4 ms·

It's weird how what I consider the same kind of story can seemingly trigger universal empathy or universal derision. If the story is of the oft-posted, "My nig

It's weird how what I consider the same kind of story can seemingly trigger universal empathy or universal derision. If the story is of the oft-posted, "My nightmare dealing with a legacy codebase" or "My nightmare delivering a project for an inept client" flavor, there's no shortage of people jumping in the comments to echo the sentiment and reinforce with their own stories. You change a few details, however, to the "My nightmare onboarding with a new company", and suddenly the comments dogpile on "Wow, this person must be incompetent!" sentiment. What's the secret sauce here? Age? Reputation? Subject matter?

luckylion 6y ago
> What's the secret sauce here? Age? Reputation? Subject matter? I suspect tone to be the secret sauce. You can rewrite most things in ways that at least some people will dislike without changing the facts. You can also rewrite them in a way that will solicit sympathy from those same people. Tone can change a lot.
- AdmiralAsshat 6y ago
  Except the tone in all of the stories is overwhelmingly the same: I'm not stupid, what I'm being asked to do is stupid. And as I said, usually the commenters will give you the benefit of the doubt: yes, that legacy code sounds like it probably sucked, or yes, the client's requirements were nonsensical and contradictory. Except here.
  - luckylion 6y ago
    I have a different understanding of tone. I'm not stupid, what I'm being asked to do is stupid is the content, the tone is how it's written. You can sound arrogant, you can call people names, you can sound like you're about to ask to speak to the manager, you can add some self-deprecating jokes, you can show empathy for whoever created the mess while describing the problems you had with said mess etc, that's the tone. The content stays the same, but people will react very differently to it based on the tone. Some styles work for nearly all audiences, some don't.
  - bobbiechen 6y ago
    >Except the tone in all of the stories is overwhelmingly the same I disagree with this. I think Rachel's blog is fairly aggressive as far as HN submissions go, which doesn't elicit a lot of sympathy. It's pretty argumentative with sniping and a sense of superiority: >Now, when I run into a thing like this, I start getting snarky and bitchy and start thinking laterally. Like, okay, watch me not use your stupid system but get the answer anyway. And I don't think that's an unjustified reaction based on the content, but it's also not typical for blog posts that show up here. So the tone is aggressive, and commenters end up being unsympathetic. I completely agree with the parent comment that changing the tone of the post would likely result in a different set of comments (not that the author seems to care). I've also noticed this in the HN comment section. There's a well-known member who ends up picking fights often in the comments; I usually don't read usernames at all, but if I notice a comment written in a certain bitter, argumentative way, then it's almost always from this person.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
_bxg1 6y ago
I generally enjoy Rachel's posts and I never support vitriol, but I read the first couple paragraphs of the original post just now and my impression was, "all of this sounds very normal". I don't know if that holds for the entire thing or not, but I would guess that many of us have gone through much of this stuff and barely even been annoyed by it. So I think maybe that's the difference. Now, whether that comes down to "things used to be less stupid and we're just all younger and don't know any better" or whether it comes down to "the author just got really frustrated and impatient about things that didn't bother most of us" I don't know. But I will say that I've gotten unreasonably impatient about different things before, so I get it, and I think a person has the right to rant about work without backlash even if it doesn't make for the world's most insightful piece. Edit: I read the rest of it, and yeah, after the dev env stuff things got a bit weirder. However, in my limited experience, it's not outside the norm for large tech companies to treat their employees like children (which is one of my pet peeves too, which is why I don't work at them). It's also not outside the norm for "new-wave" tech companies to be a bit haphazard when it comes to office/workstation setup and such. But generally you're picking one poison or the other. Given that I'm pretty sure the author was talking about Lyft, I can see how in this case they ended up with both.
- vsareto 6y ago
  That sounds like a pretty bumpy on-boarding, least of all the group activities, but most importantly: disparate systems that seem like a ball of mud with a bunch of rituals attached. I've had on-boarding that was basically: set up SSO creds + 2FA, login to the wiki, read all of the things, install your own damn tools. I had a PR open by the end of the day. I've been at the complete opposite end as well: no PC for the first 3 days, multiple systems with unique logins and varying password requirements, file multiple tickets in some ancient (HEAT) ticketing system for access to different things, setting up meetings with different teams just to find the code and infra that it all runs on. Some companies end up with solutions that just don't age well. Most of us struggle through it because we know on-boarding will eventually end. The group activities are probably not a good indicator of things to come, but tangled systems are.
- walshemj 6y ago
  Not normal in my experience and spending hours cloning a dev environment sounds just broken. This is obviously a large co - they should have a standard build they hand out and all the credentials should be ready to go. Sounds like some one in HR has built a little empire out of this. My first job onboardings consisted of a tour being issued my lab coat and being shown the portacabin that was my office. Then it was go and se Keith he will give you a quick run down on how a PDP11 works and there is a book on Fortran in the company library learn it
Lammy 6y ago
> What's the secret sauce here? Age? Reputation? Subject matter? Being a woman. The dogpilers are most likely cluing in on her name. https://i.imgur.com/Kowemhz.jpg https://i.imgur.com/Kowemhz.jpg
- maest 6y ago
  Her gender does seem to cause divisiveness, but it affects both sides of the debate. _Anyone_ who criticises anything in articles coming from these domains is downvoted and _all_ arguments are hand waved away on the grounds that they're made because OP is a woman. What this means is that no measured discussion can be had either way and the comments are almost always a disaster (at least here, on HN). It's weird, I don't know what's the root cause of all this vitriol (other women authors don't get this treatment on HN, it's just this particular domain).
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- trhway 6y ago
  definitely a double standard. If a guy was writing all that, nobody would give a damn about what would be qualified in such a case as a whining of such a self-entitled special snowflake. "For the huge tech salary they make me do stupid things!" I remember there was another post of this author, and it was pretty obvious that a guy behaving that way would be immediately and unquestionably labeled "toxic person". I mean i'm ok with that double standard, as the tech environment may feel psychologically harsh for some people and they do need to have some slack cut for them.
  - Lammy 6y ago
    “— but when a woman shares an experience she disliked she's "whining"!”
    - trhway 6y ago
      you missed my point. The people here seriously discuss the experience shared by a woman when a guy sharing the same experience in the same way would be immediately dismissed as whining.
fragmede 6y ago
The secret sauce is empathy. "My nightmare dealing with a legacy codebase"? We've all dealt with that scenario, even (or especially) if it's our own code, years later. Sharing "war stories" like that is interesting and builds camaraderie. On-boarding is harder to empathize with. For most readers it was likely a while ago, and other memories of their company have replaced the experience of the very first week. Even if it was bad, readers who are employed at a company just put up with it. Thus, Rachel's "this is stupid and so is everyone one involved except me" tone, falls flat by insulting the reader. Then there was the promise - of hearing about red flags. Personally I expected some sort of horror story. "Here's the Kafkaesque story of why I didn't have a laptop for 3 months and was forced to access my email using a fax machine". Instead, there was this bit with having to gasp talk to a coworker while being taught the company's HR system. Searching for a dog is inane, but hardly a nightmare. I'll be honest, I didn't keep reading much past that. If you changed the details in "my nightmare delivering a project for a client" to be "THEN, the client spent a bunch of time with me speccing out the work to be done, and then gave me plenty of time to do the work they asked, and I couldn't do it", would you blame the commenters for a "this person must be incompetent" sentiment? The situation's less clear cut than that, but the devil's in the details!

luckylion 6y ago

> What's the secret sauce here? Age? Reputation? Subject matter? I suspect tone to be the secret sauce. You can rewrite most things in ways that at least some people will dislike without changing the facts. You can also rewrite them in a way that will solicit sympathy from those same people. Tone can change a lot.

AdmiralAsshat 6y ago
Except the tone in all of the stories is overwhelmingly the same: I'm not stupid, what I'm being asked to do is stupid. And as I said, usually the commenters will give you the benefit of the doubt: yes, that legacy code sounds like it probably sucked, or yes, the client's requirements were nonsensical and contradictory. Except here.
- luckylion 6y ago
  I have a different understanding of tone. I'm not stupid, what I'm being asked to do is stupid is the content, the tone is how it's written. You can sound arrogant, you can call people names, you can sound like you're about to ask to speak to the manager, you can add some self-deprecating jokes, you can show empathy for whoever created the mess while describing the problems you had with said mess etc, that's the tone. The content stays the same, but people will react very differently to it based on the tone. Some styles work for nearly all audiences, some don't.
- bobbiechen 6y ago
  >Except the tone in all of the stories is overwhelmingly the same I disagree with this. I think Rachel's blog is fairly aggressive as far as HN submissions go, which doesn't elicit a lot of sympathy. It's pretty argumentative with sniping and a sense of superiority: >Now, when I run into a thing like this, I start getting snarky and bitchy and start thinking laterally. Like, okay, watch me not use your stupid system but get the answer anyway. And I don't think that's an unjustified reaction based on the content, but it's also not typical for blog posts that show up here. So the tone is aggressive, and commenters end up being unsympathetic. I completely agree with the parent comment that changing the tone of the post would likely result in a different set of comments (not that the author seems to care). I've also noticed this in the HN comment section. There's a well-known member who ends up picking fights often in the comments; I usually don't read usernames at all, but if I notice a comment written in a certain bitter, argumentative way, then it's almost always from this person.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

_bxg1 6y ago

I generally enjoy Rachel's posts and I never support vitriol, but I read the first couple paragraphs of the original post just now and my impression was, "all of this sounds very normal". I don't know if that holds for the entire thing or not, but I would guess that many of us have gone through much of this stuff and barely even been annoyed by it. So I think maybe that's the difference. Now, whether that comes down to "things used to be less stupid and we're just all younger and don't know any better" or whether it comes down to "the author just got really frustrated and impatient about things that didn't bother most of us" I don't know. But I will say that I've gotten unreasonably impatient about different things before, so I get it, and I think a person has the right to rant about work without backlash even if it doesn't make for the world's most insightful piece. Edit: I read the rest of it, and yeah, after the dev env stuff things got a bit weirder. However, in my limited experience, it's not outside the norm for large tech companies to treat their employees like children (which is one of my pet peeves too, which is why I don't work at them). It's also not outside the norm for "new-wave" tech companies to be a bit haphazard when it comes to office/workstation setup and such. But generally you're picking one poison or the other. Given that I'm pretty sure the author was talking about Lyft, I can see how in this case they ended up with both.

vsareto 6y ago
That sounds like a pretty bumpy on-boarding, least of all the group activities, but most importantly: disparate systems that seem like a ball of mud with a bunch of rituals attached. I've had on-boarding that was basically: set up SSO creds + 2FA, login to the wiki, read all of the things, install your own damn tools. I had a PR open by the end of the day. I've been at the complete opposite end as well: no PC for the first 3 days, multiple systems with unique logins and varying password requirements, file multiple tickets in some ancient (HEAT) ticketing system for access to different things, setting up meetings with different teams just to find the code and infra that it all runs on. Some companies end up with solutions that just don't age well. Most of us struggle through it because we know on-boarding will eventually end. The group activities are probably not a good indicator of things to come, but tangled systems are.
walshemj 6y ago
Not normal in my experience and spending hours cloning a dev environment sounds just broken. This is obviously a large co - they should have a standard build they hand out and all the credentials should be ready to go. Sounds like some one in HR has built a little empire out of this. My first job onboardings consisted of a tour being issued my lab coat and being shown the portacabin that was my office. Then it was go and se Keith he will give you a quick run down on how a PDP11 works and there is a book on Fortran in the company library learn it

Lammy 6y ago

> What's the secret sauce here? Age? Reputation? Subject matter? Being a woman. The dogpilers are most likely cluing in on her name. https://i.imgur.com/Kowemhz.jpg https://i.imgur.com/Kowemhz.jpg

maest 6y ago
Her gender does seem to cause divisiveness, but it affects both sides of the debate. _Anyone_ who criticises anything in articles coming from these domains is downvoted and _all_ arguments are hand waved away on the grounds that they're made because OP is a woman. What this means is that no measured discussion can be had either way and the comments are almost always a disaster (at least here, on HN). It's weird, I don't know what's the root cause of all this vitriol (other women authors don't get this treatment on HN, it's just this particular domain).
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
trhway 6y ago
definitely a double standard. If a guy was writing all that, nobody would give a damn about what would be qualified in such a case as a whining of such a self-entitled special snowflake. "For the huge tech salary they make me do stupid things!" I remember there was another post of this author, and it was pretty obvious that a guy behaving that way would be immediately and unquestionably labeled "toxic person". I mean i'm ok with that double standard, as the tech environment may feel psychologically harsh for some people and they do need to have some slack cut for them.
- Lammy 6y ago
  “— but when a woman shares an experience she disliked she's "whining"!”
  - trhway 6y ago
    you missed my point. The people here seriously discuss the experience shared by a woman when a guy sharing the same experience in the same way would be immediately dismissed as whining.

fragmede 6y ago

The secret sauce is empathy. "My nightmare dealing with a legacy codebase"? We've all dealt with that scenario, even (or especially) if it's our own code, years later. Sharing "war stories" like that is interesting and builds camaraderie. On-boarding is harder to empathize with. For most readers it was likely a while ago, and other memories of their company have replaced the experience of the very first week. Even if it was bad, readers who are employed at a company just put up with it. Thus, Rachel's "this is stupid and so is everyone one involved except me" tone, falls flat by insulting the reader. Then there was the promise - of hearing about red flags. Personally I expected some sort of horror story. "Here's the Kafkaesque story of why I didn't have a laptop for 3 months and was forced to access my email using a fax machine". Instead, there was this bit with having to gasp talk to a coworker while being taught the company's HR system. Searching for a dog is inane, but hardly a nightmare. I'll be honest, I didn't keep reading much past that. If you changed the details in "my nightmare delivering a project for a client" to be "THEN, the client spent a bunch of time with me speccing out the work to be done, and then gave me plenty of time to do the work they asked, and I couldn't do it", would you blame the commenters for a "this person must be incompetent" sentiment? The situation's less clear cut than that, but the devil's in the details!