Comment by gabereiser | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gabereiser | Hacker News Reader

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Let’s break down your version: “I think it would be better if…” You start with an opinion. That’s going to cause any listener to put up their guard. It’s the beginning of any sort of confrontations. By saying “Thank you for the effort…” you are acknowledging the work they put into it and showing empathy by seeing their work they have done. If it isn’t correct, either it should have been course corrected by management or volunteer for the next one. If you think something should be done a certain away across the board, create a brown bag or lunch and learn where you evangelize it and get consensus.

You aren’t lying when you give praise about someone’s effort (unless they gave none, in which case why are you praising to begin with?), you would be lying if you said “You did a great job” when the solution is potentially tech debt for later. It’s a matter of communication and human behavior.

You wouldn’t praise someone by saying “I think it could be better”.

Your second example is a good one and I agree is a more effective approach to communicating.

But GP was right. There's a huge difference between your first example:

> “I really liked how you tackled this, have you thought about this approach?”

and the second:

> “Thank you for the effort…”

The first is most likely a lie, otherwise you wouldn't be offering an alternative suggestion! If somebody said that to me I'd feel extremely patronized and would consider that person very disingenuous.

Offering a different point of view helps either confirm their decisions or open up avenues for improvement of their work. It’s not about telling “this is how I would do it” but rather “Have you thought about other options and approaches? What do you think? Why did you choose this route?” helps the individual weigh the pros and cons with each. It should never be an opportunity for you to chime in with how you would have done it (even if you would have done it that way). You simply want to expose the other possibilities so that they are aware of them and haven’t overlooked a potential savings or killer-feature.

to be clear, I fully agree with this and your broader point. It's the specific verbiage in your first example that I think is problematic, mainly because it feels disingenuous and insincere at best, manipulative at worst. Which is highly unfortunate because I think the vast majority of the time the motives are pure!

It’s funny because I still feel the opposite of you — I think the example where you say that you like their solution is a better approach, as long as it’s not horrible.

It leaves open the possibility that you as the reviewer are actually mistaken, and they possibly have a good reason for doing it that way.

I may be the senior reviewing the junior’s code, but they probably spent longer looking at the problem than me and there is a chance that I’m missing something. By suggesting “have you considered this, it may be able to handle x situation better”, you respect their work more.

It depends on context though, if somebody clearly just didn’t understand something obvious, then I’ll just tell them directly.

Either way, probably a difference in our opinions of feedback, you might prefer more directness than me

It feels stilted and weird to me. My first thought was "OK, that sounds unnatural, I'd have to say it different." Good idea, but I could never let it come out of my mouth that was since no actual human being talks that way.

as a manager, I'm not looking to challenge your outcome, I'm looking for you to explain why your solution works best compared to the others that were suggested. "have you thought about X?" is a genuine curiosity so that I may defend your solution to the higher ups when they ask me "what about X?". They are constantly being courted by vendors. Vendors who think they know the problem better than you do. Let's show them that you covered the bases and hit that home run properly.

In this context, is it weird to ask if you've "thought about X"? Is it disingenuine or condescending to you? Servant leadership is about supporting the team that I'm responsible for, to block and shield them from the wrath of VPs who want blood because their napkin-idea-over-cocktails wasn't selected for funding.

I'm trying to prepare you, the presenter of the solution, for the onslaught of questions that will come your way. If you feel these kinds of questions are a praise sandwich, I'm more than happy to present your solution for you.

interesting indeed, thank you!

> It leaves open the possibility that you as the reviewer are actually mistaken, and they possibly have a good reason for doing it that way.

That's a great point. There must be room in this to cover that the person actually had good reasons that the asker doesn't know about. It's a hard needle to thread.

"I like the way you tackeled this" Implies the work has been done successfully. ", have you thought about this approach?" is trying to imply that the work is not sufficient actually without actually saying that. Your message has taken a complete 180 since the first half of the sentence but you haven't given the listener any clues because if you use a word like "but" it might hurt the facade of niceness. It's mixed messaging.

But I think a lot of the issue here is because were talking about a made up example. If we just add a little more detail to the made up response it clears up a lot of the ambiguity and makes it sound less contradictory.

"I really liked how you tackled [X Requirement], have you thought about [Y Requirement + approach]?"

These approaches and how effective they are are both culturally and individually sensitive.

The "Yes, but" approach works well in a context where people understand it as feedback that they should change. Softening the criticism with praise works for many people. It can also backfire in a context where people distrust praise, where the criticism is not understood as such, or when people have trouble with American business idioms.

The more direct approach works better in other contexts. I have had coworkers who responded much better to blunt criticism about why they should do things differently than to a praise sandwich.

This gets very tricky if you are interacting with multiple very different people at once. What is a strong enough criticism for one person might be well below detectable for another. There isn't one ideal answer or approach.

It's a lot easier to teach many people how to receive communication in one style than it is to teach everyone to send communication in many styles. We can, and many organizations do, write style guides for internal communication. The most successful such style guides (eg. military, intelligence) emphasize the ABCs (accuracy, brevity, clarity) any to avoid extraneous verbiage.

If your coworkers respond negatively to a simple, direct question like "Why didn't you do it this way?", they can be trained to handle professional communication more dispassionately (more professionally).

There’s a whole division dedicated to undoing military communication style to adapt it to the real world in the private sector. Just FYI. Also, the word “didn’t” doesn’t exist in that communication style… “unable”, “status red”, “negative”, “not able”. The words “can’t” and “didn’t” are stricken.

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