Hacker News Reader

Comment by JohnBooty | Hacker News Reader

I've worked on a number of crap, toxic teams over 20+ years. This one's good.

I'm absolutely dumbfounded at the replies here. I make an offhand remark about my current team being a pleasure to work with, and I have multiple replies suggesting that there is something fishy afoot?

    "The Lake Wobegon effect, a natural human tendency 
    to overestimate one's capabilities"

Oh, cool. Because I say my coworkers are good and I enjoyed spending a few days with them, maybe I'm overestimating my own abilities. Great. Very cool. Nice thing to say about a stranger.

I've never ever had such absolutely bizarre replies on HN. I can't remember the last time I had such bizarre replies anywhere.

View on HN

Don't let it bother you man. It's just an example of cross-cultural confusion crossed with some blunt HN mannerisms (to put it politely).

The tell is the callout that this is an "American thing" -- which, well, it is. America has a culture, and especially SF has a culture, that's pretty distinct from elsewhere. Talking up the raw intellect of one's coworkers is a very SF thing, and a very-non-European thing (not to say the person you're responding to is from the EU, I'm sure there's other similar places).

How it reads to an American: "this commenter is psyched to go to work with their colleagues, whose contributions and company they enjoy"

How it (could conceivably) read to someone from a culture very different from SF's: "this commenter is bragging about the IQ of their coworkers relative to everyone else's, which is either uncouth or sycophantic."

Commenting on it is of course ridiculous. Happy your team is good :)

Interesting perspective, thanks.

It's hard to wrap my mind around somebody thinking a stranger is "bragging" or "uncouth" or "sycophantic" because they think their team is smart and fun to work with.

But, I understand that it's a thing.

To be clear, it's not that you think they are smart and fun to work with, it's that you are saying they are smart and fun to work with.

Saying they are "fun" is obviously my personal opinion. How could it be anything else? Of course it means I think they are fun and not it is a universal truth that everybody thinks my team is fun.

As for smart, aren't most/all engineers "smart?" I hardly thought that calling a group of engineers "smart" would be controversial.

Some people are just very grumpy that they have to go back to the office.

So here comes along this guy that loves going back to the office. Fuck that guy! He must be faking it, he's lying to himself. It's that fake American culture that acts as if it's a nice thing to go back to work. It's because of these kind of people that I'm forced to go back! :)

I'm European and I know the fake US thing, but I didn't read that in your post.

Thanks for the kind words and the guidance.

I think there was also a misunderstanding. I'm not returning to the office. It was just a one week visit. I am back to working remote. I live 500mi/800km from my office. I will not move there.

    fake American culture that acts as if it's a nice thing to go back to work

Are you from America? I do not understand this statement. I have lived in America my whole life and everybody complains about their jobs 99% of the time. Maybe a person might lie to their boss about being happy. But nobody lies to their friends or strangers about loving their jobs. I mean, wtf? That's what people think Americans do?

It was just an exaggeration on my part of course.

But as a European looking at US culture, there is definitely a difference between this "positive thinking" attitude. I guess that's what the first response to your post was referring to.

Respectfully, I was not addressing you, and I think you are reading very different things into my comment than I intended. The connection in my mind was that the Lake Woebegon monologue always ended with "That's the news from Lake Wobegon, where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average." I did not agree with this characterization, and I gently took someone to task for making what I considered a bigoted statement.

I have no opinion on your subjective assessment of your current or prior teams. I'm not sure what about my response merits being called bizarre. If I inadvertently touched a nerve, please understand that it was not my intention.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com