24 ms·

People prefer friendliness, trustworthiness in teammates over skill competency

510 points by rustoo 5y ago

InternetPerson 5y ago
Let's say that I get paid basically the same whether my team performs adequately or whether it really excels. In this case, why wouldn't I prefer friendly teammates? As long as we perform adequately, we're gonna get paid the same. Let the superstar assholes work on someone else's team!
Mikeb85 5y ago
Because skills can typically be taught. Much harder to teach someone not to be an asshole.
DarkWiiPlayer 5y ago
Correct me if I'm wrong, but this article doesn't really seem to be talking about actual competence, but only projections of competence in social interactions. There's a big difference here: You can act like you know everything and still have lots of bullshit ideas. Anybody with enough experience in a field will quickly figure these people out and put them in the "ignore" box.
trinovantes 5y ago
The most interesting (and cynical) interview advice I've heard was that the outcome of interviews is often decided in the first 5 minutes. Barring some extreme competency issues, if the interviewer likes you then they'll help you succeed and sometimes overlook your flaws. I guess this is Pygmalion effect in action?
raxxorrax 5y ago
What do they mean people prefer it? I thought it was fairly open secret that people dislike competency in their peers. Depends on the team, but we have a competitive work culture and this is a logical consequence of that. There are more cooperative teams, but even there you have conflicts among big egos.
timbaboon 5y ago
Nope. Having someone friendly that can’t do they job, who you then have to cover for? That breeds resentment… well for me anyway
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bserge 5y ago
Basically, fit in, don't stand out. So if you're not a lemming and want to succeed, pretend to fit in. Fake it till you make it. The chances of getting ahead without challenging anyone/anything are extremely low. The most cliche shit possible, but yeah, it holds up.
- GoToRO 5y ago
  The level of conformism in typical corporation is really hard to digest. It reminds me of communism (the implementation not the design). There was conformism there too but not at the level you see now. It seems that people that live on credit their whole lives while beeing 2 weeks from termination at any given time really brings out the worst in them.
- striking 5y ago
  I don't think that's what the article says: > The researchers found that people who exhibited both competence, through the use of challenging voice, and trustworthiness, through the use of supportive voice, were the most in-demand people when it came to assembling teams. [emphasis mine] and later, > “Our findings suggest that when people feel like they can trust you, even if you’re not necessarily the best worker, they’re going to be more likely to want to work with you,” Maupin said. “They know that there are likely to be fewer interpersonal issues in that case.” So the article is not saying "be a lemming because no one cares how good you are," it's saying being supportive of others has a greater positive impact on how others see you than your willingness to challenge others' ideas and signal your competency.
- gjulianm 5y ago
  You can challenge people and things while being trustworthy and friendly. I've found it's the best way to do it, actually.
- caymanjim 5y ago
  You can't fake being a nice person and getting along. It's obvious to everyone, and people dislike you even more. They might fake being nice in return, but they'll avoid interacting with you and won't go to bat for you when it matters.
jacknews 5y ago
No doubt these are the traits that people seek in fellow 'study group' members. Does anyone remember the way football teams used to be assembled in school? Two team captains would each take turns to pick teammates from the rest of the students. I don't recall 'friendliness and trustworthiness' being necessarily the top qualifiers.
- notreallyserio 5y ago
  The stakes of those pickup football games were pretty low (for most people).
  - jacknews 5y ago
    I think that sums up the other replies that say 'friends first, etc', and is in fact my point. In my experience there was some prestige in winning, and particularly in picking a winning team, and that would feed into who was picked for the school team. When the stakes are low, you can can choose to be among friends. When the stakes are higher, you need to work, perhaps less comfortably, with greater talent.
    - notreallyserio 5y ago
      Interesting, I had kind of the opposite takeaway. You can afford to pick friends followed by the best for pickup teams, where winning doesn’t matter too much. But when the stakes are high you need to be pick folks you can work with for months or years, even if it means their tech skills aren’t as solid as a candidate that is otherwise unfriendly or untrustworthy.
- kevinh 5y ago
  In my experience, friends were often the first ones picked to be on a team. And if a person was known for leaving midgame, they'd be one of the last ones picked.
  - jacknews 5y ago
    My experience is that the team captains were usually the most experienced players, and were often friends with the best of the rest. But everyone knew who was good, and they were picked first regardless of actual friendships, since games would feed into decisions about who made the school team, particularly captain.
Rd6n6 5y ago
If somebody isn’t trustworthy, that means they can’t be trusted. Who would want to work with and rely on somebody they thought of like that?
csee 5y ago
Trustworthiness, sure. But not friendliness (unless it's asshole-level unfriendliness) over competence. There's little worse than a friendly but incompetent teammate, who will often get too many passes and second chances (because they're well liked) before being terminated. I'll take neutral friendliness, or even slightly unfriendly, + extreme competence, any day.
- doteka 5y ago
  I don’t think that’s an opinion held by someone who actually worked with/had to manage the combination of “slightly unfriendly + extreme confidence” before. That is how you get Prima Donnas, temper tantrums during technical discussions and other fun stuff.
  - delecti 5y ago
    Someone extremely confident and prone to tantrums is not friendly. Competence is not necessarily linked with a lack of humility.
  - mypastself 5y ago
    Extreme competence, not confidence.
  - pydry 5y ago
    I've yet to work for somebody exhibiting extreme confidence in a work situation who wasnt covering for something - usually a lack of competence. I've heard stories of "brilliant assholes" but once I've peeled back the layers of these stories I always develop a strong impression that the brilliance is a facade.
    - watwut 5y ago
      My experience with brilliant assholes is that it is combination of self sufficient prophecy and bullying effects. Some people think that being asshole is component of being brilliant and thus they assume you to be brilliant if you act like ass. And the other component is that assholes often times end up dominating rooms and looking brilliant, because they effectively bully others into being silent. For most people, being silent is better then risking the asshole will target you.
serverholic 5y ago
It's nice at first if someone is friendly but eventually it wears off if they aren't competent. For that reason I suspect that this is one of those idealistic things that works out differently in practice.
thrower123 5y ago
Lets see it replicate on something other than a small group of MBA students before we lend it too much credence.
adam_arthur 5y ago
Depends on what your incentives are. If you own the business, I bet the factors you care about look a lot different. If you're just working the 9-5, and aren't in the blast radius of your coworker, of course you'll care a lot more about sociable traits than quality of work. As a manager, it's a lot easier and more enjoyable to work with higher competency people, that's for sure. Though I will say, that I'd trade a certain level of competency for general attitude/friendliness. Some people are quite good but difficult to manage. Don't think these results should be surprising.
- endisneigh 5y ago
  > As a manager, it's a lot easier and more enjoyable to work with higher competency people, that's for sure. Though I will say, that I'd trade a certain level of competency for general attitude/friendliness. Some people are quite good but difficult to manage. Why's that? Here on HN there are Ask HN threads every few months about one cofounder trying to get rid of another competent, but toxic cofounder.
  - adam_arthur 5y ago
    Specifically in regards to cofounders, the math is different. The founders will drive the direction of the culture of the business going forward, so a bad attitude will likely yield poor results in the long run RE: retention etc. I'm speaking moreso from the perspective of a manager in a larger org. It depends on the context of course, but working with junior or less capable people can turn into a micromanaging by necessity kind of situation. e.g. need to be very specific about design/implementation details when providing direction. Versus somebody who is highly competent, you can generally just give a high level direction and leave it to them to fill in the blanks. The goal is never to micromanage, obviously, but if you have a lots of design decisions to make, it can be necessary to have tight control over those decisions to maintain quality. This situation can become draining to manage. This is where formal processes and agile etc become important. But if you have a team of all highly capable and motivated people, you can have much looser processes and yield better results. Don't need to specify every detail of every task up front. I'm approaching this as a manager who is more heavily involved in the technical side... but in other situations, it might be the tech lead doing these things. But I'd for sure take somebody who's friendly and nice to work with over a highly competent but abrasive person. There's a middle ground there...
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cletus 5y ago
Roger Sterling of Mad Men said it best [1]: > I don't know if anyone's ever told you that half the time this business comes down to 'I don't like that guy.' In all my years of working, this is probably the most important thing you can learn. Except for marginal cases, it's not about how good you are at your job. You just have to be liked while being sufficiently good. It's also why the perennial "hiring is broken" posts and threads miss the point completely: really they're just trying to find someone they like. It's what "culture fit" really means. And people like people like themselves. This is part of what can lead to unlawful discrimination. Trustworthiness is an interesting one as it seems to be hard to define but some people just have it and some don't. This has been studied and can have a profound effect on, say, criminal sentencing [2]. [1]: https://twitter.com/madmenqts/status/783648743690231808?lang=en https://twitter.com/madmenqts/status/783648743690231808?lang... [2]: https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2015/07/17/423600926/in-court-your-face-could-determine-your-fate https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2015/07/17/4236009...
- deleted 5y ago
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- imbnwa 5y ago
  > really they're just trying to find someone they like. It's what "culture fit" really means. And people like people like themselves. This is part of what can lead to unlawful discrimination. This can't be stated enough
- BlargMcLarg 5y ago
  >It's also why the perennial "hiring is broken" posts and threads miss the point completely I don't think they miss the point completely when many hiring processes don't test for team cohesion at all beyond a manager pointing a finger in the air and guessing what the fit will be based on a 15 minute talk. Given these people would in the same breath claim diversity in personalities is great and covering each other's weaknesses is essential. That's exactly how we end up with teams where not a single person has the spine to go up against clearly ridiculous requirements (that is assuming any perspective, not just technical), while claiming critical thinking is great.
- 5y ago
notjustanymike 5y ago
The implication here is friendly but incompetent trumps competent but unfriendly. This isn't a surprise. A team is stronger than an individual, and competence has a productivity ceiling where you have to start playing well with others.
magneticnorth 5y ago
"Maupin and her colleagues focused on a cohort of MBA students to conduct their study. Students were randomly assigned to teams at the beginning of the semester to work on class projects and assignments." So this is about what people prefer in their MBA program study group. While I do, personally, think that kindness is super important in work colleagues as well, this study doesn't particularly address that.
- havkd 5y ago
  Just by reading the title I thought “this smells of women”. Thanks for confirming :P
- AlwaysRock 5y ago
  Welcome to the selection bias that exists in the majority of social science research.
endisneigh 5y ago
If you wonder the three criteria with three discrete levels you get a cube that's something like: Very unfriendly, somewhat friendly, very friendly. Very untrustworthy, somewhat trustworthy, very trustworthy. Incompetent, average, very competent. Now if you take these and model the interactions between people who exhibit a three-pair (e.g. (somewhat friendly, somewhat trustworthy and average) against (v. unfriendly, s. trustworthy, v. competent)) I would imagine the "world" would eventually remove all friendly people (depending on the assumptions). If you imagine friendliness and competence is correlated I would also imagine you'd get rid of a lot of the competent people as well. Unfortunately more research would be needed to assert or refute this hypothesis. Anecdotally I'd say friendliness and competence are positively correlated, but not very strongly. --- To put it another way, if you have a team of people. Will you team as a whole receive more benefit from someone very competent but ultimately toxic and ruins the culture or somewhat incompetent but very friendly?
papito 5y ago
I like a little bit of both. They better be downright brilliant if I am going to put up with their ego. I worked with a guy like that once. Yeah, he worked at Google, and "that's not how they did things over there". He was very sure of himself, but being smart is NOT the same as being intelligent. He never missed a chance to throw jabs at our lame, working codebase. Then he checked in AWS secrets in our main repo and made it public.
- DarkWiiPlayer 5y ago
  Ah yes, it's a massive red flag when people bring up where they used to work to make themselves look good. The "we did things differently at X" is also a huge red flag. Competent people will figure out the different needs of different workplaces instead of just assuming that the biggest name had the best approach. If you think something is good because google does it, you probably don't understand why google did it nor why it worked for google (and whether or not it would work at a different company).
TrackerFF 5y ago
My take is that as long as your workers are above a certain threshold (as far as technical competency goes), a team with healthy culture will on average outperform a team with toxic culture - even though the latter may have members that are more technically proficient, than in the former team. By toxic culture, I mean: - Poor communication - Abrasive or toxic personalities - Bullying and harassment etc. I think that in most normal people, stressors like those can affect their performance. And I don't mean full-blown hazing rituals - even more subtle actions (poor communication, for example) can lower morale. More so if you feel that said poor communication is deliberate.
- MudAndGears 5y ago
  Absolutely. I worked on a team where the lead engineer would be out of the office for weeks at at time, and then when he'd return he'd skim in-progress code and request radical revisions, only to criticize those decisions the next time he was in the office. I was actively looking for a new job when he quit, and it was such a relief. My productivity (and happiness) went through the roof, and a couple months into the year my manager told me that I'd already accomplished everything he hoped I'd accomplish _for the year_. By exchanging a some technical skill for a better work environment our whole team benefitted.
- calyth2018 5y ago
  I've seen that so many times in my current office, it's not even funny at this point. And I couldn't agree with you more. As long as a set level of competency is there, I'd rather work with friendly people than a bunch of know-it-mosts that don't know tact.
webinvest 5y ago
I’ve always said that a coworker has to be either friendly, competent, or both. Ideally both but some are neither.
bee_rider 5y ago
There are lots of reasons to prefer friendly teams. * Just, generally more enjoyable and productive experience. Most things are really not that important, particularly in school (which is where this experiment was run). And anyway, the purpose is often not to be optimally productive, but to learn something. If you are in a class where you are just clinging to some rockstar and getting A's that way, you don't have to learn anything. * Lots of technical decisions are really not very important. Your first solution will probably not be great anyway. It is preferable to get the group to agree on something and move forward. This can be done by having some very competent, less nice person ram their solution through, but a nice, semi-competent group with a good dynamic can also agree on a bad solution, mess it up, and iterate until it works. * Most people are really not that competent as far as I can tell. I mean, I've met people who can carry a team individually, but they are very rare, not common enough to plan on. People with more ego than talent are more common I think, and they have a net negative value in many cases. A friendly, incompetent person is at worst a minor distraction.
munchbunny 5y ago
Trustworthiness, more specifically having a clean record of integrity as opposed to just projecting a feeling of "you can trust me", is non-negotiable for me. If I don't think you're trustworthy, you're a risk to be managed and I can only really fit you into a Machiavellian mental model of "I can trust you only as much as our incentives align". I've had to work with people like that simply because it was out of my control, and it's tiring. There are well-meaning jerks who are just rough around the edges but care a lot about doing the right thing. I might not like them very much, but I'll take a competent jerk over someone whose integrity I don't trust no matter how competent or polite they are.
- mym1990 5y ago
  So basically you don't trust anyone based on intuition or impressions unless they give you a physical 'record of integrity'?
  - munchbunny 5y ago
    “Clean record” doesn’t mean long track record, it means “no issues that I know of.” People get the benefit of the doubt until they lose it.
gjulianm 5y ago
Not many surprises. I'd place trustworthiness higher than friendliness, but both of those qualities are the things that matter in terms of making your job easier. A reliable mediocre programmer is better than an unreliable good one: you can plan around the first one, you can't around the second one. And friendliness just makes all interactions easier. The skill of your teammates is not as important as being able to know what to expect from them and communicate properly.
sleepysysadmin 5y ago
Low trust, low performance. Nobody wants you, go away. High performance, high trust is too costly. They aren't applying for the job, they are getting hired without the annoying hiring process. High performance, low trust is the asshole of the group. If you're on a team and you're the one doing all the work. You're going to be resentful and become an asshole. Low performance, high trust are the dead weight of the group. They make more problems than they solve. The more dead weight you get, the more you require the assholes. Worse yet, the assholes become powerful because what happens when they quit or get fired? You are left with a team of low performance. You don't want to be in that situation. So the assholes end up getting promoted, bonuses, raises. All the metrics will be designed to benefit the assholes. Lots of people think you can hire low performance people and train them to be higher. It rarely works in IT. Things move too quickly, by the time they are good at anything, that thing is obsolete. Hence you need 5 years experience for the entry level job. The middle path is the way!
llimos 5y ago
Part of it is probably that the managers doing the hiring don't actually care all that much about the company they work for, and would prefer to just have a pleasant experience. I wonder how the results would vary for a mid-level manager in $BIGCORP vs. a founder hiring for the company he spent his life building.
clint 5y ago
I will hire a kind person who needs to learn a few things any day of the week over a puzzlemaster trivialord who pisses everyone off
gordaco 5y ago
Not that these two things are opposed to each other, you know. We should try to achieve both, at least to a reasonable level. At the very least, it's much better to have both qualities in a reasonable amount than to be excellent in one and completely lack the other. I've found that there is a sweet spot in the middle of both competencies, where you can teach the least experienced members of the team and people appreciate you for that. It's something that must not be overdone, but there are plenty of opportunities (like, say, during code reviews), and in my experience most people appreciate it as long as the explanations are brief and clear. Think something like "doing things this way can be problematic, because of X and Y. I recommend using this alternate structure, which doesn't have these problems, although it still has the minor inconvenience of Z".
photochemsyn 5y ago
This is a survey of MBA students over the course of less than six months. The definitions are a bit vague, how does one distinguish 'trustworthiness' from 'friendliness'? What is meant by 'technical competence'? For example, in retail sales, the ability to project 'friendliness' is very helpful in client relations, hence in sales margins. This doesn't translate into 'trustworthiness', i.e. not selling your company's IP t o the competition, etc. However, part of the definition of a 'competent salesperson' is the ability to project friendliness regardless of one's actual opinion of the client. So, part of the general definition of 'competence' in technical jobs should be the ability to keep interactions professional regardless of circumstances (while not tolerating actually abusive behavior).
tarkin2 5y ago
You're not making anything alone. You do it in a team. And the team needs to work together well to perform the task. The skills to "work together well" are friendliness and trustworthiness. The equivalent is having excellent hardware components, but the program that coordinates them all is really poor.
wycy 5y ago
Can confirm. I'm only medium skilled at my job, but I'm very friendly, and people seem to be quite fond of me.
chernevik 5y ago
"Maupin and her colleagues focused on a cohort of MBA students to conduct their study." I don't know how much this group tells us. When I was in business school most of the group projects were things I could do on my own if I had to. So compatibility was an absolute gating requirement, you didn't want anybody who could screw up the whole thing. And business school competence was mostly a matter of applying yourself, it wasn't as if there were wide differences in basic ability. I would probably weight compatibility differently if I was truly dependent on their input, and if that input varied a lot among possible members.
flerchin 5y ago
If you lack friendliness, trustworthiness, or competency; I'd prefer you work at a competitor's. All three are deal-breakers on my team.
chiefalchemist 5y ago
This is a given. It's human nature. Unfortunately, in the context of business, where it goes wrong is too often the less competent are able to undermine the more competent in terms of career, influence" etc. Business doesn't mitigate jealousy, "hating", etc. Sadly, too many managers and leaders are oblivious.
tinyhouse 5y ago
Well, it's useful to have great people you can learn from, but eventually what matters in life is the relationships you make. The two don't compete though. Plenty of competent people who are also nice and trustworthy.
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erichocean 5y ago
Yet another WEIRD [0] study of dubious value. Doing it on "study group partners" is particularly <chef's kiss>. [0] Western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic
mberning 5y ago
I have worked with many fine people that I liked quite a bit on a personal level, but were not very good technically. It is a very dangerous situation to allow yourself and your employer to go along with. Over time you will have a team full of very nice people with a middling skillset. You aren’t doing the company, the team, the product, or yourself any favors doing this. If a role is not a good fit for somebody’s skillset they either need some coaching or a different role where they can flourish.
austincheney 5y ago
I am not sure what this actually proves. In any system without definitions or constraints the natural preferential default is a least common denominator. In contrast in systems with an inherently high risk or danger a minimum acceptable competence is readily defined and a minimally preferred competence becomes preferential. A more important question is what does this actually matter? Most people also tend to overwhelmingly prefer agreement and cultural fit in contrast towards diversity and most employers actively work to challenge such.
jt2190 5y ago
If you’re interested in this topic area, check out the podcast Work/Life with Adam Grant [1]. The episode “The office without a*-holes” (season 2, episode 5) is a good place to start. [1] https://www.adamgrant.net/podcast/ https://www.adamgrant.net/podcast/
markus_zhang 5y ago
Since most of the jobs out there can be trained on site from ground zero, I'm not surprised. Have been working on my soft skills recently and will start attending company parties given the chance.
tomp 5y ago
People also prefer taking (communism) over earning (capitalism)... the problem is, communism is unsustainable. So is lack of competency at work (except in government jobs).
arcanon 5y ago
I’ve also seen being tall and/or having a confusingly deep voice work well too… Bs aside, its best to have ppl publicly demo what they’ve built regularly. Quickly incentivizes the dialogue to not be about political favors and instead to be about whats gotten done.
makz 5y ago
I see many people here are seeing this as black and white. It’s not like that.
penjelly 5y ago
in my experience 8 years professionally as a dev fullstack with front end focus. the highly competent often lose their eagerness to contribute over time anyways OR they go elsewhere and work in a new area where they dont have competency from the get go. so instead of being an asshole "with talent" eventually they end up just being an asshole whos very slightly better then the next guy. Either that or, more likely they learn that collaboration is more then just producing code they want and they become not an asshole.
dyeje 5y ago
I am curious if this holds true at organizations that have high performance cultures (e.g. Netflix).
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ellyagg 5y ago
People's personal goals and preferences aren't exactly aligned with company success. It's nice when they match up, but... For example, I prefer not working to working. I think most people are like me. And, yet, work needs to be done. This isn't an idle thought. People find other people friendly when they don't make them work very hard and don't hold them accountable to objective goals.
rsynnott 5y ago
I mean, I feel like this is missing the point. In a job where you're working with other people, being an arsehole or being untrustworthy _is_ a competency issue, and a fairly deal-breaking one.
syngrog66 5y ago
as an engineer I want both in my fellow engineers and bosses. lower skilled coworkers are fine if theyre fundamentally intelligent and curious and willing to learn more. core intelligence of your coworkers will prob not change, however, over the course of your fellow employment. and a raging jerk or narcissist will never get better, as a general rule.
throwaway20371 5y ago
In construction, if the foreman / lead whoever is always angry, people get fearful of speaking up about something, and then more mistakes get made because nobody wanted to point out the glaring flaw. Soldiers also prefer trustworthiness over skill competency. Of course you want your brother-in-arms to do their job well, but it's more important that you can trust them with your life. Technical skills are needed to work with a machine. People skills are needed to work with people.
itoocode 5y ago
Yes totally agree, being liked by teammates helps you climb the ladder.I would say it is a bitter truth .
doctor_eval 5y ago
This is why I can’t have nice things.
silisili 5y ago
I will say this, which seems related - I got much better performance reviews and much better promotions when I spent nearly all my time watching and responding to emails, compared to when I kept my head down and got things done. People really, really like people who reply right away to emails.
ajsnigrutin 5y ago
I'd prefer a collegue who says "I can do A and B, but I don't know how to do C", and I can be sure, that (s)he'll actually do A and B, while trying to solve C, than have someone who's capable of A, B and C, promises (s)he'll do it, but then doesn't.
- lwouis 5y ago
  I've been in the situation where the I'm the one who ends up doing C for them after they try and make a mess. It's not fun to work with incompetent people, however nice they are, if you lead the project and have to show results to stakeholders. It's extra work that you do under the radar, in addition to your own work. A lot of people coast by at work, so for them it's fine when their coworkers are not good, because someone else will deal with it. It's more of a problem when you're the one taking up the work on your shoulders
rubyist5eva 5y ago
I don’t trust someone I work with until they’ve proven to me that they are competent.
Atlantium 5y ago
Thankfully the population size is large enough that those of us who prefer competency over "personality" can form teams of our own.
WalterBright 5y ago
I suppose I'm an outlier. I prefer to work with people more competent than I am, even if they are jerks. People better than I am raises my competence. People I can't trust - that's a hard "no".
analog31 5y ago
In a way, competence is for me, and friendliness is for others. Here's what I mean: I need competence to get through the day without getting killed, and doing my work to my own satisfaction, even in the absence of anybody else watching. I have hobbies where lack of competence would be instantly obvious, such as being a jazz musician and manufacturing a humble but useful product. Naturally I also need friendliness to get through the day in any social setting, and to do my work to the satisfaction of others. Since I'm moderately extraverted, this is valuable to me. My job is in an area where neither my boss nor my colleagues understand what I do. So, I need to be trusted. But I can't imagine doing a job for very long, where friendliness can make up for lack of competence.
aleksiy123 5y ago
Seems so many people are against working on anything, but their technical competence. I feel like this is just another skill to learn and easy way to set yourself apart from other people. Especially if others don't like to do it. I want to be both likeable and technically competent.
- Jensson 5y ago
  A large majority of people already have passable social skills. What they object to is working to master the fake social interactions you see business people, HR etc engage in. And when HR select for social skills they don't select for what you mean, they select for the HR definition of social skills, this is the part people don't like and what they want changed. For example, the algorithm technical interview ensures the candidate has enough social skills to ask questions, explain their thought process and talk about technical solutions without getting angry even when stressed. That is all you need from your software engineers.
bjornsing 5y ago
Depends a lot on context, like incentives. If you’ve got a second mortgage invested in the project then I think most would prefer competent over friendly.
alexnewman 5y ago
People prefer not working as well :) 95% of people are happy with no work getting done
aprilmariko 5y ago
why does that one popular guy who doesn’t seem like he’s as smart as everyone else not get weeded out? Well, the people who know, know.
temac 5y ago
The problem is not necessarily unfriendliness (trustworthiness is harder to define so I'll not concentrate on this one first), it is more generally causing wrongs to others. Of course on the friendly/unfriendly side, that could be by insulting them. But I'm not sure people asking for friendly colleagues actually have that restrictive definition in mind; some may quickly also require regular encouragements, small talks about your life, etc. Except if you are a social worker, that may not be part of your job description. If you have the feeling that helps and are inclined to do so, of course good for you. But this kind of matter, beyond professionalism that can be expected from anybody, should be considered as completely neutral. Causing wrongs to others could also be by breaking the systems of 30 coworkers (or even production) by not caring enough to test before deploying. Mild incompetency may not even really be a problem if you don't randomly chose to skip testing because you... I don't even know? trust your preferred deity that they have blessed the software this day? (of course particular situations need to be taken into account e.g. if the testing is expensive while the only breakage reasonable to expect is very easy to repair, then maybe go on, warn people, fuck the tests and deploy) That may be covered by trustworthiness. However at one point it is called doing your job, and skipping testing because you randomly feel it is OK could and should be a gross fault in some contexts -- and is maybe too rarely. That can be an honest mistake the first time for very junior people -- for others, it is simply not doing parts of your job with the expectation of a lower effort if things go well, and from an individual pov maybe mostly externalities if things go wrong. So yeah, it is better if you have colleagues who you can trust will care to actually do their job. I would not like a plane pilot who randomly say "fuck the checklist today, I've been flying for 10 years I know how to do it". I would not like an editor who suddenly sends manuscripts directly to the printer because the author usually don't make too many typos. Etc. And then, on top of that: being professional is a must (but people are humans so they can occasionally be pissed off too, hey maybe esp. if others are untrustworthy all the time...); being friendly is a plus.
71a54xd 5y ago
Well yeah, friendliness and trustworthiness are key axioms of efficient communication. Anyone a few years out of school knows that generally speaking communication is more important than raw ability once the team size surpasses 4-5 engineers. Great article, but anyone with a borderline amount of social competence generally already knows this.
GuB-42 5y ago
For me, friendliness and competency tend to correlate. Maybe because I am naturally attracted to competent people, as you can learn a lot from them. Another thing with competent people is that they have nothing to prove and don't have to rely on deception. For example, they are less likely to steal other people work because they are better off doing it themselves. As for trustworthiness, I didn't notice much correlation, but competence can make up for it because competent people have an easier time fixing their mistakes.
greyhair 5y ago
I have worked in technology as an engineer for thirty seven years. Over that time I have worked with a number of genuinely intelligent people, way smarter than me. Some of them were an absolute joy to work with, and some of them were horrors. Technical product success was about evenly split between those two classes of coworkers, but the teams with the 'horrors' invariably shipped late, and the joyful teams invariably shipped product in a timely manner. I think a big contributor in both cases is that people are late to report problems in the horror story cases because the inevitable public beat down was so dreadful, plus the decision times drawn out by inevitable arguments delayed progress. Where on the generally joyful teams, people that were struggling would report that to get help early, and when the inevitable changes were required, the discussion and decision cycles were shorter, because, less shouting. This is purely my life experience, nothing more, nothing scientific about it, but that is what I have encountered along the way. If the team as a whole, trusts the members of the team, and the interpersonal stress level is low, work goes better. I know that all just seems to make common sense, but it is amazing how one or two confrontational members, particularly at decision making/managerial levels, can hinder an organization.

510 points by rustoo 5y ago

Let's say that I get paid basically the same whether my team performs adequately or whether it really excels. In this case, why wouldn't I prefer friendly teammates? As long as we perform adequately, we're gonna get paid the same. Let the superstar assholes work on someone else's team!

Mikeb85 5y ago

Because skills can typically be taught. Much harder to teach someone not to be an asshole.

DarkWiiPlayer 5y ago

Correct me if I'm wrong, but this article doesn't really seem to be talking about actual competence, but only projections of competence in social interactions. There's a big difference here: You can act like you know everything and still have lots of bullshit ideas. Anybody with enough experience in a field will quickly figure these people out and put them in the "ignore" box.

trinovantes 5y ago

The most interesting (and cynical) interview advice I've heard was that the outcome of interviews is often decided in the first 5 minutes. Barring some extreme competency issues, if the interviewer likes you then they'll help you succeed and sometimes overlook your flaws. I guess this is Pygmalion effect in action?

raxxorrax 5y ago

What do they mean people prefer it? I thought it was fairly open secret that people dislike competency in their peers. Depends on the team, but we have a competitive work culture and this is a logical consequence of that. There are more cooperative teams, but even there you have conflicts among big egos.

timbaboon 5y ago

Nope. Having someone friendly that can’t do they job, who you then have to cover for? That breeds resentment… well for me anyway

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bserge 5y ago

Basically, fit in, don't stand out. So if you're not a lemming and want to succeed, pretend to fit in. Fake it till you make it. The chances of getting ahead without challenging anyone/anything are extremely low. The most cliche shit possible, but yeah, it holds up.

GoToRO 5y ago
The level of conformism in typical corporation is really hard to digest. It reminds me of communism (the implementation not the design). There was conformism there too but not at the level you see now. It seems that people that live on credit their whole lives while beeing 2 weeks from termination at any given time really brings out the worst in them.
striking 5y ago
I don't think that's what the article says: > The researchers found that people who exhibited both competence, through the use of challenging voice, and trustworthiness, through the use of supportive voice, were the most in-demand people when it came to assembling teams. [emphasis mine] and later, > “Our findings suggest that when people feel like they can trust you, even if you’re not necessarily the best worker, they’re going to be more likely to want to work with you,” Maupin said. “They know that there are likely to be fewer interpersonal issues in that case.” So the article is not saying "be a lemming because no one cares how good you are," it's saying being supportive of others has a greater positive impact on how others see you than your willingness to challenge others' ideas and signal your competency.
gjulianm 5y ago
You can challenge people and things while being trustworthy and friendly. I've found it's the best way to do it, actually.
caymanjim 5y ago
You can't fake being a nice person and getting along. It's obvious to everyone, and people dislike you even more. They might fake being nice in return, but they'll avoid interacting with you and won't go to bat for you when it matters.

jacknews 5y ago

No doubt these are the traits that people seek in fellow 'study group' members. Does anyone remember the way football teams used to be assembled in school? Two team captains would each take turns to pick teammates from the rest of the students. I don't recall 'friendliness and trustworthiness' being necessarily the top qualifiers.

notreallyserio 5y ago
The stakes of those pickup football games were pretty low (for most people).
- jacknews 5y ago
  I think that sums up the other replies that say 'friends first, etc', and is in fact my point. In my experience there was some prestige in winning, and particularly in picking a winning team, and that would feed into who was picked for the school team. When the stakes are low, you can can choose to be among friends. When the stakes are higher, you need to work, perhaps less comfortably, with greater talent.
  - notreallyserio 5y ago
    Interesting, I had kind of the opposite takeaway. You can afford to pick friends followed by the best for pickup teams, where winning doesn’t matter too much. But when the stakes are high you need to be pick folks you can work with for months or years, even if it means their tech skills aren’t as solid as a candidate that is otherwise unfriendly or untrustworthy.
kevinh 5y ago
In my experience, friends were often the first ones picked to be on a team. And if a person was known for leaving midgame, they'd be one of the last ones picked.
- jacknews 5y ago
  My experience is that the team captains were usually the most experienced players, and were often friends with the best of the rest. But everyone knew who was good, and they were picked first regardless of actual friendships, since games would feed into decisions about who made the school team, particularly captain.

Rd6n6 5y ago

If somebody isn’t trustworthy, that means they can’t be trusted. Who would want to work with and rely on somebody they thought of like that?

csee 5y ago

Trustworthiness, sure. But not friendliness (unless it's asshole-level unfriendliness) over competence. There's little worse than a friendly but incompetent teammate, who will often get too many passes and second chances (because they're well liked) before being terminated. I'll take neutral friendliness, or even slightly unfriendly, + extreme competence, any day.

doteka 5y ago
I don’t think that’s an opinion held by someone who actually worked with/had to manage the combination of “slightly unfriendly + extreme confidence” before. That is how you get Prima Donnas, temper tantrums during technical discussions and other fun stuff.
- delecti 5y ago
  Someone extremely confident and prone to tantrums is not friendly. Competence is not necessarily linked with a lack of humility.
- mypastself 5y ago
  Extreme competence, not confidence.
- pydry 5y ago
  I've yet to work for somebody exhibiting extreme confidence in a work situation who wasnt covering for something - usually a lack of competence. I've heard stories of "brilliant assholes" but once I've peeled back the layers of these stories I always develop a strong impression that the brilliance is a facade.
  - watwut 5y ago
    My experience with brilliant assholes is that it is combination of self sufficient prophecy and bullying effects. Some people think that being asshole is component of being brilliant and thus they assume you to be brilliant if you act like ass. And the other component is that assholes often times end up dominating rooms and looking brilliant, because they effectively bully others into being silent. For most people, being silent is better then risking the asshole will target you.

serverholic 5y ago

It's nice at first if someone is friendly but eventually it wears off if they aren't competent. For that reason I suspect that this is one of those idealistic things that works out differently in practice.

thrower123 5y ago

Lets see it replicate on something other than a small group of MBA students before we lend it too much credence.

adam_arthur 5y ago

Depends on what your incentives are. If you own the business, I bet the factors you care about look a lot different. If you're just working the 9-5, and aren't in the blast radius of your coworker, of course you'll care a lot more about sociable traits than quality of work. As a manager, it's a lot easier and more enjoyable to work with higher competency people, that's for sure. Though I will say, that I'd trade a certain level of competency for general attitude/friendliness. Some people are quite good but difficult to manage. Don't think these results should be surprising.

endisneigh 5y ago
> As a manager, it's a lot easier and more enjoyable to work with higher competency people, that's for sure. Though I will say, that I'd trade a certain level of competency for general attitude/friendliness. Some people are quite good but difficult to manage. Why's that? Here on HN there are Ask HN threads every few months about one cofounder trying to get rid of another competent, but toxic cofounder.
- adam_arthur 5y ago
  Specifically in regards to cofounders, the math is different. The founders will drive the direction of the culture of the business going forward, so a bad attitude will likely yield poor results in the long run RE: retention etc. I'm speaking moreso from the perspective of a manager in a larger org. It depends on the context of course, but working with junior or less capable people can turn into a micromanaging by necessity kind of situation. e.g. need to be very specific about design/implementation details when providing direction. Versus somebody who is highly competent, you can generally just give a high level direction and leave it to them to fill in the blanks. The goal is never to micromanage, obviously, but if you have a lots of design decisions to make, it can be necessary to have tight control over those decisions to maintain quality. This situation can become draining to manage. This is where formal processes and agile etc become important. But if you have a team of all highly capable and motivated people, you can have much looser processes and yield better results. Don't need to specify every detail of every task up front. I'm approaching this as a manager who is more heavily involved in the technical side... but in other situations, it might be the tech lead doing these things. But I'd for sure take somebody who's friendly and nice to work with over a highly competent but abrasive person. There's a middle ground there...

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cletus 5y ago

Roger Sterling of Mad Men said it best [1]: > I don't know if anyone's ever told you that half the time this business comes down to 'I don't like that guy.' In all my years of working, this is probably the most important thing you can learn. Except for marginal cases, it's not about how good you are at your job. You just have to be liked while being sufficiently good. It's also why the perennial "hiring is broken" posts and threads miss the point completely: really they're just trying to find someone they like. It's what "culture fit" really means. And people like people like themselves. This is part of what can lead to unlawful discrimination. Trustworthiness is an interesting one as it seems to be hard to define but some people just have it and some don't. This has been studied and can have a profound effect on, say, criminal sentencing [2]. [1]: https://twitter.com/madmenqts/status/783648743690231808?lang=en https://twitter.com/madmenqts/status/783648743690231808?lang... [2]: https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2015/07/17/423600926/in-court-your-face-could-determine-your-fate https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2015/07/17/4236009...

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imbnwa 5y ago
> really they're just trying to find someone they like. It's what "culture fit" really means. And people like people like themselves. This is part of what can lead to unlawful discrimination. This can't be stated enough
BlargMcLarg 5y ago
>It's also why the perennial "hiring is broken" posts and threads miss the point completely I don't think they miss the point completely when many hiring processes don't test for team cohesion at all beyond a manager pointing a finger in the air and guessing what the fit will be based on a 15 minute talk. Given these people would in the same breath claim diversity in personalities is great and covering each other's weaknesses is essential. That's exactly how we end up with teams where not a single person has the spine to go up against clearly ridiculous requirements (that is assuming any perspective, not just technical), while claiming critical thinking is great.
5y ago

notjustanymike 5y ago

The implication here is friendly but incompetent trumps competent but unfriendly. This isn't a surprise. A team is stronger than an individual, and competence has a productivity ceiling where you have to start playing well with others.

magneticnorth 5y ago

"Maupin and her colleagues focused on a cohort of MBA students to conduct their study. Students were randomly assigned to teams at the beginning of the semester to work on class projects and assignments." So this is about what people prefer in their MBA program study group. While I do, personally, think that kindness is super important in work colleagues as well, this study doesn't particularly address that.

havkd 5y ago
Just by reading the title I thought “this smells of women”. Thanks for confirming :P
AlwaysRock 5y ago
Welcome to the selection bias that exists in the majority of social science research.

endisneigh 5y ago

If you wonder the three criteria with three discrete levels you get a cube that's something like: Very unfriendly, somewhat friendly, very friendly. Very untrustworthy, somewhat trustworthy, very trustworthy. Incompetent, average, very competent. Now if you take these and model the interactions between people who exhibit a three-pair (e.g. (somewhat friendly, somewhat trustworthy and average) against (v. unfriendly, s. trustworthy, v. competent)) I would imagine the "world" would eventually remove all friendly people (depending on the assumptions). If you imagine friendliness and competence is correlated I would also imagine you'd get rid of a lot of the competent people as well. Unfortunately more research would be needed to assert or refute this hypothesis. Anecdotally I'd say friendliness and competence are positively correlated, but not very strongly. --- To put it another way, if you have a team of people. Will you team as a whole receive more benefit from someone very competent but ultimately toxic and ruins the culture or somewhat incompetent but very friendly?

papito 5y ago

I like a little bit of both. They better be downright brilliant if I am going to put up with their ego. I worked with a guy like that once. Yeah, he worked at Google, and "that's not how they did things over there". He was very sure of himself, but being smart is NOT the same as being intelligent. He never missed a chance to throw jabs at our lame, working codebase. Then he checked in AWS secrets in our main repo and made it public.

DarkWiiPlayer 5y ago
Ah yes, it's a massive red flag when people bring up where they used to work to make themselves look good. The "we did things differently at X" is also a huge red flag. Competent people will figure out the different needs of different workplaces instead of just assuming that the biggest name had the best approach. If you think something is good because google does it, you probably don't understand why google did it nor why it worked for google (and whether or not it would work at a different company).

TrackerFF 5y ago

My take is that as long as your workers are above a certain threshold (as far as technical competency goes), a team with healthy culture will on average outperform a team with toxic culture - even though the latter may have members that are more technically proficient, than in the former team. By toxic culture, I mean: - Poor communication - Abrasive or toxic personalities - Bullying and harassment etc. I think that in most normal people, stressors like those can affect their performance. And I don't mean full-blown hazing rituals - even more subtle actions (poor communication, for example) can lower morale. More so if you feel that said poor communication is deliberate.

MudAndGears 5y ago
Absolutely. I worked on a team where the lead engineer would be out of the office for weeks at at time, and then when he'd return he'd skim in-progress code and request radical revisions, only to criticize those decisions the next time he was in the office. I was actively looking for a new job when he quit, and it was such a relief. My productivity (and happiness) went through the roof, and a couple months into the year my manager told me that I'd already accomplished everything he hoped I'd accomplish _for the year_. By exchanging a some technical skill for a better work environment our whole team benefitted.
calyth2018 5y ago
I've seen that so many times in my current office, it's not even funny at this point. And I couldn't agree with you more. As long as a set level of competency is there, I'd rather work with friendly people than a bunch of know-it-mosts that don't know tact.

webinvest 5y ago

I’ve always said that a coworker has to be either friendly, competent, or both. Ideally both but some are neither.

bee_rider 5y ago

There are lots of reasons to prefer friendly teams. * Just, generally more enjoyable and productive experience. Most things are really not that important, particularly in school (which is where this experiment was run). And anyway, the purpose is often not to be optimally productive, but to learn something. If you are in a class where you are just clinging to some rockstar and getting A's that way, you don't have to learn anything. * Lots of technical decisions are really not very important. Your first solution will probably not be great anyway. It is preferable to get the group to agree on something and move forward. This can be done by having some very competent, less nice person ram their solution through, but a nice, semi-competent group with a good dynamic can also agree on a bad solution, mess it up, and iterate until it works. * Most people are really not that competent as far as I can tell. I mean, I've met people who can carry a team individually, but they are very rare, not common enough to plan on. People with more ego than talent are more common I think, and they have a net negative value in many cases. A friendly, incompetent person is at worst a minor distraction.

munchbunny 5y ago

Trustworthiness, more specifically having a clean record of integrity as opposed to just projecting a feeling of "you can trust me", is non-negotiable for me. If I don't think you're trustworthy, you're a risk to be managed and I can only really fit you into a Machiavellian mental model of "I can trust you only as much as our incentives align". I've had to work with people like that simply because it was out of my control, and it's tiring. There are well-meaning jerks who are just rough around the edges but care a lot about doing the right thing. I might not like them very much, but I'll take a competent jerk over someone whose integrity I don't trust no matter how competent or polite they are.

mym1990 5y ago
So basically you don't trust anyone based on intuition or impressions unless they give you a physical 'record of integrity'?
- munchbunny 5y ago
  “Clean record” doesn’t mean long track record, it means “no issues that I know of.” People get the benefit of the doubt until they lose it.

gjulianm 5y ago

Not many surprises. I'd place trustworthiness higher than friendliness, but both of those qualities are the things that matter in terms of making your job easier. A reliable mediocre programmer is better than an unreliable good one: you can plan around the first one, you can't around the second one. And friendliness just makes all interactions easier. The skill of your teammates is not as important as being able to know what to expect from them and communicate properly.

sleepysysadmin 5y ago

Low trust, low performance. Nobody wants you, go away. High performance, high trust is too costly. They aren't applying for the job, they are getting hired without the annoying hiring process. High performance, low trust is the asshole of the group. If you're on a team and you're the one doing all the work. You're going to be resentful and become an asshole. Low performance, high trust are the dead weight of the group. They make more problems than they solve. The more dead weight you get, the more you require the assholes. Worse yet, the assholes become powerful because what happens when they quit or get fired? You are left with a team of low performance. You don't want to be in that situation. So the assholes end up getting promoted, bonuses, raises. All the metrics will be designed to benefit the assholes. Lots of people think you can hire low performance people and train them to be higher. It rarely works in IT. Things move too quickly, by the time they are good at anything, that thing is obsolete. Hence you need 5 years experience for the entry level job. The middle path is the way!

llimos 5y ago

Part of it is probably that the managers doing the hiring don't actually care all that much about the company they work for, and would prefer to just have a pleasant experience. I wonder how the results would vary for a mid-level manager in $BIGCORP vs. a founder hiring for the company he spent his life building.

clint 5y ago

I will hire a kind person who needs to learn a few things any day of the week over a puzzlemaster trivialord who pisses everyone off

gordaco 5y ago

Not that these two things are opposed to each other, you know. We should try to achieve both, at least to a reasonable level. At the very least, it's much better to have both qualities in a reasonable amount than to be excellent in one and completely lack the other. I've found that there is a sweet spot in the middle of both competencies, where you can teach the least experienced members of the team and people appreciate you for that. It's something that must not be overdone, but there are plenty of opportunities (like, say, during code reviews), and in my experience most people appreciate it as long as the explanations are brief and clear. Think something like "doing things this way can be problematic, because of X and Y. I recommend using this alternate structure, which doesn't have these problems, although it still has the minor inconvenience of Z".

photochemsyn 5y ago

This is a survey of MBA students over the course of less than six months. The definitions are a bit vague, how does one distinguish 'trustworthiness' from 'friendliness'? What is meant by 'technical competence'? For example, in retail sales, the ability to project 'friendliness' is very helpful in client relations, hence in sales margins. This doesn't translate into 'trustworthiness', i.e. not selling your company's IP t o the competition, etc. However, part of the definition of a 'competent salesperson' is the ability to project friendliness regardless of one's actual opinion of the client. So, part of the general definition of 'competence' in technical jobs should be the ability to keep interactions professional regardless of circumstances (while not tolerating actually abusive behavior).

tarkin2 5y ago

You're not making anything alone. You do it in a team. And the team needs to work together well to perform the task. The skills to "work together well" are friendliness and trustworthiness. The equivalent is having excellent hardware components, but the program that coordinates them all is really poor.

wycy 5y ago

Can confirm. I'm only medium skilled at my job, but I'm very friendly, and people seem to be quite fond of me.

chernevik 5y ago

"Maupin and her colleagues focused on a cohort of MBA students to conduct their study." I don't know how much this group tells us. When I was in business school most of the group projects were things I could do on my own if I had to. So compatibility was an absolute gating requirement, you didn't want anybody who could screw up the whole thing. And business school competence was mostly a matter of applying yourself, it wasn't as if there were wide differences in basic ability. I would probably weight compatibility differently if I was truly dependent on their input, and if that input varied a lot among possible members.

flerchin 5y ago

If you lack friendliness, trustworthiness, or competency; I'd prefer you work at a competitor's. All three are deal-breakers on my team.

chiefalchemist 5y ago

This is a given. It's human nature. Unfortunately, in the context of business, where it goes wrong is too often the less competent are able to undermine the more competent in terms of career, influence" etc. Business doesn't mitigate jealousy, "hating", etc. Sadly, too many managers and leaders are oblivious.

tinyhouse 5y ago

Well, it's useful to have great people you can learn from, but eventually what matters in life is the relationships you make. The two don't compete though. Plenty of competent people who are also nice and trustworthy.

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erichocean 5y ago

Yet another WEIRD [0] study of dubious value. Doing it on "study group partners" is particularly <chef's kiss>. [0] Western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic

mberning 5y ago

I have worked with many fine people that I liked quite a bit on a personal level, but were not very good technically. It is a very dangerous situation to allow yourself and your employer to go along with. Over time you will have a team full of very nice people with a middling skillset. You aren’t doing the company, the team, the product, or yourself any favors doing this. If a role is not a good fit for somebody’s skillset they either need some coaching or a different role where they can flourish.

austincheney 5y ago

I am not sure what this actually proves. In any system without definitions or constraints the natural preferential default is a least common denominator. In contrast in systems with an inherently high risk or danger a minimum acceptable competence is readily defined and a minimally preferred competence becomes preferential. A more important question is what does this actually matter? Most people also tend to overwhelmingly prefer agreement and cultural fit in contrast towards diversity and most employers actively work to challenge such.

jt2190 5y ago

If you’re interested in this topic area, check out the podcast Work/Life with Adam Grant [1]. The episode “The office without a*-holes” (season 2, episode 5) is a good place to start. [1] https://www.adamgrant.net/podcast/ https://www.adamgrant.net/podcast/

markus_zhang 5y ago

Since most of the jobs out there can be trained on site from ground zero, I'm not surprised. Have been working on my soft skills recently and will start attending company parties given the chance.

tomp 5y ago

People also prefer taking (communism) over earning (capitalism)... the problem is, communism is unsustainable. So is lack of competency at work (except in government jobs).

arcanon 5y ago

I’ve also seen being tall and/or having a confusingly deep voice work well too… Bs aside, its best to have ppl publicly demo what they’ve built regularly. Quickly incentivizes the dialogue to not be about political favors and instead to be about whats gotten done.

makz 5y ago

I see many people here are seeing this as black and white. It’s not like that.

penjelly 5y ago

in my experience 8 years professionally as a dev fullstack with front end focus. the highly competent often lose their eagerness to contribute over time anyways OR they go elsewhere and work in a new area where they dont have competency from the get go. so instead of being an asshole "with talent" eventually they end up just being an asshole whos very slightly better then the next guy. Either that or, more likely they learn that collaboration is more then just producing code they want and they become not an asshole.

dyeje 5y ago

I am curious if this holds true at organizations that have high performance cultures (e.g. Netflix).

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ellyagg 5y ago

People's personal goals and preferences aren't exactly aligned with company success. It's nice when they match up, but... For example, I prefer not working to working. I think most people are like me. And, yet, work needs to be done. This isn't an idle thought. People find other people friendly when they don't make them work very hard and don't hold them accountable to objective goals.

rsynnott 5y ago

I mean, I feel like this is missing the point. In a job where you're working with other people, being an arsehole or being untrustworthy _is_ a competency issue, and a fairly deal-breaking one.

syngrog66 5y ago

as an engineer I want both in my fellow engineers and bosses. lower skilled coworkers are fine if theyre fundamentally intelligent and curious and willing to learn more. core intelligence of your coworkers will prob not change, however, over the course of your fellow employment. and a raging jerk or narcissist will never get better, as a general rule.

throwaway20371 5y ago

In construction, if the foreman / lead whoever is always angry, people get fearful of speaking up about something, and then more mistakes get made because nobody wanted to point out the glaring flaw. Soldiers also prefer trustworthiness over skill competency. Of course you want your brother-in-arms to do their job well, but it's more important that you can trust them with your life. Technical skills are needed to work with a machine. People skills are needed to work with people.

itoocode 5y ago

Yes totally agree, being liked by teammates helps you climb the ladder.I would say it is a bitter truth .

doctor_eval 5y ago

This is why I can’t have nice things.

silisili 5y ago

I will say this, which seems related - I got much better performance reviews and much better promotions when I spent nearly all my time watching and responding to emails, compared to when I kept my head down and got things done. People really, really like people who reply right away to emails.

ajsnigrutin 5y ago

I'd prefer a collegue who says "I can do A and B, but I don't know how to do C", and I can be sure, that (s)he'll actually do A and B, while trying to solve C, than have someone who's capable of A, B and C, promises (s)he'll do it, but then doesn't.

lwouis 5y ago
I've been in the situation where the I'm the one who ends up doing C for them after they try and make a mess. It's not fun to work with incompetent people, however nice they are, if you lead the project and have to show results to stakeholders. It's extra work that you do under the radar, in addition to your own work. A lot of people coast by at work, so for them it's fine when their coworkers are not good, because someone else will deal with it. It's more of a problem when you're the one taking up the work on your shoulders

rubyist5eva 5y ago

I don’t trust someone I work with until they’ve proven to me that they are competent.

Atlantium 5y ago

Thankfully the population size is large enough that those of us who prefer competency over "personality" can form teams of our own.

WalterBright 5y ago

I suppose I'm an outlier. I prefer to work with people more competent than I am, even if they are jerks. People better than I am raises my competence. People I can't trust - that's a hard "no".

analog31 5y ago

In a way, competence is for me, and friendliness is for others. Here's what I mean: I need competence to get through the day without getting killed, and doing my work to my own satisfaction, even in the absence of anybody else watching. I have hobbies where lack of competence would be instantly obvious, such as being a jazz musician and manufacturing a humble but useful product. Naturally I also need friendliness to get through the day in any social setting, and to do my work to the satisfaction of others. Since I'm moderately extraverted, this is valuable to me. My job is in an area where neither my boss nor my colleagues understand what I do. So, I need to be trusted. But I can't imagine doing a job for very long, where friendliness can make up for lack of competence.

aleksiy123 5y ago

Seems so many people are against working on anything, but their technical competence. I feel like this is just another skill to learn and easy way to set yourself apart from other people. Especially if others don't like to do it. I want to be both likeable and technically competent.

Jensson 5y ago
A large majority of people already have passable social skills. What they object to is working to master the fake social interactions you see business people, HR etc engage in. And when HR select for social skills they don't select for what you mean, they select for the HR definition of social skills, this is the part people don't like and what they want changed. For example, the algorithm technical interview ensures the candidate has enough social skills to ask questions, explain their thought process and talk about technical solutions without getting angry even when stressed. That is all you need from your software engineers.

bjornsing 5y ago

Depends a lot on context, like incentives. If you’ve got a second mortgage invested in the project then I think most would prefer competent over friendly.

alexnewman 5y ago

People prefer not working as well :) 95% of people are happy with no work getting done

aprilmariko 5y ago

why does that one popular guy who doesn’t seem like he’s as smart as everyone else not get weeded out? Well, the people who know, know.

temac 5y ago

The problem is not necessarily unfriendliness (trustworthiness is harder to define so I'll not concentrate on this one first), it is more generally causing wrongs to others. Of course on the friendly/unfriendly side, that could be by insulting them. But I'm not sure people asking for friendly colleagues actually have that restrictive definition in mind; some may quickly also require regular encouragements, small talks about your life, etc. Except if you are a social worker, that may not be part of your job description. If you have the feeling that helps and are inclined to do so, of course good for you. But this kind of matter, beyond professionalism that can be expected from anybody, should be considered as completely neutral. Causing wrongs to others could also be by breaking the systems of 30 coworkers (or even production) by not caring enough to test before deploying. Mild incompetency may not even really be a problem if you don't randomly chose to skip testing because you... I don't even know? trust your preferred deity that they have blessed the software this day? (of course particular situations need to be taken into account e.g. if the testing is expensive while the only breakage reasonable to expect is very easy to repair, then maybe go on, warn people, fuck the tests and deploy) That may be covered by trustworthiness. However at one point it is called doing your job, and skipping testing because you randomly feel it is OK could and should be a gross fault in some contexts -- and is maybe too rarely. That can be an honest mistake the first time for very junior people -- for others, it is simply not doing parts of your job with the expectation of a lower effort if things go well, and from an individual pov maybe mostly externalities if things go wrong. So yeah, it is better if you have colleagues who you can trust will care to actually do their job. I would not like a plane pilot who randomly say "fuck the checklist today, I've been flying for 10 years I know how to do it". I would not like an editor who suddenly sends manuscripts directly to the printer because the author usually don't make too many typos. Etc. And then, on top of that: being professional is a must (but people are humans so they can occasionally be pissed off too, hey maybe esp. if others are untrustworthy all the time...); being friendly is a plus.

71a54xd 5y ago

Well yeah, friendliness and trustworthiness are key axioms of efficient communication. Anyone a few years out of school knows that generally speaking communication is more important than raw ability once the team size surpasses 4-5 engineers. Great article, but anyone with a borderline amount of social competence generally already knows this.

GuB-42 5y ago

For me, friendliness and competency tend to correlate. Maybe because I am naturally attracted to competent people, as you can learn a lot from them. Another thing with competent people is that they have nothing to prove and don't have to rely on deception. For example, they are less likely to steal other people work because they are better off doing it themselves. As for trustworthiness, I didn't notice much correlation, but competence can make up for it because competent people have an easier time fixing their mistakes.

greyhair 5y ago

I have worked in technology as an engineer for thirty seven years. Over that time I have worked with a number of genuinely intelligent people, way smarter than me. Some of them were an absolute joy to work with, and some of them were horrors. Technical product success was about evenly split between those two classes of coworkers, but the teams with the 'horrors' invariably shipped late, and the joyful teams invariably shipped product in a timely manner. I think a big contributor in both cases is that people are late to report problems in the horror story cases because the inevitable public beat down was so dreadful, plus the decision times drawn out by inevitable arguments delayed progress. Where on the generally joyful teams, people that were struggling would report that to get help early, and when the inevitable changes were required, the discussion and decision cycles were shorter, because, less shouting. This is purely my life experience, nothing more, nothing scientific about it, but that is what I have encountered along the way. If the team as a whole, trusts the members of the team, and the interpersonal stress level is low, work goes better. I know that all just seems to make common sense, but it is amazing how one or two confrontational members, particularly at decision making/managerial levels, can hinder an organization.