Hacker News Reader

Comment by simplotek | Hacker News Reader

> Accomplishing negative impact.

This opinion piece is the epitome of a negative impact work. It's easy to accuse random things of being all wrong, but it's far harder to actually present something you feel is right.

View on HN

Not every criticism of something has to be accompanied by a better solution. Pointing out that something has shortcomings is the first step. It’s perfectly fine to say, “That person’s singing is awful,” without also adding, “They need to work on their breath control.” You don’t need to be a great singer to know when someone’s doing a bad job at it. (And many people who are great at what they do are terrible at teaching others to do it, anyway.)

Criticism without suggestions for improvement is almost always useless.

Then why do company constantly ask me to "score this phone call", "score this driver", "was this person helpful?", "what did you think of this recommendation?", "could you spend some time to answer this questionnaire what you thought of that widget you bought"?

So to me it seems like criticism without suggestions is very valuable, it is called data. Suggestions from amateurs are usually bad and misleading, just highlighting a problem so that the expert can come up with a solution is the most efficient way to work in most cases.

I suspect a lot of that data provides very little value.

If you don’t know why the customer was unhappy, what do you change? You can fire the customer service rep, but then what do you do when the next one gets reviews just as bad because they are following the same script?

"This food is terrible" merely needs to be true, and anyone can say it, even people who aren't chefs. This is a ridiculous barr that only sorta kinda sounds reasonable if you just want an excuse not to like the message or the messenger.

> "This food is terrible" merely needs to be true, and anyone can say it, even people who aren't chefs.

If you bitch about how "this food is terrible" but you do nothing to make it more palatable or order something else and instead just stand there eating while complaining and reordering and asking for seconds... The food is not terrible, and you just enjoy bitching.

I would have warned you about the pot hole that destroyed my car instead of letting you get nailed by it too, but that would have just been bitching about something without fixing it, and I know you don't have any use for that.

> Pointing out that something has shortcomings is the first step.

Talk is cheap. If even that same critic feels that his solution to his problem is not worth pursuing, the criticism adds nothing and creates no value. At best it's nitpicking about stuff that falls in Eisenhower's "not important"/"not urgent" box.

Do you need to be a chef to realise some food is burnt?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com