Are you saying you don't want to work with the people who use praise w/ direction? That is my assumption about what you meant given that it seems like the contrary opinion and thus the reason for replying. If that's the case, care to elaborate why you don't like that style?
Such communication style can work well, but only if it is genuine. When people do mess up, there is often something good in the mix. It’s possible to lead with a compliment to point out what was done well, and follow up with constructive criticism. It’s about style. When done well, you don’t notice it and you like it. If done awkwardly or stiffly, it feels fake, patronizing, and disingenuous.
But yeah if you're a person who's only capable of complaining and criticizing others (assuming it's perfectly legitimate/reasonable) you might struggle communicating with most people who don't know you really well/are used to different culture.
Well, only if it is a lie. The example is a hypothetical story so we can read into it whatever we want.
There are ways to like someone’s work, even if you don’t think it’s complete or optimal.
For example, I think a huge part of getting a job done is just having someone take initiative and at least try, as opposed to waiting for someone else to start them off.
The line might mean “I’m glad you started us down this road…”
I'll share my reason. It's phony as hell. If someone is legitimately angry or disappointed with my performance, just say it. Don't construct a "compliment sandwich" and patronize me with that.
Considering this is about how you communicate with others, you are saying people should consider the way you want to be communicated with, but you should be able to ignore how others want to be communicated with?
That just makes you a disappointing, inefficient hypocrite.
> But you understand that people can genuinely like you right?
Yeah, I do. And when I get genuine compliments, I like them!
But it's obvious when someone consistently prefaces their statements with "softening" compliments. When they're "deploying" a "communications strategy."
Talk to me like a real person, please. It will make it easier for those compliments to land when recipients know they're real. But if you're the type to always lead with one, then they're all worthless. You're just a happy-talker. Your praise is empty.
I always have doubts about others' work and suggestions on how they could do it better. To avoid constantly dominating others, I either have to shut my mouth or try to be more accommodating in how I deliver my feedback. I do a mix of both, but if you tell me to be straight with you, then I'll be straight with you.
Especially in large corporate organizations where there are vast differences in how people communicate and take input, and you talk to too many people in a given day to really get close with any of them, it requires a handshake to know that I can always indicate my roughly unfiltered technical opinion to you and that you'll take it in stride, and if you feel strongly about it, you'll have the confidence to shoot my idea down without me having to give you an opening by posing my suggestion as a question.
This should just be the default. Many organizations do in fact write this down in their internal communication guides, where it's known as the ABCs (accuracy, brevity, clarity) of professional communication.
> I always have doubts about others' work and suggestions on how they could do it better
If you're right, they should listen to you (gratefully), if you're not they should tell you why so you can learn. There is no good reason to react emotionally to professional criticism, it is a worst-practice which no measures ought be taken to accommodate.
> There is no good reason to react emotionally to professional criticism.
And yet when it happens (not a rare event), it can be quite unproductive for both parties. I would hope that you deal with other worst-practices in your domain with greater grace than a total refusal to deal with and prevent pathological outcomes.
Additionally, if you truly believe what you stated, then so long as I avoid sacrificing significant efficiency/productivity to keep my words from bothering people, then I do not see why it should bother you either. If I had to self-judge, I really don't think that the added conversational padding pans out to more than 15 minutes per day. That's worth spending to make sure that the people you work with are engaged with you and the task at hand in an accommodating way, rather than fearing being rebuked at each turn.
When it does happen, like any other mistake, it should be corrected. Just like if someone put secrets into git, it should be explained to them why they shouldn't do that, and an expectation should be set not to do it again. If the individual fails to meet that expectation, disciplinary action should be taken, up to and including termination.
I've in fact had this happen to a developer who took PR comments personally. The rest of the team was very glad to see them terminated. Fifteen minutes per day adds up to a lot, and I'm quite sure it's more for staff whose roles are heavier on communication or those for whom anticipating people's feelings comes less naturally.
> rather than fearing being rebuked at each turn
My point is that a fear of professional criticism is a fundamental flaw in a professional, one that should be corrected to the benefit of the individual and the organization. A leader who refuses to correct this flaw in their reports is holding back their professional development and failing in their role as mentor. One should experience nothing but sublime gratitude that one's mistakes were found and corrected before they caused any damage.
I actually agree with most of the points you've made here. I think the difference lies in what context this feedback is relayed to a teammate.
If I'm tasked with a code review, that is pretty much a directive for me to offer feedback. When I am asked explicitly for feedback, whether directly by my peer or as assigned by a higher up, I tend not to bother with the kind of niceties I am talking about. Still, being nice is nice. But I expect the other person to take my words as-is, so I won't mince them.
Accommodating others becomes more important to me outside of this "directly asked for feedback" context. If I'm in a group discussion, or if my feedback hasn't been explicitly solicited, then that's a trickier environment with greater potential for me to negatively dominate the discussion. Similarly, if the issue at hand is not one of baseline technical necessity (like committing secrets to git) but more open to different opinions (like how to structure an interface we're exposing), I place greater weight on trying to be accommodating. I find that most discussions tend to be of the latter kind.
To me that just sounds passive aggressive and sort of like "you should mind your own business".
I'd feel better you if someone just told me: "I saw you patched a bug, could you do X"
or even just "can you give the SREs a heads up next time?" alone.
Then again I'm used to a culture where any praise is ussually implicit and criticism tends to be quite explicit so it's easy to interpret words like "glad" etc. as insincere by default without even wanting too..
Because the example is oversimplified for the sake of HN commentary. In the real world it goes more like this:
"Hey, I saw you patched that bug that was causing traffics spikes. That's awesome work and I appreciate your proactivity! The Ops team thought we had to work late tonight to implement mitigations for the problem.
In fact, it looks like we had a communication breakdown and they didn't realize you had fixed the issue until 6 hours later. In the future do you think you could let them know when this sort of problem is fixed, just to make sure we're all on the same page? We'll have to look at a solution
for automated alerts too -- maybe an integration with the ticket system or build system. Do you have any ideas for that so we don't have to rely on manual communication? We're moving so fast that it's hard for everyone to keep up! Thanks again for the great work."
Okay, if we worked with each other in real life, I would accept that and I guess never speak to you that way.
Since this is a discussion of communication theory, I have to say, it’s crazy to me that you read it as passive aggressive.
Like when I say bad things about you, you can just accept those things in a straightforward fashion. However when I say good things about you, that cannot be accept in just as straightforward a way, and instead it is viewed as passive aggressive.
You don’t seem to understand the reasons why I would consider it passive aggressive, and it’s my fault because I didn’t explain it. Thing is, in my culture exactly this phrasing had been a form of passive aggressive tone that had been very common way of working communication. I’m not sure if that’s still the case - I’ve left my country years ago. But this exact phrasing is a strong trigger.
> However when I say good things about you
Yeah, I read it as the exact opposite, in this particular phrasing. Historical reasons.
In fact I’m on the SRE side in this example, and I often have to remind people to suppress alerts when they change something. I normally go with “We got paged for the planned works, could you please turn off alerts next time? Thanks”. I’m not thanking people for their job in this case because it’s likely irrelevant - we’re from different teams and chances are I don’t even know what exactly they’ve been working on (in a broad sense) or for what reason. I’m being polite and straightforward. Never got any complain, at least so far.
Im not the GP but it hides all clarity wrt how important the colleague thinks the “directions” that the praise came along with are. If I accept the praise but dismiss the directions, am I being an asshole? Or am I being subordinate? Am I ignoring a direct order? The boss was in the room and they didn’t object to the directions! What does it all mean?
All this is a level of 4D interpersonal chess that you’re forcing me to play that could simply be avoided if you said that you think its worth changing it like so and so because such and such.
Fair point. I think it comes down to knowing your audience, which is always the most fundamental and important part. Coworkers with lots of rapport can be very direct with each other. Or a neurodivergent person who struggles with social/verbal cues may be much better served with succinct direct feedback (and likewise not feel the sting and demotivation that the initial strategy is intended to avoid)
