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We're not jerks. We're people who notice problems. You're shooting the messenger. Every problem that tech has comes from treating disagreeable people as pariah

We're not jerks. We're people who notice problems. You're shooting the messenger. Every problem that tech has comes from treating disagreeable people as pariahs. Organizational bloat and tech debt are still issues even when we're not there. Avoid hiring disagreeable people and you'll arrive at the stereotypical tech org that can't get anything done. If you don't have disagreeable people to solve your issues, you have to use the other tool: Layoffs. Discriminating against people because they're disagreeable is insane. It's a Big Five personality trait. You hate half of humanity. Evolution produced the best problem-solving thing ever, humanity, and you decided a lot of the work done there was just pointless. The real reason disagreeable people are valuable and can attain power in the workplace is because you've made it so with this completely unreasonable bias you have. They're not supposed to be extremely rare! That only happens in the tech workplace. Would you similarly discriminate against anxious people? What about people who aren't open to new experiences? Do you shut them out too? How does your ideology square with black people being way more disagreeable on average? Let me guess: You don't hire any and then mumble something about culture fit. Working with disagreeable people doesn't suck. Working sucks. The disagreeable people just point it out. How do you ever improve without that? Working at an all-agreeable-people tech firm is a Kafkaesque nightmare of everything being perfect and nothing getting done. And you all deserve it because you decided that when people tend to be one way or the other, the ones who are like you are just better.

crtified 4y ago
Tech workplaces hold no special claim to conformity. It's not uncommon for big old professions and specialities to have institutes and charters which include compulsory precepts along the lines of "thou shalt not publicly disagree with or badmouth thy fellow". There, agreeing-to-agree is foundationally baked in; the very professions are sustained around the continual churning out of cookie-cutter journeymen, with intergenerational progress carefully, hierarchically regulated such that the profession all steps forward together.
talentedcoin 4y ago
Strong disagree. It is possible to disagree without being disagreeable, and I personally find it frustrating when people excuse their behaviour in the manner you are doing. Yes work sucks, but being unpleasant, cynical and snarky just makes it even worse. Roll up your sleeves and help or please get out of the way.
- mdcds 4y ago
  > It is possible to disagree without being disagreeable, -1 for strawman disagreeing with someone and raking high on Disagreeableness BigFive trait are two different things
  - mcguire 4y ago
    Yes, and the comment being responded to is asserting it's impossible to disagree without being disagreeable.
- macNchz 4y ago
  Absolutely, organizations need someone who will stand up and ensure important things are dealt with, but doing so does not require being unpleasant. This is something I’ve actively tried to cultivate in myself, and have been happy to receive feedback both that I am “not at all a yes-man” and am “someone who has a calming presence” by coworkers. I think that being the unpleasant version of “not a yes-man” just means that people will try to find ways around you.
  - xen2xen1 4y ago
    I'm known as the nice friend who will tell you hard things. I'm a nice guy who knows how to be a dick when I have to be. I actively work on both being "softer" as I probably have gone a bit too direct, and being more assertive as I can be too easy going. I usually like the balance I've struck, and often have people thank me after I tell them hard, serious stuff. I wish more people could do that, know so many jerks. Being assertive does NOT mean you have to be ass.
    - kyleyeats 4y ago
      How would you do it the other way? If you started off as disagreeable and had to learn agreeability? Do you think you could do that without ever being an ass? Do you think it's fair that you got a chance to develop towards a happy middle but someone working from the other end would never get that chance?
wnolens 4y ago
As a somewhat disagreeable person, I have to agree. So much of my time spent at work is in a state of frustration at processes and people. I think it's my job to be vocal about what I see, either to improve the situation, or correct my perspective (i.e. learn!). However.. I have to sanitize my language and use the most gross of corporate speak. I often sleep on it before sending a contentious email. I'm still the team asshole, but an old boss said every team needs one ;)
- mcguire 4y ago
  Once upon a time, I worked with a particular person. At one point we were evaluating version control alternatives and he looked at one. He said it was great, but would never respond when anyone asked, "How do you do X, Y, or Z?" Eventually we picked one of the others (partially because he would never tell us why his was better), but he refused to accept that, resulting in the team lead having to develop a script to exchange changes between the system he used and the one everyone else used. He's also the guy who kept commenting out "-Wall" from our C++ Makefile with comments like "Nobody has time for that." (Though apparently, I had time to fire up Valgrind and track down all the memory issues, most of which would have been caught by compiler warnings.) He also considered "Maybe I'll just throw myself under a bus" to be a valid technical point during a discussion. I began my career at IBM, where the loudest, most aggressive person got to be in charge. I have a lot of experience working around disagreeable co-workers---usually by doing things their way, whether or not it is best for the project---because there's no other way to get anything done. But then, I don't consider constant bike-shedding arguments as getting things done. Fortunately, I don't have to do that any more. I've quit jobs because I couldn't stand spending more of my time keeping a disagreeable person happy (well, not happy; they're never going to be happy) than getting my actual work done. (Oh, that co-worker from the first paragraph? A few years later he sent me an email asking if I would be a reference. I said no.)
civilized 4y ago
As a self-IDed somewhat "disagreeable" person, I have mixed feelings about this. I think you're absolutely right that people who notice and articulate problems can come to be viewed negatively, and it places a double burden on them to notice the problem and then come up with the perfect way of articulating it that can't possibly hurt anyone's feelings. And if no one is willing or able to assume that burden, and there isn't a tolerance for some negativity in the workplace, it leads to exactly the thing you mention, a place where "everything is perfect and nothing gets done". On the other hand, I do think it's possible to assume this double burden, and the people who do it well can become the most valued people in an organization. Consider taking it as yet another problem that you can work on! The hidden superpower of the "neurotic" and "disagreeable" is being sensitive to how things are not great, which helps give rise to the drive to improve. And that drive can and should be applied to our sometimes socially suboptimal ways of expressing ourselves. An "opportunity to improve" can be a lot more popular than a "way things suck", depending on who you're working with.
- kyleyeats 4y ago
  Great insights. Curious about your result on my personality test: https://eristicstest.com/ https://eristicstest.com/ Disagreeable people often have an over-the-top people-pleaser side because they're bad at agreeability. For them it's usually a choice of being a doormat or a jerk. When people are bad at agreeability in this way, but still agreeable, nobody is in a rush to correct them. Nobody threatens to quit over the doormat. But it's the exact same personality flaw, just expressed differently in Big Five terms.
  - civilized 4y ago
    I got The Fixer. Very interesting test. I'm kind of impressed/mystified at how it got so much information about me from those questions. Like Myers-Briggs but seemingly both more ambitious theoretically and using fewer questions. I wonder how it would fare under psychometric validation (as I understand MBTI doesn't fare well despite being so popular and so many people including me finding insight there). Re: agreeability, it seems like you're speaking of it as a skill more than just a personality variable. I see the skill of being prosocial and the personality trait of agreeability as separate. I see myself as a high-functioning disagreeable person, where I see things more negatively than average and have more conflictual feelings than average, but usually manage to turn it all into something effective and prosocial when working with other people.
_a_a_a_ 4y ago
Having a good giggle at this. Joke, right? > Working with disagreeable people doesn't suck W00t! By definition it does. > The disagreeable people just point it out Ah, perhaps you mean disagree-ing people. That would make some sense at least.
encloser 4y ago
The article describes disagreeable people as "selfish, combative, and manipulative." And "Does being disagreeable-that is, behaving in aggressive, selfish, and manipulative ways-help people attain power?" Which, to me, sounds very different from voicing concerns or identifying problems.
unsui 4y ago
> You hate half of humanity This reeks of all-or-nothing thinking, which itself reeks of deep insecurity (a very likely root condition of being disagreeable). It's one thing to have differing thoughts and opinions. It's another thing to be "disagreeable", which is the personality trait of being difficult to work with, often for the sake of being contrarian or having an ego trip (i.e, proving that you are right to showcase your power and value relative to others). As others have stated, disagreeing is orthogonal to being disagreeable. One can disagree via constructive dialogue and open communication; however, taking disagreeableness as an identifying personality trait (and moreover, holding it as valuable in-and-of-itself) is a slippery slope to the creation of toxic working relationships.
- Name_Chawps 4y ago
  > It's one thing to have differing thoughts and opinions. It's another thing to be "disagreeable", which is the personality trait of being difficult to work with, often for the sake of being contrarian or having an ego trip (i.e, proving that you are right to showcase your power and value relative to others). You have the psychology wrong. That's not what the term disagreeable means in personality psychology.
HWR_14 4y ago
You don't quite get the Big Five personality trait. It's poorly labelled, I'll grant. But "disagreeable (big five sense)" and "disagreeing with people" have no correlation I am aware of. I am also not aware of any studies showing that disagreeable people are more likely to voice their disagreements in a group setting. > Would you similarly discriminate against anxious people? As a bomb-disposal tech? Yes. As a cashier? No. Similarly, would I discriminate against a disagreeable person as a manager? Yes. As a solitary programmer? No.
- mcguire 4y ago
  A solitary programmer, as in someone who never has to interface with another person?
- kyleyeats 4y ago
  You're crazy not to take the anxious bomb-disposal guys.
  - HWR_14 4y ago
    Why?
    - kyleyeats 4y ago
      Everyone's anxious on that mission and he has more experience in overcoming anxiety.
nautilius 4y ago
> We're not jerks. We're people who notice problems. You're shooting the messenger. The definition is literally in the title: "disagreeable personalities (selfish, combative, and manipulative)". So, yes, by definition, disagreeable people are jerks. If that's you, then you, too, are a jerk. That is completely orthogonal to "people who notice problems". If someone thinks that it's necessary to be "selfish, combative, and manipulative" in order to notice a problem, then that person is not only a jerk, but also deluding themselves that they're just misunderstood.
- kyleyeats 4y ago
  I was talking about this in a Big Five sense, but yeah. I agree with you. If you're not at work to be selfish, combative and manipulative, you are not at work. What do you even do all day? Why are we here? A workplace full of people who don't need the paycheck isn't a workplace. People who aren't fighting for something don't care. People who aren't manipulating don't care about the future. Ideas that aren't challenged suck. The same is true for people, at the individual and organizational level. I don't think believing this makes me a jerk.
mcguire 4y ago
"Disagreeableness is a relatively stable aspect of personality that involves the tendency to behave in quarrelsome, cold, callous, and selfish ways (1). ... For example, disagreeable people tend to be hostile and abusive to others (2), deceive and manipulate others for their own gain (3), and ignore others’ concerns or welfare (4)." Your comments such as "...as pariahs", "if you don't have disagreeable people to solve your issues, you have to use the other tool: Layoffs", "insane", and "hate" are exactly the sort of quarrelsome, manipulative statements that make working with someone 'disagreeable' so difficult. You aren't noticing problems; you're not pointing them out. What you are doing is demanding everyone else adapt to you, and you are using twisted emotional, disingenuous language to do it.
- kyleyeats 4y ago
  My argument is that disagreeable people aren't inherently bad. Your argument is that I'm disagreeable so I'm inherently bad. I get it. You don't like disagreeable people. We can just agree to disagree here. I'm not asking anything of you. If were to make demands, it'd be in the form of helpful emotional advice: Hire so that at least 1 out of 6 people at your company are disagreeable. Don't ever allow agreeability silos, especially not around top executives. Never let a disagreeable person serve in a leadership role unless they have at least one disagreeable person working as a direct report.
  - mcguire 4y ago
    If I were to give advice, I'd suggest not taking advice from someone who thinks that you are insane, that you hate half of humanity, or that you treat them as pariahs simply because they are quarrelsome, hostile, abusive, and manipulative.
    - kyleyeats 4y ago
      An improvement! At least this advice isn't in whiny, woe-is-me fairy tale format.

crtified 4y ago

Tech workplaces hold no special claim to conformity. It's not uncommon for big old professions and specialities to have institutes and charters which include compulsory precepts along the lines of "thou shalt not publicly disagree with or badmouth thy fellow". There, agreeing-to-agree is foundationally baked in; the very professions are sustained around the continual churning out of cookie-cutter journeymen, with intergenerational progress carefully, hierarchically regulated such that the profession all steps forward together.

talentedcoin 4y ago

Strong disagree. It is possible to disagree without being disagreeable, and I personally find it frustrating when people excuse their behaviour in the manner you are doing. Yes work sucks, but being unpleasant, cynical and snarky just makes it even worse. Roll up your sleeves and help or please get out of the way.

mdcds 4y ago
> It is possible to disagree without being disagreeable, -1 for strawman disagreeing with someone and raking high on Disagreeableness BigFive trait are two different things
- mcguire 4y ago
  Yes, and the comment being responded to is asserting it's impossible to disagree without being disagreeable.
macNchz 4y ago
Absolutely, organizations need someone who will stand up and ensure important things are dealt with, but doing so does not require being unpleasant. This is something I’ve actively tried to cultivate in myself, and have been happy to receive feedback both that I am “not at all a yes-man” and am “someone who has a calming presence” by coworkers. I think that being the unpleasant version of “not a yes-man” just means that people will try to find ways around you.
- xen2xen1 4y ago
  I'm known as the nice friend who will tell you hard things. I'm a nice guy who knows how to be a dick when I have to be. I actively work on both being "softer" as I probably have gone a bit too direct, and being more assertive as I can be too easy going. I usually like the balance I've struck, and often have people thank me after I tell them hard, serious stuff. I wish more people could do that, know so many jerks. Being assertive does NOT mean you have to be ass.
  - kyleyeats 4y ago
    How would you do it the other way? If you started off as disagreeable and had to learn agreeability? Do you think you could do that without ever being an ass? Do you think it's fair that you got a chance to develop towards a happy middle but someone working from the other end would never get that chance?

wnolens 4y ago

As a somewhat disagreeable person, I have to agree. So much of my time spent at work is in a state of frustration at processes and people. I think it's my job to be vocal about what I see, either to improve the situation, or correct my perspective (i.e. learn!). However.. I have to sanitize my language and use the most gross of corporate speak. I often sleep on it before sending a contentious email. I'm still the team asshole, but an old boss said every team needs one ;)

mcguire 4y ago
Once upon a time, I worked with a particular person. At one point we were evaluating version control alternatives and he looked at one. He said it was great, but would never respond when anyone asked, "How do you do X, Y, or Z?" Eventually we picked one of the others (partially because he would never tell us why his was better), but he refused to accept that, resulting in the team lead having to develop a script to exchange changes between the system he used and the one everyone else used. He's also the guy who kept commenting out "-Wall" from our C++ Makefile with comments like "Nobody has time for that." (Though apparently, I had time to fire up Valgrind and track down all the memory issues, most of which would have been caught by compiler warnings.) He also considered "Maybe I'll just throw myself under a bus" to be a valid technical point during a discussion. I began my career at IBM, where the loudest, most aggressive person got to be in charge. I have a lot of experience working around disagreeable co-workers---usually by doing things their way, whether or not it is best for the project---because there's no other way to get anything done. But then, I don't consider constant bike-shedding arguments as getting things done. Fortunately, I don't have to do that any more. I've quit jobs because I couldn't stand spending more of my time keeping a disagreeable person happy (well, not happy; they're never going to be happy) than getting my actual work done. (Oh, that co-worker from the first paragraph? A few years later he sent me an email asking if I would be a reference. I said no.)

civilized 4y ago

As a self-IDed somewhat "disagreeable" person, I have mixed feelings about this. I think you're absolutely right that people who notice and articulate problems can come to be viewed negatively, and it places a double burden on them to notice the problem and then come up with the perfect way of articulating it that can't possibly hurt anyone's feelings. And if no one is willing or able to assume that burden, and there isn't a tolerance for some negativity in the workplace, it leads to exactly the thing you mention, a place where "everything is perfect and nothing gets done". On the other hand, I do think it's possible to assume this double burden, and the people who do it well can become the most valued people in an organization. Consider taking it as yet another problem that you can work on! The hidden superpower of the "neurotic" and "disagreeable" is being sensitive to how things are not great, which helps give rise to the drive to improve. And that drive can and should be applied to our sometimes socially suboptimal ways of expressing ourselves. An "opportunity to improve" can be a lot more popular than a "way things suck", depending on who you're working with.

kyleyeats 4y ago
Great insights. Curious about your result on my personality test: https://eristicstest.com/ https://eristicstest.com/ Disagreeable people often have an over-the-top people-pleaser side because they're bad at agreeability. For them it's usually a choice of being a doormat or a jerk. When people are bad at agreeability in this way, but still agreeable, nobody is in a rush to correct them. Nobody threatens to quit over the doormat. But it's the exact same personality flaw, just expressed differently in Big Five terms.
- civilized 4y ago
  I got The Fixer. Very interesting test. I'm kind of impressed/mystified at how it got so much information about me from those questions. Like Myers-Briggs but seemingly both more ambitious theoretically and using fewer questions. I wonder how it would fare under psychometric validation (as I understand MBTI doesn't fare well despite being so popular and so many people including me finding insight there). Re: agreeability, it seems like you're speaking of it as a skill more than just a personality variable. I see the skill of being prosocial and the personality trait of agreeability as separate. I see myself as a high-functioning disagreeable person, where I see things more negatively than average and have more conflictual feelings than average, but usually manage to turn it all into something effective and prosocial when working with other people.

_a_a_a_ 4y ago

Having a good giggle at this. Joke, right? > Working with disagreeable people doesn't suck W00t! By definition it does. > The disagreeable people just point it out Ah, perhaps you mean disagree-ing people. That would make some sense at least.

encloser 4y ago

The article describes disagreeable people as "selfish, combative, and manipulative." And "Does being disagreeable-that is, behaving in aggressive, selfish, and manipulative ways-help people attain power?" Which, to me, sounds very different from voicing concerns or identifying problems.

unsui 4y ago

> You hate half of humanity This reeks of all-or-nothing thinking, which itself reeks of deep insecurity (a very likely root condition of being disagreeable). It's one thing to have differing thoughts and opinions. It's another thing to be "disagreeable", which is the personality trait of being difficult to work with, often for the sake of being contrarian or having an ego trip (i.e, proving that you are right to showcase your power and value relative to others). As others have stated, disagreeing is orthogonal to being disagreeable. One can disagree via constructive dialogue and open communication; however, taking disagreeableness as an identifying personality trait (and moreover, holding it as valuable in-and-of-itself) is a slippery slope to the creation of toxic working relationships.

Name_Chawps 4y ago
> It's one thing to have differing thoughts and opinions. It's another thing to be "disagreeable", which is the personality trait of being difficult to work with, often for the sake of being contrarian or having an ego trip (i.e, proving that you are right to showcase your power and value relative to others). You have the psychology wrong. That's not what the term disagreeable means in personality psychology.

HWR_14 4y ago

You don't quite get the Big Five personality trait. It's poorly labelled, I'll grant. But "disagreeable (big five sense)" and "disagreeing with people" have no correlation I am aware of. I am also not aware of any studies showing that disagreeable people are more likely to voice their disagreements in a group setting. > Would you similarly discriminate against anxious people? As a bomb-disposal tech? Yes. As a cashier? No. Similarly, would I discriminate against a disagreeable person as a manager? Yes. As a solitary programmer? No.

mcguire 4y ago
A solitary programmer, as in someone who never has to interface with another person?
kyleyeats 4y ago
You're crazy not to take the anxious bomb-disposal guys.
- HWR_14 4y ago
  Why?
  - kyleyeats 4y ago
    Everyone's anxious on that mission and he has more experience in overcoming anxiety.

nautilius 4y ago

> We're not jerks. We're people who notice problems. You're shooting the messenger. The definition is literally in the title: "disagreeable personalities (selfish, combative, and manipulative)". So, yes, by definition, disagreeable people are jerks. If that's you, then you, too, are a jerk. That is completely orthogonal to "people who notice problems". If someone thinks that it's necessary to be "selfish, combative, and manipulative" in order to notice a problem, then that person is not only a jerk, but also deluding themselves that they're just misunderstood.

kyleyeats 4y ago
I was talking about this in a Big Five sense, but yeah. I agree with you. If you're not at work to be selfish, combative and manipulative, you are not at work. What do you even do all day? Why are we here? A workplace full of people who don't need the paycheck isn't a workplace. People who aren't fighting for something don't care. People who aren't manipulating don't care about the future. Ideas that aren't challenged suck. The same is true for people, at the individual and organizational level. I don't think believing this makes me a jerk.

mcguire 4y ago

"Disagreeableness is a relatively stable aspect of personality that involves the tendency to behave in quarrelsome, cold, callous, and selfish ways (1). ... For example, disagreeable people tend to be hostile and abusive to others (2), deceive and manipulate others for their own gain (3), and ignore others’ concerns or welfare (4)." Your comments such as "...as pariahs", "if you don't have disagreeable people to solve your issues, you have to use the other tool: Layoffs", "insane", and "hate" are exactly the sort of quarrelsome, manipulative statements that make working with someone 'disagreeable' so difficult. You aren't noticing problems; you're not pointing them out. What you are doing is demanding everyone else adapt to you, and you are using twisted emotional, disingenuous language to do it.

kyleyeats 4y ago
My argument is that disagreeable people aren't inherently bad. Your argument is that I'm disagreeable so I'm inherently bad. I get it. You don't like disagreeable people. We can just agree to disagree here. I'm not asking anything of you. If were to make demands, it'd be in the form of helpful emotional advice: Hire so that at least 1 out of 6 people at your company are disagreeable. Don't ever allow agreeability silos, especially not around top executives. Never let a disagreeable person serve in a leadership role unless they have at least one disagreeable person working as a direct report.
- mcguire 4y ago
  If I were to give advice, I'd suggest not taking advice from someone who thinks that you are insane, that you hate half of humanity, or that you treat them as pariahs simply because they are quarrelsome, hostile, abusive, and manipulative.
  - kyleyeats 4y ago
    An improvement! At least this advice isn't in whiny, woe-is-me fairy tale format.