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This is a creative way of expressing concerns that ultimately always boil down to a few personality metrics: objectivity, honesty, and empathy. In objectivity

This is a creative way of expressing concerns that ultimately always boil down to a few personality metrics: objectivity, honesty, and empathy. In objectivity everything is a data point and each of those data points have competing levels of validity with regards to a given problem. It doesn't matter what you want or find more important or even emotionally compelling. What matters is what collisions of data express to your planning calculus. This sounds dry and mathematical like some machine calculation, but it is actually a personality component that some people are more capable of applying than others. This is the chief reason Magnus Carlsen refuses to play chess against chess software applications. Honesty is a skill and its hard to really nail. Honesty includes things like directness, transparency, communication, and most importantly listening. If you are a person who is easily offended your honesty skill is weak. If you are a person who has trouble communicating something important to the business that may hurt peoples' feelings your honesty skill could use some improvement. Empathy is the ability to perceive the emotions and needs of others. Empathy in absolutely not a means of sharing or expressing an emotional state, which is sympathy. In order to solve people problems and really, I mean REALLY, gel as a team you need empathy. In army warrant officer school we had 7 minutes to wake up, be dressed, make our beds, and be outside in morning formation. I didn't have time to feel sorry for people, but I did have time to help people be ready or help make other peoples' beds.

asdfman123 7y ago
My brother interviews for McKinsey and he says the number one thing they look for in new hires is a sense of understanding of someone else's mental state. He had a good technical term for it, but I forget what he called it. It's basically though the ability to not think, "this person is a jerk who is wrong," but "this person has his reasons for reaching his conclusions and although I am angry with him after our disagreement, I see the personal factors that must have gone into it." It's very useful to work in teams of people who have that sort of basic emotional intelligence. How do you work with someone that just gets angry and projects everything onto you? I think the model of the "pissed off code badass" is thankfully going away, because programming is becoming more collaborative and more professional. Yeah, it's extremely important to have strong technical competence on your team, but it's more important to be able to work with others and integrate everyone's perspective. Because no matter how technically smart you may be, you have your blind spots. It's important to listen to the junior who is worried that the implementation strategy might lead to X, Y, Z, that only she sees because she is seeing it with fresh eyes.
- SmellyGeekBoy 7y ago
  > My brother interviews for McKinsey and he says the number one thing they look for in new hires is a sense of understanding of someone else's mental state. He had a good technical term for it, but I forget what he called it. Empathy?
  - asdfman123 7y ago
    It wasn't a buzzword but it was a useful way to describe it. It's kind of like "not just going with your snap judgments about people."
    - austincheney 7y ago
      Empathy is different than that. It is about really reading peoples' emotions, like micro-expressions and body language. Empathy allows you to dig into a person's personal space when uncomfortable and pry out things that might be hard to discuss. I conducted some ethics investigations last year. I had to interview people and make assessments that resulted in potential harms to persons careers, forfeiture of pay, and possibly other legal consequences. You don't want to pass harmful judgement lightly. You really want to get the most detailed picture possible and recommend solutions that do more benefit than harm. You need to have a feel for what people were thinking, at the time, and why even when they may lie to you or withhold necessary information.
- morningseagulls 7y ago
  >My brother interviews for McKinsey and he says the number one thing they look for in new hires is a sense of understanding of someone else's mental state. He had a good technical term for it, but I forget what he called it. >It's basically though the ability to not think, "this person is a jerk who is wrong," but "this person has his reasons for reaching his conclusions and although I am angry with him after our disagreement, I see the personal factors that must have gone into it." Avoid the fundamental attribution error?[0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error
mikece 7y ago
Excellent points, but how often have you heard of programmers being hired because of objectivity, honesty, and empathy? Change the context to construction: how long will a team of objective, honest, empathetic builders last who can't complete the construction of a building last before they are either fired or the company folds because nobody wants to hire a group of nice but inept builders? Perhaps another analogy is worth considering: the military. How can a group of incredibly diverse individuals form effective teams? Things aren't always socially rosy but there are two things which allow them to gel as a team: common purpose and they are stuck with each other. How often do programmers find common purpose with the other members of their team or the company as a whole? Maybe this was the genius of Steve Jobs, turning Apple (and later Pixar) into a revolutionary crusade and preaching sermons more than giving leadership at times. As programmers we're frequently hired to solve a problem nobody else could or had time for. When's the last time a new hire was put on new feature development so that more seasoned devs could go tackle technical debt? I'm not saying that would be a good thing but without a sense of common purpose it's hard to build a team. And that second aspect that allows military teams to gel... we're not stuck with our co-workers in civilian life -- we're free to leave (or be let go) at any time. It's very rare to find teams where three or more programmers (who are keen on keeping up with technology) have been there for more than ten years. I can only think of two where I've worked: one was an RPG/AS-400 shop and I was the boat-rocker being brought in to move things to .NET (and was resisted every step of the way until I left) and the other was a shop where I was brought in to help convert a VB6 app to .NET Core microservices.
- austincheney 7y ago
  Almost nobody hires first by psychiatric assessment, but Bridge Water does and has written case studies about it. Ray Dalio wrote extensively about this in his book: Principles. https://www.bridgewater.com/ https://www.bridgewater.com/ Also, I have been in the military 22 years. Diverse people form excellent teams all the time. By diverse I mean different career interests, national cultures, economic backgrounds, and so forth. I have never experienced diversity on that level as a developer in the corporate world even though a good number of my coworkers have always been from India. One thing the military is really good at enforcing is group failure and group consequences. The closest thing I have seen to that in the corporate world are layoffs.

asdfman123 7y ago

My brother interviews for McKinsey and he says the number one thing they look for in new hires is a sense of understanding of someone else's mental state. He had a good technical term for it, but I forget what he called it. It's basically though the ability to not think, "this person is a jerk who is wrong," but "this person has his reasons for reaching his conclusions and although I am angry with him after our disagreement, I see the personal factors that must have gone into it." It's very useful to work in teams of people who have that sort of basic emotional intelligence. How do you work with someone that just gets angry and projects everything onto you? I think the model of the "pissed off code badass" is thankfully going away, because programming is becoming more collaborative and more professional. Yeah, it's extremely important to have strong technical competence on your team, but it's more important to be able to work with others and integrate everyone's perspective. Because no matter how technically smart you may be, you have your blind spots. It's important to listen to the junior who is worried that the implementation strategy might lead to X, Y, Z, that only she sees because she is seeing it with fresh eyes.

SmellyGeekBoy 7y ago
> My brother interviews for McKinsey and he says the number one thing they look for in new hires is a sense of understanding of someone else's mental state. He had a good technical term for it, but I forget what he called it. Empathy?
- asdfman123 7y ago
  It wasn't a buzzword but it was a useful way to describe it. It's kind of like "not just going with your snap judgments about people."
  - austincheney 7y ago
    Empathy is different than that. It is about really reading peoples' emotions, like micro-expressions and body language. Empathy allows you to dig into a person's personal space when uncomfortable and pry out things that might be hard to discuss. I conducted some ethics investigations last year. I had to interview people and make assessments that resulted in potential harms to persons careers, forfeiture of pay, and possibly other legal consequences. You don't want to pass harmful judgement lightly. You really want to get the most detailed picture possible and recommend solutions that do more benefit than harm. You need to have a feel for what people were thinking, at the time, and why even when they may lie to you or withhold necessary information.
morningseagulls 7y ago
>My brother interviews for McKinsey and he says the number one thing they look for in new hires is a sense of understanding of someone else's mental state. He had a good technical term for it, but I forget what he called it. >It's basically though the ability to not think, "this person is a jerk who is wrong," but "this person has his reasons for reaching his conclusions and although I am angry with him after our disagreement, I see the personal factors that must have gone into it." Avoid the fundamental attribution error?[0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error

mikece 7y ago

Excellent points, but how often have you heard of programmers being hired because of objectivity, honesty, and empathy? Change the context to construction: how long will a team of objective, honest, empathetic builders last who can't complete the construction of a building last before they are either fired or the company folds because nobody wants to hire a group of nice but inept builders? Perhaps another analogy is worth considering: the military. How can a group of incredibly diverse individuals form effective teams? Things aren't always socially rosy but there are two things which allow them to gel as a team: common purpose and they are stuck with each other. How often do programmers find common purpose with the other members of their team or the company as a whole? Maybe this was the genius of Steve Jobs, turning Apple (and later Pixar) into a revolutionary crusade and preaching sermons more than giving leadership at times. As programmers we're frequently hired to solve a problem nobody else could or had time for. When's the last time a new hire was put on new feature development so that more seasoned devs could go tackle technical debt? I'm not saying that would be a good thing but without a sense of common purpose it's hard to build a team. And that second aspect that allows military teams to gel... we're not stuck with our co-workers in civilian life -- we're free to leave (or be let go) at any time. It's very rare to find teams where three or more programmers (who are keen on keeping up with technology) have been there for more than ten years. I can only think of two where I've worked: one was an RPG/AS-400 shop and I was the boat-rocker being brought in to move things to .NET (and was resisted every step of the way until I left) and the other was a shop where I was brought in to help convert a VB6 app to .NET Core microservices.

austincheney 7y ago
Almost nobody hires first by psychiatric assessment, but Bridge Water does and has written case studies about it. Ray Dalio wrote extensively about this in his book: Principles. https://www.bridgewater.com/ https://www.bridgewater.com/ Also, I have been in the military 22 years. Diverse people form excellent teams all the time. By diverse I mean different career interests, national cultures, economic backgrounds, and so forth. I have never experienced diversity on that level as a developer in the corporate world even though a good number of my coworkers have always been from India. One thing the military is really good at enforcing is group failure and group consequences. The closest thing I have seen to that in the corporate world are layoffs.