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People often use "its just my personality" as an excuse for bad behavior. Intuitively I think most people know that you have control over your behavior at the v

• refulgentis 10y ago
  Over time, it seemed to me there was a strong correlation between the technical expertise of my co-workers and their ability to neuter anti-social behavior. To be fair, I went from poorly funded startups and contracting work to BigCo.
• tw04 10y ago
  I've always wondered, given this "stereotype" if there isn't more to it. Is it possible that because, in general, people who were "nerds" were likely more of a social outcast growing up, that they have essentially become "hardened", if you will, to social graces. They spent so much of their developmental years being teased/ridiculed/whatever that what is "normal" treatment of others has essentially become foreign to them? Sure, you can form a relationship with your family, but that really doesn't extend to how you interact with people outside of your inner circle. There seems to be such a strong correlation, curious if anyone has ever studied it. It seems we've gotten to the point that so very much of our adult behavior can be traced to childhood events/upbringing that this can't be an outlier.
  • sametmax 10y ago
    +1. Most asocial persons I know have been raised that way by society. Now you want them to undo what took years of training. This is hard. And unfair.
    • mseebach 10y ago
      That is true, but irrelevant. "He had a hard time in school, so we should tolerate him being an asshole" won't really fly. Many racists were probably raised that way by society, too, and undoing that is probably both hard and unfair - but necessary and a reasonable prerequisite for being a part of polite society.
      • tw04 10y ago
        I think you're missing the point. "Being racist" is pretty easy to nip in the bud. Telling someone not to be mean to someone else just because they're insert non-white race is easy. Telling someone "when you say X, that doesn't even occur to you might be offensive, it upsets other people". Now repeat that for a thousand different social interactions, and tell me how easy it is. "Don't be an asshole" is what? "Being an asshole" means different things to different people. THAT is the core of the issue. For instance: I've got coworkers, who if they screw something up, I can just straight up say - that was wrong, do it this way next time, then we won't have an issue. For other coworkers that direct interaction would be the absolute end of the world. And instead you have to tap dance around until you eventually get to a state where you're fairly certain they know not to do what they did again. Would it make me an asshole for not knowing one person can handle direct feedback, and others can't? Is it "being an asshole" for telling someone factual information without sugar coating? I don't think so, plenty of people out in the real world do, however. And, quite frankly, most of the people who want direct feedback consider people who tapdance assholes because so much effort is wasted on getting to the point.
        • apinstein 10y ago
          Great analysis! Have you heard of the Birkman personality assessment? One of the components it measures is exactly what you describe (they call it Esteem). It doesn't make you an asshole (intent) not to know that, but it does make your interactions less effective to not work "with the grain" of that dynamic. At our company everyone takes the Birkman and we train everyone on how to leverage the knowledge it provides on your personality style and how that intersects with others' style. Whenever you're having trouble in an interpersonal interaction with someone, you can think about / looks at the profile and tweak your approach to improve things. It had been incredibly effective for making it easier, more effective, and more pleasant to work with others.
  • ArkyBeagle 10y ago
    There is a scene in "Better Things" where Sam's oldest expresses a dread of the future because she'd spent all her time "being social" and felt unprepared. This when the school counselor had demonstrated that her options for college were quite limited. This appears to be still encouraged, or at least not discouraged.
  • dpark 10y ago
    I think this is mostly an effect of nerds not wanting to be exclusionary and therefore enabling this kind of behavior. If you're a nerd and you're kind of a prick, other nerds will tend to excuse it rather than just pushing you away. They'll disregard your behavior and keep inviting you to events. They'll ignore the fact that you're unpleasant when bonuses/promos are being handed out at work because it should be based on merit, as if there's no merit in behaving sociably. They'll generally look the other way because the alternatives are to be confrontational (which most people, including nerds, don't want to do) or to exclude you. On the other hand, if you're not a nerd and you act like a prick, people will just start to cut you out of their lives. You won't get invited to social events. You probably won't get promoted because no one wants to work with you. Your behavior will impact your life. You can be a prick and be successful, but it's harder, because you have to balance it by being really good at something else. You're an amazing salesperson so you get rewarded despite being unpleasant. You're wealthy so people hang out with you even though you're rude. The bar for nerds looking the other way seems to be lower. You're rude, but that's just how you are. Obviously there are limits even for nerds, but the limits seem to be pretty high.
    • g00gler 10y ago
      Why not both?
      • qball 10y ago
        To someone with an uncommon interest (a "nerd", in other words, though nerdy interests tend to require higher-than-average intelligence to possess), people with that interest are hard to find. Once you finally meet someone sharing that interest, and it turns out that they act like a prick, you have a difficult choice (if you value sociable behavior over the opportunity to be social at all; willingly choosing isolation is frequently not a tenable position). The cost and stakes for confrontation (and exclusion) are higher than it is in a "nerdier" group than for people with more common interests, simply because of the lack of people who are capable of the interest in the first place. So, more bad behaviors are tolerated. It's also worth noting that "bad" covers both "weird" and "malicious", which is also why groups with these interests tend to be much more accepting of people with other interests outside of those standard for the surrounding society. The feedback loop is as such less; personality quirks don't get as rounded-off as they would in a less-exclusive group, so any conversions from asshole -> non-asshole in a small community will take longer if they even happen at all. So, it should be no surprise that individuals more aware than most of the fact that "good people are hard to find" are willing to make certain sacrifices to retain them. For individuals whose interests and abilities involve a larger cross-section of the population, however, people are much more interchangeable, so excluding weird/malicious behavior is much easier. As an example, consider the tech community's recent trend of attempting to exclude speakers with non-standard political views from conferences. The arguments for doing so come from people with the mindset that technology experts are interchangeable (which is valid in some areas), the arguments against it come from those who see technology experts as an unusually scarce resource (which is valid everywhere else in the world).
• _0ffh 10y ago
  I'm not familiar with that meme, and I wonder how it came to be. Maybe from people who got on the nerves of others who do not suffer fools or lazy people gladly? Personally, I work in a environment where most of my colleagues are also engineering professionals, and most everyone is friendly and helpful. And while probably being the most stereotypical tech nerd in my department, I still get occasional commendations for my good team play. BUT... even I will not for long put a good face for lazy whiners who would have me do their job for them, and hold their hand through every trivial aspect of things they should either already know, or be able to figure out for themselves with a bare minimum of brains and effort. And, unfortunately, those people are not quite unheard of.
  • dpark 10y ago
    The meme is that tech people are generally just assholes. It is a pretty common meme, but I don't think it's actually true. Very few of the tech people I know are actually assholes. Most are quite pleasant, even the ones that are socially awkward.
    • mseebach 10y ago
      It's rare now, but probably less so in the 80s/90s. The BOFH meme didn't come from nowhere, and there's also the quite strikingly sudden exodus of women from the field to consider.
      • dpark 10y ago
        BOFH comes at least in part from putting people who don't want to do customer service into what are effectively customer service roles. You see this at food service locations where someone who hates customers ends up interacting with them. They end up being unpleasant. For roles like food service, the person eventually either gets fired or learns to be socially reasonable. For technical support roles, this behavior gets a pass unless it's really egregious because the employee is supposedly hired for technical ability and not hospitality. Plus in these roles the "customer" is often another employee who's basically captive. So largely this is the result of messed up incentives. You see the same issue, e.g., at the DMV. Largely the employees are fine, but there are always several who clearly don't want to be there and a couple who are actively unpleasant. The incentives are set up to enable this because customer service is not "job 1". The customers are captive and there's little pushing out unpleasant employees. The relative lack of women is probably multifaceted but to the extent that it's related to antisocial geeks, I again think it's more to do with enabling the behavior than with the volume. A very small portion of the population can do severe damage if the rest allow it.
• awfgylbcxhrey 10y ago
  There is a weird meme that tech people aren't capable of being "team players" or working with other people. This is purely anecdotal, but at one particularly memorable company, the head of HR would regularly make casual comments that cast the engineers as socially incapable and childish. Meanwhile, she was constantly offending people and her life was a chaotic mess. At the same company, they always talked about team this and team that, but efforts to actually incorporate the team (e.g. clear communication, collaboration) were obviously seen as weak, and the "arrogant know it all" persona was rewarded. I don't know how many of these things are simply cognitive dissonance, or poor communication, and which are deliberate efforts to gain power over others. Seems like a little of all three to me. I also think it's a convenient way for technically incompetent management to lord something over you. They may not understand your technical contributions, but they can finish the review by mentioning how you need to work on some undefined and arbitrary social aspect.
  • pjc50 10y ago
    "Not a team player" is a common euphemism for "won't compliantly do what I tell them". (A common cause of these complaints is people hearing "we can't do that" as "we won't do that", mistaking impossibility for insubordination)
    • 77pt77 10y ago
      The common retort is that nothing is impossible.
  • 77pt77 10y ago
    > they always talked about team this and team that, but efforts to actually incorporate the team were obviously seen as weak, and the "arrogant know it all" persona was rewarded. These are usually techniques to weed out people that the people defending those strategies think (consciously or not) are unfit. If you follow the advice you really are unfit and they will exclude you. This is common across the board in social situations.
    • awfgylbcxhrey 10y ago
• deleted 10y ago
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• ArkyBeagle 10y ago
  "Being a team player" may be meant to include being intellectually dishonest and/or groupthink.
• underwater 10y ago
  It is a really counter productive meme. My theory is that engineers are so comfortable using logic to solve problems, and viewing solutions as right or wrong that they fail to adapt when there are shades of grey. Get a bunch engineers in a room and they'll argue forever about a solution because they don't understand their own biases or how emotion is clouding people's judgement. Bringing a bit of empathy can resolve these impasses so much more quickly. The most effective technical people I've met have combined intelligence with an ability to get people on board with their vision.
  • mememachine 10y ago
    >It is a really counter productive meme. My theory is that engineers are so comfortable using logic to solve problems, and viewing solutions as right or wrong that they fail to adapt when there are shades of grey. Youre going wrong trying to paint engineers with a brush this broad.
    • underwater 10y ago
      In my experience engineers will discuss if a solution is correct or incorrect, as though there is one global truth. But I rarely see discussions that acknowledge people have biases and that leads to differing opinions on correctness. I follow some developer advocates on Twitter who get very angry at engineers who don't prioritise web performance above everything else (UX, accessibility, features, actually shipping code). Given their experience battling bad performance all day every day this is understandable. But from the perspective of someone who is trying to juggle a million priorities this comes across as crazy.
  • wfbbiue 10y ago
    "republicans see everything in black and white, democrats see every shade of grey"
• bambax 10y ago
  Absolutely. In a great text written in 1880, Émile Littré, author of a great French dictionary that took him over 15 years to write, says this: > je suis corrigible, ayant de bonne heure compris qu’il était peu sage de répondre aux suggestions d’amendement «Je suis comme cela» [1] > I can change, having grasped early that it's not very clever to answer "that's just how I am" to people giving you life advice [my translation] [1] https://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Page%3AEmile_Littre_-_Etudes_et_glanures_-_Didier%2C_1880.djvu/427 https://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Page%3AEmile_Littre_-_Etudes_...
• umberway 10y ago
  My thought is that 'nerds' collaborate better despite poorer than average understanding of fellow humans. It's because their work and its success or failure are more objectively defined which makes organising and delegation of tasks relatively straightforward. So we can have thousands of scientists and engineers building the Large Super Hadron Collider while a Liberal Arts Department may be beset by bickering and feuds.