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Comment by adrianmonk | Hacker News Reader

Toward the end, he gives the backstory of how the breakup was brewing for a long time, and it seems very possible the CEO may have already made up his mind to fire him before the Palo Alto dinner.

So maybe frankness wasn't the cause. It's even possible they were interested in his perspective and wanted to get his honest opinion before they lost the opportunity. Or maybe they had nearly made a final decision but not quite and wanted this conversation to see if what they learned made a difference either way.

On a separate(?) topic, a lot of tech organizations seem to be fond of saying they want to hear all ideas and judge the ideas on their merits, but when you actually say something that goes against popular opinion or conventional thinking within the organization, people aren't open to it or are even hostile or dismissive. In my opinion, it's not as easy for humans to be objective and open-minded as we think.

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"a lot of tech organizations seem to be fond of saying they want to hear all ideas and judge the ideas on their merits..."

This is often true, but it is also sometimes perceived as true even if it isn't.

I'm very picky about where I'm willing to work, and sometimes that means there can be gaps between permanent positions for me to fill. I fill those gaps by taking contract gigs.

On one such gig, I was working on code that was dismally bad and, given a number of arbitrary constraints from management, couldn't be improved.

I decided that I would try honesty, and tell management my honest assessments of the issues. I figured that this was not a contract that I enjoyed and although I wasn't going to violate the terms by quitting without sufficient cause, it would be a perfectly acceptable outcome if they fired me because I was too outspoken.

So I did. And for the next few weeks, I had a steady stream of permanent engineers stopping me to say variations of "Thank you for speaking out. I've been wanting to say that stuff for years, but didn't want to lose my job".

Weirdly enough, rather than fire me, the company wanted to extend my contract when the original term was up. I declined.

> Weirdly enough, rather than fire me, the company wanted to extend my contract when the original term was up.

Why do you consider this weird? The most valuable engineers have strong opinions, weakly held, and shared constructively.

The best teams I've ever worked on had many such engineers with opposing viewpoints, where the 'debate' usually boiled down to, "Can we get data to support one path over another? What are the values we're using to judge success?"

I considered it weird because the issues I raised were, at heart, about how management was the cause of the major problems. I didn't present them that way (I prefer to avoid assigning blame for things, as that rarely leads to a resolution of the problem), but the implications of what I said were obvious.

Also because of the fear the permanent engineers had about speaking up. I assumed that if there was so much fear, there was probably a reason for it, and I honestly expected to be let go. That was the point of my story -- sometimes such fear is not justified.

"The most valuable engineers have strong opinions, weakly held, and shared constructively."

That sounds true to me.

I'm not about to classify myself as a "most valuable engineer" (It's hard to know if I'm being honest or egotistical), but I am a very opinionated person and my opinions are pretty easy to shift with a good, substantiated argument.

Ever hear the saying "A prophet isn't welcome in his hometown"? You had blundered into why companies keep Gartner on retainer.

You were an outsider. That has inherent value, even if you and I agree it shouldn't. One of the quirks of humans. You could have probably been a positive force for change, for a while anyway, had you stayed.

I've experienced this - converting from contractor to employee. Stuff talked about and agreed to when I was a contractor is now questioned when an employee. Other outsiders brought in to "validate". Whatever - I just pass the "validators" what I need mgmt to hear, they parrot it, everyone nods their heads and life goes on. Stupid? Yup. Worth fighting? Absolutely not - if you like accomplishing stuff.

This is an excellent observation, thank you!

My pleasure! I used to get miffed by it until I realized it's just human nature and started to roll with it. And more importantly use it to keep things moving :)

Being open-minded with someone in a non-business context is doable with the development of intimacy, and more about personal factors. Being contradicted in front of others in a workplace setting, especially more than once, leads to a narrative -- and I think this situation is more governed by political factors.

I think this was another case of the truism that HR doesn't work for you, they work for the company. The pep talk from the HR VP was probably to try to get his honest feelings so they could determine if they really needed to let him go or not. Not so that the CEO could be affected by his feedback.

I also agree, everyone wants to believe they are the type of person who is open-minded and receptive to criticism, but that doesn't mean they actually are.

I think this is an overused cliché, at least when applied to this situation, I. e. individual top-level executives.

Individuals don’t behave like machines, especially not when dealing with people they have known for a long time. That idea is readily accepted by most anybody when evaluating the CEO here, as far as I can tell, who would seem to be putting his emotions (pride) over the interests of his company. If we readily accept that he is guided by emotions, it’s inconsistent to assume someone in a similar situation (the HR head) would be completely immune from emotions and act machine-like, with Machiavellian calculus.

The only way to make this work would be to posit a difference in the ability of negative emotions to influence us, vs positive—pride vs loyalty, honesty, friendship, etc. since I’ve seen more people lose money loaned to a friend, than make money stealing from friends, or seeing the willingness of people to die rescuing others, I can’t really subscribe to such an arbitrary split.

I'm not sure I understand your point. My thesis was that both the CEO and HR VP were not being guided by emotions, but logic. They didn't feel that their colleague was on board with the CEO's plan. Before they did something that could have negative consequences like firing him, they wanted to see if he was willing to get on board, or if he just fundamentally disagreed and was going to stick to his guns. When he was asked and directly answered, it was clear that he was never going to truly be on board. So he was let go. No emotion required. Though, I do believe humans are emotional more than logical, and I wouldn't be one bit surprised if emotion was involved too.

> people aren't open to it or are even hostile or dismissive.

Over the years I noticed that you have to keep repeating your idea. The first time everyone ignores it or is dismissive. But keep bringing it up. After some time, you might hear someone else bring up your idea, sometimes thinking they came up with it.

It seems you have to give the idea its own life. Maybe you can compare it to ads, where a person needs to have multiple contact points with it before getting ingrained.

I had multiple ideas like this, that were eventually accepted, without anyone knowing where it originally came from.

> On a separate(?) topic, a lot of tech organizations seem to be fond of saying they want to hear all ideas and judge the ideas on their merits, but when you actually say something that goes against popular opinion or conventional thinking within the organization, people aren't open to it or are even hostile or dismissive

Another one I often hear is some variation of "present solutions not problems", often from developers and not just management. Except problems are easy to spot and solutions often require a substantial time investment to solve and present, time that won't be allocated unless problems are identified. Even if you spend your own time on the solution it will often be dismissed by people that don't see the problem in the first place, it's just "how we've always done it". It's basically a long winded way of telling people to stop complaining.

> ...present solutions not problems...

My favorite response to that is that understanding a problem is the first part of a solution. We had names for the sound barrier, smallpox, and moon landing problems long before we had solutions.

Also, don't hire problem solvers and then complain that they are good at spotting problems.

    > Another one I often hear is some variation of "present solutions 
    > not problems", often from developers and not just management. 
    > Except problems are easy to spot and solutions often require a 
    > substantial time investment to solve and present, time that won't 
    > be allocated unless problems are identified.

This is one of the most powerful insights imaginable.

From an employee's perspective, it's crucial to adopt the mentality of always striving to deliver solutions and not problems. Considered in a vacuum, yes, it's a valuable trait! Of course solutions are better than mere gripes!

But it's equally crucial to realize that the common refrain of "bring me solutions, not problems" is -- as you say -- often a profound way for management to (perhaps sometimes unintentionally) bully, stifle, and ignore engineers.

It works as an instrument of management's bullying because it preys upon the guilt we engineers feel when we present a problem without a solution.

I should have been better. I should have developed a solution as well. That's what we tell ourselves. But, as you say, this is not always feasible. A solution may take days, weeks, months, or years. And the importance of the problem is often positively correlated with the time and resources needed to develop the solution.

>>> It's even possible they were interested in his perspective and wanted to get his honest opinion before they lost the opportunity.

So they got the exit interview that they were hoping for.

These days people can't even consider the possibility of listening to opposing points of view let alone actually doing so. This a recent thing.

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