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Comment by monkeybutton | Hacker News Reader

Trustworthiness is not hard to define at all. When a coworker tells you they will do something, do they do it? When you tell them something in confidence, do they keep it to themselves? When there's a problem, even when its their fault, do they address it honestly and factually? When I write this out, it starts to sound like trust is a lot like professionalism and I think that's it. I trust someone who acts professionally, and I don't trust someone who doesn't.

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We discount the value of psychological safety too. Nobody wants to look stupid, especially in front of others, and if you punish people for mistakes then they either stop interacting with you or all of your interactions are engineered to avoid those situations. At this point candor has gone out the window, and your impression of what's really going on becomes progressively more inaccurate.

I have a couple coworkers who say, "I haven't heard of any of this," as if it's a statement that a problem doesn't exist, instead of a realization that they're in the dark on something important. It's because one feeds you optimism, and the other is grouchy and writes exhaustingly byzantine code and then doesn't understand why people don't think he's brilliant (I think this is the root of most of the grouchiness).

> Trustworthiness is not hard to define at all. When a coworker tells you they will do something, do they do it?

And the devil is in the details:

- Will ALL of the request be addressed, or will some parts be omitted without the omissions being surfaced explicitly?

- Will this person ask questions and/or look carefully at context to resolve any ambiguities in the ask? Or will they just kind of assume what you mean, ignoring any ambiguity or context that conflicts with their assumption, and not communicate any of the assumptions they made or thought process behind those?

- Will they be thoughtful about unintended consequences of the ask and surface those, or just do literally what was requested, let the shit hit the fan, and blame you if anything goes wrong?

I think trustworthiness can also apply to the code itself.

There are so many times where I have thought, "I better add this test here, even though I know I will probably only be the person who knows there needs to be a test here."

And I add the test, as I like to think I can be trusted to do the right thing, even though nobody will in all likelihood see it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/If_a_tree_falls_in_a_forest

If a tree can fall in a forest, better test it, just in case!

Or the tree falling in a forest test for short

He's talking about the perception of trust, like in an interview. They won't have a history with you to see how trustworthy you are at that point.

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