(And I say that with the full knowledge that my phrasing will make you less receptive to my argument.)
Environments where you can't discuss mistakes are poisonous. People make mistakes. People do stupid things. If those mistakes are not dealt with directly, they become larger mistakes, and you end up in situations where people don't take minor actions that can prevent disasters because they're afraid that somebody's feelings might be hurt.
As an example, a few years ago the college I was then attending switched from internally managed email to gmail. For a month after the switch, you could log into anyone's email account without a password. This happened in large part because there was a culture of ignoring mistakes, and people who regularly raises issues were branded as "complainers". And so when they were doing the switch, nobody was willing to stand up and say "have we done basic testing?"
There are, of course, times and places where your goal is not offending people, and criticizing them is obviously a bad idea. (Telling a VC "that investment you made a week ago was really dumb" is probably a bad way to get them to invest in your company.) But much of the time, that rule causes many more problems than it solves.
It's also worth noting that phrasing and delivery matter quite a lot, and that's something that's much harder to convey in text. There's a huge difference, as I've said already, between insulting somebody and criticizing their work. The first is not productive--the second can be.
I never said anything about not discussing mistakes. I never said to not deal with issues. I said that if you call my work "rubbish", I will be resentful, not grateful. Your comments elsewhere make me think that we agree on this. When you criticize someone, their absolute first instinct is to defend themselves. Even if you're commenting on a thread on a message board on the internet on something made by someone you'll never meet, saying "it's rubbish" 1) won't get your point across (because they will resent you for saying so publicly, for giving them bad press, for insulting their work, etc) and 2) won't improve the discussion.
We agree on basically everything you said. You're 100% right that phrasing and delivery matter quite a lot - which, and this is really the most important part, is exactly what the original post was trying to say. The tone and delivery of most of the comments on the original submission was just ridiculously hostile. And when you're giving someone feedback, that tone matters, whether you have to work with the person every day or it's someone you'll never meet.
Version 1: Your reply if fucking stupid, you arrogant bastard, and you successfully made an ass of yourself. Even if your example was relevant, which is not, everyone knows you can't ever get idiots in any IT department to fix something like missing password. Fuck, nobody gets a job in IT in a college department without being terminally brain-dead. You are not smart enough to realize that the right thing to do is go in the server room with an ax, and hope that when they rebuild the system they'll get a clue. Sheesh, you people are the reason we need an Internet license, to prevent folks like you from polluting the web with nonsense.
Version 2: Dear samdk, I fail to see why people would fix the email system faster if you criticize them or make them resent you. You did not provide the details of the story, but I know of a similar case where the problem was fixed in private, technical, and polite e-mails. That case involved early Sun4 systems where everybody could read anybody's screen over the network, so it was relatively critical too... All it took was showing the sysadmin's screen on mine to get things fixed rather rapidly.
> (And I say that with the full knowledge that my phrasing will make you less receptive to my argument.)
This means you write this for yourself and not to fix things. This is the reason why rule #1 is a good rule: it places the other guy in the center. Your ultimate goal in a negotiation is to get the other side to do what you want. This means they are the center of the universe at that moment. You illustrated that very well with your VC example. What makes a VC different from an IT admin? That you think they are more powerful?
Jon Kershaw, who manages killer whales for a leaving, likes to bring the point that if you try to force a killer whale to do something, you end up dead more often than you want. To bring killer whales to do what you want, you need to make them want to.
Back to the story at hand, I liked the new design, except for the J-like capital I and a few details. Yet, I would certainly have remained silent on the thread because of the vocal and needless criticism, which I find a bit low for YC.
(And I say that with the full knowledge that my phrasing will make you less receptive to my argument.)
Environments where you can't discuss mistakes are poisonous. People make mistakes. People do stupid things. If those mistakes are not dealt with directly, they become larger mistakes, and you end up in situations where people don't take minor actions that can prevent disasters because they're afraid that somebody's feelings might be hurt.
As an example, a few years ago the college I was then attending switched from internally managed email to gmail. For a month after the switch, you could log into anyone's email account without a password. This happened in large part because there was a culture of ignoring mistakes, and people who regularly raises issues were branded as "complainers". And so when they were doing the switch, nobody was willing to stand up and say "have we done basic testing?"
There are, of course, times and places where your goal is not offending people, and criticizing them is obviously a bad idea. (Telling a VC "that investment you made a week ago was really dumb" is probably a bad way to get them to invest in your company.) But much of the time, that rule causes many more problems than it solves.
It's also worth noting that phrasing and delivery matter quite a lot, and that's something that's much harder to convey in text. There's a huge difference, as I've said already, between insulting somebody and criticizing their work. The first is not productive--the second can be.