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Sorry if this is off-topic but I often see in HN (either in articles posted here, or in the comments) lack of empathy. He talks about a "friend" and then proce
by Xenoamorphous 3y ago
Sorry if this is off-topic but I often see in HN (either in articles posted here, or in the comments) lack of empathy.
He talks about a "friend" and then proceeds to say things like "To be honest, I suspect he didn't know or think much about them" or "This was not a fruitful conversation".
How is that supposed friend, who might very well be aware of this person's blog, going to feel after reading this? Is it a cultural thing and this is not offensive everywhere?
The irony is that the main page says "I ♥ people; look for ways to make them happy, and empower them."
- iinnPP 3y agoI wish my friends were this honest and blunt. I acknowledge that the friends I keep would almost certainly disagree though. The normal (at least in Canada) seems to be as you suggest. I'm perfectly ok with being the weird one though.
- nixpulvis 3y agoYou can absolutely have friends that you have unfruitful conversations with. The idea that every interaction needs to be positive to constitute friendship is extremely unhealthy and sterilizing.
- seydor 3y agoyou can have such conversations with anyone, they are not a friend. friendship implies a certain emotional investment, which implies a certain bias
- daveslash 3y agoI agree. I think in modern American vocabulary, "Friend" is thrown around quite loosely to mean "somebody who I know and I'm not adversarial with". Personally, I have very few friends - people with whom I have an emotional investment, who I'd trust to call if I had a bad breakup or needed money or some sort of personal help. But I have tons of casual relationships with folks that I'm on friendly terms with.
- nixpulvis 3y agoI don't understand your point.
- luma 3y agoI have fruitful conversations with friends, and exactly none of them have been arguments about our favorite programming languages. This dude just wanted a pretense for a blog post about Very Strongly Held Feelings Concerning PLangs.
- shrimp_emoji 3y agoI have fruitful arguments about programming with friends. You just have to find people that enjoy banter and aren't insecure, which isn't very easy.
- lloydatkinson 3y agoAnd also very American-ised. This forced positivity seems to be a cultural aspect of American life.
- ChatGTP 3y agoI agree with the forced positivity thing, I work for an American firm and if you're not positive, you're reprimanded. I had to be told several times to learn to feedback constructively. While I do appreciate this, and I understand it, I just feel like a robot now, not a human at work. So much tip toeing around issues it all just feels so fake and there is little room for emotion. Sometimes, I think it's ok to just be honest with people , but not in America for some reason.
- NikolaNovak 3y agoFWIW, my experience (being a 45yo who immigrated to North America at 15) is that "Culture of fake niceness" predates "Culture of Emotional intelligence and empathy" I find in last few years, many people/groups/companies are working toward increased emotional intelligence and empathy. I see that as a good thing. It just gets mixed up with the original "somewhat real but also somewhat fake classless friendly positive culture". It's... nice that I can call my client Bob and my VP Laurie, instead of Mr Neubauer and Mz Jameson. It's nice that we speak as equals. It's however false to then erroneously assume that we are equals or that we have equal relationship, so there are layers and nuances to lessons a newbie to north american corporate life needs to learn and internalize. Anyhoo, what I'm getting to: the "original corporate fake positiveness/niceness" indeed could suck the life out of me. The "new & improved show empathy and grow emotional intelligence" I quite enjoy; it's a good challenge for systems-oriented nerd actually. I always think "What leads us to Star Trek future" and I think empathy is a key factor. So showing empathy in code review is good. Showing sterile niceness and avoiding constructive criticism is bad. It can be easy to mix them up though. My 100 Croatian Lipa, FWIW :->
- ChatGTP 3y agoInteresting take on it, and I've seen things trend in that direction, which is a good thing, I agree.
- justin66 3y agoThere's no need to conflate "unfruitful" and "negative." Plenty of people have fun arguing without persuading one another of anything, more or less the definition of an "unfruitful" conversation. It's negative when someone's not having fun. Or more to the point, when someone feels the need to post on the internet about how defective the "friend" they were arguing with is.
- joseph_grobbles 3y ago[dead]
- wpietri 3y agoI don't think I'd personally be offended by those bits. People have different focuses! Sometimes conversations aren't fruitful! I'm ok with that. But I do think there's a lack of empathy displayed in his strong value judgments. His "here are the different things people think about" breakdown is interesting. But there's a flavor of "and these specific people are bad and wrong" here that I don't like. I think he should have kept going to "and here's why they focus on those things" with the same amount of appreciation.
- kayodelycaon 3y agoWell said. The only issue I have is the lack of empathy. Friends don’t have to agree on everything. Calling your friend a jerk because their interests don’t align with yours is… odd?
- yoyohello13 3y agoOP didn't call his friend a jerk though. He said the conversation wasn't fruitful. There was a bit of an heir of "Oh, you don't know about GC?" but I think people are reading too much into that line.
- wpietri 3y agoI think the problem isn't that line, it's in the rest of the article. Which I think then colors the interaction with the friend.
- fatfingerd 3y agoI'm maybe not as offended as you because I think his friend is more mature and should be proud they avoided being baited. The GC being preemptive might be part of a group choice at selection time, whether the language is painful to read and/or write is a permanent factor in your quality of life at work until you eventually move to another project. Of course whether they are not emphatic enough is more a matter of whether the author sees it as a criticism of their friend.
- kayodelycaon 3y agoI think a lot of people have these kind of discussions behind people’s backs. I’ve certainly done it. Who hasn’t occasionally mentioned to one friend how another friend annoyed you? On the other hand, it’s not something you do in public. I’d be just a tad upset this person didn’t tell me how they felt and instead told everyone but me.
- shrimp_emoji 3y agoYeah. A friend telling me I'm being annoying or stupid is fine. The narcissism of turning your life into content creation where I happened to cameo isn't something I could ever get used to though. :p That feels like such a new and toxic dynamic enabled by the fact that anyone can (and is incentivized to) blog online.
- bsenftner 3y agoDecades ago, my group of close friends made a pact: if anyone of us is talking shit, talking nonsense, or simply expressing attitude that smells of self deception, do not let it lie and declare it is time for a reality debate. Friends should never let friends descend into self deception, because that slippery slope can kill, as well as sour everything one experiences. Others seeing us in the midst of a reality debate would often form little crowds. If you ever witnessed the "pseudo intellectual club" debates at the Boston Pour House during the late 80's, that was us. That group of close friends is long dispersed into the winds, several still keep in touch, and it is that 'reality debate' activity we continually return, and debate the state of the world.
- mrkeen 3y agoThat fits exactly with non-fruitfulness. A discussion about programming languages became a discussion about someone's empathy.
- eropple 3y ago"How to be a decent human in the world" is always a fruitful discussion. It is, perhaps, the most important one.
- than3 3y agoThat kind of conversation often lacks for how to deal with deceitful, ruthless, and generally harmful people. Not everyone is decent, and turning the other cheek doesn't work or communicate what it once did in this age of platform megaphones. The corruption of indeceny is everywhere, and most people don't even realize it when they do it because of menticide, indoctrination, or whatever you want to call it.
- mrkeen 3y agoWe are all each other's arseholes. I didn't find what the author posted rude. I find accusing him of having a lack of empathy rude. Ignore the noise, engage with the content.
- than3 3y agoYou might want to make that a bit more clear then. It seemed more like hyperbole, and I certainly didn't get that from what you said.
- VoodooJuJu 3y ago>Sorry if this is off-topic but I often see in HN (either in articles posted here, or in the comments) lack of empathy. You are absolutely correct. This place is populated with quite a few nerds. Nerds typically have subpar social skills, which is is both fueled by and results in a lack of empathy. >"I ♥ people; look for ways to make them happy, and empower them." The propaganda arm of the Soviets is called "Pravda", which means "truth". It's like people who say "I'm such a nice guy", "I'm very humble", or this author saying "I love people and my friend" but then they talk shit about their friend in this very article. Listen not to what someone says, observe what they do. "Actions speak louder than words" and all that.
- joenot443 3y agoYou're getting downvoted, but you're right. >I wanted to talk about its garbage collector (1, 2), its cooperative scheduler that many people think is a preemptive scheduler, its very loose approach to correctness… and he didn't want to talk about any of that. This is not the way an emotionally intelligent person approaches a conversation. The idea that a conversation should be a demonstration of ones own knowledge is a pretty common notion I see with socially-stunted geek types. Growing up with a narrow or minimal social group will do that, it's no one's fault, but it's a pretty clear indicator this person's advice on interpersonal relationships shouldn't be taken too seriously. In the same way you can tell immediately from a blogpost that someone is an inexperienced engineer, the takeaway from this one for me is that the author is an inexperienced friend.
- iak8god 3y ago> This is not the way an emotionally intelligent person approaches a conversation. Good thing you and the other apparently high EQ commenters in this thread are here to set the records straight and bully some guy over his personality traits as determined by you after reading a single blog post.
- rideontime 3y ago> The idea that a conversation should be a demonstration of ones own knowledge Thanks for a succinct description of something I’ve been noticing a lot lately. This is going to stick with me.
- austin-cheney 3y agoIt could be an aspect of undiagnosed or unmedicated ADHD. ADHA applies more broadly than just states of focus and includes social conditions that when the ADHD is advanced can mimic behaviors commonly thought of autistic. One of those impaired social behaviors can include empathy development. Please note this does not apply to most cases of ADHD and seems to apply in cases that are more pronounced. One key indicator of whether impaired empathy is the result of ADHD is that everything tends to be communicated as either starting from or directly referring to the person forming the communication almost as if narcissistic, but not necessarily with a selfishness intent.
- jvanderbot 3y ago[Engineer/HN stereotype implies un-diagnosed ADHD] has become an engineer/HN stereotype. I personally think people can make empathy mistakes without having a permanent neurological disorder.
- sph 3y ago> ADHD is advanced can mimic behaviors commonly thought of autistic Please stop and go educate yourself. ADHD is at times co-morbid with autism, but they are not the same thing, have different neurological causes, symptoms and treatments. Sincerely, a diagnosed ADHD, non-autistic person that self-identifies as an empath (i.e. the opposite of a psychopath. I can read body language and empathise with people better than most. It's not always as fun as one might think.) A common misconception is that empathy means love and compassion for everybody. No. It just means being able to easily put yourself in other people's shoes and feel their mental states. Empathy alone doesn't turn you into Mother Theresa.
- austin-cheney 3y agoI never claimed they were the same. I have been recently educated on this matter through numerous visits to psychologists/diagnostics in support of a family member. I promise it’s a better authoritative source than YouTube or amateur bloggers.
- 3y ago
- andai 3y agoThe entire point of Go is that it's designed for less talented programmers, i.e. people who can't understand or don't want to put in the effort to understand those things. That's the whole appeal of many programming languages, they massively simplify the mental model (for a price). I've been a lot happier and more productive since I switched to a slow language (which younger me would have been sad to hear).
- quest88 3y agoYea, competent programmers only write in assembly.
- hu3 3y agoSure if you consider programmers at Uber, Google, Docker/Kubernetes "less talented".
- mardifoufs 3y agoI think they are referring to the famous Robert pike quote (though I disagree that it implies a lack of talent from its users, it just means that the language was designed to be practical): "The key point here is our programmers are Googlers, they’re not researchers. They’re typically, fairly young, fresh out of school, probably learned Java, maybe learned C or C++, probably learned Python. They’re not capable of understanding a brilliant language but we want to use them to build good software. So, the language that we give them has to be easy for them to understand and easy to adopt." It's usually used in a tongue in cheek manner to mock Go which is usually pretty funny but it's disingenuous to argue that it seriously implies that go programmers are not talented.
- hu3 3y agoYeah I knew it was referencing that. Thanks. It's just tiresome and lazy to use that misquote and I see that often. I don't even code in Go these days but I hold HN to a higher standards.
- 3y ago
- narag 3y agoHow is that supposed friend, who might very well be aware of this person's blog, going to feel after reading this? In Spanish there's a saying, la confianza da asco, that could be translated more or less as "familiarity sucks". You often treat your friends and family worse than you would to strangers. It also means that if a good friend doesn't talk truth to you, who will?
- cookie_monsta 3y agoI think that "familiarity breeds contempt" is probably a closer translation there, and a phrase that most English speakers would have heard before
- narag 3y agoYes, your "I know you so I don't like you" is close to our "you know me so you need to suffer me" but subtly different.
- Eumenes 3y agothat's your take away from this? so tired of hearing about the e word, and all this therapy talk in business/tech world. "psychological safety" and "vulnerability" (not related to security unfortunately) are two others that make constant rounds among the management caste. i instantly cringe when someone starts talking about this crap at work. please, just focus on your job.
- FollowingTheDao 3y ago> How is that supposed friend, who might very well be aware of this person's blog, going to feel after reading this? Friends are people you can talk like this about and they are still your friend afterwards.
- blululu 3y agoTalking directly and honestly with your friends is a very good thing, but don't talk trash about them behind their backs - it is passive-aggressive, deceitful and reflects very poorly upon your character.
- chefandy 3y agoYeah-- that's always been the case in more technical crowds from my experience. I switched to HN from Slashdot like a decade ago because the Slashdot crowd seemed to get overrun with folks like that. Recently, I most frequently notice it when people discuss potential job losses from AI automation. Regardless of whether or not this is good for society, it's absolutely bizarre how many folks around here (and some other places, like related subreddits,) gleefully dance on the grave of artists of all people. Some seem to disdain creatives wanting to participate in our economy using their hard-won skills and vocation, almost as if their doing so is oppressive to non-artists. Others seem to think it appropriate to act like they've just beaten them in a game. The majority of folks around here seem to act pretty reasonably about it but that vocal minority is obnoxious, to say the least. Accuracy of their predictions aside, it's just a disgusting way to talk about people whose careers, they imagine, were just unexpectedly flushed down the toilet through no fault of their own. Unsurprisingly, these people usually have the least sophisticated, and least useful philosophical understanding of what art is. I imagine this is a cognitive limitation directly related to their empathic limitations.
- Kalium 3y agoIt's been my experience that in conversations about AI, literally nobody actually wants empathy. People want to talk about empathy and deplore the people they disagree with as lacking it. The underlying assumption and implication is that a person experiencing genuine empathy would both display it in some legible manner and agree with the speaker's positions on things. In short, the idea of empathy is weaponized. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this falls down on several points. It's just a disgusting way to talk about your fellow human beings when it's your own failures tripping you up. I imagine this is a cognitive limitation directly related to their own empathic limitations. In conversations about AI, people usually want changed behavior and similar concrete shifts. Empathy is viewed as a lever to produce those changes. When the changes are not forthcoming, the conclusion people reach is that clearly it's because the emotional experience of empathy isn't happening. This avoids considering awkward and unpleasant questions such as if there may be other good reasons why those changes are not forthcoming from a person who may be experiencing sincere and genuine empathy. I spent a lot of years as a professional software engineer. Many of those left me daily on the receiving end of people for whom calling on the empathy of others was their preferred means of shaping behavior. I had to learn to set aside those emotions in order to preserve my own judgment. Now I see, daily, the same kind of people deploring that the tools they taught me to resist are not working. What I see in this blog post is someone relating a story in which an awkward encounter is anonymized. The anonymization is itself a form of empathy in action - the person is not called out specifically, only the conversation. There's plenty of room to criticize the author in what is presented, but we really have no idea who missed what cues in that conversation. It's not a kind comment on either person.
- clnq 3y agoThe tech world might not be as empathetic as some other human endeavors, but it has a unique approach. We need to consider whether we should foster more empathy or simply adapt to the existing landscape. Being practical and discerning, sometimes to the point of discrimination, has proven effective in areas like space exploration, business, and even the natural process of evolution. And tech, too. Over the past 30 years, the tech industry has achieved remarkable feats, feats that would seem magical to people living a century ago. This success stems from swiftly testing new ideas and people, and discriminating between those who can deliver results and those who cannot. However, such judgment or discrimination can pose problems. While it might be beneficial in natural systems, facilitating improvement, it isn't perceived positively in our society. We aim for fairness and equality for everyone. The term "discriminate", even though integral to nature and many productive systems, often carries a negative connotation in sociology. And indeed when we look at examples of unfairness and inequality in history, they are generally seen as immoral. But I wonder if that is because the inequality was often means to an end for someone else's decadence. Here's a difficult question: should tech become more empathetic or continue to discriminate based on ability? If we become less judgmental of skills, we might not achieve as much. If we continue to be unempathetic, that will cause social friction. While I don't have a definitive answer, it's certainly worth considering. In my tentative opinion (since I don't feel particularly adamant about it), we should continue assessing individuals based on their technical understanding in the tech realm, but within reason. We need to maintain humility, recognizing our limited knowledge and potential to misjudge others. Our critiques should be measured, and we should avoid letting our assessments of others' technical skills cloud our perception of their worth in other areas. After all, one can possess excellent personal attributes yet lack technical skills or be unfit for a specific tech project. In that sense, I lean more heavily towards the fundamentally non-empathetic approach. But that's just N=1. The important part of my message here is that we need to acknowledge the equity/empathy-effectiveness trade-off and be conscious of it.
- stereolambda 3y agoIt's an interesting notion that you can't disagree or find faults in your friends, especially if we adapt the Anglophone definition of a friend as a loose sorta sustained contact. Would people rush to criticizing in this manner if someone truthfully wrote that their friend has problems hauling 20 kg weights up four floors of stairs? The description is undiplomatic, could be written in a more roundabout way, but this could be read as even more haughty and rude. I'd say that as human collectives we need to maintain a grip on reality, and it is wasteful and dangerous to live in a web of polite lies.
- pjlegato 3y agoThis is an inaccurate and highly reductive stereotype of what the supposed "Anglophone" cultural world believes about friendship. In reality, there are vast cultural differences between different English speaking regions, which foreigners often overlook due to the shared language. California, New York, Miami, Johannesburg, New Zealand, and rural Yorkshire are all technically "Anglophone" in some broad reductive sense, yet are as culturally distinct (or even moreso) as, say, Sweden and Greece.
- d1str0 3y agoRight? As he explains, there are many different hierarchies of critiquing a programming language. Yet, they heavily imply if you care about “surface” topics, your feelings aren’t as valid as if you were more interested in the garbage collector.
- danenania 3y agoIt's a well-worn genre. "Here are the things you need to know to be a real X" where there just so happens to be perfect overlap with every subject the author knows well. Anything the author doesn't know much about is, of course, irrelevant, and not something a real X would waste their time on.
- sublinear 3y ago> How is that supposed friend, who might very well be aware of this person's blog, going to feel after reading this? Don't worry. The friend is probably imaginary just for the story.
- AYBABTME 3y agoI think it's perfectly okay if my friends think they had an unfruitful conversation with me and thought that I didn't know what I was talking about. I don't like rubber-stamp people who just say whatever I want to hear and have no depth of their own and aren't willing to disagree on anything. In fact, I really can't stand when I talk to someone and they seem to agree unconditionally with everything I say; it's not believable. Surely they disagree, why can't they express their feelings? Why is no one willing to go on a limb and be wrong or criticized? I find it particularly prevalent in the tech circles, when talking to parents of other kids in the SF Bay area. Everything is very picture perfect, and I can't believe it, so I feel I can't trust the people speaking. They're too nice, too polished. I like my friends who will disagree with me (most of the time respectfully) and allow me to say stupid things and forgive me for my imperfections, and equally for theirs.
- srpablo 3y agoHi! Author here. This is fair; I can see how you feel this way from the article. That said, "I suspect he didn't know or think much about them" isn't a value judgement on him; just as I didn't care much about his point on `for` loops, we all have things we care about more and less about than others. Same with "fruitful conversation" — I meant that for both of us! I think both of us could have had a better time. I'll try to be more mindful in the future, but I think "the original characterization doesn't trash him" is defensible. If he sees the blog and thinks its unfair, he's perfectly able to reach out (we're not actually very close). I make it clear we value different things but I never explicitly say "this guy sucks" _because I don't believe that._ He's a fantastic dev who's built great systems, but I wish we had a better framework for chatting about Golang. Edit: I've updated the language with a few more details to better reflect how that whole interaction went down, which was a playful chat between two seasoned devs with ~12 companies between them. I didn't want to spend too much of the article on the anecdote, so I originally cut out some surrounding context (he was excited to "get into it," it's not like I just came at him when he said "I like Go").
- blululu 3y ago"He's a fantastic dev who's built great systems, but I suspect he is not interested in these aspects of software" would have changed the entire tenor of the article. This person doesn't need to be in the article at all and I had a lot of trouble getting past this section to the many reasonable points made after it.
- srpablo 3y agoThanks for the feedback. I updated the language a bit to better reflect how that whole interaction went down, which was a playful chat between two seasoned devs with ~12 companies between them. I also removed the language that was being perceived as judgemental.