4 ms·

This really applies to all relationships. Every relationship has a pros and cons, and if the cons outweigh the pros = dump that person. I have a filter on new

This really applies to all relationships. Every relationship has a pros and cons, and if the cons outweigh the pros = dump that person. I have a filter on new employees such that if they cannot fill out the application on the website, they don't get an interview. Same with customers - I deliberately channel them to the website because if they cannot figure out how to use our brainlessly easy website, I don't want to spend the next year walking them through. There is a multiplicative hidden cost working with uneducated/lazy people people. It's like the locked doors theory of crime. The most criminal 0.1% of society costs society a 100x increase in security costs. The same is true for romantic relationships - some are just not worth it.

DoofusOfDeath 6y ago
I honestly mean the following statement as a kindness to you: You need to suffer. It will probably do you some good.
- dang 6y ago
  Personal attacks will get you banned here, regardless of someone else's views on relationships. Obviously there's a criticism to be made about treating other people as means to an end, but this is not the way to do that. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - DoofusOfDeath 6y ago
    FWIW, I didn't intend it as a personal attack in any way. The goal of my comment was to share some counter-intuitive personal wisdom. The author's comment showed an uncommon lack of empathy for the other parties. Many people (me included) have seen that same quality in ourselves, and have found our own suffering to be a remedy to that. When writing HN comments, I often struggle to find the right verbosity level. Perhaps in this case I didn't explain myself well enough. @dang: Does this address your concern, or is even my clarified comment a problem? Just trying to make sure I'm clear on what you found objectionable.
    - dang 6y ago
      I'm sure you didn't mean it that way, but "You need to suffer" is not something you can say on the internet without it coming across as a personal attack. Besides, it's guaranteed not to convince the other person, any more than smacking them for their own good would do. When it comes to things like this, the burden is on the commenter to disambiguate their intent, and this needs to be done sufficiently well to obviate the default reactions. Previous explanations about that: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=disambiguate%20burden%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so... If you had written something about your personal experience, like you started to do in this reply, that would have been much better. That's a much better thing to do generally!
      - DoofusOfDeath 6y ago
        Thanks, that's very helpful. I genuinely appreciate the advice.
        tkgally 6y ago
        The above is an admirable exchange. Thank you, dang, and thank you, DoofusOfDeath. You both showed why HN is worth reading.
yourapostasy 6y ago
> There is a multiplicative hidden cost working with uneducated/lazy people people. It's like the locked doors theory of crime. The most criminal 0.1% of society costs society a 100x increase in security costs. This is probably a lesson that is endlessly learned by new junior consultants. When new consultants get into consulting through the fluent practitioner route (as opposed to the "warm body contract job shop" route), they tend to make the common assumption everyone is as excited as they are about the field, and the only difference between them and their clients' staff is time-on-keyboard, and perhaps some perspective. There is a distinct category of staff that the new consultant will encounter who immediately glom onto the convenience of treating the consultant as a personal Google service, with the added bonus of not even having to sift through the search results and handed the answer. Kind of a value add when the check-signing manager witnesses this happening first-hand; many appreciate getting confirmation they bought the services of an expert. However, the trap is the new consultant assumes the staff member will leverage these answers to find their own new lessons to learn. Or even remember the answer. This becomes a significant time sink, so different consultants develop different ways with different clients to mitigate this anti-pattern. Nothing to fire a client over (to bring us back to the original topic), but definitely an issue you want to keep tactics to employ in your back pocket for.
- sitkack 6y ago
  I would like to discuss this subthread at length, this specific pathology is playing out at my current engagement right now. For context, I have been in consulting roles for most of my career, probably because of my proclivity to be "unsolicited advice guy". I see something amiss and I tell people about it. My delivery has changed and matured over the years, but I still cannot correct flaw. An epiphany I had a couple months ago, and this is after 20+ years of this work, is that consultants are primarily organizational psychologists. They bring a lot to the project and the org, but it isn't the technical that takes the highest position. And in the case of the repeat-help-desk-can't-fish customer there are a lot of different issues at play. Some of the charitable ones are - lack of confidence - risk of getting blamed - over worked, too much responsibility compared to the skills - unrealistic deadlines by their managers - personal issues prevent a lack of focus and inability to do deep work If you deliver the n-th answer like you delivered the zeroth answer, they will think you have an infinite capacity for taking their burden. There are signals you can use to push back, explain how busy you are, frame you answer relative to a previous answer, answer the question with 3 questions and some tasks that if completed will solve their problem (Socratic help desk). Consultants should make their customers and all of their customers look like rock stars, but we shouldn't let folks within the org use your knowledge and skills to make themselves look better. This particular pattern is damaging because while to the rest of the org they look amazing, their ego erodes and they keep coming back to the oracle for more answers and at some point they are only a mindless conduit. In the case of an employee who is using you as a 2nd brain, one technique is do a pomo of the issue, give them mad props for the debugging, development, patience, etc while outlining the problem and how it solved. Make a group effort while giving them some praise but don't allow them to consistently take center stage. On the flip side, one can find the staff members how share knowledge within the org, and synthesize new solutions from previous ones. These folks need to be protected, cultivated and propped up, they will save projects and your ass if handled with care.

DoofusOfDeath 6y ago

I honestly mean the following statement as a kindness to you: You need to suffer. It will probably do you some good.

dang 6y ago
Personal attacks will get you banned here, regardless of someone else's views on relationships. Obviously there's a criticism to be made about treating other people as means to an end, but this is not the way to do that. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- DoofusOfDeath 6y ago
  FWIW, I didn't intend it as a personal attack in any way. The goal of my comment was to share some counter-intuitive personal wisdom. The author's comment showed an uncommon lack of empathy for the other parties. Many people (me included) have seen that same quality in ourselves, and have found our own suffering to be a remedy to that. When writing HN comments, I often struggle to find the right verbosity level. Perhaps in this case I didn't explain myself well enough. @dang: Does this address your concern, or is even my clarified comment a problem? Just trying to make sure I'm clear on what you found objectionable.
  - dang 6y ago
    I'm sure you didn't mean it that way, but "You need to suffer" is not something you can say on the internet without it coming across as a personal attack. Besides, it's guaranteed not to convince the other person, any more than smacking them for their own good would do. When it comes to things like this, the burden is on the commenter to disambiguate their intent, and this needs to be done sufficiently well to obviate the default reactions. Previous explanations about that: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=disambiguate%20burden%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so... If you had written something about your personal experience, like you started to do in this reply, that would have been much better. That's a much better thing to do generally!
    - DoofusOfDeath 6y ago
      Thanks, that's very helpful. I genuinely appreciate the advice.
      - tkgally 6y ago
        The above is an admirable exchange. Thank you, dang, and thank you, DoofusOfDeath. You both showed why HN is worth reading.

yourapostasy 6y ago

> There is a multiplicative hidden cost working with uneducated/lazy people people. It's like the locked doors theory of crime. The most criminal 0.1% of society costs society a 100x increase in security costs. This is probably a lesson that is endlessly learned by new junior consultants. When new consultants get into consulting through the fluent practitioner route (as opposed to the "warm body contract job shop" route), they tend to make the common assumption everyone is as excited as they are about the field, and the only difference between them and their clients' staff is time-on-keyboard, and perhaps some perspective. There is a distinct category of staff that the new consultant will encounter who immediately glom onto the convenience of treating the consultant as a personal Google service, with the added bonus of not even having to sift through the search results and handed the answer. Kind of a value add when the check-signing manager witnesses this happening first-hand; many appreciate getting confirmation they bought the services of an expert. However, the trap is the new consultant assumes the staff member will leverage these answers to find their own new lessons to learn. Or even remember the answer. This becomes a significant time sink, so different consultants develop different ways with different clients to mitigate this anti-pattern. Nothing to fire a client over (to bring us back to the original topic), but definitely an issue you want to keep tactics to employ in your back pocket for.

sitkack 6y ago
I would like to discuss this subthread at length, this specific pathology is playing out at my current engagement right now. For context, I have been in consulting roles for most of my career, probably because of my proclivity to be "unsolicited advice guy". I see something amiss and I tell people about it. My delivery has changed and matured over the years, but I still cannot correct flaw. An epiphany I had a couple months ago, and this is after 20+ years of this work, is that consultants are primarily organizational psychologists. They bring a lot to the project and the org, but it isn't the technical that takes the highest position. And in the case of the repeat-help-desk-can't-fish customer there are a lot of different issues at play. Some of the charitable ones are - lack of confidence - risk of getting blamed - over worked, too much responsibility compared to the skills - unrealistic deadlines by their managers - personal issues prevent a lack of focus and inability to do deep work If you deliver the n-th answer like you delivered the zeroth answer, they will think you have an infinite capacity for taking their burden. There are signals you can use to push back, explain how busy you are, frame you answer relative to a previous answer, answer the question with 3 questions and some tasks that if completed will solve their problem (Socratic help desk). Consultants should make their customers and all of their customers look like rock stars, but we shouldn't let folks within the org use your knowledge and skills to make themselves look better. This particular pattern is damaging because while to the rest of the org they look amazing, their ego erodes and they keep coming back to the oracle for more answers and at some point they are only a mindless conduit. In the case of an employee who is using you as a 2nd brain, one technique is do a pomo of the issue, give them mad props for the debugging, development, patience, etc while outlining the problem and how it solved. Make a group effort while giving them some praise but don't allow them to consistently take center stage. On the flip side, one can find the staff members how share knowledge within the org, and synthesize new solutions from previous ones. These folks need to be protected, cultivated and propped up, they will save projects and your ass if handled with care.