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Comment by nookiemonster | Hacker News Reader

Something I didn't understand at 18 (that I do at 35) is that your 'enemies' may be dealing with things you simply cannot understand.

If a coworker is belligerent to an 18 year old, they are assholes. To a 35 year old (at least to me), the first thing I think of is that I have no idea what their home life is like.

People endure crazy life experiences. I am working with them on a problem that results in revenue for both of us. Just because we're making money, doesn't mean that they're dealing with problems of personal identity, cancer, financial ruin, etc.

Age matters, kid. It fucking sucks. It's cool that you're punk rock about this. But you will achieve more & achieve faster when you realize that age really does matter.

(p.s.- age is not a way to measure wisdom, but it is a wisdom indicator)

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> If a coworker is belligerent to an 18 year old, they are assholes. To a 35 year old (at least to me), the first thing I think of is that I have no idea what their home life is like.

I'm sorry, but I don't care what your home life is when you're at work. You're there to do your job, and communicating with your coworkers without being an ass is part of that. It sucks that <insert bad thing here>, but your job should not be affected by that.

If we're out at a pub in a non-professional setting, that's different; feel free to pour out your soul. But when we're on the clock, just do your job.

I say this having had a very, very close friend die on the morning of my first real world product launch. I had been up all night hammering out every last detail when I got the call from my mom, around 7am. At that moment I knew that the right thing to do was to finish what I had to do, and go home and mourn on my own time; it was what was fair to my coworkers, working right along with me, and to myself. It wasn't their problem, and if I had lashed out at them it would've done nothing but impede our progress. Sometimes you have to step up and do what needs to be done.

It is good that you can separate the two so well. Depending on where you work you may find out very quickly that a LOT of people can't... they consciously or sub-consciously take their problems with them. And I think the older you get, the more "self-righteous" you are about it, as in more likely to not care just as much and turn your bad feelings out instead of keeping them in and being a good soldier.

I'm from the UK, I know all about stiff-upper-lip but even to me this seems like unnecessary martyrdom.

I would feel that I had failed my staff if any of them thought that our product was so fragile that delaying launch by a week so they could mourn would cause irrevocable damage.

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