8 ms·

The best employees are not the agreeable ones

cortexia3 8y ago
Cool, I just need to get my boss to read this.
- Etheryte 8y ago
  Being disagreeable doesn't necessarily make you a good employee.
jxub 8y ago
Usually, the employee screening at the entry level relies on assessment of education history of the prospect. The problem is that educational excellence often selects for agreeableness, as there is no real reward of contrarianism in education. From bullshit Liberal Arts essays where you are graded in function of the level of endorsement of the brain farts of the professor in question to even the CS projects that are supposed to be made in a specific technology, often some JavaEE crap avoiding using more powerful languages or ecosystems like Python, Elixir or Clojure. I wonder how many billions has the economy lost as a result.
- dsajames 8y ago
  Not true. A CS degree from say, UIUC has no correlation to agreeableness I can see. I can't count the amount of jerks I knew in school. Cockiness, yes. Sometimes brilliant, yes. The few girls in the CS program could easily verify the lack of agreeableness.
  - trentmb 8y ago
    Yeah, I was a student at math.illinois.edu, but did a CS minor- man, that major had the highest proportion of fuckheads I've ever encountered.
- eeZah7Ux 8y ago
  > I wonder how many billions has the economy lost as a result. Not a meaningful metric. The world is creating plenty of fake jobs and inefficiency to justify occupation.
- continuational 8y ago
  It is a very poor CS curriculum that requires the use of a specific framework; what does JavaEE has to do with science? Nothing. And even as vocational training, would you hire somebody who went to school to study a framework?
  - EpicEng 8y ago
    So anyone can use any language for any assigent. How many runtimes do I need to install to grade your program? Howany languages do I need to know? How many frameworks do I need to understand? It's a problem of practicality. I agree that any CS course focused on a tech stack instead of CS concepts is a poor one, but that's not the only reason we see specific languages being mandated.
- JumpCrisscross 8y ago
  > educational excellence often selects for agreeableness Only to a limited degree. "The average relationship of academic performance with Conscientiousness (d = .46) can be seen as a medium-sized effect, the relationships with Agreeableness (d = .14) and Openness (d = .24) as small effects, and the relationships with Emotional Stability and Extraversion as relatively minor" [1]. Moreover, given "correlations with Agreeableness were least affected by controlling for intelligence" (page 26) and "increasing age was associated with declining correlations with Agreeableness" (page 29), one could argue that better-educated individuals will be more Agreeable (per the Big Five model [2]) solely due to being older. More likely is interview performance, as "Agreeableness, Conscientiousness and Emotional Stability are all associated with social desirability (Digman, 1997), which has also been shown to affect performance ratings (Murphy & Cleveland, 1995)" (page 36). [1] https://research-repository.griffith.edu.au/bitstream/handle/10072/30324/54018_1.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y https://research-repository.griffith.edu.au/bitstream/handle... page 22 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits
- grigjd3 8y ago
  I found assholes regularly got good grades.
- evgen 8y ago
  > The problem is that educational excellence often selects for agreeableness, as there is no real reward of contrarianism in education. Simply not true. Perhaps at second-tier and below schools this happens, but at a good university you are rewarded for contrarianism that can support itself with good arguments. You aren't rewarded just for being a contrarian, so no one is giving you free points just for saying 'you're wrong' without a coherent argument supporting your case. If your education history is being scrutinized then the filter usually consists of 'I have heard of this university' && 'did graduate'; if your grades actually come into the discussion then you either are probably not qualified for the job or probably don't really want take the job even if they make an offer.
extralego 8y ago
As a disagreeable giver, I have learned to accept a lot of things, mainly that I am widely misunderstood. A funny thing I’ve come to learn is to always seek employers who are themselves committed and passionate beyond convention. The gap between the results of finding such an employer and working for an average drone spans the almost the entire spectrum. Passionate people always get me, and I think they have been greatly rewarded for it. I will do anything for those people; I’ll even knowingly waste their time if I really like them, but that’s asking a lot.
- staticautomatic 8y ago
  I like to call our approach "radically earnest."
  - strictfp 8y ago
    Radical candor.
  - nso 8y ago
    I generally try to go by this approach as well, which I have found to create for some interesting situations after moving country. I come from Norway, where speakig up if something is wrong is highly encouraged, and you will most of the time be able to directly jump org levels with your conserns without anyone getting sour. People seem to genuinly want to contribute in the best way available, and work to that end. Mexico is my new home, which can be best generalized and summed up as a macho culture where people mind their own business and don't want to rock the boat (might be a regional thing, tho. The south where I live is very mañana mañana). Being afraid of speaking up is not encoded in my genes, so I've quite a few times called out injustices when I see them, and peoples reactions are a funny mix. I luckily have found a company to work for that has one of those dreamer bosses that OP mentions, and I find myself having a lot of influence on the business simply because I speak up.
- erric 8y ago
  Personally I have observed that people generally misunderstand passion and confuse it for aggression, or even outright anger.
pcmaffey 8y ago
Related: The best employers don't seek out and promote agreeable employees.
- JumpCrisscross 8y ago
  > The best employers don't seek out and promote agreeable employees The best employers know when to hire agreeable employees. "It may be that agreeableness may aid performance in some jobs but be a limitation in others... Evidence supports a link between agreeableness and prosocial work behaviors (Chiaburu, Oh, Berry, Li, & Gardner, 2011). Such a link exists, at least in part, because agreeable individuals are motivated to maintain positive interpersonal relationships with others (e.g., Barrick, Stewart, & Piotrowski, 2002). This is particularly important when considering group activity. Graziano, Jensen-Campbell, and Hair (1996) found that agree- able individuals reported higher levels of liking toward a randomly assigned partner. Most relevant to the current study, Mount et al. (1998) found that agreeableness was positively related to performance for service jobs requiring dyadic interactions. However, some agreeableness characteristics—namely, the eagerness to cooperate and avoid conflict (Goldberg, 1990; McCrae & Costa, 1990)—suggest that agreeable individuals might struggle in competitive environments." [1]. Also, "agreeableness more positively predicted job performance in jobs requiring attention to detail and involving independence in completing work" (page 11670. [1] http://leeds-faculty.colorado.edu/dahe7472/Judge%20and%20zapata%201149.full.pdf http://leeds-faculty.colorado.edu/dahe7472/Judge%20and%20zap... page 1155
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
k_vi 8y ago
The best I've worked with have a knack for presenting making their contrary ideas agreeable. While the jerks assume they are being attacked for their beliefs, the smart ones understands the value of group effort.
- awinder 8y ago
  Yeah being an X employee is setting a low bar. Behavior has to be adapted on a situational basis, and if you can’t, that’s a problem across the spectrum. Though if I had to pick favorites I would totally go for agreeable giver who wields the other 3 roles for impact :-).
- notabee 8y ago
  This is so important. Picking one's battles and being diplomatic is just as important to getting things done as being correct. If you create a lot of noise over minor things, no one will want to listen when it's something critical.
EastLondonCoder 8y ago
I have managed a disagreeable giver. I very much appreciated his upfront style and his passion. But whenever he was exposed to the rest of the organisation people took him as hostile and arrogant. Ultimately me backing him made me untenable. Moral is that working with contrarians are good but be careful.
lordnacho 8y ago
There's another point that's relevant. If someone isn't producing the goods, they need need to make themselves liked somehow. Joke around, pat people on the back for whatever they do, generally act positive. That way people might not notice they're not pulling their weight. This happened at a place I worked at, and it was compounded by the others being too agreeable to call him out. When I eventually did it ended badly for me.
- JumpCrisscross 8y ago
  > If someone isn't producing the goods, they need need to make themselves liked somehow In competitive work environments, I've seen this heuristic overcorrect more often than be right, i.e. the nice person is assumed to be incompetent. Having worked on a trading floor, where niceness was not valued, and on teams with nice people with whom one could vent, reconsider interpersonal disputes or bounce ideas off (in terms of how others on the team might see a proposal), I strongly preferred the latter.
sanderjd 8y ago
I'm always skeptical of things like this that attempt to distill the full range of human personality and behavior into a simple table with four values. I haven't done any studies, but I feel like this sort of thing is disprovable by simple counter-example: as soon as I come across a single person who does not fit into this box, the universality of the box is already clearly wrong. I've come across many such people, whose behavior in the work place can't be described by the combination of two adjectives. (In fact, it's the only kind of person I've come across.)
- jey 8y ago
  The intention is to offer one more useful framing to look at the world with (along with all the other ways of understanding things). I think you're asking for too much if you're looking for an exhaustive and irrefutable universal classification theorem like those found in more mathematical fields.
  - sanderjd 8y ago
    I'm not asking or looking for that, I'm quite happy to accept the complexity of individuals and attempt to understand them on their own terms rather than trying to categorize them into a quadrant.
- cup-of-tea 8y ago
  It is implicit in things like this that it's a generalisation suitable for discussing the case in point and not actually trying to describe the full spectrum of human behaviour. You should (and clearly do) know this. Generalisations are very powerful. I know they are unfashionable because everyone is unique and special, but you won't get very far without them. Individuals are very difficult to predict. Populations are remarkably easy to predict.
  - brailsafe 8y ago
    > "Populations are remarkably easy to predict." Could you break that down a little further?
kendallpark 8y ago
> They’re more likely to fight for what they believe in, challenge the status quo, and push the organization to make painful but necessary changes, he says. A long time ago, I had a new employer that wanted me to hotfix non-critical code changes to a live, popular website via FTP with no version control, no nothing. Like a single typo could crash a high traffic site. I told them this was extremely dangerous and irresponsible, and refused to do any changes until we got the system under version control with a reasonable way to deploy changes. This caused a huge standoff and I basically put my foot down and told them that I wouldn't be deploying any changes until I got the client's website under version control--they could dock my pay for the extra time it took, I didn't care. Anyhow, I set up version control and a deployment strategy that we could rollback (this only took a day or so). Then I made the changes and educated the team on how to safely push changes to the site. A month or so later they decided to not renew my contract, but by then the feeling was quite mutual. I told this story while interviewing at what would be my next employer and it worked as points in my favor. EDIT: FWIW I consider myself a generally agreeable giver until a certain threshold is crossed. One such threshold is stuff that moves into what I consider to be ethically irresponsible behavior. Perhaps you would call this a "selectively agreeable/disagreeable giver." There are "disagreeable givers" that pick their battles wisely in terms of when to apply friction and when to go along with the team. On the flip side there are those that will apply friction to every little thing and might relish in complaining and "I told you so"s and cowboying up their own solutions for every small disagreement. EDIT2: Clarifying that the "hotfixes" were non-critical, normal code changes.
- ng12 8y ago
  I think there's a trade off there. There's something to be said for "getting shit done" in the short term, voraciously arguing why it was bad afterwards.
  - Kluny 8y ago
    You have to decide for yourself how much you can tolerate and still respect yourself. I'd have made the same choice as OP, and because I know that about myself, I keep fuck-off money in my bank account in case I ever need to take a stand that gets me fired. Self-respect is more important to me than any one job.
crispyambulance 8y ago
Most orgs favor takers IMHO. It is more compatible with how project managers run things: "Here's your tasks, tell me when they will be done, don't do other tasks (like helping your peers) or the deadline will slip." That way of working is almost antithetical to givers. These places prefer agreeable takers-- that's why people always say stuff like "I have a lot on _MY_ plate!"
kemiller 8y ago
Disagreeability is itself a form of taking. You had better be amazing at what you do if you want to be grumpy.
- EpicEng 8y ago
  Disagree with the first sentence, agree with the second. How precisely is "Disagreeability... a form of taking"?
  - michaelcampbell 8y ago
    You just took his time by having to explain.
    - majkinetor 8y ago
      You could also save A LOT of time by making others realize that idea has no merit.
    - EpicEng 8y ago
      Haha there it is!
  - kemiller 8y ago
    It’s loading emotional work onto the people around you. A well-functioning team takes work to maintain and the grumps not only don’t do their share but are often a burden besides.
    - EpicEng 8y ago
      But what's the net result? I have an employee who easily fits into the grouch/giver category. Yeah, he can be a pain, but often his complaints/attitude stem from the fact that he actually cares about what we do and how we do it. It does require my time to smooth over certain interactions, expose him to the right people (and hide him a bit from others), and generally manage his mood a bit. However, what I get from him outweighs all of that and he's generally a great employee. I'd much prefer him to an agreeable person who is mediocre at their job. In the end this person saves us all time.
analogwzrd 8y ago
I think the author left out the other side of the argument...maybe the Wharton professor didn't in the original presentation of the idea. How does the company treat the employee? I've found that the employee will generally try to mirror how the company treats them. If they feel the company is taking advantage of them, then they might start acting like a Taker just to balance out the relationship. If they freely give to the company, and the company gives back, then that could start a positive feedback loop. Sometimes, the company is structured so that the company can't give back, i.e. rigid HR policies about raises/promotions that limit a meritocracy. If the opportunity cost of switching company's is higher, then the employee is probably going to milking the company for everything it's worth to try to even out the relationship.
cup-of-tea 8y ago
I'm a disagreeable giver. I've just left a job which didn't appreciate this. Funny thing is, everyone on my level said all the time how much they appreciate my openness with knowledge and desire to teach my skills. I found that odd because I consider it completely normal. The people above me hated it, though. Some of them shot down my efforts to enable basic knowledge sharing in the company. Most of the time I just made it very obvious that I could see them with their clothes off, though, and there were a lot of naked people above me.
- nayuki 8y ago
  Well done. Can I ask why the superiors didn't want you to share knowledge? Is it something about wielding power and keeping low-level employees in the dark?
  - cup-of-tea 8y ago
    It was a desire to have trade secrets kept from other departments in the same organisation. My superiors realised that a lot of our worth was just the things we knew and that if I just wrote it down it would make us kind of pointless. They didn't really understand that I consider myself a bit more than a meat-based knowledge repository.
- jl2718 8y ago
  Am I wrong to assume that most of HN is the disagreeable giver type? I’m assuming that agreeable people tend not to seek out information outside of their bounds, and takers would be on some crypto trading forum or something.
  - jxub 8y ago
    I don't think that your hypothesis can be proved, unless the givers here can be just agreeable enough to reach some form of consensus about your assumption.
  - cup-of-tea 8y ago
    I think you're probably right, yeah. The typical internet commenter will be very quick to tell you you're wrong, but they'll make every effort to tell you why.
readams 8y ago
You want people who can "disagree without being disagreeable"
- tonyedgecombe 8y ago
  I've seen the word disagreeable being used in a few studies lately and I was beginning to wonder if it meant something else in psychological circles, ie not agreeing to everything rather than being unpleasant. Every definition seems to point to being vexatious, which I find somewhat sad.
purplezooey 8y ago
"Disagreeable givers, on the other hand, can be a pain in the ass, but valuable to an organization, Grant says." The problem is this person doesn't exist. Most people that are constantly disagreeable are just bluster and talk and don't get anything done. Occasionally disagreeable is useful, though.
- ghthor 8y ago
  We never get anything done because everyone tells us how wrong we are all the time and the psycological toll is hard to manage. I get my best work done when I tell no one, just do the thing that I know needs done and then try to navigate the politics at the end to get it accepted.
eximius 8y ago
While I agree with the result, let's be cognizant that we don't allow assholes to blend in by claiming they are 'disagreeable'.
perl4ever 8y ago
I've worked at places where people are "too busy" to help with anything, and where nobody asks me for help with anything. I can't imagine anybody prides themselves on that sort of culture, but it seems common. My first job after graduation, I was lucky to be in a place where giving and asking for help/advice was normalized. The more cocooned and protective of their job, and the more distrusting of the organization people are, the less I suppose they want to share information.

Cool, I just need to get my boss to read this.

Etheryte 8y ago
Being disagreeable doesn't necessarily make you a good employee.

jxub 8y ago

Usually, the employee screening at the entry level relies on assessment of education history of the prospect. The problem is that educational excellence often selects for agreeableness, as there is no real reward of contrarianism in education. From bullshit Liberal Arts essays where you are graded in function of the level of endorsement of the brain farts of the professor in question to even the CS projects that are supposed to be made in a specific technology, often some JavaEE crap avoiding using more powerful languages or ecosystems like Python, Elixir or Clojure. I wonder how many billions has the economy lost as a result.

dsajames 8y ago
Not true. A CS degree from say, UIUC has no correlation to agreeableness I can see. I can't count the amount of jerks I knew in school. Cockiness, yes. Sometimes brilliant, yes. The few girls in the CS program could easily verify the lack of agreeableness.
- trentmb 8y ago
  Yeah, I was a student at math.illinois.edu, but did a CS minor- man, that major had the highest proportion of fuckheads I've ever encountered.
eeZah7Ux 8y ago
> I wonder how many billions has the economy lost as a result. Not a meaningful metric. The world is creating plenty of fake jobs and inefficiency to justify occupation.
continuational 8y ago
It is a very poor CS curriculum that requires the use of a specific framework; what does JavaEE has to do with science? Nothing. And even as vocational training, would you hire somebody who went to school to study a framework?
- EpicEng 8y ago
  So anyone can use any language for any assigent. How many runtimes do I need to install to grade your program? Howany languages do I need to know? How many frameworks do I need to understand? It's a problem of practicality. I agree that any CS course focused on a tech stack instead of CS concepts is a poor one, but that's not the only reason we see specific languages being mandated.
JumpCrisscross 8y ago
> educational excellence often selects for agreeableness Only to a limited degree. "The average relationship of academic performance with Conscientiousness (d = .46) can be seen as a medium-sized effect, the relationships with Agreeableness (d = .14) and Openness (d = .24) as small effects, and the relationships with Emotional Stability and Extraversion as relatively minor" [1]. Moreover, given "correlations with Agreeableness were least affected by controlling for intelligence" (page 26) and "increasing age was associated with declining correlations with Agreeableness" (page 29), one could argue that better-educated individuals will be more Agreeable (per the Big Five model [2]) solely due to being older. More likely is interview performance, as "Agreeableness, Conscientiousness and Emotional Stability are all associated with social desirability (Digman, 1997), which has also been shown to affect performance ratings (Murphy & Cleveland, 1995)" (page 36). [1] https://research-repository.griffith.edu.au/bitstream/handle/10072/30324/54018_1.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y https://research-repository.griffith.edu.au/bitstream/handle... page 22 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits
grigjd3 8y ago
I found assholes regularly got good grades.
evgen 8y ago
> The problem is that educational excellence often selects for agreeableness, as there is no real reward of contrarianism in education. Simply not true. Perhaps at second-tier and below schools this happens, but at a good university you are rewarded for contrarianism that can support itself with good arguments. You aren't rewarded just for being a contrarian, so no one is giving you free points just for saying 'you're wrong' without a coherent argument supporting your case. If your education history is being scrutinized then the filter usually consists of 'I have heard of this university' && 'did graduate'; if your grades actually come into the discussion then you either are probably not qualified for the job or probably don't really want take the job even if they make an offer.

extralego 8y ago

As a disagreeable giver, I have learned to accept a lot of things, mainly that I am widely misunderstood. A funny thing I’ve come to learn is to always seek employers who are themselves committed and passionate beyond convention. The gap between the results of finding such an employer and working for an average drone spans the almost the entire spectrum. Passionate people always get me, and I think they have been greatly rewarded for it. I will do anything for those people; I’ll even knowingly waste their time if I really like them, but that’s asking a lot.

staticautomatic 8y ago
I like to call our approach "radically earnest."
- strictfp 8y ago
  Radical candor.
- nso 8y ago
  I generally try to go by this approach as well, which I have found to create for some interesting situations after moving country. I come from Norway, where speakig up if something is wrong is highly encouraged, and you will most of the time be able to directly jump org levels with your conserns without anyone getting sour. People seem to genuinly want to contribute in the best way available, and work to that end. Mexico is my new home, which can be best generalized and summed up as a macho culture where people mind their own business and don't want to rock the boat (might be a regional thing, tho. The south where I live is very mañana mañana). Being afraid of speaking up is not encoded in my genes, so I've quite a few times called out injustices when I see them, and peoples reactions are a funny mix. I luckily have found a company to work for that has one of those dreamer bosses that OP mentions, and I find myself having a lot of influence on the business simply because I speak up.
erric 8y ago
Personally I have observed that people generally misunderstand passion and confuse it for aggression, or even outright anger.

pcmaffey 8y ago

Related: The best employers don't seek out and promote agreeable employees.

JumpCrisscross 8y ago
> The best employers don't seek out and promote agreeable employees The best employers know when to hire agreeable employees. "It may be that agreeableness may aid performance in some jobs but be a limitation in others... Evidence supports a link between agreeableness and prosocial work behaviors (Chiaburu, Oh, Berry, Li, & Gardner, 2011). Such a link exists, at least in part, because agreeable individuals are motivated to maintain positive interpersonal relationships with others (e.g., Barrick, Stewart, & Piotrowski, 2002). This is particularly important when considering group activity. Graziano, Jensen-Campbell, and Hair (1996) found that agree- able individuals reported higher levels of liking toward a randomly assigned partner. Most relevant to the current study, Mount et al. (1998) found that agreeableness was positively related to performance for service jobs requiring dyadic interactions. However, some agreeableness characteristics—namely, the eagerness to cooperate and avoid conflict (Goldberg, 1990; McCrae & Costa, 1990)—suggest that agreeable individuals might struggle in competitive environments." [1]. Also, "agreeableness more positively predicted job performance in jobs requiring attention to detail and involving independence in completing work" (page 11670. [1] http://leeds-faculty.colorado.edu/dahe7472/Judge%20and%20zapata%201149.full.pdf http://leeds-faculty.colorado.edu/dahe7472/Judge%20and%20zap... page 1155
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]

k_vi 8y ago

The best I've worked with have a knack for presenting making their contrary ideas agreeable. While the jerks assume they are being attacked for their beliefs, the smart ones understands the value of group effort.

awinder 8y ago
Yeah being an X employee is setting a low bar. Behavior has to be adapted on a situational basis, and if you can’t, that’s a problem across the spectrum. Though if I had to pick favorites I would totally go for agreeable giver who wields the other 3 roles for impact :-).
notabee 8y ago
This is so important. Picking one's battles and being diplomatic is just as important to getting things done as being correct. If you create a lot of noise over minor things, no one will want to listen when it's something critical.

EastLondonCoder 8y ago

I have managed a disagreeable giver. I very much appreciated his upfront style and his passion. But whenever he was exposed to the rest of the organisation people took him as hostile and arrogant. Ultimately me backing him made me untenable. Moral is that working with contrarians are good but be careful.

lordnacho 8y ago

There's another point that's relevant. If someone isn't producing the goods, they need need to make themselves liked somehow. Joke around, pat people on the back for whatever they do, generally act positive. That way people might not notice they're not pulling their weight. This happened at a place I worked at, and it was compounded by the others being too agreeable to call him out. When I eventually did it ended badly for me.

JumpCrisscross 8y ago
> If someone isn't producing the goods, they need need to make themselves liked somehow In competitive work environments, I've seen this heuristic overcorrect more often than be right, i.e. the nice person is assumed to be incompetent. Having worked on a trading floor, where niceness was not valued, and on teams with nice people with whom one could vent, reconsider interpersonal disputes or bounce ideas off (in terms of how others on the team might see a proposal), I strongly preferred the latter.

sanderjd 8y ago

I'm always skeptical of things like this that attempt to distill the full range of human personality and behavior into a simple table with four values. I haven't done any studies, but I feel like this sort of thing is disprovable by simple counter-example: as soon as I come across a single person who does not fit into this box, the universality of the box is already clearly wrong. I've come across many such people, whose behavior in the work place can't be described by the combination of two adjectives. (In fact, it's the only kind of person I've come across.)

jey 8y ago
The intention is to offer one more useful framing to look at the world with (along with all the other ways of understanding things). I think you're asking for too much if you're looking for an exhaustive and irrefutable universal classification theorem like those found in more mathematical fields.
- sanderjd 8y ago
  I'm not asking or looking for that, I'm quite happy to accept the complexity of individuals and attempt to understand them on their own terms rather than trying to categorize them into a quadrant.
cup-of-tea 8y ago
It is implicit in things like this that it's a generalisation suitable for discussing the case in point and not actually trying to describe the full spectrum of human behaviour. You should (and clearly do) know this. Generalisations are very powerful. I know they are unfashionable because everyone is unique and special, but you won't get very far without them. Individuals are very difficult to predict. Populations are remarkably easy to predict.
- brailsafe 8y ago
  > "Populations are remarkably easy to predict." Could you break that down a little further?

kendallpark 8y ago

> They’re more likely to fight for what they believe in, challenge the status quo, and push the organization to make painful but necessary changes, he says. A long time ago, I had a new employer that wanted me to hotfix non-critical code changes to a live, popular website via FTP with no version control, no nothing. Like a single typo could crash a high traffic site. I told them this was extremely dangerous and irresponsible, and refused to do any changes until we got the system under version control with a reasonable way to deploy changes. This caused a huge standoff and I basically put my foot down and told them that I wouldn't be deploying any changes until I got the client's website under version control--they could dock my pay for the extra time it took, I didn't care. Anyhow, I set up version control and a deployment strategy that we could rollback (this only took a day or so). Then I made the changes and educated the team on how to safely push changes to the site. A month or so later they decided to not renew my contract, but by then the feeling was quite mutual. I told this story while interviewing at what would be my next employer and it worked as points in my favor. EDIT: FWIW I consider myself a generally agreeable giver until a certain threshold is crossed. One such threshold is stuff that moves into what I consider to be ethically irresponsible behavior. Perhaps you would call this a "selectively agreeable/disagreeable giver." There are "disagreeable givers" that pick their battles wisely in terms of when to apply friction and when to go along with the team. On the flip side there are those that will apply friction to every little thing and might relish in complaining and "I told you so"s and cowboying up their own solutions for every small disagreement. EDIT2: Clarifying that the "hotfixes" were non-critical, normal code changes.

ng12 8y ago
I think there's a trade off there. There's something to be said for "getting shit done" in the short term, voraciously arguing why it was bad afterwards.
- Kluny 8y ago
  You have to decide for yourself how much you can tolerate and still respect yourself. I'd have made the same choice as OP, and because I know that about myself, I keep fuck-off money in my bank account in case I ever need to take a stand that gets me fired. Self-respect is more important to me than any one job.

crispyambulance 8y ago

Most orgs favor takers IMHO. It is more compatible with how project managers run things: "Here's your tasks, tell me when they will be done, don't do other tasks (like helping your peers) or the deadline will slip." That way of working is almost antithetical to givers. These places prefer agreeable takers-- that's why people always say stuff like "I have a lot on _MY_ plate!"

kemiller 8y ago

Disagreeability is itself a form of taking. You had better be amazing at what you do if you want to be grumpy.

EpicEng 8y ago
Disagree with the first sentence, agree with the second. How precisely is "Disagreeability... a form of taking"?
- michaelcampbell 8y ago
  You just took his time by having to explain.
  - majkinetor 8y ago
    You could also save A LOT of time by making others realize that idea has no merit.
  - EpicEng 8y ago
    Haha there it is!
- kemiller 8y ago
  It’s loading emotional work onto the people around you. A well-functioning team takes work to maintain and the grumps not only don’t do their share but are often a burden besides.
  - EpicEng 8y ago
    But what's the net result? I have an employee who easily fits into the grouch/giver category. Yeah, he can be a pain, but often his complaints/attitude stem from the fact that he actually cares about what we do and how we do it. It does require my time to smooth over certain interactions, expose him to the right people (and hide him a bit from others), and generally manage his mood a bit. However, what I get from him outweighs all of that and he's generally a great employee. I'd much prefer him to an agreeable person who is mediocre at their job. In the end this person saves us all time.

analogwzrd 8y ago

I think the author left out the other side of the argument...maybe the Wharton professor didn't in the original presentation of the idea. How does the company treat the employee? I've found that the employee will generally try to mirror how the company treats them. If they feel the company is taking advantage of them, then they might start acting like a Taker just to balance out the relationship. If they freely give to the company, and the company gives back, then that could start a positive feedback loop. Sometimes, the company is structured so that the company can't give back, i.e. rigid HR policies about raises/promotions that limit a meritocracy. If the opportunity cost of switching company's is higher, then the employee is probably going to milking the company for everything it's worth to try to even out the relationship.

cup-of-tea 8y ago

I'm a disagreeable giver. I've just left a job which didn't appreciate this. Funny thing is, everyone on my level said all the time how much they appreciate my openness with knowledge and desire to teach my skills. I found that odd because I consider it completely normal. The people above me hated it, though. Some of them shot down my efforts to enable basic knowledge sharing in the company. Most of the time I just made it very obvious that I could see them with their clothes off, though, and there were a lot of naked people above me.

nayuki 8y ago
Well done. Can I ask why the superiors didn't want you to share knowledge? Is it something about wielding power and keeping low-level employees in the dark?
- cup-of-tea 8y ago
  It was a desire to have trade secrets kept from other departments in the same organisation. My superiors realised that a lot of our worth was just the things we knew and that if I just wrote it down it would make us kind of pointless. They didn't really understand that I consider myself a bit more than a meat-based knowledge repository.
jl2718 8y ago
Am I wrong to assume that most of HN is the disagreeable giver type? I’m assuming that agreeable people tend not to seek out information outside of their bounds, and takers would be on some crypto trading forum or something.
- jxub 8y ago
  I don't think that your hypothesis can be proved, unless the givers here can be just agreeable enough to reach some form of consensus about your assumption.
- cup-of-tea 8y ago
  I think you're probably right, yeah. The typical internet commenter will be very quick to tell you you're wrong, but they'll make every effort to tell you why.

readams 8y ago

You want people who can "disagree without being disagreeable"

tonyedgecombe 8y ago
I've seen the word disagreeable being used in a few studies lately and I was beginning to wonder if it meant something else in psychological circles, ie not agreeing to everything rather than being unpleasant. Every definition seems to point to being vexatious, which I find somewhat sad.

purplezooey 8y ago

"Disagreeable givers, on the other hand, can be a pain in the ass, but valuable to an organization, Grant says." The problem is this person doesn't exist. Most people that are constantly disagreeable are just bluster and talk and don't get anything done. Occasionally disagreeable is useful, though.

ghthor 8y ago
We never get anything done because everyone tells us how wrong we are all the time and the psycological toll is hard to manage. I get my best work done when I tell no one, just do the thing that I know needs done and then try to navigate the politics at the end to get it accepted.

eximius 8y ago

While I agree with the result, let's be cognizant that we don't allow assholes to blend in by claiming they are 'disagreeable'.

perl4ever 8y ago

I've worked at places where people are "too busy" to help with anything, and where nobody asks me for help with anything. I can't imagine anybody prides themselves on that sort of culture, but it seems common. My first job after graduation, I was lucky to be in a place where giving and asking for help/advice was normalized. The more cocooned and protective of their job, and the more distrusting of the organization people are, the less I suppose they want to share information.