A DevOps engineer at a company I used to work for was very unhappy at the way management handled the day to day running of certain parts of the job. When he raised his feelings about it he was told that it was unprofessional to bring it up or talk about how he felt.
Not long after this he left the company, and they were unable to successfully recruit a new DevOps person for about two years; at which point a system that had not been patched in that time was hacked, and the company is no longer with us.
Why is this Victorian Workhouse idea of suffering in silence considered professionalism? If professional is defined as the thing that brings the most success to the business unit or company, surely failing to discuss feelings in the workplace is the antithesis of professional.
Seth is a special case in his field. He works in a very creative discipline but frequently defers to logic. So I'm guessing there are many aspects of the average marketing day-to-day that would drive him absolutely nuts.
> Better to share our feelings than to pretend we have an argument to make.
Better to share? Is one even allowed to share these feeling things without some cover? Tech communities for example generally respond rather poorly to the sharing of feelings in isolation.
Feelings are thus typically voiceless by default in many tech communities. They happen behind the scenes via anonymous voting systems, off-channel community chat, etc.
Further, feelings don't really care what the definition of an argument really is. That's how they work. Feelings aren't the same as logic. But this doesn't mean that feelings are bad. In many cases, if not most cases, they are extremely useful to monitor.
Feelings also start arguments all the time--you can even say that part of the point of feelings is that they don't agree about what constitutes a proper argument, fair argument, etc.
IMO one of the best ways to get _more_ of the feelings you _don't_ want is to make logical arguments against them.
There are, however, extremely logical forms of feeling which can be used to deal with shallower and less appropriate forms of expression. Knowing & using such can be really wise.
And inappropriate expression is often what people really hate, when they feel hatred for feelings.
> An argument might be flawed because it relies on facts that aren’t in evidence.
And when someone hasn't developed the skill to perceive quality in logic at the level of other logical thinkers (regardless of the objective validity of their personal perceptions--this is important), they are often left with the impression that inappropriate expression is their only fallback.
This, conversely, can make an argument from logic completely unreliable, putting situations at loggerheads and supporting the perception of false dichotomies (feelings vs. logic).
Why is this Victorian Workhouse idea of suffering in silence considered professionalism? If professional is defined as the thing that brings the most success to the business unit or company, surely failing to discuss feelings in the workplace is the antithesis of professional.