the deployment system on the side.

Version control is a must have for any project involving more than a few files or a few developers. It's simply not acceptable to work without version control in this decade.

Yes this is the best approach IMO. CYA (cover your ass) by explaining the risks, take backups (file & db) and push the hotfix. Sometimes you have to work with what you got while moving toward an ideal.

You then sell them the version control benefits and get them to sign off on that scope instead of being an obstructionist.

Yes, this is good advice. I was a doe-eyed fresh dev back then and in an advantageous position in the sense that nothing was riding on this job. Getting fired wouldn't have been the worst thing in the world. That said, had I gone ahead and made a mistake doing cowboy development on a live site... it would've fallen in my head I would've lost the contract anyway.

As I mentioned in another comment, I work in health now. You really can't turn a blind eye to these things in my current field. You might say I found a field more calibrated to my speed-quality balance than the old job.

Many times it comes down to personal approach too. Believe me, I have zero patience for corporate environments and I'm not afraid to rock the boat because I've been fortunate to never have to care about losing a job. It's a great position to be in. I've just seen so many agencies and clients use cowboy programmers and not adhere to best practices that I've had to help them through that process and sell the best practices.

Glad you're doing well and def. w health you can't move fast and go cowboy because the stakes are higher. We have clients in the health space too and the speed kind of annoys me but I've gotten used to it. But we still have clients that have used bad devs and ftp code so I see the gamut.

Personally I like the in between. Not cowboy but not corporate.

How critical was this website? How much would people be put out if it was down for a few minutes?

With all due respect, I don't want to go into all the details of a previous employer and their relationship with that client so that people on the internet can retrospectively tell me whether I made the right call or not.

Suffice to say, as I've leveled up as a developer over the years, there are many decisions I've later realized were naive or misinformed.

With all the knowledge and experience I have now: I have zero regrets about the above standoff.

FWIW if someone told a dev to FTP-cowboy develop at that company now, they'd be the one getting fired. When I was there, the company was in the midst of transitioning into more serious web dev practices.

It’s hardly “extremely dangerous.” Hotfixes like that are very common on for technically unsophisticated web sites. If a typo did crash it, what’s the big deal? Just fix it and move on.

I'm always skeptical of things like this that attempt to distill the full range of human personality and behavior into a simple table with four values. I haven't done any studies, but I feel like this sort of thing is disprovable by simple counter-example: as soon as I come across a single person who does not fit into this box, the universality of the box is already clearly wrong. I've come across many such people, whose behavior in the work place can't be described by the combination of two adjectives. (In fact, it's the only kind of person I've come across.)

The intention is to offer one more useful framing to look at the world with (along with all the other ways of understanding things). I think you're asking for too much if you're looking for an exhaustive and irrefutable universal classification theorem like those found in more mathematical fields.

I'm not asking or looking for that, I'm quite happy to accept the complexity of individuals and attempt to understand them on their own terms rather than trying to categorize them into a quadrant.

It is implicit in things like this that it's a generalisation suitable for discussing the case in point and not actually trying to describe the full spectrum of human behaviour. You should (and clearly do) know this. Generalisations are very powerful. I know they are unfashionable because everyone is unique and special, but you won't get very far without them.

Individuals are very difficult to predict. Populations are remarkably easy to predict.

> "Populations are remarkably easy to predict."

Could you break that down a little further?

Well it's the very essence of statistics. You probably can't predict how many of your friends will reproduce and how many offspring they will have, but you could definitely predict the average number of offspring the current population will have. Even though the "model person" with 2.1 children doesn't exist (can't exist even) it's still a thoroughly useful generalisation.

> you won't get very far without them

In the workplace, I think the opposite is true. Understanding and treating coworkers as individuals gets one much further than this sort of incredibly granular categorization. You're bound to miss important things about people if you just think of them as a "disagreeable taker" here or an "agreeable giver" there. Most importantly, you'll miss that people not only fluctuate in personality day to day based on many factors, but indeed often change entirely over time. It's not that this kind of mumbo jumbo is "unfashionable", it's that it isn't useful.

I think the author left out the other side of the argument...maybe the Wharton professor didn't in the original presentation of the idea.

How does the company treat the employee? I've found that the employee will generally try to mirror how the company treats them. If they feel the company is taking advantage of them, then they might start acting like a Taker just to balance out the relationship.

If they freely give to the company, and the company gives back, then that could start a positive feedback loop.

Sometimes, the company is structured so that the company can't give back, i.e. rigid HR policies about raises/promotions that limit a meritocracy. If the opportunity cost of switching company's is higher, then the employee is probably going to milking the company for everything it's worth to try to even out the relationship.

As a disagreeable giver, I have learned to accept a lot of things, mainly that I am widely misunderstood. A funny thing I’ve come to learn is to always seek employers who are themselves committed and passionate beyond convention. The gap between the results of finding such an employer and working for an average drone spans the almost the entire spectrum. Passionate people always get me, and I think they have been greatly rewarded for it. I will do anything for those people; I’ll even knowingly waste their time if I really like them, but that’s asking a lot.

I like to call our approach "radically earnest."

Radical candor.

I generally try to go by this approach as well, which I have found to create for some interesting situations after moving country.

I come from Norway, where speakig up if something is wrong is highly encouraged, and you will most of the time be able to directly jump org levels with your conserns without anyone getting sour. People seem to genuinly want to contribute in the best way available, and work to that end.

Mexico is my new home, which can be best generalized and summed up as a macho culture where people mind their own business and don't want to rock the boat (might be a regional thing, tho. The south where I live is very mañana mañana). Being afraid of speaking up is not encoded in my genes, so I've quite a few times called out injustices when I see them, and peoples reactions are a funny mix.

I luckily have found a company to work for that has one of those dreamer bosses that OP mentions, and I find myself having a lot of influence on the business simply because I speak up.

Personally I have observed that people generally misunderstand passion and confuse it for aggression, or even outright anger.

I'm a disagreeable giver. I've just left a job which didn't appreciate this. Funny thing is, everyone on my level said all the time how much they appreciate my openness with knowledge and desire to teach my skills. I found that odd because I consider it completely normal. The people above me hated it, though. Some of them shot down my efforts to enable basic knowledge sharing in the company. Most of the time I just made it very obvious that I could see them with their clothes off, though, and there were a lot of naked people above me.

Well done. Can I ask why the superiors didn't want you to share knowledge? Is it something about wielding power and keeping low-level employees in the dark?

It was a desire to have trade secrets kept from other departments in the same organisation. My superiors realised that a lot of our worth was just the things we knew and that if I just wrote it down it would make us kind of pointless. They didn't really understand that I consider myself a bit more than a meat-based knowledge repository.

Am I wrong to assume that most of HN is the disagreeable giver type?

I’m assuming that agreeable people tend not to seek out information outside of their bounds, and takers would be on some crypto trading forum or something.

I don't think that your hypothesis can be proved, unless the givers here can be just agreeable enough to reach some form of consensus about your assumption.

I think you're probably right, yeah. The typical internet commenter will be very quick to tell you you're wrong, but they'll make every effort to tell you why.

The best I've worked with have a knack for presenting making their contrary ideas agreeable.

While the jerks assume they are being attacked for their beliefs, the smart ones understands the value of group effort.

Yeah being an X employee is setting a low bar. Behavior has to be adapted on a situational basis, and if you can’t, that’s a problem across the spectrum.

Though if I had to pick favorites I would totally go for agreeable giver who wields the other 3 roles for impact :-).

This is so important. Picking one's battles and being diplomatic is just as important to getting things done as being correct. If you create a lot of noise over minor things, no one will want to listen when it's something critical.

Usually, the employee screening at the entry level relies on assessment of education history of the prospect.

The problem is that educational excellence often selects for agreeableness, as there is no real reward of contrarianism in education.

From bullshit Liberal Arts essays where you are graded in function of the level of endorsement of the brain farts of the professor in question to even the CS projects that are supposed to be made in a specific technology, often some JavaEE crap avoiding using more powerful languages or ecosystems like Python, Elixir or Clojure.

I wonder how many billions has the economy lost as a result.

Not true. A CS degree from say, UIUC has no correlation to agreeableness I can see. I can't count the amount of jerks I knew in school. Cockiness, yes. Sometimes brilliant, yes.

The few girls in the CS program could easily verify the lack of agreeableness.

Yeah, I was a student at math.illinois.edu, but did a CS minor- man, that major had the highest proportion of fuckheads I've ever encountered.

> I wonder how many billions has the economy lost as a result.

Not a meaningful metric. The world is creating plenty of fake jobs and inefficiency to justify occupation.

It is a very poor CS curriculum that requires the use of a specific framework; what does JavaEE has to do with science? Nothing.

And even as vocational training, would you hire somebody who went to school to study a framework?

So anyone can use any language for any assigent. How many runtimes do I need to install to grade your program? Howany languages do I need to know? How many frameworks do I need to understand? It's a problem of practicality.

I agree that any CS course focused on a tech stack instead of CS concepts is a poor one, but that's not the only reason we see specific languages being mandated.

> educational excellence often selects for agreeableness

Only to a limited degree. "The average relationship of academic performance with Conscientiousness (d = .46) can be seen as a medium-sized effect, the relationships with Agreeableness (d = .14) and Openness (d = .24) as small effects, and the relationships with Emotional Stability and Extraversion as relatively minor" [1].

Moreover, given "correlations with Agreeableness were least affected by controlling for intelligence" (page 26) and "increasing age was associated with declining correlations with Agreeableness" (page 29), one could argue that better-educated individuals will be more Agreeable (per the Big Five model [2]) solely due to being older.

More likely is interview performance, as "Agreeableness, Conscientiousness and Emotional Stability are all associated with social desirability (Digman, 1997), which has also been shown to affect performance ratings (Murphy & Cleveland, 1995)" (page 36).

[1] https://research-repository.griffith.edu.au/bitstream/handle... page 22

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits

I found assholes regularly got good grades.

> The problem is that educational excellence often selects for agreeableness, as there is no real reward of contrarianism in education.

Simply not true. Perhaps at second-tier and below schools this happens, but at a good university you are rewarded for contrarianism that can support itself with good arguments. You aren't rewarded just for being a contrarian, so no one is giving you free points just for saying 'you're wrong' without a coherent argument supporting your case.

If your education history is being scrutinized then the filter usually consists of 'I have heard of this university' && 'did graduate'; if your grades actually come into the discussion then you either are probably not qualified for the job or probably don't really want take the job even if they make an offer.

I have managed a disagreeable giver. I very much appreciated his upfront style and his passion. But whenever he was exposed to the rest of the organisation people took him as hostile and arrogant. Ultimately me backing him made me untenable. Moral is that working with contrarians are good but be careful.

There's another point that's relevant. If someone isn't producing the goods, they need need to make themselves liked somehow. Joke around, pat people on the back for whatever they do, generally act positive. That way people might not notice they're not pulling their weight.

This happened at a place I worked at, and it was compounded by the others being too agreeable to call him out. When I eventually did it ended badly for me.

> If someone isn't producing the goods, they need need to make themselves liked somehow

In competitive work environments, I've seen this heuristic overcorrect more often than be right, i.e. the nice person is assumed to be incompetent. Having worked on a trading floor, where niceness was not valued, and on teams with nice people with whom one could vent, reconsider interpersonal disputes or bounce ideas off (in terms of how others on the team might see a proposal), I strongly preferred the latter.

Most orgs favor takers IMHO.

It is more compatible with how project managers run things: "Here's your tasks, tell me when they will be done, don't do other tasks (like helping your peers) or the deadline will slip." That way of working is almost antithetical to givers.

These places prefer agreeable takers-- that's why people always say stuff like "I have a lot on _MY_ plate!"

I've worked at places where people are "too busy" to help with anything, and where nobody asks me for help with anything. I can't imagine anybody prides themselves on that sort of culture, but it seems common. My first job after graduation, I was lucky to be in a place where giving and asking for help/advice was normalized. The more cocooned and protective of their job, and the more distrusting of the organization people are, the less I suppose they want to share information.

Cool, I just need to get my boss to read this.

Being disagreeable doesn't necessarily make you a good employee.

"Disagreeable givers, on the other hand, can be a pain in the ass, but valuable to an organization, Grant says."

The problem is this person doesn't exist. Most people that are constantly disagreeable are just bluster and talk and don't get anything done. Occasionally disagreeable is useful, though.

We never get anything done because everyone tells us how wrong we are all the time and the psycological toll is hard to manage. I get my best work done when I tell no one, just do the thing that I know needs done and then try to navigate the politics at the end to get it accepted.

You want people who can "disagree without being disagreeable"

I've seen the word disagreeable being used in a few studies lately and I was beginning to wonder if it meant something else in psychological circles, ie not agreeing to everything rather than being unpleasant.

Every definition seems to point to being vexatious, which I find somewhat sad.

While I agree with the result, let's be cognizant that we don't allow assholes to blend in by claiming they are 'disagreeable'.

Disagreeability is itself a form of taking. You had better be amazing at what you do if you want to be grumpy.

Disagree with the first sentence, agree with the second. How precisely is "Disagreeability... a form of taking"?

You just took his time by having to explain.

You could also save A LOT of time by making others realize that idea has no merit.

Haha there it is!

It’s loading emotional work onto the people around you. A well-functioning team takes work to maintain and the grumps not only don’t do their share but are often a burden besides.

But what's the net result?

I have an employee who easily fits into the grouch/giver category. Yeah, he can be a pain, but often his complaints/attitude stem from the fact that he actually cares about what we do and how we do it.

It does require my time to smooth over certain interactions, expose him to the right people (and hide him a bit from others), and generally manage his mood a bit. However, what I get from him outweighs all of that and he's generally a great employee.

I'd much prefer him to an agreeable person who is mediocre at their job. In the end this person saves us all time.

Well that’s what I’m saying. I don’t mean there is no place for a grumpy but talented employee, just that it raises the bar. And having some merely-good but socially smart people in the mix is also very helpful.

Related: The best employers don't seek out and promote agreeable employees.

> The best employers don't seek out and promote agreeable employees

The best employers know when to hire agreeable employees.

"It may be that agreeableness may aid performance in some jobs but be a limitation in others... Evidence supports a link between agreeableness and prosocial work behaviors (Chiaburu, Oh, Berry, Li, & Gardner, 2011). Such a link exists, at least in part, because agreeable individuals are motivated to maintain positive interpersonal relationships with others (e.g., Barrick, Stewart, & Piotrowski, 2002). This is particularly important when considering group activity. Graziano, Jensen-Campbell, and Hair (1996) found that agree- able individuals reported higher levels of liking toward a randomly assigned partner. Most relevant to the current study, Mount et al. (1998) found that agreeableness was positively related to performance for service jobs requiring dyadic interactions.

However, some agreeableness characteristics—namely, the eagerness to cooperate and avoid conflict (Goldberg, 1990; McCrae & Costa, 1990)—suggest that agreeable individuals might struggle in competitive environments." [1].

Also, "agreeableness more positively predicted job performance in jobs requiring attention to detail and involving independence in completing work" (page 11670.

[1] http://leeds-faculty.colorado.edu/dahe7472/Judge%20and%20zap... page 1155

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