> I don't know if anyone's ever told you that half the time this business comes down to 'I don't like that guy.'
In all my years of working, this is probably the most important thing you can learn. Except for marginal cases, it's not about how good you are at your job. You just have to be liked while being sufficiently good.
It's also why the perennial "hiring is broken" posts and threads miss the point completely: really they're just trying to find someone they like. It's what "culture fit" really means. And people like people like themselves. This is part of what can lead to unlawful discrimination.
Trustworthiness is an interesting one as it seems to be hard to define but some people just have it and some don't. This has been studied and can have a profound effect on, say, criminal sentencing [2].
> Except for marginal cases, it's not about how good you are at your job. You just have to be liked while being sufficiently good.
I think this is dangerous ground to thread. I don't like to work with assholes any more than the next guy and I'd certainly prefer working with people I personally like but that kind of thinking opens doors to all kinds of abuse; from favoritism (I like him, therefore he gets a pass when somebody else might not), through promotions (what does giving a promotion to somebody likeable over somebody more competent do to morale?) to plain fuckarounditis (playing career games rather than what's good for the business, wasting company resources on petty political games).
I mean, I get it - it's human nature. But something feels off when we're justifying our simian prejudices in an environment where we're supposed to prioritize somebody else's satisfaction (whoever is paying us) but instead we do what we feel is best for us personally, using a fairly emotional and error prone system of judgment (I don't care if this guy sucks, I like him because he's my friend).
There's a pragmatic reason too for that. You work more efficiently when you work with your friends imo vs rigid or unagreeable personalities. You show up excited to work and contribute and share ideas vs wanting to get out of there and watching the clock tick slowly all day. I'd say the friend effect is able to elevate people who have 'mediocre' skills on paper to be efficient enough and start learning at a rate that sees them performing well above their qualifications. There is definitely a performance advantage towards feeling engaged and focused.
Coming from the Midwest I was brought up in a weirdly religious meritocracy where it was all about worship of "hard work". Unfortunately over time I'm realizing that others perceptions of me are more important to career advancement over any of the actual work. So much more important.
> But something feels off when we're justifying our simian prejudices
It does, but in so many ways I feel like I'm trying to swim against the current if I continue down the "kick ass and take names" route vs. the "tread carefully and make sure everyone likes you" one. Even if you're successful at solving "Very Big Problem™" people tend to hate the wrecking ball who doesn't participate in 2:00pm office beers - even if they are getting shit done.
Sorry to interject my own strong feelings here but work isn't about work as much as we like to think... It is my experience at every place that I've worked that SWEs that make the most friends, participate socially, and prioritize their own brand internally are the ones that move up. Practical example: instead of being the person who busts ass to optimize the core Postgres DB (by meticulously sussing out slow queries etc), be the person who starts the Friday book club. Although the former is of way more value to the tangible product, the latter is way more valuable to you socially.
Your outward social narrative is more important than anything these days - this is just work culture anymore.
I agree with you, 100%. 'Culture fit', in my experience, leads to discrimination and in- and out-group thinking.
That being said; a challenge to your statements:
>[. . .] instead we do what we feel is best for us personally, using a fairly emotional and error prone system of judgment [. . .].
My experience has shown that a very cohesive team who like and appreciate each other, but is made of middle-ability individuals is much, much more productive to my measure as the boss than a team comprised of high-ability, but un-cohesive (non-cohesive?) individuals.
Soft skills and the ability to work well together without judgment are both wildly important. In a team of antagonists, it is difficult, if not impossible, to feel comfortable enough to take chances.
Not sure what the challenge is in that statement, but it's in there somewhere.
It’s important to balance an individual’s individual competence vs their effects on others.
If working with a competent person means the rest of the team constantly feels stressed, bullied, aggrandized, looked down on, or whatever else then those people are less likely to perform to expectations which may have more of an impact than the competence gain.
I'll take competent or amazing with some annoying personality quirks over incompetent and highly likeable any day of the week.
The latter might be fun for chatting during a coffee break, but they consume resources while providing little of value which ultimately means more work for you.
>> Except for marginal cases, it's not about how good you are at your job. You just have to be liked while being sufficiently good.
> I think this is dangerous ground to thread.
He is not speaking to those choosing who to hire, he is speaking to those being interviewed. He's not saying to hire those you like, he is saying you will only be hired if you are liked.
It does suck, but it's been true for me. Making the interviewers like me is at least as important as convincing them of my skills.
I am confused why people are so outraged at the idea that some part of selecting people to work with may be based on whether you get along with them.
People are social beings. Part of working together comes from feeling like you want to cooperate. You could have someone who is incredibly smart and clever as your business partner, but will you really feel like you want to go the extra mile for him/her? Do you have to watch your back constantly? Do you have the same goals in life? Does every interaction drain energy from you?
We come from families, social structures. We have people in our families who are incompetent but we love them. It's not unreasonable to think that some of this behavior would continue in our work worlds.
"Diversity" in the trendy usage today, for most people still doesn't trump whether you want to work with someone, and that hopefully doesn't have much to do with race/background/gender/etc. I say hopefully of course, and helping people overcome or not be prejudiced that some characteristic correlates with ability/desire to work with them, is an important thing to do.
But forcing people to believe that someone's <x> characteristic is more important than whether you want to work with them is a recipe for dissatisfaction and backlash against people who insist that it should be so.
Because you're on a site where a significant portion of the population probably have poor social skills / are unlikable but have high degrees of technical skill.
If you had this conversation in the real world instead of the internet, everyone would just say "yeah, duh".
> I am confused why people are so outraged at the idea that some part of selecting people to work with may be based on whether you get along with them.
It's rather simple. If you apply for a job and get hired because they like you, then the system is good. But if you apply to that job and don't get it, it turns into "fuck this old boys club". The outrage isn't logical, it's almost purely emotional.
Yeah I got kick back on HN for expressing this opinion. There's a lot of unexplained reasons why people like each other, dating sites haven't cracked this either. But anything unexplained in this realm now seems to immediately explained with "unconscious bias". I can't explain why I like certain people but can't stand others.
The one unfortunate side effect is that sometimes what seems totally innocuous to one person (interjecting, a crass joke, swearing, not talking enough, using the language differently, tough accents) may be interpreted as less desirable to work with even though it’s often just a cultural thing.
There are studies which show diverse teams are stronger because they bring in differing view points but I also think that they may end up self selecting for those that are empathetic enough to look through others eyes maybe.
> I am confused why people are so outraged at the idea that some part of selecting people to work with may be based on whether you get along with them.
Because in large companies you will not work with the people that hired you.
Many successful sport teams were composed by people who openly disliked each other, there's no reason to be likeable if you are not being paid to be liked by others, but there are many reasons to cooperate to the end goal if the team members' salaries depend on it.
For many people being likable in the way it is represented in the article it's more stressful and energy draining than the job itself.
I would go as far as to say that people that can't go through first impressions and work together with someone they don't particularly like (except of course if it's for good reasons) aren't good team members.
But they tend to select each other to not feel alone in being bad team members.
> You just have to be liked while being sufficiently good.
One of my friends has a joke series of posts titled the "32x engineer"[1], one of which is about niceness.
People who aren't nice get routed around when crisis situations happen as adding them to the mix is not pleasant - this is probably different from the extrovert-friendly connotations people pick up in interviews, but a more clear "is this person going to yell at me or help me (first)".
This lesson is probably doubled up in personal life as people have kids and try to get their tweenagers to communicate with them - the "you did WHAT?" reaction is basically equivalent with the not-nice people who are competent, but tired of cleaning up the mess of over years (not realizing their reaction has a long-term impact on what kids think adults do).
The role growth part is also relevant, as people with context don't want to come to you unless they have to, you slowly lose context on what's going on until you are in a basement with a stapler.
I'd like to refine the sentiment a little bit. In technical circles, trustworthiness is sufficient to get you some traction, but you'll have a glass ceiling unless the bosses like you. If you don't plan to climb very high in the org, this might seem like a reasonable deal to you, but remember that there are other times besides getting promoted when you need to spend social capital with the management team.
> The role growth part is also relevant, as people with context don't want to come to you unless they have to, you slowly lose context on what's going on until you are in a basement with a stapler.
This is my first to promotions to lead in a nutshell.
People who had been there longer lost context because I categorize some/many fuck-ups as reasonable, and I was good at bailing people out if my advice was wrong. If you broke something, or just thought something was broken (ie, QA) I was least likely to bite your head off. If something I asked you to do exploded, I'd help you fix it.
Technically and emotionally trustworthy people hear about more 'dirt', and many serious architectural problems are hidden in that dirt. If you are technical you can parlay that information into bug fixes (including production outages) and technical initiatives. If you're getting stuff done and people generally seem to trust you (even if they don't like you), then that means they listen when you talk. Your boss would be stupid not to promote you.
At the point where you are sufficiently good at the core skills, I would argue it matters more that you are also pleasant, fun and trustworthy.
The truth is, most jobs don't need the best of the best, problems are not always needing a breakthrough, often it's business as usual, so sufficiently good is good enough, and then you need to be able to collaborate effectively. That latter quality is as important to business success as the former.
>It's also why the perennial "hiring is broken" posts and threads miss the point completely: really they're just trying to find someone they like. It's what "culture fit" really means. And people like people like themselves. This is part of what can lead to unlawful discrimination.
I don't care about this, and never will care.
How startups expect to make progress or deliver a groundbreaking products following this inverted psychology is beyond me.
In simple words possible: I have hired people who I don't like naturally only on professional expertise and the value that they delivered to my company was immense.
You cannot learn to be likeable.
You don't need this nonsense. You, as a professional, must learn to communicate and respect people for their skills and accomplishments, not for similarities in music taste, consumer purchases or favorite movies.
All of this crap is produced by companies who want to exploit overtime by creating emotional bonding and subjective preferences. The added "benefit" is that this artificial divide leads to generational hostility and mistrust (which is handy when someone old with experience will try to share useful information to someone young and full with illusions).
I have managed teams of people who didn't like each other at all, and this was not a problem because of clear communication, procedure and company mission.
It's about time, this "cultural fit" nonsense to die. Companies who are operating with this mentality will never produce long-term value. Period.
It's about time, we as a community, to grow up and stop pretending that we are not having a role in growing ageism and tribalism in our industry.
Can you imagine if engineers of the Apollo Program were selected by friendliness?
If your goal is to deliver the most value possible to the company you work for, your attitude is correct.
My goal is to enjoy my life. To a certain extent, bringing value is enjoyable. So I try and work hard and do a good job. But if someone makes my day worse, no matter how valuable they are to my employer, I don't want to work with them.
I just can't imagine hiring someone you know you won't like. I'm not saying every person that's hired has to be best friends, but with the amount of time everyone spends together there should be at least some level of friendship.
Learning basic social skills is pretty easy for most non-neurodivergent humans
It's about time, this "cultural fit" nonsense to die. Companies who are operating with this mentality will never produce long-term value. Period.
Ah yes, because all the companies that have toxic cultures where nobody likes each other are thriving right? I think as with most things, you need a balance. If you have an active dislike of someone because of rude behavior, the chances that you're able to collaborate and work on something together is nil.
> How startups expect to make progress or deliver a groundbreaking products following this inverted psychology is beyond me.
The vast majority of startups are not doing any groundbreaking technology, they're just packaging some crummy REST APIs written in a hairball of messy slow code.
Trustworthiness is not hard to define at all. When a coworker tells you they will do something, do they do it? When you tell them something in confidence, do they keep it to themselves? When there's a problem, even when its their fault, do they address it honestly and factually? When I write this out, it starts to sound like trust is a lot like professionalism and I think that's it. I trust someone who acts professionally, and I don't trust someone who doesn't.
We discount the value of psychological safety too. Nobody wants to look stupid, especially in front of others, and if you punish people for mistakes then they either stop interacting with you or all of your interactions are engineered to avoid those situations. At this point candor has gone out the window, and your impression of what's really going on becomes progressively more inaccurate.
I have a couple coworkers who say, "I haven't heard of any of this," as if it's a statement that a problem doesn't exist, instead of a realization that they're in the dark on something important. It's because one feeds you optimism, and the other is grouchy and writes exhaustingly byzantine code and then doesn't understand why people don't think he's brilliant (I think this is the root of most of the grouchiness).
> Trustworthiness is not hard to define at all. When a coworker tells you they will do something, do they do it?
And the devil is in the details:
- Will ALL of the request be addressed, or will some parts be omitted without the omissions being surfaced explicitly?
- Will this person ask questions and/or look carefully at context to resolve any ambiguities in the ask? Or will they just kind of assume what you mean, ignoring any ambiguity or context that conflicts with their assumption, and not communicate any of the assumptions they made or thought process behind those?
- Will they be thoughtful about unintended consequences of the ask and surface those, or just do literally what was requested, let the shit hit the fan, and blame you if anything goes wrong?
I think trustworthiness can also apply to the code itself.
There are so many times where I have thought, "I better add this test here, even though I know I will probably only be the person who knows there needs to be a test here."
And I add the test, as I like to think I can be trusted to do the right thing, even though nobody will in all likelihood see it.
>It's also why the perennial "hiring is broken" posts and threads miss the point completely
I don't think they miss the point completely when many hiring processes don't test for team cohesion at all beyond a manager pointing a finger in the air and guessing what the fit will be based on a 15 minute talk. Given these people would in the same breath claim diversity in personalities is great and covering each other's weaknesses is essential. That's exactly how we end up with teams where not a single person has the spine to go up against clearly ridiculous requirements (that is assuming any perspective, not just technical), while claiming critical thinking is great.
>It's also why the perennial "hiring is broken" posts and threads miss the point completely
If people are trying to find someone they like, the current common tech interview process certainly isn't the way to do it. Back when I started, interviewers would ask open ended questions about prior projects that were worked on; explain some mistakes; explain some benefits and made the judgement based on that. That seems like a much better way to find a culture fit as opposed to obscure tech gotcha questions.
> it's not about how good you are at your job. You just have to be liked
The sad part is that many of us struggle with social interactions and end up being unliked despite our best efforts. No one cares about what you achieve, unless it's useful for them, or if they just like you because you "have it".
You don't have to be a social butterfly to be liked. You just mainly shouldn't be an asshole.
And the key is to consistently not be an asshole, otherwise those things will accumulate and you will eventually get rejected. (I'm not accusing you of being an asshole.) If you're nice 90% of the time, but lash out or say shitty things 10% of the time, that's more than enough to get eventually rejected.
My son, unfortunately, is like this. 95% a sweet kid but 5% really, really shitty and saying mean things. We are working on it. He started out immensely popular but over the course of this school year, his classmates look at him lukewarm now, instead of being his close friends, and it's entirely his issue.
It's more how to put up with liars, bullshitters, scam artists, fraud people, sexual harassers, but hey, they are the nicest bunch of folks, if you raise your voice, you aren't a team player or not in the cultural fit.
There are those of us out there, teams and companies, who notice yall, don't give up hope! Especially in software/tech you can find places where people understand.
It's weird that Devs find this so surprising, other than that we are mostly a bunch of introverted misanthropes.
I mean - you spend more time with your teammates than you do with your spouse, it's not hard to understand why friendliness is ranked as high importance.
If you've ever REALLY worked with a team full of assholes, you'd get it too. If not, maybe you were one of the assholes.
That said, this isn't a question of whats best for the firm, it's what people prefer in their work environment. Goes along with higher pay, less hours, better benefits.
trust is easy to define. Trust = Character * Competence.
zero competence will still result in a low level of trust. I think what the article is saying is that its easy to overwhelmingly improve your character at a job you may only have marginal competence at. This boosts your Trust, and in doing so makes you palatable to all but the hard-working tech people with low character and high competence, who view you as a grinning moron they occasionally have to stop to support.
> You just have to be liked while being sufficiently good.
I would caution that this not become an invitation to become a Willy Loman. Dead fish float downstream. Wanting to be liked is a recipe for obsequiousness, cowardice, and mediocrity of character. The doormats of the world are people who need to be liked. It is the ethos of the undignified, the dishonest, and the resentful.
We should not care if we are liked. We should care about doing what we ought. One ought not be an asshole, not because you won't be liked (and there is bound to be someone that will like the asshole, btw), but because being an asshole is a defect of character which you should recognize and repair instead.
Of course, the side effect of doing what we ought is the respect of good people, but that is incidental.
> Trustworthiness is an interesting one as it seems to be hard to define but some people just have it and some don't
It is interesting, but that is me. I am always brought into inner circles. From work to friend's families. People feel like bringing me into folds; it is odd. Maybe it is because I'm trusting, who knows. But what I also find odd is that I don't have a large friend network, so I'm not gaining friends from this odd ability. Strange. </greybeard_ramble>
My small experience of non small work groups also taught me a few things:
- nobody wants to come to work (duh but hold on)
- above points creates a constant laziness drag
- the system maintains some socially / somatically critical functions
- hierarchy is function of criticality, the more important, the higher it's gonna propagate
- the rest is fluff that can be delayed, forgotten, half assed
- learn the critical functions by heart, never ever miss them
- to spot them check whenever your superior comes down, and when he talks about his/her superior coming down (remember, people don't care, they don't wanna be here, they never want to come down unless they're forced to)
- then crack jokes with your colleagues
- everybody will ignore you doing nothing, unless critical functions are rolling
ps: your point about hiring/culture-fit is a sad realization to me, they could have told me so after HS.. instead of learning sublinear Fibonacci computations during a master, I'd have spent one year at burning man to be chill. All in all, I kinda agree about the need to fit, humans cannot operate nice if they don't click with their colleagues, it's only gonna lead to walking pressure cookers who cannot make progress. But the lack of honesty around this is staggering
> really they're just trying to find someone they like. It's what "culture fit" really means. And people like people like themselves. This is part of what can lead to unlawful discrimination.
This sort of crap is why I left software. Niceness over competence.
I didn't enter this (at the time) largely solitary profession to have all the best, juiciest parts of the job get taken over by these people-oriented idiots.
There needs to be a revolution that returns programming back into the hands of solitary nerds working on sheer competence. More people need to care about the quality of the final output than whether or not the guy who wrote it is "a nice fellow".
I feel like this is 'participation trophy' culture coming back to haunt us. Stop being so afraid of getting yelled at, anger is a part of life!
As an introvert who had to push himself to become one of those "people-oriented idiots", the reality you have to recognize is that software is ultimately about people. It is not written in a vacuum to make computers happy, there's generally a human (or a bunch of them) at the other end who will be deriving value from it. Working competently to solve the wrong problem is not how successful software is written. And the chances of solving the right problem without talking to people are, frankly, slim.
There will not be a revolution that eschews the people aspects, the industry has evolved (yes, the opposite of devolved) beyond that. Walking around calling people idiots and being generally angry is not going to win you any trophies either.
I'm pretty sure this will hold true in my field where teamwork is required. If you're not nice, people won't want to talk to you, if you're not part of the communication chain, your value as a team member drops. No part of this has anything to do with software.
They sell b.s. on Mad Men, so that's not exactly reflective of the broader economy. People like to sell soft skills in web forums where humanities majors exchange ideas, without thinking about all the hard tech decisions that went into building those forums. We're exchanging text via bits sent across wires installed in the ground and across the public rights of way, all brought about by the military industrial complex. This online post is brought to you by tons of unliked guys
Totally agree. It’s not just trustworthiness though- it’s insidious tribal traits like looks, race, gender/sex, intelligence, height, built- ie things you can’t control. The only way we’re going to get around this in society is genetic modifications, and not just before birth. People need to have full free choice to change all of the above.
Mad Men is a story about people working for a company that is exclusively focused of human emotions (and manipulating them). I don’t think any “lessons” it may teach about workplace politics are any more generalizable than any other single industry.
Sure, but I feel the quote still stands. The hard reality is high school is more representative of life than we would like to believe. If everyone likes you, you probably don’t get laid off or fired, can still happen though (the other half of the business)
Trustworthiness, sure. But not friendliness (unless it's asshole-level unfriendliness) over competence. There's little worse than a friendly but incompetent teammate, who will often get too many passes and second chances (because they're well liked) before being terminated.
I'll take neutral friendliness, or even slightly unfriendly, + extreme competence, any day.
> There's little worse than a friendly but incompetent teammate
Except that you can teach them things.
It's hard to teach an unfriendly person anything, and it's impossible to teach an arrogant asshole anything at all, because they think they're better than anyone else.
The best predictor of teachability is how much they learned in the past. If a person is incompetent today then most likely they will be hard to teach, and if a person is competent today they will soak up most things you say.
There are exceptions of course, but friendly and unteachable and unfriendly but very teachable are both very common scenarios. Teaching the unfriendly person might not be fun but it still works.
I don't know about;"teaching", but I think people can change their nature and it's life experience that causes this to happen. It would be pretty surprising to me if someone acted the same way at 23 and 32. Arrogance in particular is something that often ebbs with age.
OTOH, for software, the most important skill is resourcefulness, and that seems like more of an intrinsic property of someone's personality.
Second this. It is weird that parent went from incompetence directly to being terminated. Competence is built over long periods of time, and if you're lucky you can positively influence an "incompetent" person rather than putting them back into the water.
I personally have no problem with "hard-shell" type of people who are maybe _rough_ and direct, but have emotional depth and are ultimately self-reflective. They can come off as assholes to some people, but most of the time (not always...) they are just uncomfortable, which can have very positive effects as well.
So I'm personally not like that though in most situations. I think it's counterproductive with most people and often rude. I think the above is a bad strategy in more than 60% of cases (scientific number; totally not pulling that out of my ass), because most people take direct criticism personally or become defensive.
However in my closer professional circle I very often prefer uncomfortable no-bullshit type of style. It's simply more _effective_ and clear.
I don’t think that’s an opinion held by someone who actually worked with/had to manage the combination of “slightly unfriendly + extreme confidence” before. That is how you get Prima Donnas, temper tantrums during technical discussions and other fun stuff.
I've yet to work for somebody exhibiting extreme confidence in a work situation who wasnt covering for something - usually a lack of competence.
I've heard stories of "brilliant assholes" but once I've peeled back the layers of these stories I always develop a strong impression that the brilliance is a facade.
> There's little worse than a friendly but incompetent teammate, who will often get too many passes and second chances (because they're well liked) before being terminated.
In my experience, a brilliant asshole is worse. He's less likely to be terminated, and causes problems for everyone. Incompetent people are self aware of their incompetence. Brilliant assholes rarely acknowledge their problem.
The one time I dealt with a brilliant asshole - oh wow. He would be right 90% of the time, but for the remaining 10% there would be no way on Earth you could convince him he was wrong. You could bring evidence, mathematical proof, anything: He just wouldn't listen. It got to me being very careful that he not be around when I'd ask for help - because he often misunderstood my problem and would then insist I implement his solution, and there was no way I could convince him that he misunderstood the problem statement. If I ignored him and implemented a different solution, he would throw a loud tantrum. And he had no stake in my work - we were working on different projects.
I spent two years in that team and every time he acted up I started documenting it.
I never complained (it was clear the manager didn't want to deal with people problems), and on the outside I didn't let my frustration show. I now hear that another member of that team is really complaining to the manager about him. I reached out to him and let him know that if he wants to escalate with HR, I have plenty of material to provide.
The one nice thing with incompetent people is you at least look better when it comes to reviews. I know in one job I had I ended up slacking quite a bit, but I knew it wouldn't hurt me because they had quite a few people at my grade level who were just plain incompetent. Management isn't going to give the whole team a poor review.
Someone who is friendly but incompetent is fun to shoot the shit with, but they will also make a commit that breaks prod and duck out for the weekend leaving you to fix the mess. Less competence ultimately means more burden and headache for those that are more competent, and at the end of the day, I value having coworkers who I can rely on more than having coworkers who are easy to talk to.
For me, they're not even fun to shoot the shit with. There's nothing like 1 year of built-up resentment at having to pick up their slack again and again only to be paid roughly the same and sharing half the credit with them.
There's little worse than a friendly but incompetent teammate, who will often get too many passes and second chances (because they're well liked) before being terminated.
Except of course for the perfectly (if narrowly) competent but decidedly jerkface and/or outright asshole teammate. Who is even more likely to get a pass for being such a "rainmaker". Or because "it's crunchtime and we need all the firepower we can get our hands on".
> There's little worse than a friendly but incompetent teammate
What about a very competent but toxic personality who ends up preventing contributions from other team members, because when they contribute they get belittled or bullied?
Someone who prevents work from being completed is not competent. The one-dimensional view of competence as being purely technical knowledge is not useful for measuring ability to complete projects and advance the goals of the business.
> There's little worse than a friendly but incompetent teammate, who will often get too many passes and second chances (because they're well liked) before being terminated.
This reminds of people who try to defend someone accused of incompetence: "but s/he's so nice!"
Most teams don't have a pressing need for competence. As long as they tread water, they're fine. If they outperform, there is no meaningful reward. In those environments, friendliness trumps competence.
> But not friendliness (unless it's asshole-level unfriendliness) over competence.
If you could translate "friendliness" and "competence" into equivalent units, I think competence would be devalued compared to friendliness, at least once you get into negative values (e.g. for every extra point of unfriendliness, you need 5-10 competence points to make up for it).
I’ll take anyone that doesn’t create extra work for me, you can be an asshole no problem.
The easier you make doing my job (eg, I can get my work done without you adding bullshit code that I need to make my way around), the more I’m willing to forgive almost anything.
Just be invisible to my work plans for the day, and we’re all good.
> But not friendliness (unless it's a***-level unfriendliness) over competence.
This is the wrong way of looking at things. You shouldn't compromise on friendliness and you shouldn't compromise on competence. If you have to compromise, you compromise a little bit on both but not too much on either. An unfriendly teammate is very bad.
I get what you're saying but if they're reliable its different.
If they ask for help and won't just go missing for a week or something like that, then its not a big deal if they need some hand holding on a more complex task. Reliably mediocre is better than unreliable, any day.
Depends i guess - if you've got a teammate that is plainly and repeatedly careless/incompetent in his doing you're not exactly going to throw your hands up and think "This is fine, the research says it is", right?
Anecdata: colleague of mine at least twice a week reboots production servers during the day, sometimes by themselves, sometimes along with their ESX-hosts...
His response? "Oops."
Does he ever learn from it? Doesn't look like it...
I mean, i'm not exactly working at a hospital or something - i.e. no peoples lives on the line, but try to explain for the n-th time to someone whose last hours work was lost because someone couldn't be bothered to check if he can reboot that server now or not?
I understand that HN leans toward research as the final word on everything, but sometimes anecdotal evidence is pretty accurate. It's like saying "but the poll researches are saying candidate X is going to win". Then a seasoned advisor actually lands on the ground and counts the yard signs and talks to people, and the picture becomes much less clear.
Not to mention that the "research paper" industry is often very manipulated, inaccurate, and sometimes downright fraudulent. Ironically, also discussed on HN once a blue moon.
What I am saying is, do site the "research papers", but don't use that to shut down an argument. It's a clue, not a fact.
According to the article the actual research showed that people preferred trustworthy and competent over trustworthy and friendly. They preferred trustworthy and friendly over just competent.
The people in the research are students and we know nothing about their experience in any real work environment, or if they have been in a position where the progress on their tasks/teams depends on the competence level of their co-workers.
Really depending on the people. Sometime I prefer prefer friendliness over competence. However if the competency involves me doing work to cover for the other colleague, then I take unfriendliness and competent anytime.
I was sharing my subjective preference and the reasons for my preference. The research is surveying other people's subjective preferences. There is no conflict here.
"Maupin and her colleagues focused on a cohort of MBA students to conduct their study. Students were randomly assigned to teams at the beginning of the semester to work on class projects and assignments."
So this is about what people prefer in their MBA program study group. While I do, personally, think that kindness is super important in work colleagues as well, this study doesn't particularly address that.
My take is that as long as your workers are above a certain threshold (as far as technical competency goes), a team with healthy culture will on average outperform a team with toxic culture - even though the latter may have members that are more technically proficient, than in the former team.
By toxic culture, I mean:
- Poor communication
- Abrasive or toxic personalities
- Bullying and harassment
etc.
I think that in most normal people, stressors like those can affect their performance.
And I don't mean full-blown hazing rituals - even more subtle actions (poor communication, for example) can lower morale. More so if you feel that said poor communication is deliberate.
Absolutely. I worked on a team where the lead engineer would be out of the office for weeks at at time, and then when he'd return he'd skim in-progress code and request radical revisions, only to criticize those decisions the next time he was in the office.
I was actively looking for a new job when he quit, and it was such a relief. My productivity (and happiness) went through the roof, and a couple months into the year my manager told me that I'd already accomplished everything he hoped I'd accomplish _for the year_.
By exchanging a some technical skill for a better work environment our whole team benefitted.
I've seen that so many times in my current office, it's not even funny at this point.
And I couldn't agree with you more. As long as a set level of competency is there, I'd rather work with friendly people than a bunch of know-it-mosts that don't know tact.
There are lots of reasons to prefer friendly teams.
* Just, generally more enjoyable and productive experience. Most things are really not that important, particularly in school (which is where this experiment was run). And anyway, the purpose is often not to be optimally productive, but to learn something. If you are in a class where you are just clinging to some rockstar and getting A's that way, you don't have to learn anything.
* Lots of technical decisions are really not very important. Your first solution will probably not be great anyway. It is preferable to get the group to agree on something and move forward. This can be done by having some very competent, less nice person ram their solution through, but a nice, semi-competent group with a good dynamic can also agree on a bad solution, mess it up, and iterate until it works.
* Most people are really not that competent as far as I can tell. I mean, I've met people who can carry a team individually, but they are very rare, not common enough to plan on. People with more ego than talent are more common I think, and they have a net negative value in many cases. A friendly, incompetent person is at worst a minor distraction.
Trustworthiness, more specifically having a clean record of integrity as opposed to just projecting a feeling of "you can trust me", is non-negotiable for me. If I don't think you're trustworthy, you're a risk to be managed and I can only really fit you into a Machiavellian mental model of "I can trust you only as much as our incentives align". I've had to work with people like that simply because it was out of my control, and it's tiring.
There are well-meaning jerks who are just rough around the edges but care a lot about doing the right thing. I might not like them very much, but I'll take a competent jerk over someone whose integrity I don't trust no matter how competent or polite they are.
No doubt these are the traits that people seek in fellow 'study group' members.
Does anyone remember the way football teams used to be assembled in school? Two team captains would each take turns to pick teammates from the rest of the students. I don't recall 'friendliness and trustworthiness' being necessarily the top qualifiers.
In my experience, friends were often the first ones picked to be on a team. And if a person was known for leaving midgame, they'd be one of the last ones picked.
My experience is that the team captains were usually the most experienced players, and were often friends with the best of the rest.
But everyone knew who was good, and they were picked first regardless of actual friendships, since games would feed into decisions about who made the school team, particularly captain.
The best friend gets picked first. Exceptionally athletic kid follow. From the rest, popular kids go first regardless of ability. Outsiders and loners go last.
I think that sums up the other replies that say 'friends first, etc', and is in fact my point.
In my experience there was some prestige in winning, and particularly in picking a winning team, and that would feed into who was picked for the school team.
When the stakes are low, you can can choose to be among friends. When the stakes are higher, you need to work, perhaps less comfortably, with greater talent.
If you wonder the three criteria with three discrete levels you get a cube that's something like:
Very unfriendly, somewhat friendly, very friendly.
Very untrustworthy, somewhat trustworthy, very trustworthy.
Incompetent, average, very competent.
Now if you take these and model the interactions between people who exhibit a three-pair (e.g. (somewhat friendly, somewhat trustworthy and average) against (v. unfriendly, s. trustworthy, v. competent)) I would imagine the "world" would eventually remove all friendly people (depending on the assumptions).
If you imagine friendliness and competence is correlated I would also imagine you'd get rid of a lot of the competent people as well.
Unfortunately more research would be needed to assert or refute this hypothesis. Anecdotally I'd say friendliness and competence are positively correlated, but not very strongly.
---
To put it another way, if you have a team of people. Will you team as a whole receive more benefit from someone very competent but ultimately toxic and ruins the culture or somewhat incompetent but very friendly?
Readit News
> I don't know if anyone's ever told you that half the time this business comes down to 'I don't like that guy.'
In all my years of working, this is probably the most important thing you can learn. Except for marginal cases, it's not about how good you are at your job. You just have to be liked while being sufficiently good.
It's also why the perennial "hiring is broken" posts and threads miss the point completely: really they're just trying to find someone they like. It's what "culture fit" really means. And people like people like themselves. This is part of what can lead to unlawful discrimination.
Trustworthiness is an interesting one as it seems to be hard to define but some people just have it and some don't. This has been studied and can have a profound effect on, say, criminal sentencing [2].
[1]: https://twitter.com/madmenqts/status/783648743690231808?lang...
[2]: https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2015/07/17/4236009...
I think this is dangerous ground to thread. I don't like to work with assholes any more than the next guy and I'd certainly prefer working with people I personally like but that kind of thinking opens doors to all kinds of abuse; from favoritism (I like him, therefore he gets a pass when somebody else might not), through promotions (what does giving a promotion to somebody likeable over somebody more competent do to morale?) to plain fuckarounditis (playing career games rather than what's good for the business, wasting company resources on petty political games).
I mean, I get it - it's human nature. But something feels off when we're justifying our simian prejudices in an environment where we're supposed to prioritize somebody else's satisfaction (whoever is paying us) but instead we do what we feel is best for us personally, using a fairly emotional and error prone system of judgment (I don't care if this guy sucks, I like him because he's my friend).
> But something feels off when we're justifying our simian prejudices
It does, but in so many ways I feel like I'm trying to swim against the current if I continue down the "kick ass and take names" route vs. the "tread carefully and make sure everyone likes you" one. Even if you're successful at solving "Very Big Problem™" people tend to hate the wrecking ball who doesn't participate in 2:00pm office beers - even if they are getting shit done.
Sorry to interject my own strong feelings here but work isn't about work as much as we like to think... It is my experience at every place that I've worked that SWEs that make the most friends, participate socially, and prioritize their own brand internally are the ones that move up. Practical example: instead of being the person who busts ass to optimize the core Postgres DB (by meticulously sussing out slow queries etc), be the person who starts the Friday book club. Although the former is of way more value to the tangible product, the latter is way more valuable to you socially.
Your outward social narrative is more important than anything these days - this is just work culture anymore.
That being said; a challenge to your statements:
>[. . .] instead we do what we feel is best for us personally, using a fairly emotional and error prone system of judgment [. . .].
My experience has shown that a very cohesive team who like and appreciate each other, but is made of middle-ability individuals is much, much more productive to my measure as the boss than a team comprised of high-ability, but un-cohesive (non-cohesive?) individuals.
Soft skills and the ability to work well together without judgment are both wildly important. In a team of antagonists, it is difficult, if not impossible, to feel comfortable enough to take chances.
Not sure what the challenge is in that statement, but it's in there somewhere.
If working with a competent person means the rest of the team constantly feels stressed, bullied, aggrandized, looked down on, or whatever else then those people are less likely to perform to expectations which may have more of an impact than the competence gain.
The latter might be fun for chatting during a coffee break, but they consume resources while providing little of value which ultimately means more work for you.
IMO, that’s as it should be, because he’s gravitated/been pushed toward roles where likability matters and contributes to effectiveness.
> I think this is dangerous ground to thread.
He is not speaking to those choosing who to hire, he is speaking to those being interviewed. He's not saying to hire those you like, he is saying you will only be hired if you are liked.
It does suck, but it's been true for me. Making the interviewers like me is at least as important as convincing them of my skills.
I gave my best in all dimension to get hired, the only time I did was because I knew a guy who knew a guy.
[0] I heard that anglo-saxon work ethos was skills first, character second (to an extent)
Dead Comment
People are social beings. Part of working together comes from feeling like you want to cooperate. You could have someone who is incredibly smart and clever as your business partner, but will you really feel like you want to go the extra mile for him/her? Do you have to watch your back constantly? Do you have the same goals in life? Does every interaction drain energy from you?
We come from families, social structures. We have people in our families who are incompetent but we love them. It's not unreasonable to think that some of this behavior would continue in our work worlds.
"Diversity" in the trendy usage today, for most people still doesn't trump whether you want to work with someone, and that hopefully doesn't have much to do with race/background/gender/etc. I say hopefully of course, and helping people overcome or not be prejudiced that some characteristic correlates with ability/desire to work with them, is an important thing to do.
But forcing people to believe that someone's <x> characteristic is more important than whether you want to work with them is a recipe for dissatisfaction and backlash against people who insist that it should be so.
If you had this conversation in the real world instead of the internet, everyone would just say "yeah, duh".
It's rather simple. If you apply for a job and get hired because they like you, then the system is good. But if you apply to that job and don't get it, it turns into "fuck this old boys club". The outrage isn't logical, it's almost purely emotional.
There are studies which show diverse teams are stronger because they bring in differing view points but I also think that they may end up self selecting for those that are empathetic enough to look through others eyes maybe.
Because in large companies you will not work with the people that hired you.
Many successful sport teams were composed by people who openly disliked each other, there's no reason to be likeable if you are not being paid to be liked by others, but there are many reasons to cooperate to the end goal if the team members' salaries depend on it.
For many people being likable in the way it is represented in the article it's more stressful and energy draining than the job itself.
I would go as far as to say that people that can't go through first impressions and work together with someone they don't particularly like (except of course if it's for good reasons) aren't good team members.
But they tend to select each other to not feel alone in being bad team members.
One of my friends has a joke series of posts titled the "32x engineer"[1], one of which is about niceness.
People who aren't nice get routed around when crisis situations happen as adding them to the mix is not pleasant - this is probably different from the extrovert-friendly connotations people pick up in interviews, but a more clear "is this person going to yell at me or help me (first)".
This lesson is probably doubled up in personal life as people have kids and try to get their tweenagers to communicate with them - the "you did WHAT?" reaction is basically equivalent with the not-nice people who are competent, but tired of cleaning up the mess of over years (not realizing their reaction has a long-term impact on what kids think adults do).
The role growth part is also relevant, as people with context don't want to come to you unless they have to, you slowly lose context on what's going on until you are in a basement with a stapler.
[1] - https://twitter.com/tdinkar/status/1149554345077137410
> The role growth part is also relevant, as people with context don't want to come to you unless they have to, you slowly lose context on what's going on until you are in a basement with a stapler.
This is my first to promotions to lead in a nutshell.
People who had been there longer lost context because I categorize some/many fuck-ups as reasonable, and I was good at bailing people out if my advice was wrong. If you broke something, or just thought something was broken (ie, QA) I was least likely to bite your head off. If something I asked you to do exploded, I'd help you fix it.
Technically and emotionally trustworthy people hear about more 'dirt', and many serious architectural problems are hidden in that dirt. If you are technical you can parlay that information into bug fixes (including production outages) and technical initiatives. If you're getting stuff done and people generally seem to trust you (even if they don't like you), then that means they listen when you talk. Your boss would be stupid not to promote you.
The truth is, most jobs don't need the best of the best, problems are not always needing a breakthrough, often it's business as usual, so sufficiently good is good enough, and then you need to be able to collaborate effectively. That latter quality is as important to business success as the former.
In a toxic work environment "sufficiently good" may still be "incompetent".
I don't care about this, and never will care.
How startups expect to make progress or deliver a groundbreaking products following this inverted psychology is beyond me.
In simple words possible: I have hired people who I don't like naturally only on professional expertise and the value that they delivered to my company was immense.
You cannot learn to be likeable.
You don't need this nonsense. You, as a professional, must learn to communicate and respect people for their skills and accomplishments, not for similarities in music taste, consumer purchases or favorite movies.
All of this crap is produced by companies who want to exploit overtime by creating emotional bonding and subjective preferences. The added "benefit" is that this artificial divide leads to generational hostility and mistrust (which is handy when someone old with experience will try to share useful information to someone young and full with illusions).
I have managed teams of people who didn't like each other at all, and this was not a problem because of clear communication, procedure and company mission.
It's about time, this "cultural fit" nonsense to die. Companies who are operating with this mentality will never produce long-term value. Period.
It's about time, we as a community, to grow up and stop pretending that we are not having a role in growing ageism and tribalism in our industry.
Can you imagine if engineers of the Apollo Program were selected by friendliness?
My goal is to enjoy my life. To a certain extent, bringing value is enjoyable. So I try and work hard and do a good job. But if someone makes my day worse, no matter how valuable they are to my employer, I don't want to work with them.
I just can't imagine hiring someone you know you won't like. I'm not saying every person that's hired has to be best friends, but with the amount of time everyone spends together there should be at least some level of friendship.
Learning basic social skills is pretty easy for most non-neurodivergent humans
It's about time, this "cultural fit" nonsense to die. Companies who are operating with this mentality will never produce long-term value. Period.
Ah yes, because all the companies that have toxic cultures where nobody likes each other are thriving right? I think as with most things, you need a balance. If you have an active dislike of someone because of rude behavior, the chances that you're able to collaborate and work on something together is nil.
The vast majority of startups are not doing any groundbreaking technology, they're just packaging some crummy REST APIs written in a hairball of messy slow code.
I have a couple coworkers who say, "I haven't heard of any of this," as if it's a statement that a problem doesn't exist, instead of a realization that they're in the dark on something important. It's because one feeds you optimism, and the other is grouchy and writes exhaustingly byzantine code and then doesn't understand why people don't think he's brilliant (I think this is the root of most of the grouchiness).
And the devil is in the details:
- Will ALL of the request be addressed, or will some parts be omitted without the omissions being surfaced explicitly?
- Will this person ask questions and/or look carefully at context to resolve any ambiguities in the ask? Or will they just kind of assume what you mean, ignoring any ambiguity or context that conflicts with their assumption, and not communicate any of the assumptions they made or thought process behind those?
- Will they be thoughtful about unintended consequences of the ask and surface those, or just do literally what was requested, let the shit hit the fan, and blame you if anything goes wrong?
There are so many times where I have thought, "I better add this test here, even though I know I will probably only be the person who knows there needs to be a test here."
And I add the test, as I like to think I can be trusted to do the right thing, even though nobody will in all likelihood see it.
I don't think they miss the point completely when many hiring processes don't test for team cohesion at all beyond a manager pointing a finger in the air and guessing what the fit will be based on a 15 minute talk. Given these people would in the same breath claim diversity in personalities is great and covering each other's weaknesses is essential. That's exactly how we end up with teams where not a single person has the spine to go up against clearly ridiculous requirements (that is assuming any perspective, not just technical), while claiming critical thinking is great.
If people are trying to find someone they like, the current common tech interview process certainly isn't the way to do it. Back when I started, interviewers would ask open ended questions about prior projects that were worked on; explain some mistakes; explain some benefits and made the judgement based on that. That seems like a much better way to find a culture fit as opposed to obscure tech gotcha questions.
The sad part is that many of us struggle with social interactions and end up being unliked despite our best efforts. No one cares about what you achieve, unless it's useful for them, or if they just like you because you "have it".
And the key is to consistently not be an asshole, otherwise those things will accumulate and you will eventually get rejected. (I'm not accusing you of being an asshole.) If you're nice 90% of the time, but lash out or say shitty things 10% of the time, that's more than enough to get eventually rejected.
My son, unfortunately, is like this. 95% a sweet kid but 5% really, really shitty and saying mean things. We are working on it. He started out immensely popular but over the course of this school year, his classmates look at him lukewarm now, instead of being his close friends, and it's entirely his issue.
I mean - you spend more time with your teammates than you do with your spouse, it's not hard to understand why friendliness is ranked as high importance.
If you've ever REALLY worked with a team full of assholes, you'd get it too. If not, maybe you were one of the assholes.
That said, this isn't a question of whats best for the firm, it's what people prefer in their work environment. Goes along with higher pay, less hours, better benefits.
zero competence will still result in a low level of trust. I think what the article is saying is that its easy to overwhelmingly improve your character at a job you may only have marginal competence at. This boosts your Trust, and in doing so makes you palatable to all but the hard-working tech people with low character and high competence, who view you as a grinning moron they occasionally have to stop to support.
I would caution that this not become an invitation to become a Willy Loman. Dead fish float downstream. Wanting to be liked is a recipe for obsequiousness, cowardice, and mediocrity of character. The doormats of the world are people who need to be liked. It is the ethos of the undignified, the dishonest, and the resentful.
We should not care if we are liked. We should care about doing what we ought. One ought not be an asshole, not because you won't be liked (and there is bound to be someone that will like the asshole, btw), but because being an asshole is a defect of character which you should recognize and repair instead.
Of course, the side effect of doing what we ought is the respect of good people, but that is incidental.
It is interesting, but that is me. I am always brought into inner circles. From work to friend's families. People feel like bringing me into folds; it is odd. Maybe it is because I'm trusting, who knows. But what I also find odd is that I don't have a large friend network, so I'm not gaining friends from this odd ability. Strange. </greybeard_ramble>
- nobody wants to come to work (duh but hold on)
- above points creates a constant laziness drag
- the system maintains some socially / somatically critical functions
- hierarchy is function of criticality, the more important, the higher it's gonna propagate
- the rest is fluff that can be delayed, forgotten, half assed
- learn the critical functions by heart, never ever miss them
- to spot them check whenever your superior comes down, and when he talks about his/her superior coming down (remember, people don't care, they don't wanna be here, they never want to come down unless they're forced to)
- then crack jokes with your colleagues
- everybody will ignore you doing nothing, unless critical functions are rolling
ps: your point about hiring/culture-fit is a sad realization to me, they could have told me so after HS.. instead of learning sublinear Fibonacci computations during a master, I'd have spent one year at burning man to be chill. All in all, I kinda agree about the need to fit, humans cannot operate nice if they don't click with their colleagues, it's only gonna lead to walking pressure cookers who cannot make progress. But the lack of honesty around this is staggering
This can't be stated enough
I didn't enter this (at the time) largely solitary profession to have all the best, juiciest parts of the job get taken over by these people-oriented idiots.
There needs to be a revolution that returns programming back into the hands of solitary nerds working on sheer competence. More people need to care about the quality of the final output than whether or not the guy who wrote it is "a nice fellow".
I feel like this is 'participation trophy' culture coming back to haunt us. Stop being so afraid of getting yelled at, anger is a part of life!
There will not be a revolution that eschews the people aspects, the industry has evolved (yes, the opposite of devolved) beyond that. Walking around calling people idiots and being generally angry is not going to win you any trophies either.
What are you doing now?
Being unable to express your opinions without anger or yelling isn't a sign of competence, it's a sign of a mental imbalance.
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And it happens both on the positive and the negative. Nasty people tends to bring more nasty people on board.
"Skin in the game" being the game changer.
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1. Can they do the job? 2. Will they like the job? 3. Will I like working with them?
1 and 2 are the easiest to determine, yet we overemphasize it in interview time. We usually save 3 for the last five minutes of any session.
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I'll take neutral friendliness, or even slightly unfriendly, + extreme competence, any day.
Except that you can teach them things.
It's hard to teach an unfriendly person anything, and it's impossible to teach an arrogant asshole anything at all, because they think they're better than anyone else.
There are exceptions of course, but friendly and unteachable and unfriendly but very teachable are both very common scenarios. Teaching the unfriendly person might not be fun but it still works.
OTOH, for software, the most important skill is resourcefulness, and that seems like more of an intrinsic property of someone's personality.
So I'm personally not like that though in most situations. I think it's counterproductive with most people and often rude. I think the above is a bad strategy in more than 60% of cases (scientific number; totally not pulling that out of my ass), because most people take direct criticism personally or become defensive.
However in my closer professional circle I very often prefer uncomfortable no-bullshit type of style. It's simply more _effective_ and clear.
I've heard stories of "brilliant assholes" but once I've peeled back the layers of these stories I always develop a strong impression that the brilliance is a facade.
Competence is not necessarily linked with a lack of humility.
In my experience, a brilliant asshole is worse. He's less likely to be terminated, and causes problems for everyone. Incompetent people are self aware of their incompetence. Brilliant assholes rarely acknowledge their problem.
The one time I dealt with a brilliant asshole - oh wow. He would be right 90% of the time, but for the remaining 10% there would be no way on Earth you could convince him he was wrong. You could bring evidence, mathematical proof, anything: He just wouldn't listen. It got to me being very careful that he not be around when I'd ask for help - because he often misunderstood my problem and would then insist I implement his solution, and there was no way I could convince him that he misunderstood the problem statement. If I ignored him and implemented a different solution, he would throw a loud tantrum. And he had no stake in my work - we were working on different projects.
I spent two years in that team and every time he acted up I started documenting it.
I never complained (it was clear the manager didn't want to deal with people problems), and on the outside I didn't let my frustration show. I now hear that another member of that team is really complaining to the manager about him. I reached out to him and let him know that if he wants to escalate with HR, I have plenty of material to provide.
The one nice thing with incompetent people is you at least look better when it comes to reviews. I know in one job I had I ended up slacking quite a bit, but I knew it wouldn't hurt me because they had quite a few people at my grade level who were just plain incompetent. Management isn't going to give the whole team a poor review.
Except of course for the perfectly (if narrowly) competent but decidedly jerkface and/or outright asshole teammate. Who is even more likely to get a pass for being such a "rainmaker". Or because "it's crunchtime and we need all the firepower we can get our hands on".
Which was basically the article's point.
What about a very competent but toxic personality who ends up preventing contributions from other team members, because when they contribute they get belittled or bullied?
At worst, the former is a neutral in his overall contributions, whereas the latter will be a net negative.
This reminds of people who try to defend someone accused of incompetence: "but s/he's so nice!"
If you could translate "friendliness" and "competence" into equivalent units, I think competence would be devalued compared to friendliness, at least once you get into negative values (e.g. for every extra point of unfriendliness, you need 5-10 competence points to make up for it).
The easier you make doing my job (eg, I can get my work done without you adding bullshit code that I need to make my way around), the more I’m willing to forgive almost anything.
Just be invisible to my work plans for the day, and we’re all good.
Did you met unfriendly and incompetent? Cause those really sux.
The worst is "jerk, average competent, but people who don't work directly with him assume he is genius because he is jerk".
Deleted Comment
This is the wrong way of looking at things. You shouldn't compromise on friendliness and you shouldn't compromise on competence. If you have to compromise, you compromise a little bit on both but not too much on either. An unfriendly teammate is very bad.
If they ask for help and won't just go missing for a week or something like that, then its not a big deal if they need some hand holding on a more complex task. Reliably mediocre is better than unreliable, any day.
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Anecdata: colleague of mine at least twice a week reboots production servers during the day, sometimes by themselves, sometimes along with their ESX-hosts...
His response? "Oops."
Does he ever learn from it? Doesn't look like it...
I mean, i'm not exactly working at a hospital or something - i.e. no peoples lives on the line, but try to explain for the n-th time to someone whose last hours work was lost because someone couldn't be bothered to check if he can reboot that server now or not?
Not to mention that the "research paper" industry is often very manipulated, inaccurate, and sometimes downright fraudulent. Ironically, also discussed on HN once a blue moon.
What I am saying is, do site the "research papers", but don't use that to shut down an argument. It's a clue, not a fact.
So this is about what people prefer in their MBA program study group. While I do, personally, think that kindness is super important in work colleagues as well, this study doesn't particularly address that.
Dead Comment
By toxic culture, I mean:
- Poor communication
- Abrasive or toxic personalities
- Bullying and harassment
etc.
I think that in most normal people, stressors like those can affect their performance. And I don't mean full-blown hazing rituals - even more subtle actions (poor communication, for example) can lower morale. More so if you feel that said poor communication is deliberate.
I was actively looking for a new job when he quit, and it was such a relief. My productivity (and happiness) went through the roof, and a couple months into the year my manager told me that I'd already accomplished everything he hoped I'd accomplish _for the year_.
By exchanging a some technical skill for a better work environment our whole team benefitted.
And I couldn't agree with you more. As long as a set level of competency is there, I'd rather work with friendly people than a bunch of know-it-mosts that don't know tact.
* Just, generally more enjoyable and productive experience. Most things are really not that important, particularly in school (which is where this experiment was run). And anyway, the purpose is often not to be optimally productive, but to learn something. If you are in a class where you are just clinging to some rockstar and getting A's that way, you don't have to learn anything.
* Lots of technical decisions are really not very important. Your first solution will probably not be great anyway. It is preferable to get the group to agree on something and move forward. This can be done by having some very competent, less nice person ram their solution through, but a nice, semi-competent group with a good dynamic can also agree on a bad solution, mess it up, and iterate until it works.
* Most people are really not that competent as far as I can tell. I mean, I've met people who can carry a team individually, but they are very rare, not common enough to plan on. People with more ego than talent are more common I think, and they have a net negative value in many cases. A friendly, incompetent person is at worst a minor distraction.
There are well-meaning jerks who are just rough around the edges but care a lot about doing the right thing. I might not like them very much, but I'll take a competent jerk over someone whose integrity I don't trust no matter how competent or polite they are.
People get the benefit of the doubt until they lose it.
Does anyone remember the way football teams used to be assembled in school? Two team captains would each take turns to pick teammates from the rest of the students. I don't recall 'friendliness and trustworthiness' being necessarily the top qualifiers.
But everyone knew who was good, and they were picked first regardless of actual friendships, since games would feed into decisions about who made the school team, particularly captain.
In my experience there was some prestige in winning, and particularly in picking a winning team, and that would feed into who was picked for the school team.
When the stakes are low, you can can choose to be among friends. When the stakes are higher, you need to work, perhaps less comfortably, with greater talent.
If you imagine friendliness and competence is correlated I would also imagine you'd get rid of a lot of the competent people as well.
Unfortunately more research would be needed to assert or refute this hypothesis. Anecdotally I'd say friendliness and competence are positively correlated, but not very strongly.
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To put it another way, if you have a team of people. Will you team as a whole receive more benefit from someone very competent but ultimately toxic and ruins the culture or somewhat incompetent but very friendly?