Always a good idea to keep a work journal, but there's something on the tone of this article that bothers me. I would like working with someone that is not a borg and is not following a script that seems taken from How to win friends and influence people. In general I will mistrust anyone that tries to manipulate me, that is, if I catch them doing it.
That intentional attitude around how the author wants to be perceived is definitely going to sound offputting to mamy people.
Just wanted to comment to say: don't get carried away by that knee-jerk reaction. Sit with it for a while.
Personally, I also have a goal for how I want my stakeholders to feel. And it'd been a useful rule of thumb in how to behave. I've also run into provlems with my technical work whenever I ignored the human dimension (like what kind of gossip is going around, how I'm perceived by others and how others are casting my work). "Just do a good job" doesn't get rid of the fact that there is a "feelings dimension" to your work - and that it matters how you & your work make others feel.
I will quote specifically some examples of what jumps out to me as manipulative behavior:
> I'll ask why things on the list are that way, and how they got to be that way. I'm trying to establish credibility as someone who's genuinely curious and empathetic, who's patient, and who respects the expertise of my coworkers. That's the reputation that's going to let me make changes later.
I would not try to establish credibility, but earn it. I will not try to be genuinely curious or empathetic. I either am, or am not.
> At this point I'm looking for one or two problems that have been bugging one of my new teammates for a while, and that have relatively simple solutions. I'm looking for something I can put on the retro board and know I won't be the only person who's bothered by that problem.
This screams to me as playing the work game. If someone can spend time looking for problems over their coworker shoulders or "something to put on the retro board" it just means they are out of meaningful tasks to do.
> Then, during the team conversation about the problem, I'll identify something that teammate suggests as an action item that we could try immediately. That way the team starts to see me as someone who helps them solve their problems.
Change the context and this sounds like a pickup artist explaining dating tricks, or a con man telling you how to infiltrate or someone on the secret service trying to enter a gang.
> The feeling that I want to create, the association I want people to have with me, is, "Oh, Nat joine [...]
Feelings are not something one goes around creating unless they are actively manipulating people around.
> There's a very specific reputation I want to have on a team: "Nat helps me solve my problems. Nat get things I care about done." That's the reputation that's going to get me the results I want in next year's performance review.
I could keep going on, but I think these are enough examples
I think your reaction is common, your mindset is one that I recognize in myself and causes me many insecurities in relationships both personal and professional.
However, it's worth saying that: Being intentional about relationships is not manipulation.
If I decide "I want to be a better husband" and then spend time noticing and writing down a list of things that my wife says bother her or would make her happy or she thinks would be romantic, and then I go through and choose some of them and set myself reminders in my calendar to do them... Am I "manipulating" my wife into "thinking" I'm a better husband? Or am I just plain being a better husband?
Would it be worse if I got the idea from a book titled
Would it be better if, instead of being so intentional, I just let my passions and romance sweep me into doing romantic things without any conscious thought? Why?
To make my point clear: Being very intentional about relationships (how others perceive and feel about you — and what actions you take to make them feel and perceive you that way) is not manipulation. If I act in a way that makes my coworkers think that I'm a good coworker, then I AM a good coworker! The fact that it was on purpose and not accidental is...?
Manipulation happens when you develop your "be-a-good-coworker" skills (which is good) and then use those skills in a way that intentionally hurts your coworkers or makes them act against their interests (which is bad).
I see evidence in the article of the first but not the second.
It's a fine line. Maybe it isn't necessarily manipulation, but it does come off as disingenuous to me.
To take your marriage example. The genuine motivation would be: "I acknowledge my flaws and I'm willing to put in the effort to change myself for the benefit of my wife". If the motivation is to just tweak your wife's views of you, that may not be manipulation but it's not very loving either.
People will be able to sniff out if the goal of his behaviour is to have people think of him a certain way, versus having the goal of wanting to bring beneficial change and helping a team out.
The behaviour may be the same on the surface, but the intent is very different. I would be very wary of judging people's motivations, but the fact that the author explicitly mentions it bothers me.
The Turing test for husbands: determine if your husband is actually a good person or if he is acting like a good person so that you will love and appreciate him.
You say the genuine motivation would be:
"I acknowledge my flaws and I'm willing to put in the effort to change myself for the benefit of my wife"
But... How do I know which actions will "benefit" my wife? I argue that one of the best ways to know is to ask myself: "Will this action make her feel positively about me?". That way, I'm not going to do things that are important to me but not her, or that I think she SHOULD appreciate but she doesn't actually care about, or whatever.
Of course, to answer that question accurately requires plenty of listening, understanding and empathy.
In the past, I thought more like you. But I think it harmed me. Ultimately I came to the conclusion that intentionally doing things so that other people like to be around you isn't "disingenuous", it's a wonderful thing to work towards!
For some this might have a bit of sociopathic creepiness to it which even seems more apparent in that marriage context than it does in the original article of an "deeply" structured coder.
Of course control might be a valid goal, and controlling your need to control might be a good meta step, too, in a professional environment. The issue of the line between caring and controlling just seems not been discussed enough. And not seeing and mentioning that obvious emotional aspect might already make it look a bit weird.
I don't agree. You should only do things that benefit the team if they are done out of a true sense of cameraderie, and pure desire to empathize and solve problems? Not everyone has natural empathy, and people who don't have it learning how to do it in a way that benefits them and the people around them is positive.
Re:'It sounds like a con artist', the techniques for getting people to trust and like you are often the same whether your intent is good or bad. I don't think these techniques should be reserved for people who have an innate wellspring of curiosity and cooperation.
This person is trying to earn credibility, and is specifically focused on the 'new' phase of being on a team, when you do not have a big pile of meaningful tasks yet and your primary goal is getting the lay of the land and establishing good relationships with your teammates.
Finally,
> Feelings are not something one goes around creating unless they are actively manipulating people around.
I don't really understand what this means. I create feelings all the time, intentionally and unintentionally. I often do things where the primary purpose is to make somebody feel good, usually things like 'make some effort to solve a problem that I don't think matters' or 'let somebody explain something to me that I already know about'. It's not about gaining power and status, it's about greasing social wheels and making friendly cooperation easier.
Am I 'manipulating' people? Well, I am often trying to influence them so that they act in a way that I believe will benefit both of us. I do want to rise in my career, but I want to do it by making positive impacts and relationships, not by stepping on others. I don't think that's a bad thing.
Without imputing any actual intention to the author, I agree with your points on tone. It feels focused on optics, not outcomes.
It's one thing to say that you want to get things done. It's another to say you want to be _seen_ as someone who gets things done.
Again, I don't intend to mind read here, and I think the author actually has some really good data gathering ideas. But the language definitely smacks of political motivation, which some folks (myself included) find off-putting.
I get where you're coming from, but in a somewhat large or large organisation the organisation has a life of its own and it couldn't care less whether you're authentically you or not. If there is something to gain from throwing you out it will, regardless of how you feel about it.
Hedging against that with conscious social strategies can be a reasonable thing to do, at least if you are in or are likely to end up in such a large organisation.
I've made the choice to be in a small organisation, in part because my contributions don't need packaging and announcements to become known to those with more power in it than I have. If I were to change my mind and join a large organisation I wouldn't think twice about entertaining a 'game', balancing the degree to which I exploit other people and organisational weaknesses to gain money and stability for myself against a semblance of professional and personal ethics.
He thinks about those types of things and are acting on it (which is the key point in my opinion) because he is someone who thinks about those types of things.
Not the parent, but what bothers me is how the author tries to spin the idea of taking notes when you're new as something profound. He even gives it a catchy name "WTF Notebook". And the connection between creating a reputation of a fixer at the company, and taking notes with a WTF journal, is weak. I usually don't like to hate on articles like this and instead ignore them, but since you asked, it mostly sounds like bullshit to me.
Writing things down and thinking them over before acting on them, isn't bullshit. There's other decent advice in the article. I think your review of the article is overly negative.
Perhaps these techniques come naturally to some people, and others need to learn it by instruction? I'm in the latter camp. I often need to think about how I sound and make sure I don't come across as too negative.
You hit on the most interesting aspect from this. I will explain what I noticed and I’m interested in how this viewpoint lands.
First, the author is doing 101 new leadership stuff. I’ve done it, I’ve seen it done, there’s a science to it. I can distill the whole blog post into when taking over leading something (as an experienced IC, as a new manager, as an army officer, it’s all the same), take the first 30-90 days to not change anything, and just seek to understand how and more relevantly why things work. There are a mess of organization benefits to this, it would take more than a comment to explain why. But in short, ya this is how it’s done.
Second, engs have worked for awful managers, can’t often understand or exactly place why but they know their manager sucks. I can argue capably in thread about how often this difficult to explain “sh*ty manager” sense boils down to the manager not doing like tactically good leadership. In the same way as engineering is a taught skill, so is leading teams. Issue is only a few places teach it intentionally. Top of mind for me is the military, and senior exec training. There’s an actual science to it, full stop. You either get taught it by orgs that treat it this way, or you pick it up from a mentor who learned it somehow. Note - the author learned it this second way. This is really common.
Third, to work for good managers, you actually want to work for good leaders. Leadership is a tactical skill, the same way efficient lines of C++ are. Leadership tactical means tactically shaping and steering people to achieve a goal greater than the sum of the team’s individual parts. This full stop requires what in a certain light is what you point out - it’s a bit manipulative feeling. It’s using leadership methods to make people work together in a way that is effective. A lot of this is good EQ and stuff like the author maps out.
So, who do engs like working for? Often it’s working for technically inclined good people who go to bat for their team with external parties, shield their team from stupid stuff, resource the team to complete its goals, praise in public criticize in private, give good but not overly micromanaging guidance on where to steer things, recognizes and rewards performance, holds unperforners to a standard, and so on and so on?
Some examples of who knows how to do this but for the wrong reasons are people engs don’t like working for - to stereotype: charismatic jocks out of MBA programs who can know nothing about tech but know corp politics and deploy this stuff tactically.
Who do engs hate working for often - technical hires promoted into management and they hate/are bad at their jobs bc management != tech chops, as my above covered.
So, what that leaves is a scenario where teams are led by the occasional person that inherently knows good leadership chops, or more often it’s pissed off engineers who hate working for someone manipulative or incompetent.
To raise the collective industry odds that tech teams work for skilled and competent leaders, that leaves as the solution spelling out tactical leadership - how to do it, what it looks like, how people fit into it, like this blog does.
Pick your poison - more of the same, or good people who just need clear guidance learning from resources like this on how to run teams people want to work on? HN certainly complains to no end about the dynamic caused by not approaching leadership as a skill vs some nebulous thing people somehow know how to do.
I think you nailed it here. It's important to internalize that being a good employee (and/or leader) is not a virtue, it is a skill. You can be a good person and a bad employee/teammate/leader. A bad employee in the sense that you're letting other people down, and/or a bad employee in the sense that you're not getting paid appropriately or getting denied opportunities.
Your job is a really important part of your life - and you will also affect a lot of other people. It's important to be a bit strategic. Otherwise, even if you have wonderful intentions, there's a great chance you'll work on things that don't matter and that leadership knows nothing about, until your career quietly fizzles out.
If you want to be capably strategic about your life and intentions, most people that action on this are the small proportion that natively gets how to do it somehow. In the context of leading teams, this is usually ones that are natively charismatic and “get people.”
For everyone else, such as the introverts (engineers) who prob could lead a team quite well but don’t have that natural charisma ——> it’s learning from guides that spell it out… like this article does.
Hell, even Perfect Dark before that. I'm not one to defend Halo as the most-innovative, especially with the disproportionate amount of funding and manpower that went into it.
That being said, I think Halo deserves commendation for bringing a lot to the mainstream without compromise. The same people that casually enjoyed Halo were probably not also playing Goldeneye or Arma in their free time. And marketing be damned, Halo is fun even today. Hopping in a match of CE makes me lament how little team-based shooters have progressed in the past 20 years.
Something about halo just feels like such modern game, even halo ce. It’s so weird to think this game was contemporary with golden eye or quake. I think it was the polish with the animations, sound, and the physics. You pull out the pistol and do that satisfying pull back and click on it. You throw a grenade and hear it arm and see it thrown. You see your teammates throw grenades. You throw a grenade under a warthog, it flips it and knocks the occupants out. Even just scoping in and out of the sniper was satisfying with the sound it made.
To me it's crazy to think how far ahead of its time in terms of emergent behavior was Battlefield compared to other games, besides battle arenas. Probably it wasn't the first one either, but it's the one that comes to mind.
Picking up a tank or a jeep is one thing, but going for controlling an aircraft carrier or a submarine? Even if the controls were really primitive, it felt amazing!
The destructible environment aspect in some of those games was so cool. Can’t breach into the objective? Take down the building. No other game is or was like that. Even new battlefield games have walked back a lot of that behavior.
The thing being discussed is attempting to access deeply nested values, so short-circuiting here is a win-win. I.e., you wouldn't want to unnecessarily traverse tons of empty dictionaries using the `.get() or {}` trick.
Not sure why but separation of concers was hammered so hard for a while that I cannot accept any inlined javascript or css at all. For me the reason is clear, I do not need to scan the html to know what a particular piece of code is doing and will just assume these ids are somewhere out there.
Something I felt reading the book that I did not feel with the movie was a bit of horror sci-fi vibes. That alone to me is what makes Solaris one of Lem's top works, on which the crude descriptions add to the suspense and horror.
the bit where visitor-Hari punches through a metal door, injuring herself, because she can't stand being separated from Kelvin is quite scary, and was a shock to me when i first saw the fil in the mid 70s. and there are others.
