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"... You see this often when engineers meet. If the group is new, and haven't established a status hierarchy already, they will quickly start throwing jargon ar

"... You see this often when engineers meet. If the group is new, and haven't established a status hierarchy already, they will quickly start throwing jargon around at each other, to show who is more knowledgeable and try to make others look stupid. ..." Great observation. Mean girls and Queen-bee behaviour in engineers ~ http://www.amazon.com/Queen-Bees-Wannabes-Boyfriends-Realities/dp/0307454444 http://www.amazon.com/Queen-Bees-Wannabes-Boyfriends-Realiti... "... But there is an upside to it. ..." In the natural world, "status hierarchy" is used to protect the integrity of groups at the expense of pions. So there is upside. You see it in Bees for example: ~ http://www.thaindian.com/newsportal/sci-tech/researchers-unravel-secret-of-queen-bees-behaviour_100227498.html http://www.thaindian.com/newsportal/sci-tech/researchers-unr... "... I think it is necessary to emphasize that this extends to professional domain knowledge. It is absolutely unacceptable to put anyone down because of their religion, sex orientation, skin color, or body shape. ..." It's naive to think telling people "they are full of shit" won't have repercussions. If opinion is disregarded with such emotion it will have negative impacts on the team and team members. Queen bees use "homovanillyl alcohol" (HVA) to chemically interfere and suppress worker drones. Maybe in human teams, status is enforced through social pressure? "... Evolution has provided queen bees with a chemical that selectively blocks aversive learning but leaves reward learning intact ..." Now that's an idea worth exploring. How to knock down potentially inefficient ideas more efficiently?

rdtsc 17y ago
> It's naive to think telling people "they are full of shit" won't have repercussions. Yes, it does have repercussions. It usually doesn't come to that. But the benefit outweighs the repercussions. It creates a level of trust between us, because we cut through bullshit and passive aggressive "fake niceness". We yell at each other, but then we also apologize to each other. We mitigate the repercussion by screening heavily based on personality when we hire. When we hire people we make it explicit that this is the environment. Candidates spend a whole day with us, we go to lunch together, we do a debug session, we ask them to participate in some mock-up or simple design spec with a group of engineers and white-board. Some otherwise good engineers didn't end up working for us because we didn't like their personality, some were terrified that we threw the "f" word around too much, some thought us as not too "politically correct". So far this has worked for the company for 20 years, I've been with them for 3 years and I really like it.

rdtsc 17y ago

> It's naive to think telling people "they are full of shit" won't have repercussions. Yes, it does have repercussions. It usually doesn't come to that. But the benefit outweighs the repercussions. It creates a level of trust between us, because we cut through bullshit and passive aggressive "fake niceness". We yell at each other, but then we also apologize to each other. We mitigate the repercussion by screening heavily based on personality when we hire. When we hire people we make it explicit that this is the environment. Candidates spend a whole day with us, we go to lunch together, we do a debug session, we ask them to participate in some mock-up or simple design spec with a group of engineers and white-board. Some otherwise good engineers didn't end up working for us because we didn't like their personality, some were terrified that we threw the "f" word around too much, some thought us as not too "politically correct". So far this has worked for the company for 20 years, I've been with them for 3 years and I really like it.