> Kind of sad that he was let go for the one thing he likely had the least ability to control: Other people's feelings

> how do you coach someone to change someone else's impression of him?

Assuming he was standing behind women in the office watching them he's an outright creep. This reads like you're blaming other people for a creep's behavior.

Many places are at-will employment and that can be terminated on either side of the relationship as long as it doesn't fall in the realm of discrimination. As far as I'm concerned, the employer and management operated 100% responsibly to ensure a safe and comfortable working environment for everyone.

>>As a manager, how do you tell someone to "stop standing near people and/or looking at people"

"Hey, I've gotten some complaints about people feeling uncomfortable around you. Specifically that you have a tendency to stand too close, and stare too long at people's screens."

There are two ways I can see this going right off the bat. The Sten is either confused about the nature of the problem (maybe does not recall a time that sounds like this, or does not understand that it is a problem) OR the Sten understands that the behavior is problematic but sees it as not his problem (starts to justify it or otherwise excuse it). The first case is easier, presuming the Sten does not wish to make others uncomfortable. You can explain some etiquette or tips to address the situation (its polite to verbally introduce yourself when getting into some ones personal space, its polite to express curiosity and ask to read or know more about another's work), you can simply ask them to be conscious of the feedback. The second case is more difficult but still involves telling the Sten what the social expectations are.

He… doesn’t have the ability to control whether he stands silently behind other people while they work?

You can't control how other people feel, but you can control what information you choose to give them to inform those feelings. From this you can observe patterns and shape what future information you choose to give them.

You can't control how other people feel, but you sure can do a lot to shape it.

High level software engineering jobs are paying enough money that you should be a net positive for the company or you get cut. It is silly to coddle someone who is getting paid >200k a year while most of the population struggles to make ends meet.

There is no need to. Society has a contract. We accept those that fit in and reject those that don’t. And that’s a good thing. Just like birds reject sick birds to preserve the health of the group. It’s the best thing from an evolutionary perspective. There is an envelope within which which diversity is accepted. Outside of the envelope you get rejected. It sounds like this particular individual was outside the envelope. So he goes.

Until verified, a rumor is just something that needs to be examined. People can lie also about their coworkers if there is a possible advantage on doing it.

That is some world-class victim blaming right there. I've taken a screenshot of it and put it in one of my presos as an example.

I successfully coach 'impression' with my employees all the time. It's usually something like "you say 'um' a lot when you speak and it can distract from an otherwise great presentation; lets work on that" or "let's see what we can do to improve your business writing so your message is clearer". Sometimes it's "you need to practice better hygiene", "lets find a better way of expressing your opinions than calling your coworker a 'fucking idiot' in front of the team" or "your behavior is objectively creepy/offensive". Usually, when made aware, an adult will make an effort at least to improve; but there's always someone like you who says "everyone else in the world is the problem, not me...I should be able to do anything I want". And then you start managing them out the door.

One of the things that every job has is "prereqs". They often include the ability to code, have good (enough) communication skills, etc.

Some of the unstated ones are - wear clothes to work, not whip your dick out, not lick people, not piss on your desk, etc. As a manager you can easily just say "stop standing near people and/or looking at people more than three seconds if they are not interacting with you".

The issue is that I'm paying you $$ so I don't have to train you. For tech skills, this is what college/etc is for. For human behavior, this is what parents/etc are for.

That you don't see this makes one think you may have these same issues. This isn't a "feelings" thing.

Feelings thing: during a political discussion, I say I voted for Trump (and now you're triggered) This: I am standing closer to you than anyone else and staring at you without you interacting with me. This means you have no cause to be in my space or staring.

Zero need to coach. Have you ever had to be coached on how to not make child porn? Did you demand guide rails and exact spelled-out definitions of constitutes porn when taking pictures of young children? I hope not.

There are lots of things where recognition is far easier than definition. If you lack this skill, you are unfit for the task at hand. This includes many things related to interacting with others, especially regarding children and the opposite sex. Inappropriate hugs/touching, physical proximity, commenting on some attribute, talking to them too much, talking to them at all, standing in such a way as to impede their movement, asking questions, etc.

I think you are being downvoted rather harshly.

Only sorta. Software devs can and should treat their machines as cattle, yes. But the guys actually maintaining the racks shouldn't. They have finite space, definite machines, and when one is down they have to identify it and go fix it.

(Meanwhile moving further down, if the hardware guys are having to name ethernet or power ports on the wall due to their various temperaments, something is wrong. And moving up, it's reasonable for devs to name their services, but a signal of an issue if the VP has to know them)

There's a level of abstraction underneath which you should not be aware of to do your job...but someone likely has to (it's not quite turtles all the way down, but it probably ends with physicists and theory rather than cold hard fact).

I wish people would stop talking about cattle and pets. If you have or know someone who has worked in animal husbandry, you know it's a fragile metaphor.

My uncle owns a dairy farm with ~50 or so head of cattle.He gave each of them names and when one gets sick, he takes care of it.

Of course this is not a big industrial farm, but even so... not even actual cattle are as "cattle" as we're expected to treat computer-cattle -- and thanks to virtualization, computer-cattle are largely pretend anyway.

A name generator makes the cattle herdable. Humans may remember zombie-wombat-kitten but not 3991. You might not ever interact with the machine directly but if you are hunting down an issue from log files it reduces cognitive load.

I've seen this multiple times, and there seems to be a pattern emerging.

At first, people name the machines after the software they install on it. Then, when you get to about 4-5 machines, you start finding a "cute" naming convention (Constellations, Star Trek ships, mythological figures). As long as there is only a handful of machines, it's easier to remember which machine does what.

Then, as you start to scale up, between a few tens to a hundred, finding names gets harder, so you switch to a more standard naming conventions. Something that communicates the physical/logical location and the organizational unit, as well as an index for duplicates / replicas / redundant machines.

So I think it's fine to be clever as long as it's manageable. The moment it's going to start getting out of hand you can switch to a more scalable approach.

Best scheme I've seen for a small fleet of development boxes (hardware, not VMs) was naming them after elements. Very easy to determine the IP address on that subnet.

But then people go from the memorable “Ebola” cluster to asynccompletionloggernodeweb where even with names that supposedly explain the function all the name parts are utterly generic and related to implementation not purpose. Not that people should keep Ebola. It should name services with a little skill and based on purpose not implementation. “Log4JarScanner” not “goAsyncFilerTreeScanner”. Tho the repo name is go-tree-jar cause I suck at names. Another cost of rushing is names it becomes hard to refactor out. At least we have hierarchical dns and longer names now, so it can have he data center/as and not be 8 chars. God bless the people that have name rules like Us1aesas02 - ProcessPostEventNodeDaemonServ-0322.Dallas.internal.example.com is more legible.

At the last job I had, there were a dozen or so microservices named after Greek/Roman mythology. The names were all quite clever if you knew the stories behind them... Eurybates handled inter-service communication, Stentor yelled at Hermes to send out emails, Hephaestus handled our cloud infrastructure, Janus handles some frontend pieces. The problem was that not everybody knew the stories behind them so it got really confusing.

At some point we got tired of it and made a very firm "all services going forward must have normal, descriptive names" rule and ended up with such shocking names as "Metrics" and "Authentication".

Switching jobs to other startups, it seems like "cute" microservice names are going out of style. Thankfully.

Getting "Being John Malkovich" vibes from this comment.

> In Japanese, he or she is called バッチリ日本人. (^_^)

I'm only a beginner in Japanese so I might be wrong, but I don't think that's correct. (Or am I missing a joke?)

バッチリ means "perfect" or "fully prepared" and it's an adverb; 日本人 means "a Japanese person". I can't find anywhere stating this phrase means an illeist.

One way to say that is just 一人称を名前で呼ぶ人, which means "a person who uses their name as their first person pronoun."

Out of curiosity, is the first person pronoun used in the original translation?

What if he died and nobody knows it. Half the Bitcoins are in his wallet and nobody can get them out without the password, named after several of his girlfriends no doubt.

headmelted tried to think of how headmelted would even phrase an answer to this question either way and quickly got very confused.

Nah, probably sold when it got to a dollar.

Last year, I worked on a PHP application. Getting it to a CVS trimmed down the folder from 3 GB to 100 MB with essential assets. They just dumped things in there and backup the whole server instead.

> (What is "normal" is of course culturally determined and varies by your local culture, social class, etc, and covers all sorts of things. (...))

-I've heard the quip -'Being considered normal just means you are as weird as the national average.'

The masking thing has a subtile but real cost. It works great, I have (apparently) high natural charisma, it allows me to mask my peculiarities somewhat easier - but at some point when I'm tired enough, or hungry enough, or stressed enough, or some combination of those thought enough, I lose that ability to mask - then all hell breaks loose.

Those examples are the opposite of an increasing probability of "acquiring" eccentricities-- they are examples of expressing or masking behaviors.

And that's not a truism-- people of all ages make the mistake of coupling the potential expression of some behavior X with an entire group of behaviors they are afraid they will catch like "cooties." Then they decide not to publicly express behavior X for fear of that.

Perhaps that's not what OP meant by "acquiring," but there's a high probability some HN'er read it that way. Hence, my comment here.

I will make sure to conform in some low cost ways to preserve my ability to bring out my eccentricities when I find hem particularly valuable. So I make sure not to leave the people I talk to feeling weirded out by hints, and to ask questions about how they are doing and so on, but I won’t use a chair with a back or stop coding in order to have a better on time record for meetings.

I think that not normal mostly doesn’t imply eccentric.

This is, I think, a quirk of the Japanese language. It famously has many of what we would consider first person pronouns, which have a feeling to me of kinda being third person themselves. Or maybe it would be more accurate to say they don't have such a strict delineation. Occasionally one can even hear someone use, for example, 'boku' as a second person pronoun. It's maybe kinda like in a casino a dealer might say that "the house" wins, or a judge might say "this court" regarding a decision. Only many such 'role' pronouns exist in Japanese.

One can imagine growing up as a child and hearing Japanese with its variety of first-person pronouns, which also are not used as much as we use them in English, and choosing to use your name as it is consistently associated with you.

That said, I've had only a smattering of Japanese study, so definitely take all of that with a grain of salt.

That’s funny, the same is the case with small children in China. Instead of “我饿了” (I’m hungry) they could say “人家饿了” which is something like “people are hungry”. This is also seen as cute and naturally goes away as they get older.

Same here in Indonesia.

If not their first name, then their title "younger brother/sister" (adik), "older brother sister" (kakak). Interestingly, when the second child is born, the "adik" becomes the "kakak", which you would think would be confusing but the switch happens pretty naturally.

Kids talk in third person about themselves in slavic languages too. It is normal as they are learning to talk. They switch to first person by themselves later.

Interesting. Does speaking in the third person sound “childish” to people in Japan? (That would explain Pokémon quite a bit at least.)

Kids at young age are more a thing than a person, so it kind of fits.

This is not uncommon in the West either. A lot of parents talk to themselves by title in the third person to their children, e.g. "Daddy doesn't want to play right now, daddy is working". It's even worse if they refer to each other by a 'parental' name. Just makes me wince.

To people that actually do this, do not erase yourself; you are a person, you have needs and an identity of your own. You can express your needs, not a mythical 3rd person parental figure.

> To be honest, I’m not sure why I do this.

We're in the same boat. And for a few month I've found it pretty annoying and I've tried to stop, but I haven't manage to do so. What's wrong with our brains?!

Since I've tried consciously not to do that, now the kid thinks "myself" is my name. I.e. says "myself" did this when the kid means "Dad did this"

Indeed, pronouns are a pretty challenging skill for toddlers. Similarly, for their sake, you will often refer to yourself in third person as well, saying Daddy or Mommy rather than I or me.

I'm pretty sure if you use "the" to refer to yourself, you're also obligated by law to wear shades at all times, do finger guns at least once a day and use the term "rad" at least once every hour.

I strangely acquired this habit at home shortly after my first son was born for some conversations...

"I need to do this now" became "Daddy needs to do this now"... It is weird, and entirely unnecessary, kids acquire understanding of "I" and "you" quite fast. It just came and never went. I think I was trying to be less ambiguous when conversations did not involve only me and the kids, but also Mum and others, or when I somehow want to emphasize the context and my role (?) I have no idea and it is fading, only a lot of company present might trigger it - or recounting stories to others.

But maybe I just never realized how weird it is - I would raise both eyebrows if a colleague at work would talk like that in a "normal" context.

Ditto here. A friend's girlfriend uses her first name instead of "I" in every instance. She's even got the friend to start doing it for her too. eg firstname instead of "you"

No major concerns about it though, it doesn't negatively affect things.

Is your friend a TNG [0] fan? :-P

[0] https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Who_Watches_The_Watcher...

The Dude abides. :)

Do you mean Babel-17?

IRC does this for you, if you put "/me" into an utterance.

[Edit] Several other chat services copy that behaviour.

They're not fat, just overloaded!

I don't know. Is it worse to objectify them or to treat them functionally?

How would you feel to be locked up and separated into discrete units, only to be used up and thrown away?

tuples and thruples are my thing but they aren't the norm in my language :(

I use template metaprogramming to do all the computation at compile time.

"how to terminate forked children"