> I don't know if anyone's ever told you that half the time this business comes down to 'I don't like that guy.'

In all my years of working, this is probably the most important thing you can learn. Except for marginal cases, it's not about how good you are at your job. You just have to be liked while being sufficiently good.

It's also why the perennial "hiring is broken" posts and threads miss the point completely: really they're just trying to find someone they like. It's what "culture fit" really means. And people like people like themselves. This is part of what can lead to unlawful discrimination.

Trustworthiness is an interesting one as it seems to be hard to define but some people just have it and some don't. This has been studied and can have a profound effect on, say, criminal sentencing [2].

[1]: https://twitter.com/madmenqts/status/783648743690231808?lang...

[2]: https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2015/07/17/4236009...

I think this is dangerous ground to thread. I don't like to work with assholes any more than the next guy and I'd certainly prefer working with people I personally like but that kind of thinking opens doors to all kinds of abuse; from favoritism (I like him, therefore he gets a pass when somebody else might not), through promotions (what does giving a promotion to somebody likeable over somebody more competent do to morale?) to plain fuckarounditis (playing career games rather than what's good for the business, wasting company resources on petty political games).

I mean, I get it - it's human nature. But something feels off when we're justifying our simian prejudices in an environment where we're supposed to prioritize somebody else's satisfaction (whoever is paying us) but instead we do what we feel is best for us personally, using a fairly emotional and error prone system of judgment (I don't care if this guy sucks, I like him because he's my friend).

If you start adjusting the workplace to fit the needs of the employee (gosh, how wrong that sentence sounds!) you end up in situations where it's suddenly justifiable to let developers use technologies unsuited for the situation because they're "fun" and "interesting" to use and keeping them happy means they're more "productive". Or letting middle management play politics because it keeps them happy and more productive. Or forcing people into open offices because some boss likes the feeling of lording over his subordinates and that makes him happy and productive.

I guess what I'm trying to say is - some basic levels of courtesy and human empathy are needed for any group endeavor to work but beyond that, decisions should be made in the interest of the business rather than what makes individuals happy.

You obviously can not want that as an employer but you’re either gonna have empty roles for a long time or pay out the ass for the lack of fringe benefits

I think in these situations, the employee should ask himself: "what is good for the business?" rather than "what do I want to do?".

It's also true that "what is good for the business is good for employees". So it's a two-way street that needs to be walked by honest employees and empoyers. Not possible in toxic cultures. So it's important to keep the toxic employees and managers (even shareholders!) out. This is what hiring should mostly focus on (not sure on how to keep toxic shareholders out, and businesses often rot from their heads down because of this)

Well, companies already do that and justify the practice as something that selects for more passionate developers and makes job postings seem more attractive. Exhibit A: YC's very own Paul Graham wrote "The Python Paradox" [1] back in 2004.

[1] http://paulgraham.com/pypar.html

Both are important. Without friends and fun, in a heavily intellectual cooperative field like CS, you'll do subpar work.

But I think a good first step is to just be aware of it. Many people don't even notice these subtle biases. Once you're aware of them, it's a matter of training yourself to ask the question: is this good for me, or good for the business? Am I doing this because it's good for me, or good for the business?

Any sources for this? Should we assume the '96 Bulls were "best buddies"? Are Amazon and Apple the "most tightly knit companies on Earth", thus reaching $1T valuation? This sounds like an "I assume this to be true by' common sense', therefore it's persuasive" type of claim.

The problem is, competence is important. Nice people who design airplanes that are "mostly right, but fall out of the sky slightly more than average" have real costs versus a team that's "a little cold to each other, but meshes well to create a high quality product."

Which matters more probably ultimately depends on the "mission criticality" / ramifications of failure of the product. But assuming that two Advanced Beginners will elevate each other to competence also ignores that they can create a "blind leading the blind" style of effect.

A huge factor with academics, and with anyone in high-skill professions (critically those where your boss does not know how to do your job) is that in a lot of job situations, one has to perform their actual job functions, and then, separately, one has to perform (literally) a PR show for their managers, putting on an outward display of competence. Managers can measure competence up to the point of obvious failure, but once you get above that it gets FAR harder to tell if someone's good, and the whole affair becomes susceptible to "con men". You see this with professors, you see this with engineers, with doctors, sometimes with lawyers, etc, etc.

So even if you're acting in good faith, you need to put on a theater act of being skilled at your job.

Here's the thing: It's a million times easier if all of your teammates are supporting you. If you're in a cooperative relationship with your teammates, then your teammates can "allow you to admit your mistakes". Quietly amongst your peers, in a way that doesn't hurt your chances of promotion. But the important thing is the mistakes get exposed AND FIXED. Also - the confidence intervals get exposed, and guarded against.

In an adversarial relationship (which you see in more zero-sum games like professors fighting over tenure), people have to hide their incompetence, and the horrible, dangerous thing is:

—they get away with it—

… because the time-scales are long, and the confidence intervals are high enough that it's a reasonably safe bet. They might have a 1-in-5 chance of having it blow up on them, but if they talk a big game, exude confidence, push a risky bet, and have it work out, they could easily become a team lead, and basically seal their career. Life is short and lots of people take those risks.

Being cooperative simply boosts competence; not merely as a team, but as an individual. Since they don't need to pretend they're always making the right choices, people don't have to double-down on "inferior choices" to avoid pretending they're wrong. They can just shamelessly change their minds and pivot to being more correct.

I'd rather work with competent strangers who are sufficiently polite than get dragged down by friends who can't carry their weight. No need to mix personal life with work life.

Given a collaborative environment, I'll always choose agreeable/worse. Because with the disagreeable/better collaborator, I suddenly have a barrier between potential productivity and output: I have to co-ordinate with the asshole.

Your personal bias towards agreeableness as a universally good trait is muddying what I think is an otherwise valid point, that people are more productive working with people they like (and sometimes, they like working with disagreeable people, as hard as that may be to believe).

Agreeable/disagreeable is a subjective judgement, and I'm the one making the judgement in this scenario. Whether someone is agreeable and whether I like to work with them are synonyms.

The conversation was generally talking culture fit and not universal qualities, after all.

Honestly, a lot of the people I'd consider disagreeable to work with are actually so overwhelmingly positive that it makes me feel like a cynical asshole if I don't severely self-censor. To the wrong group, I am the asshole.

> But something feels off when we're justifying our simian prejudices

It does, but in so many ways I feel like I'm trying to swim against the current if I continue down the "kick ass and take names" route vs. the "tread carefully and make sure everyone likes you" one. Even if you're successful at solving "Very Big Problem™" people tend to hate the wrecking ball who doesn't participate in 2:00pm office beers - even if they are getting shit done.

Sorry to interject my own strong feelings here but work isn't about work as much as we like to think... It is my experience at every place that I've worked that SWEs that make the most friends, participate socially, and prioritize their own brand internally are the ones that move up. Practical example: instead of being the person who busts ass to optimize the core Postgres DB (by meticulously sussing out slow queries etc), be the person who starts the Friday book club. Although the former is of way more value to the tangible product, the latter is way more valuable to you socially.

Your outward social narrative is more important than anything these days - this is just work culture anymore.

> people tend to hate the wrecking ball who doesn't participate in 2:00pm office beers

The former (wrecking ball), people will tend to hate. The latter (beers), people should be fine with. I speak from experience on this.

Find out why people perceive you as a wrecking ball and change your behaviour to not actively antagonise your colleagues.

If you do this and it’s not drinking beer in the office that’s holding you back, I’d seriously look for alternative employment. The good news is you’ll be infinitely more employable as a result.

To scratch at it, yeah I'm painting myself here a bit because I'm very annoyed at having to socialize in an office vs. just being able to show up and work. 100% I would rather work through my afternoons than go do team building activities - those things have been more about weird in-group "culture fit" crap vs. growing closer to my coworkers. Going from being a professional in Iowa where this didn't happen as much to California where "tech-bro" is a thing... well let's just say way more weird socializing happens out here.

> If you do this and it’s not drinking beer in the office that’s holding you back, I’d seriously look for alternative employment. The good news is you’ll be infinitely more employable as a result.

Exactly - and that's exactly what I did in the anecdotal situation I outlined above. I promise you though, many places are like this and you will ostracize yourself if you make the same mistakes I did. Keeping your nose down while everyone else is making their buddies is a very bad idea. Apparently, I'm paid to drink, go play minigolf, and race gokarts - sure this sounds like it's awesome to a lot of folks but for this middle aged engineer I just want to finish the work and go home. I have a damn family.

This is part of the reason I felt like work from home was kind of "the great equalizer" via the way it took those who coast by on social capital down and increased the visibility of the non-social high producers. At my firm at least we laid off some middle management who were highly visible but weren't big contributors for specific deliverables during the pandemic.

Outside of that particular bubble, "wrecking ball" carries inherently destructive connotations. Even in positive usage, I've only seen it used to convey creative destruction.

I 100% agree with you but I would say that many places will turn the lack of participation in Friday beers, book club, and gokarting back at you as not being a good culture fit.

I'm from Iowa where the work culture is much different - even for SWEs. I prefer it to this weird "culture fit" environment out here on the coast because I am paid to work, I am paid to be a software professional. I am most happy when I am working, and I am most happy when I am effectively making software that solves people's problems. If I want to stick around and focus on my assigned work I feel that should never turn around and bite me in the ass... It does consistently.

I've made a huge shift in my career where I realize that I have to go against my own wishes and participate in the gokarting, beers, game nights, etc. You have to go - every time. You have to make as many friends there - every time. My career has gotten much easier the more social I've become. I just resent it because I want to do good work, and go home. I have a family god dammit.

I expect the emergence of remote, distributed work to change that in the same way that mass media affected regional dialects.

Clearly this would be a problem, and I understand why people are conflating it with what I am describing because it is both related and relatable.

But, I'm talking about doing your assigned work - maybe calling out the specific Postgres example is why everyone assumes it's just some jackass running off on their own... in the hypothetical I posited I did not mean this. I also did not mean to paint the hypothetical worker staying back at the office as rude/a jackass...

Truly - there are many people who are only interested in keeping their nose down 100% focused on what work is assigned to them vs. the amorphous "culture fit" socializing. Hell - lots of them for fully rational reasons like social anxiety.

Many people want to come to work to work, and then go home.

"kick ass and take names" route vs. the "tread carefully and make sure everyone likes you"

combined with the wrecking ball idea just paints a picture of someone who is grinding to get their work done but not worried about their relationships with or the collateral damage they cause for their coworkers. Reading your other comments I don't think it was your intent, just the way it came off to me at first blush.

The ideal political capital is being the person who saves other people from embarrassing "good faith" screwups. Cynically, bad-faith ones (where they're being derelict or doing something sketchy) on their part can give you some blackmail, but there's a related concept that happens, that I don't really have a name for (whitemail?), where someone just makes an "honest mistake" where they're working in good faith and working hard, but things just go wrong. And you help them out, and guard their reputation. You get stuff like that on your ledger, where you've quietly saved their ass in a tough spot, and it's solid gold.

If you get that snowballing, you can build a "band of brothers" (or some other sappy military meme). It becomes a great environment to work in because you know people have your back, and are defending you; not merely your reputation, but also are defending (through maintenance) the actual quality of your material work.

Machiavelli had it backwards with his classic quote of "it is better to be feared than to be loved" — being loved is what makes it possible for others to fear you. Love is genuine loyalty. Loyalty is genuine political power. And in most organizations, that's really the only thing that makes people fear.

My email is in my profile.

I'm using a throwaway to not associate my email to my usual username.

That being said; a challenge to your statements:

>[. . .] instead we do what we feel is best for us personally, using a fairly emotional and error prone system of judgment [. . .].

My experience has shown that a very cohesive team who like and appreciate each other, but is made of middle-ability individuals is much, much more productive to my measure as the boss than a team comprised of high-ability, but un-cohesive (non-cohesive?) individuals.

Soft skills and the ability to work well together without judgment are both wildly important. In a team of antagonists, it is difficult, if not impossible, to feel comfortable enough to take chances.

Not sure what the challenge is in that statement, but it's in there somewhere.

In my experience it gets harder to do this as organizations grow and become less focused in their hiring strategy.

It really requires a high bar for every single hire. There’s a couple things I try to determine in every interview process:

* is this person comfortable in giving themselves an honest criticism of their own work? If they can’t comfortably find their own faults, they’re not likely to respect when others do it.

* can the person logically entertain an idea without emotionally committing to it? And if they have a bias, do they recognize it? Just with simple stuff: “I’m partial to [insert technology] because I have experience with it” is a great answer, and “[x technology] is what you need to do this” is a red flag.

Very much this - to an extent, you need some deep-divers in places but the non-cohesive teams, I find, end up with a similar performance but lower levels of employee satisfaction.

Having worked in a variety of settings and witnessing varying levels of team performance within those, this is what I, personally, have come to believe is true.

Technical ability and people skills are largely orthogonal. We are just more willing to tolerate poor people skills to get technical ability.

WTF? That's not how it works. The most highly skilled person in the world can also be the nicest person... or a dickhead, just like the nicest person in the world could also have really great skills, or not... there's no necessary relation between the two things.

The opposite is also true for similar reasons - a mediocre individual will be a bad fit in an unusually competent group.

This is almost the definition of cultural fit: people with complementary skills who are all working at more or less the same level.

No one likes outliers because they just don't fit. This has nothing to do with whether or not they're friendly or likeable people.

Not being social is orthogonal to that, and a different problem.

It has everything to do with perceived hierarchy and the level of power and influence they have. They're tolerable as leaders if they have some ability in that direction. But they're intolerable as equals - unless perhaps they can be sidelined into a niche where they won't bother everyone else.

As the unusually competent individual who rarely “fits in”, this hasn’t been my experience. Mutual respect and some humility can bridge any experience gap I’ve encountered. I’m always happy to teach. If someone doesn’t know something, it’s an exciting opportunity to learn.

If someone just doesn’t have the ability, I’ll be gently honest with them and work to find their strengths. Not everyone is cut out for deep work, but everyone has things they are good at.

To do this effectively, I carefully guard my time. I block out at least two 4-hour blocks during the week for my own responsibilities. Usually Tuesday and Thursday at the same time every day.

I manage this with a disability that limits me to 40 hours or less each week. I never overcommit and set expectations early and often. I’ve never been more productive in my career, even before my disability.

Where I live, everyone has this disability :D it's called the law.

If working with a competent person means the rest of the team constantly feels stressed, bullied, aggrandized, looked down on, or whatever else then those people are less likely to perform to expectations which may have more of an impact than the competence gain.

But this is sadly not the case for most workplaces, so why bother working hard? Just do the bare minimum and play politics.

I think it’s about those who’re competent without tact.

The latter might be fun for chatting during a coffee break, but they consume resources while providing little of value which ultimately means more work for you.

Also there's a huge difference between "annoying personality quirks" and the toxic a-holes who are the usual manifestation.

As it turns out most devs are somewhere between 0.8x-1.2x. With a few 2x and 0x outliers. In many roles a 0.8x who plays well with others is vastly preferable to a 1.2x who cannot work as part of a team.

Unless you are at the most prestigious, high paying, selective firm.. then maybe you have possibly higher performing people, but by your selection process they will also be clustered themselves.. just on a different range of the band.

IMO, that’s as it should be, because he’s gravitated/been pushed toward roles where likability matters and contributes to effectiveness.

> I think this is dangerous ground to thread.

He is not speaking to those choosing who to hire, he is speaking to those being interviewed. He's not saying to hire those you like, he is saying you will only be hired if you are liked.

It does suck, but it's been true for me. Making the interviewers like me is at least as important as convincing them of my skills.

I gave my best in all dimension to get hired, the only time I did was because I knew a guy who knew a guy.

[0] I heard that anglo-saxon work ethos was skills first, character second (to an extent)

People are social beings. Part of working together comes from feeling like you want to cooperate. You could have someone who is incredibly smart and clever as your business partner, but will you really feel like you want to go the extra mile for him/her? Do you have to watch your back constantly? Do you have the same goals in life? Does every interaction drain energy from you?

We come from families, social structures. We have people in our families who are incompetent but we love them. It's not unreasonable to think that some of this behavior would continue in our work worlds.

"Diversity" in the trendy usage today, for most people still doesn't trump whether you want to work with someone, and that hopefully doesn't have much to do with race/background/gender/etc. I say hopefully of course, and helping people overcome or not be prejudiced that some characteristic correlates with ability/desire to work with them, is an important thing to do.

But forcing people to believe that someone's <x> characteristic is more important than whether you want to work with them is a recipe for dissatisfaction and backlash against people who insist that it should be so.

If you had this conversation in the real world instead of the internet, everyone would just say "yeah, duh".

It's rather simple. If you apply for a job and get hired because they like you, then the system is good. But if you apply to that job and don't get it, it turns into "fuck this old boys club". The outrage isn't logical, it's almost purely emotional.

I shouldn't have to say this but actual competence matters - without it at best you get stunted potential and mediocrity. At worst the whole thing falls apart like the cliqueish house of cards it is.

Why?

Most people are just trying to get by and enjoy life as much as they can.

I spend 40+ hours a week with the people I work with. I'm absolutely going to optimize for working with people I like more than their competence.

99% of us aren't working on life-or-death projects.

There are studies which show diverse teams are stronger because they bring in differing view points but I also think that they may end up self selecting for those that are empathetic enough to look through others eyes maybe.

Because in large companies you will not work with the people that hired you.

Many successful sport teams were composed by people who openly disliked each other, there's no reason to be likeable if you are not being paid to be liked by others, but there are many reasons to cooperate to the end goal if the team members' salaries depend on it.

For many people being likable in the way it is represented in the article it's more stressful and energy draining than the job itself.

I would go as far as to say that people that can't go through first impressions and work together with someone they don't particularly like (except of course if it's for good reasons) aren't good team members.

But they tend to select each other to not feel alone in being bad team members.

One of my friends has a joke series of posts titled the "32x engineer"[1], one of which is about niceness.

People who aren't nice get routed around when crisis situations happen as adding them to the mix is not pleasant - this is probably different from the extrovert-friendly connotations people pick up in interviews, but a more clear "is this person going to yell at me or help me (first)".

This lesson is probably doubled up in personal life as people have kids and try to get their tweenagers to communicate with them - the "you did WHAT?" reaction is basically equivalent with the not-nice people who are competent, but tired of cleaning up the mess of over years (not realizing their reaction has a long-term impact on what kids think adults do).

The role growth part is also relevant, as people with context don't want to come to you unless they have to, you slowly lose context on what's going on until you are in a basement with a stapler.

[1] - https://twitter.com/tdinkar/status/1149554345077137410

> The role growth part is also relevant, as people with context don't want to come to you unless they have to, you slowly lose context on what's going on until you are in a basement with a stapler.

This is my first to promotions to lead in a nutshell.

People who had been there longer lost context because I categorize some/many fuck-ups as reasonable, and I was good at bailing people out if my advice was wrong. If you broke something, or just thought something was broken (ie, QA) I was least likely to bite your head off. If something I asked you to do exploded, I'd help you fix it.

Technically and emotionally trustworthy people hear about more 'dirt', and many serious architectural problems are hidden in that dirt. If you are technical you can parlay that information into bug fixes (including production outages) and technical initiatives. If you're getting stuff done and people generally seem to trust you (even if they don't like you), then that means they listen when you talk. Your boss would be stupid not to promote you.

The truth is, most jobs don't need the best of the best, problems are not always needing a breakthrough, often it's business as usual, so sufficiently good is good enough, and then you need to be able to collaborate effectively. That latter quality is as important to business success as the former.

In a toxic work environment "sufficiently good" may still be "incompetent".

True story: I once worked for place that at one point hired a front-end engineer who didn't know JavaScript. Nice guy, generally. But from my POV had listening skills that led to friction (and crap output for clients).

I was never able to wrap my head around the fact that within out team was a front end engineer who had no experience with JS. I don't want to work with a-holes but my job / career shouldn't be tied to someone who can't swim.

For real though, how on earth did that org hire a front-end dev who didn't know js?

God knows OpenGL ain't no joke.

Which I mean, if you're good enough for the job, that would be a meet expectations review, which I'd say counts as "good".

So having said that, my experience is that people who aren't at least good enough to get the job done do eventually get fired or stop moving up the latter, even if they are super nice. At least in the software engineering field, don't know about business or management tracks.

One thing that seems to get missed by a lot of people, is that if your profit margins are 90%, that means you can screw up almost every order as long as marketing and sales can bring in enough customers.

I don't care about this, and never will care.

How startups expect to make progress or deliver a groundbreaking products following this inverted psychology is beyond me.

In simple words possible: I have hired people who I don't like naturally only on professional expertise and the value that they delivered to my company was immense.

You cannot learn to be likeable.

You don't need this nonsense. You, as a professional, must learn to communicate and respect people for their skills and accomplishments, not for similarities in music taste, consumer purchases or favorite movies.

All of this crap is produced by companies who want to exploit overtime by creating emotional bonding and subjective preferences. The added "benefit" is that this artificial divide leads to generational hostility and mistrust (which is handy when someone old with experience will try to share useful information to someone young and full with illusions).

I have managed teams of people who didn't like each other at all, and this was not a problem because of clear communication, procedure and company mission.

It's about time, this "cultural fit" nonsense to die. Companies who are operating with this mentality will never produce long-term value. Period.

It's about time, we as a community, to grow up and stop pretending that we are not having a role in growing ageism and tribalism in our industry.

Can you imagine if engineers of the Apollo Program were selected by friendliness?

My goal is to enjoy my life. To a certain extent, bringing value is enjoyable. So I try and work hard and do a good job. But if someone makes my day worse, no matter how valuable they are to my employer, I don't want to work with them.

I just can't imagine hiring someone you know you won't like. I'm not saying every person that's hired has to be best friends, but with the amount of time everyone spends together there should be at least some level of friendship.

With teams going full remote, does it still matter ? There’s people I work with day to day I’ll never meet more that once in a month. Same way there’s people I clearly don’t click with on a personal level, but we’re literally keeping distances.

I feel a lot of these rhetorics will have to change now that the day to day life also has change for so many of us.

You still need to communicate with your coworkers and being able to develop a rapport is a lot easier (for me) if you have at least something in common.

With all due respect, how do you define "makes my day worse"?

If proper communication in strictly professional use-case is present, nobody's day will be defined as "worst" or "better".

Friendship is cool, but is subjective and temporary form of perception. People characters change under pressure or due to personal internal or external events. As always there is exception of this rule, but in general building trust trough honesty and open communication is the better investment.

Respecting someone for knowledge, experience and abilities has long-term value in life and obviously in production reality.

Sure but is that fun? You're still laser focused on sucking value and productivity out of everything.

I spend a MASSIVE amount of time with my coworkers (40+ hours a week!). If they're not fun to work with then I'm leaving.

Does their job in such a way that it runs completely counter to the central mission of running a company/Department, contributes to higher employee attrition, creates more work that has to be undone, etc?

Run into it all the time. They can know their stuff, they can be able to apply it, but if they're a raging, uncontrollable unaccountable jerk, or have a physical odiousness or manner that disrupts the workplace for others, all the skills in the world cannot save you in the course of being hired by me.

We spend a full third minimum of our lives working. When you're responsible for a team, I see it as a serious responsibility to make sure everyone is accommodated for and welcome... Even that though is finite. I call it the "Filthy Breeder Jerk Chicken" exception.

From my experience you cannot select with certainty and from the start with subjective criteria, you can mitigate the problems with right management and proper procedures.

What if someone with high intelligence learns to "act" and implement some "persuasion" tricks?

I had similar experiences with people with "acceptable" skillset and over the top "persuasion" skills who did not bring quality to the company at all. They go along and create "comfort" for others in the name of their own survival and career advancements.

Luckily I am aware of this "phenomenon" and never will accept "friendliness" or other subjective criteria in my company.

From production stand point the problem is that this "friendliness trend" leads to team sentiments and lack of critical thinking.

All of this is mitigated trough clear company culture and requirements. Removing subjectivism and personal preferences is vital for production processes and requires management skills.

May be this is the core of the problem: A lot of tech entrepreneurs don't invest in acquiring management knowledge and go with a path of least resistance - comfort, friendliness and "culture fit".:)

True quality speaks for itself. The fast talkers can be tricky, but as long as you are not overextended that you can't close the loop and eval work product, you can negate that relatively quickly... I learned that the hard way. Also, once you build a solid amount of real, genuine trust with your people; the kind you can't buy with just money, it gets easier.

>Luckily I am aware of this "phenomenon" and never will accept "friendliness" or other subjective criteria in my company.

So you evaluate every hire of yes/no criteria, hmmm? I'm sure HR loves that. Makes their job easy. Good luck with that. I've not had good luck with it. People aren't nuts and bolts. If there is anything I've learned, it's that real force multiplication happens when you start treating people like people, not cogs, one, and two sometimes, the sub-optimal hires can be a net positive in the long run by at least being a shining example of what to look out and forcing you to do things in ways resilient to burning out high performers. Truly resilient and working business processes should be tolerant of candidates of all stripes. If you find yourself needing the cream of the crop all the time, you're running a department as a hot house flower, which means you're on borrowed time.

>All of this is mitigated trough clear company culture and requirements. Removing subjectivism and personal preferences is vital for production processes and requires management skills.

Man is the measure of all things, and woe into they that in hubris or denial forgets it. I applaud the dedication to process, but in my world examples of those others say have "management skills" are either someone willing to have someone else suffer for their decisions, someone with a strong Reality Distortion Field, or those who are just in too deep to be able to back out now. I'll take a candidate with leadership skills over a self-styled manager anyday.

My laser focus is on process. Process is made by humans and quality management requires all of the things you mention.

My reaction comes from reality of today.

Today big portion of tech industry is suffering from bad HR practices and procedures. Combine this with tendency for "cultural fit" preference and you have a crisis.

There are countless qualified individuals who are exiting the workforce because of this. Ageism. Tribalism. Lack of proper communication and "interviews from hell".

Removing this is not hard. The argument for "friendliness" over professional qualities and experience is weak. Professional qualities include ability for adequate behavior but are not the driving force of "cultural fit" criteria.

Cultural fit is actually a narrow qualifier created by HR to serve corporations and startups and hide the ugly true of discriminatory nature of the employee selection processes.

Learning basic social skills is pretty easy for most non-neurodivergent humans

It's about time, this "cultural fit" nonsense to die. Companies who are operating with this mentality will never produce long-term value. Period.

Ah yes, because all the companies that have toxic cultures where nobody likes each other are thriving right? I think as with most things, you need a balance. If you have an active dislike of someone because of rude behavior, the chances that you're able to collaborate and work on something together is nil.

So the solution in your view to select with "cultural fit" first. My solutions is proper management and clear communication without bias.

You are right. It is about the balance. Balance but with preferences towards skillset and adequate professional behavior.

The workplace must be objective place. And to bring a balance, companies must abandon sentimental or "politically correct" agendas. This is place for work. Not some "brotherhood", "family and friends" kindergarten created with subjective selection at the get go.

You go to work to produce value and exchange this for money. If monetary award and participation in value creation process is not enough, and the goal is to model people behavior toward "trends" things will go south fast.

The vast majority of startups are not doing any groundbreaking technology, they're just packaging some crummy REST APIs written in a hairball of messy slow code.

I have a couple coworkers who say, "I haven't heard of any of this," as if it's a statement that a problem doesn't exist, instead of a realization that they're in the dark on something important. It's because one feeds you optimism, and the other is grouchy and writes exhaustingly byzantine code and then doesn't understand why people don't think he's brilliant (I think this is the root of most of the grouchiness).

And the devil is in the details:

- Will ALL of the request be addressed, or will some parts be omitted without the omissions being surfaced explicitly?

- Will this person ask questions and/or look carefully at context to resolve any ambiguities in the ask? Or will they just kind of assume what you mean, ignoring any ambiguity or context that conflicts with their assumption, and not communicate any of the assumptions they made or thought process behind those?

- Will they be thoughtful about unintended consequences of the ask and surface those, or just do literally what was requested, let the shit hit the fan, and blame you if anything goes wrong?

There are so many times where I have thought, "I better add this test here, even though I know I will probably only be the person who knows there needs to be a test here."

And I add the test, as I like to think I can be trusted to do the right thing, even though nobody will in all likelihood see it.

If a tree can fall in a forest, better test it, just in case!

Or the tree falling in a forest test for short

I don't think they miss the point completely when many hiring processes don't test for team cohesion at all beyond a manager pointing a finger in the air and guessing what the fit will be based on a 15 minute talk. Given these people would in the same breath claim diversity in personalities is great and covering each other's weaknesses is essential. That's exactly how we end up with teams where not a single person has the spine to go up against clearly ridiculous requirements (that is assuming any perspective, not just technical), while claiming critical thinking is great.

If people are trying to find someone they like, the current common tech interview process certainly isn't the way to do it. Back when I started, interviewers would ask open ended questions about prior projects that were worked on; explain some mistakes; explain some benefits and made the judgement based on that. That seems like a much better way to find a culture fit as opposed to obscure tech gotcha questions.

The sad part is that many of us struggle with social interactions and end up being unliked despite our best efforts. No one cares about what you achieve, unless it's useful for them, or if they just like you because you "have it".

And the key is to consistently not be an asshole, otherwise those things will accumulate and you will eventually get rejected. (I'm not accusing you of being an asshole.) If you're nice 90% of the time, but lash out or say shitty things 10% of the time, that's more than enough to get eventually rejected.

My son, unfortunately, is like this. 95% a sweet kid but 5% really, really shitty and saying mean things. We are working on it. He started out immensely popular but over the course of this school year, his classmates look at him lukewarm now, instead of being his close friends, and it's entirely his issue.

This sounds so obvious on paper, but in my own experience, things have definitely shifted to include more traits and lower intensity of those traits as "asshole traits". I have no doubt many critical people who do not sugarcoat things and do not spend time trying to curry favor, despite staying stoic and civil, are often seen as negative and told to "be more outgoing / positive / extroverted / etc." Not only does that go against just not going out of one's way to upset people, it also shows the boundaries of what is / isn't an "asshole" can change over time.

I try very hard to remove all emotion and personal judgement with my interactions and treat everyone exactly the same. What is wrong with that.

One thing you have to accept is that there is a problem with the way you communicate. People would not be going to HR if you were as unemotional as you think. So seek out advice and honest feedback from your friends, your coworkers and your family. Maybe you can find an expert in communications that can point out what the flaws are and how to correct them.

But DO NOT sweep this under the rug. There is a problem here, and it sounds like no one wants to help you fix it. That's probably another indication that there's a pretty bad problem.

This is perhaps not the best way for a lot of scenarios. Read a book like How to Win Friends and Influence People. Take every person you work with and list out their best qualities, list out what excites them (work wise and personally as far as you know). Keep these at the forefront of your mind when you talk to them. Have interactions with them within this context.

People like being appreciated, like knowing that others recognize their good qualities. Do it.

I went back to working at a company full of in-demand folks who were secure in their ability, and my style immediately works smoothly again.

Also experienced this. Was very surprised.

I mean - you spend more time with your teammates than you do with your spouse, it's not hard to understand why friendliness is ranked as high importance.

If you've ever REALLY worked with a team full of assholes, you'd get it too. If not, maybe you were one of the assholes.

That said, this isn't a question of whats best for the firm, it's what people prefer in their work environment. Goes along with higher pay, less hours, better benefits.

zero competence will still result in a low level of trust. I think what the article is saying is that its easy to overwhelmingly improve your character at a job you may only have marginal competence at. This boosts your Trust, and in doing so makes you palatable to all but the hard-working tech people with low character and high competence, who view you as a grinning moron they occasionally have to stop to support.

character = trust / competence

I would caution that this not become an invitation to become a Willy Loman. Dead fish float downstream. Wanting to be liked is a recipe for obsequiousness, cowardice, and mediocrity of character. The doormats of the world are people who need to be liked. It is the ethos of the undignified, the dishonest, and the resentful.

We should not care if we are liked. We should care about doing what we ought. One ought not be an asshole, not because you won't be liked (and there is bound to be someone that will like the asshole, btw), but because being an asshole is a defect of character which you should recognize and repair instead.

Of course, the side effect of doing what we ought is the respect of good people, but that is incidental.

It is interesting, but that is me. I am always brought into inner circles. From work to friend's families. People feel like bringing me into folds; it is odd. Maybe it is because I'm trusting, who knows. But what I also find odd is that I don't have a large friend network, so I'm not gaining friends from this odd ability. Strange. </greybeard_ramble>

- nobody wants to come to work (duh but hold on)

- above points creates a constant laziness drag

- the system maintains some socially / somatically critical functions

- hierarchy is function of criticality, the more important, the higher it's gonna propagate

- the rest is fluff that can be delayed, forgotten, half assed

- learn the critical functions by heart, never ever miss them

- to spot them check whenever your superior comes down, and when he talks about his/her superior coming down (remember, people don't care, they don't wanna be here, they never want to come down unless they're forced to)

- then crack jokes with your colleagues

- everybody will ignore you doing nothing, unless critical functions are rolling

ps: your point about hiring/culture-fit is a sad realization to me, they could have told me so after HS.. instead of learning sublinear Fibonacci computations during a master, I'd have spent one year at burning man to be chill. All in all, I kinda agree about the need to fit, humans cannot operate nice if they don't click with their colleagues, it's only gonna lead to walking pressure cookers who cannot make progress. But the lack of honesty around this is staggering

This can't be stated enough

I didn't enter this (at the time) largely solitary profession to have all the best, juiciest parts of the job get taken over by these people-oriented idiots.

There needs to be a revolution that returns programming back into the hands of solitary nerds working on sheer competence. More people need to care about the quality of the final output than whether or not the guy who wrote it is "a nice fellow".

I feel like this is 'participation trophy' culture coming back to haunt us. Stop being so afraid of getting yelled at, anger is a part of life!

There will not be a revolution that eschews the people aspects, the industry has evolved (yes, the opposite of devolved) beyond that. Walking around calling people idiots and being generally angry is not going to win you any trophies either.

But internally, I do not think that having requirements filter through ever-growing and increasingly specialized teams is a net positive. Early in my career I worked directly with stakeholders and shareholders, and I was empowered to build and deploy things that solved their issues, often from scratch. And I did exactly that, and it felt great!

When I quit, I worked mainly with my product manager, who in turn interfaced with god knows how many people, and only receive tasks after they were parceled out and dispatched to me via JIRA, where I could only see a small part of the picture and I was held to arbitrary metrics on performance.

Things were much better when we programmers were a weird and mysterious rainmakers that the higher-ups didn't understand. This newer, more gentrified profession is ... a lot less enjoyable to work in.

> There needs to be a revolution that returns programming back into the hands of solitary nerds working on sheer competence.

sounds and awful lot like the problematic example you described:

> and only receive tasks after they were parceled out and dispatched to me via JIRA, where I could only see a small part of the picture and I was held to arbitrary metrics on performance.

IME, only the simplest technical projects, with completely pre-defined inputs and outputs can be successfully executed by "solitary nerds working on sheer competence", and that's because all the messy work of defining the requirements and managing the uncertainty has been done by someone else.

For even moderately complex projects, you need to work with a team, and being "nice" - which just means not being a jerk - is pretty essential for working even with an all technical team.

Those are highly exceptional cases with specific motivations for their organizational structure (evading the law). They are also a sort of projects that have very few competitors due to their questionable legality, and therefore the organizational structure's effectiveness can't really be compared against regular "licit" software projects.

Would you call Google a moderately complex project? Because Google is very much focused on individuals rather than teams. Sometimes individuals works together, but it isn't required and you can spend your entire career just working on your own separate problems.

Of course Google also has lots of people who are competent at organizing and talking to people, but having a ton of engineers you can give a well defined problem and they will build a great solution without any extra input is still great to have and you can use that to compose reliable solutions to huge problems. There is no reason work groups needs to be teams rather than individuals.

Yes... but Google is my employer of well over a decade, so I might be biased on the complexity of the problems worked on here.

> Because Google is very much focused on individuals rather than teams. Because Google is very much focused on individuals rather than teams. Sometimes individuals works together, but it isn't required and you can spend your entire career just working on your own separate problems.

This is untrue in nearly all of my experience at Google. I'm not sure where you are getting your information from, but it's a big company, so maybe there are some corners where that might be true, but it's far from the norm.

ICs at all levels are expected to do a lot of intra and inter-team communication and collaboration. You could limit your opportunities if you choose to silo yourself.

> having a ton of engineers you can give a well defined problem and they will build a great solution without any extra input

This is what interns and entry-level engineering hires do at Google, with the strong expectation that they move beyond working on unambiguous problems into tackling harder problems with more ambiguous and often conflicting requirements.

> This is what interns and entry-level engineering hires do at Google, with the strong expectation that they move beyond working on unambiguous problems into tackling harder problems with more ambiguous and often conflicting requirements.

Right, they tackle problems on their own, that was my point. They are expected to figure out requirements etc, and ask the questions needed to be asked. That greatly reduces the amount of communication needed compared to the teamwork approach where you split this project up into 10 parts and those are done by different people who go and ask a lot of different questions that then needs to be communicated and then some things were missing so people have to go and ask more things etc.

Communicating with stakeholders and users is very different from communicating with teammates. First and foremost the quantity is much lower, so people who burn out quickly from social interactions can still manage. Lets say a person gets burned out on social interactions after 5 hours a week. That is enough for an hour of meetings a day and then individual work, more than enough to work as a senior engineer at Google (non manager), but that wouldn't be nearly enough to work at most places where you need to communicate a lot just to code.

Many

> Lets take a project you would give to one junior engineer at Google, at a typical large company they would give that to a team of 5

This statement lacks any sort of basis for the 1:5 Google:Non-Google staffing ratio you are quoting. I'm not sure where you are getting it. Even though I work there, I don't think Google engineers are 5x as "effective" as a typical engineer at another large company, they just often deal with problems specific to Google's technology and scale.

If anything, large companies like Google can afford to staff their projects with a deeper bench than smaller companies - in part to mitigate burnout caused by being overworked, but also to maximize knowledge sharing and minimize knowledge silos. It's not a good thing if only the person who wrote a system understands how the system works.

> and then they would need to communicate and talk a lot with each other how to get that project done, all that communication disappears when you work like Google does.

That's not my experience at all at Google. It's the opposite: engineers at all levels communicate and talk a lot with each other to get a project done. In fact, we rely on these conversations heavily to validate our ideas and get constructively critical feedback on our approach. It's wired into the process, from design documents through to code reviews. Very often these can require F2F communications and even negotiations when engineer-time is a constrained resource. So I'm not sure what you mean by "work like Google does".

I guess what I'm getting at is while there are plenty of shitty teams, I wouldn't say it's an indictment on the industry as a whole. After 20-ish years in it, I'm actually optimistic that things are improving as new companies shed more of the traditional command-and-control techniques.

And to their credit, my last team was actually very good. Nice people, all very smart programmers. But the product was still a mess, and corporate's gotta corporate.

>software is ultimately about people.

does not contradict this

>more people need to care about the quality of the final output than whether or not the guy who wrote it is "a nice fellow".

GP is very clearly saying that software has to be written to satisfy customers. It is the process and the quality of outcome they have a problem with, not the focus.

That this invokes the kneejerk response of "well you need to communicate to make products" is arguably a bigger testament of what is wrong with tech. Including the incessant need to label everything with only the smallest details.

What are you doing now?

I am now software-adjacent, working solo. Got sick of the people aspect and the fact that my employer takes 99% of the value I create and then forces me to practically beg for a 5% raise each year

Fuck that industry. I became a programmer because I love computers, not people

I hear you.

thanks for the reply

You are on ycombinator, where there is all the information you need to know on how to capture your value. If I deconstruct your complaint, it is inherently capitalist. If you want to receive profits you need to be a risk-taking owner.

Why is it fair that employees do not get paid what they are “worth”?

Firstly, a startup example. What you perceive as profits, are often the returns for risks. Risks a well paid employee doesn’t take. A VC needs to get 30x* returns from the 1 in 10 successes they get, just to break even on the risk adjusted returns for an investment where capital is locked up for more than a decade. Employee’s risk free wages are sometimes the largest cost for a startup. If you are a very early employee then only you have the incentive to negotiate ownership (and also deal with all the risks of ownership!).

Secondly, an example of an existing business. Apple is a business that makes huge profits: Apple pays as little as possible to create as much profit as possible. A new employee never created the money machine (e.g. Apple), instead the employee joined it long after it was created, and the employee has no right to claim to the profits that the machine creates. Anytime you are late to the party to become an employee of any business, you will struggle to claim profits, and will only receive what you beg for. Capitalism 101.

I know all the above is stating the completely obvious, but your statement is simply not coherent with reality, and that disturbs me. YC is about as capitalist as you can get so your statement seems jarring - HN is one of the few places founders can get good advice.

If you wanted to “get your value”, perhaps join a cooperative (where membership is ownership). Or go to a country where rewards are spread more evenly to everyone. Or parse the benefits of being in the top 1% of the world as your rewards (assuming you work as a programmer in the US, you are likely in the top 1% of earners in the world).

Actually you appear pretty angry, bitter and disappointed with your work. Perhaps investigate if you can learn a new attitude and be more satisfied with what you have. Just becoming an owner is unlikely solve your negative feelings IMHO. Note that I know plenty of people that echo what you are feeling - it is natural and you are definitely not alone!

Disclaimer: I am a well off hippy capitalist that chooses to live in a socialist democratic country. I have been a whiner about wages in the past, and I have had a minor win at the capitalist lottery.

* https://techcrunch.com/2017/06/01/the-meeting-that-showed-me...

PG quote: “Great programmers are sometimes said to be indifferent to money. This isn't quite true. It is true that all they really care about is doing interesting work.”.

Quote from https://corecursive.com/leaving-debian/ ””” Adam: Around this time is when I first heard of Joey. And the thing that caught my interest about him was he looked like this platonic ideal of a hardcore software developer. He was just working on what he cared about and living out in the woods. At the time, everybody was talking about entrepreneurship and startups and how you can work crazy hard as a software developer and make a whole bunch of money, and then you’d be set for life. And here was Joey, and he had been through the first bubble and it seemed like he had cracked the code. He said, you’re looking at the numerator how much money you need to do what you want, but I’m looking at the denominator. I’ve just decreased my cost of living. I made the Zen move, so instead of hitting a big score, I can just do what I want right now. At least this was my impression from the outside. So that’s really the question, I wanted to ask Joey: Was this idyllic life you’ve built in a cabin in the woods as great as it looks?

Joey: There’s always a backstory that might not live up to the romanticism. But I certainly do feel very lucky that I do have a lot of ability to take some time and just think about an idea and then be, okay, I’m going to go spend whatever amount of time it ends up taking, because it’s worth doing this. It’s hills around me here and a few mountains in the distance, but dense forest and I’m kind of down an oval bowl with basically completely isolated from whatever’s going on, except for whatever noise might filter up from the distant road a mile away. And yeah, it’s a very calm and peaceful place. And for me that’s more of just a background thing, I just know that, I can sit down and work for five hours and that’s a really nice thing. And I know that if I need a break, I can go and easily take a walk and refresh my mind. And so yeah, it’s the little things really that make living in a rural place nice. I wish more people have that ability and I feel very, very lucky to have it right now. Who knows how long it will continue. ”””

Being unable to express your opinions without anger or yelling isn't a sign of competence, it's a sign of a mental imbalance.

Children scream and throw tantrums. Adults channel those emotions into productive means or recreational outlets. Adults understand that their colleagues also experience the same frustrations and emotions, and it's unfair to be a messy bitch and pollute the work environment with that garbage.

I really can't imagine thinking someone losing their cool and composure at their job is a sign of competency, of all things...

Ultimately either the better idea or cooler heads prevail, some people are just stubborn and take some coaxing.

It can be whatever angry word you want to call it, but not directed at you, and that's just fine with me.

A cool and collected discussion is preferred, of course.

Often when we feel anger, there is something that needs to be expressed, but the art is in choosing the right moment and expressing it in the right way (which I add is certainly not an art I have perfected!).

And it happens both on the positive and the negative. Nasty people tends to bring more nasty people on board.

"Skin in the game" being the game changer.

1. Can they do the job? 2. Will they like the job? 3. Will I like working with them?

1 and 2 are the easiest to determine, yet we overemphasize it in interview time. We usually save 3 for the last five minutes of any session.

I'll take neutral friendliness, or even slightly unfriendly, + extreme competence, any day.

Except that you can teach them things.

It's hard to teach an unfriendly person anything, and it's impossible to teach an arrogant asshole anything at all, because they think they're better than anyone else.

There are exceptions of course, but friendly and unteachable and unfriendly but very teachable are both very common scenarios. Teaching the unfriendly person might not be fun but it still works.

OTOH, for software, the most important skill is resourcefulness, and that seems like more of an intrinsic property of someone's personality.

I would argue that arrogance ebbs with experiencing or observing failure just enough times.

Failures and their lessons usually correlate with age. However, it is not unusual to find people with enough age and nous yet lacking the graciousness you expect from experts/mentors.

So I'm personally not like that though in most situations. I think it's counterproductive with most people and often rude. I think the above is a bad strategy in more than 60% of cases (scientific number; totally not pulling that out of my ass), because most people take direct criticism personally or become defensive.

However in my closer professional circle I very often prefer uncomfortable no-bullshit type of style. It's simply more _effective_ and clear.

I've heard stories of "brilliant assholes" but once I've peeled back the layers of these stories I always develop a strong impression that the brilliance is a facade.

And the other component is that assholes often times end up dominating rooms and looking brilliant, because they effectively bully others into being silent. For most people, being silent is better then risking the asshole will target you.

Competence is not necessarily linked with a lack of humility.

In my experience, a brilliant asshole is worse. He's less likely to be terminated, and causes problems for everyone. Incompetent people are self aware of their incompetence. Brilliant assholes rarely acknowledge their problem.

The one time I dealt with a brilliant asshole - oh wow. He would be right 90% of the time, but for the remaining 10% there would be no way on Earth you could convince him he was wrong. You could bring evidence, mathematical proof, anything: He just wouldn't listen. It got to me being very careful that he not be around when I'd ask for help - because he often misunderstood my problem and would then insist I implement his solution, and there was no way I could convince him that he misunderstood the problem statement. If I ignored him and implemented a different solution, he would throw a loud tantrum. And he had no stake in my work - we were working on different projects.

I spent two years in that team and every time he acted up I started documenting it.

I never complained (it was clear the manager didn't want to deal with people problems), and on the outside I didn't let my frustration show. I now hear that another member of that team is really complaining to the manager about him. I reached out to him and let him know that if he wants to escalate with HR, I have plenty of material to provide.

The one nice thing with incompetent people is you at least look better when it comes to reviews. I know in one job I had I ended up slacking quite a bit, but I knew it wouldn't hurt me because they had quite a few people at my grade level who were just plain incompetent. Management isn't going to give the whole team a poor review.

Except of course for the perfectly (if narrowly) competent but decidedly jerkface and/or outright asshole teammate. Who is even more likely to get a pass for being such a "rainmaker". Or because "it's crunchtime and we need all the firepower we can get our hands on".

Which was basically the article's point.

What about a very competent but toxic personality who ends up preventing contributions from other team members, because when they contribute they get belittled or bullied?

At worst, the former is a neutral in his overall contributions, whereas the latter will be a net negative.

No, with an extra teammate the expectations on your team increases, so you have to work hard enough to pay for that guys salary as well.

Lets extend this a bit, would you prefer to work in a team with 5 incompetent but nice persons who don't contribute anything, so your work has to be enough to pay all their salaries, or would you want to work with 5 assholes who work hard enough that you can slack all day because they pick it up? I'm sure a majority would prefer the second scenario, the first scenario would lead to burnout really quickly and soon they will call you the toxic asshole genius.

I've worked with people that refuse to do anything in git other than commit, which means:

    - new copy of the repo every time origin changes
    - spending a week manually rebasing a dozen commits (obviously with many unique mistakes each time)

and refuses to upgrade their monitor from 1366x766 even after being given the money to do it, because "it's not necessary"

This reminds of people who try to defend someone accused of incompetence: "but s/he's so nice!"

If you could translate "friendliness" and "competence" into equivalent units, I think competence would be devalued compared to friendliness, at least once you get into negative values (e.g. for every extra point of unfriendliness, you need 5-10 competence points to make up for it).

The easier you make doing my job (eg, I can get my work done without you adding bullshit code that I need to make my way around), the more I’m willing to forgive almost anything.

Just be invisible to my work plans for the day, and we’re all good.

Did you met unfriendly and incompetent? Cause those really sux.

The worst is "jerk, average competent, but people who don't work directly with him assume he is genius because he is jerk".

This is the wrong way of looking at things. You shouldn't compromise on friendliness and you shouldn't compromise on competence. If you have to compromise, you compromise a little bit on both but not too much on either. An unfriendly teammate is very bad.

If they ask for help and won't just go missing for a week or something like that, then its not a big deal if they need some hand holding on a more complex task. Reliably mediocre is better than unreliable, any day.

Anecdata: colleague of mine at least twice a week reboots production servers during the day, sometimes by themselves, sometimes along with their ESX-hosts...

His response? "Oops."

Does he ever learn from it? Doesn't look like it...

I mean, i'm not exactly working at a hospital or something - i.e. no peoples lives on the line, but try to explain for the n-th time to someone whose last hours work was lost because someone couldn't be bothered to check if he can reboot that server now or not?

Not to mention that the "research paper" industry is often very manipulated, inaccurate, and sometimes downright fraudulent. Ironically, also discussed on HN once a blue moon.

What I am saying is, do site the "research papers", but don't use that to shut down an argument. It's a clue, not a fact.

So this is about what people prefer in their MBA program study group. While I do, personally, think that kindness is super important in work colleagues as well, this study doesn't particularly address that.

By toxic culture, I mean:

- Poor communication

- Abrasive or toxic personalities

- Bullying and harassment

etc.

I think that in most normal people, stressors like those can affect their performance. And I don't mean full-blown hazing rituals - even more subtle actions (poor communication, for example) can lower morale. More so if you feel that said poor communication is deliberate.

I was actively looking for a new job when he quit, and it was such a relief. My productivity (and happiness) went through the roof, and a couple months into the year my manager told me that I'd already accomplished everything he hoped I'd accomplish _for the year_.

By exchanging a some technical skill for a better work environment our whole team benefitted.

And I couldn't agree with you more. As long as a set level of competency is there, I'd rather work with friendly people than a bunch of know-it-mosts that don't know tact.

* Just, generally more enjoyable and productive experience. Most things are really not that important, particularly in school (which is where this experiment was run). And anyway, the purpose is often not to be optimally productive, but to learn something. If you are in a class where you are just clinging to some rockstar and getting A's that way, you don't have to learn anything.

* Lots of technical decisions are really not very important. Your first solution will probably not be great anyway. It is preferable to get the group to agree on something and move forward. This can be done by having some very competent, less nice person ram their solution through, but a nice, semi-competent group with a good dynamic can also agree on a bad solution, mess it up, and iterate until it works.

* Most people are really not that competent as far as I can tell. I mean, I've met people who can carry a team individually, but they are very rare, not common enough to plan on. People with more ego than talent are more common I think, and they have a net negative value in many cases. A friendly, incompetent person is at worst a minor distraction.

There are well-meaning jerks who are just rough around the edges but care a lot about doing the right thing. I might not like them very much, but I'll take a competent jerk over someone whose integrity I don't trust no matter how competent or polite they are.

People get the benefit of the doubt until they lose it.

Does anyone remember the way football teams used to be assembled in school? Two team captains would each take turns to pick teammates from the rest of the students. I don't recall 'friendliness and trustworthiness' being necessarily the top qualifiers.

But everyone knew who was good, and they were picked first regardless of actual friendships, since games would feed into decisions about who made the school team, particularly captain.

In my experience there was some prestige in winning, and particularly in picking a winning team, and that would feed into who was picked for the school team.

When the stakes are low, you can can choose to be among friends. When the stakes are higher, you need to work, perhaps less comfortably, with greater talent.

   Very unfriendly, somewhat friendly, very friendly.
   Very untrustworthy, somewhat trustworthy, very trustworthy.
   Incompetent, average, very competent.

If you imagine friendliness and competence is correlated I would also imagine you'd get rid of a lot of the competent people as well.

Unfortunately more research would be needed to assert or refute this hypothesis. Anecdotally I'd say friendliness and competence are positively correlated, but not very strongly.

---

To put it another way, if you have a team of people. Will you team as a whole receive more benefit from someone very competent but ultimately toxic and ruins the culture or somewhat incompetent but very friendly?

If you're just working the 9-5, and aren't in the blast radius of your coworker, of course you'll care a lot more about sociable traits than quality of work.

As a manager, it's a lot easier and more enjoyable to work with higher competency people, that's for sure. Though I will say, that I'd trade a certain level of competency for general attitude/friendliness. Some people are quite good but difficult to manage.

Don't think these results should be surprising.

"People managers" prioritize interpersonal manageability while owners / "sufficiently incentivized" / technical managers have more weighting towards competency and execution performance.

At either end of the "sociable vs competent" spectrum (a reduction for sure), an underperforming or rude colleague will invariably decrease output from ordinary team members. The impact variable must be closely monitored and responded to.

Quarterly eNPS-type feedback helps keep these cycles tight.

edit: quotes

Why's that?

Here on HN there are Ask HN threads every few months about one cofounder trying to get rid of another competent, but toxic cofounder.

I'm speaking moreso from the perspective of a manager in a larger org. It depends on the context of course, but working with junior or less capable people can turn into a micromanaging by necessity kind of situation.

e.g. need to be very specific about design/implementation details when providing direction. Versus somebody who is highly competent, you can generally just give a high level direction and leave it to them to fill in the blanks.

The goal is never to micromanage, obviously, but if you have a lots of design decisions to make, it can be necessary to have tight control over those decisions to maintain quality. This situation can become draining to manage.

This is where formal processes and agile etc become important. But if you have a team of all highly capable and motivated people, you can have much looser processes and yield better results. Don't need to specify every detail of every task up front.

I'm approaching this as a manager who is more heavily involved in the technical side... but in other situations, it might be the tech lead doing these things.

But I'd for sure take somebody who's friendly and nice to work with over a highly competent but abrasive person. There's a middle ground there...

For example, in retail sales, the ability to project 'friendliness' is very helpful in client relations, hence in sales margins. This doesn't translate into 'trustworthiness', i.e. not selling your company's IP t o the competition, etc. However, part of the definition of a 'competent salesperson' is the ability to project friendliness regardless of one's actual opinion of the client.

So, part of the general definition of 'competence' in technical jobs should be the ability to keep interactions professional regardless of circumstances (while not tolerating actually abusive behavior).

For example, I prefer not working to working. I think most people are like me. And, yet, work needs to be done.

This isn't an idle thought. People find other people friendly when they don't make them work very hard and don't hold them accountable to objective goals.

I think a big contributor in both cases is that people are late to report problems in the horror story cases because the inevitable public beat down was so dreadful, plus the decision times drawn out by inevitable arguments delayed progress.

Where on the generally joyful teams, people that were struggling would report that to get help early, and when the inevitable changes were required, the discussion and decision cycles were shorter, because, less shouting.

This is purely my life experience, nothing more, nothing scientific about it, but that is what I have encountered along the way.

If the team as a whole, trusts the members of the team, and the interpersonal stress level is low, work goes better.

I know that all just seems to make common sense, but it is amazing how one or two confrontational members, particularly at decision making/managerial levels, can hinder an organization.

I wonder how the results would vary for a mid-level manager in $BIGCORP vs. a founder hiring for the company he spent his life building.

I got much better performance reviews and much better promotions when I spent nearly all my time watching and responding to emails, compared to when I kept my head down and got things done.

People really, really like people who reply right away to emails.

Bs aside, its best to have ppl publicly demo what they’ve built regularly. Quickly incentivizes the dialogue to not be about political favors and instead to be about whats gotten done.