Comment by duxup | Hacker News Reader

Comment by duxup | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I once worked for a company where several groups were VERY vocal about their complaints about each other. It seemed like bitching about the other team(s) was part of the job. Lots of walls built here and there between teams.

I kept quiet. I decided bitching was too tiresome / nobody was getting anything done, nobody was getting better by having complainants flung at them.

After I established relationships with various folks across the groups, I had folks from every team come to me / were available to me in ways they never would for each other.

My job was 2x easier as far as getting help / information / cooperation compared to the folks complaining non stop.

There were groups I agreed with / disagreed with (one group was straight wrong about nearly everything), but throwing a fit just made for worse relationships.

I still made suggestions to folks whose job it was to manage these groups, politely, gently, often quietly, but if they did or did not fix it / repeating myself wasn't a big focus for me.

I've long since given up on right and wrong (well outside real moral issues) and more about how to get to the end as best as possible with the relationships / people available.

I call this employing tactical empathy and it is the single most important soft skill I learned. It's the only, only effective way to do cross-team coordination, arguably all the way up to C-level to C-level.

The old fashioned term for this is “politeness”

Assuming we're using a shared definition of polite, I disagree!

> having or showing behavior that is respectful and considerate of other people.

You can be polite while not facilitating the counterparty in a way that's useful to you but in the short term feels like you're giving up something. People often can't get past that temporary feeling of losing so they don't venture into it.

Was being a bit tongue in cheek, but yes, it depends on your definition of politeness. I’d argue that being genuinely polite, ie being genuinely respectful and considerate, involves the kind of self sacrifice you’re describing. But I also agree that when most people imagine politeness, they imagine what I’d call “superficial politeness”, not “genuine politeness”

I only recently discovered something that is probably obvious to most other people: someone’s immediate verbal reaction to a message is often different than their long-term behavioural response to it.

“Your team isn’t pulling their weight”

The immediate reaction might be “Yes of course we are, how dare you!”

Now you have two options. It sounds like they have rejected your premise. Do you double down and try to force a verbal capitulation? “No, you are all really doing nothing!”

Or do you leave the seed you have planted: “Oh, alright then, good to hear it.”

The second option works way better. What they said in their immediate reaction is not predictive of the longer-term response. The longer term reaction might be that the team quietly increases their performance. If you went the confrontational approach, you would have ruled that out.

> right and wrong (well outside real moral issues)

Even moral issues don't have objective right and wrong. The idea that there are base moral facts is ridiculous, and without fully understanding each others priors arguments about ethics are rarely productive.

Oh yeah moral issues are within a context and so on.

> The idea that there are base moral facts is ridiculous

Sexual abuse of toddlers?

Unprovoked abduction and torture?

I think there certainly are base moral facts at the extremes of behaviour. Evil exists. Malevolence exists.

But I agree that most behaviour isn’t so extreme as to be easily judged without the understanding you describe.

Familiar story. Worse when the group that's wrong on nearly everything gets a cozy position from people in charge, where they can get by with minimum effort.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com