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Just a note. Once I worked at a tele provider and I accidentally messed up some contract and we lost $6000 - that was in a very professional working environment

• Tyrannosaurs 13y ago
  The important difference is that the mailing list is public, your humbling was private. I'm guessing your co-workers knew you'd been chewed out but how much worse would you have felt (I guess plenty) and how much more would you have learned (I guess nothing) had your dressing down been in public? Much of this isn't about some artificial standard for the sake of it, it's about getting the best out of people. Public beatings have been shown not to do that. If the OSS community wants to behave this way then it can but ultimately it's going to drive a bunch of people away, or cow them into not really speaking up for fear of retribution and as a result will likely miss out on valuable contributions.
  • nknighthb 13y ago
    I much prefer being publicly berated. There's no question of what was said, and there is pressure on the one doing the berating to get it right and not be unreasonable in their expectations. It further urges consistency -- if one person is dressed down for doing X in Y circumstances, failure to do the same to the next person who makes the same error will either reveal obvious bias, or make clear that the original berating was undeserved.
    • Tyrannosaurs 13y ago
      Research shows that you're not typical - most people find it massively demotivating. There seems to be a thing here with a lot of people saying "I work like this and like it". That's fine but the worst mistake you can make with others is often assuming that everyone else is like you. a lot of management science is bullshit but alongside the nonsense there is actual quantitative research about how people behave and so on. There is possibly a discussion to be had around whether programmers (or more strictly people with the potential to be good programmers as that's what you want to optimise for, rather than the people who are currently programmers) are typical but as a hypothesis I'd rather go with programmers behave broadly as other people do.
      • nknighthb 13y ago
        > Research shows that you're not typical - most people find it massively demotivating What is "it", exactly? Any public criticism? Public belittling (which is severely different from a proper dressing down)? Swearing? There's a lot mixed in here. And does research conclusively establish a significantly different reaction to otherwise identical acts in public vs private? > I'd rather go with programmers behave broadly as other people do. Even if programmers behave broadly as other people do, that doesn't mean they'd have the same reaction to the same behavior in two very different scenarios. Our dressing-downs[1] are as likely to come from our peers as our management. And even when they come from managers, we have a much different relationship with them. We are in positions of relative power and economic security, as well as positions of trust. A manager is more peer or patron than overlord, and we are more agent than minion. This is a very different dynamic than most jobs. I question the relevance of any research on this that doesn't specifically target highly-skilled fields with economically-secure workers. [1] Dressings down? Can you make bandages out of soft feathers?
        • Tyrannosaurs 13y ago
          "It" was referring to being publicly berated from your reply. Berating is angry criticism so I think it's fairly specific. Ultimately it depends on what you're trying to achieve when you're talking to someone. There might be occasions when being shamed in front of the team is the best thing for the person but I'd suggest that they're few and far between. As a manager if I act angrily towards you then regardless of what you've done I'd suggest that I've both failed - yes you might have done something which has annoyed me but I've then responded by handling it badly. The best I can say at the end is that I didn't start it. The twice I've lost my temper publicly at a member of my team my overriding sense afterwards was that I should have handled the situation better. Certainly in neither case do I think what I did got the best from the person in question (one I think viewed the whole thing with complete indifference, the other was demotivated by it). In terms of the specifics of the research, it's been a while since I looked at it (back in my days studying). I recall that public was generally a greater demotivator than private but I'm not aware of anything that's been done on different skill levels - would certainly be interested in that. My gut feel is that while there might be differences constructive engagement in private would still be the most productive way of handling it - I don't think programmers and other skilled workers are that different to the rest of the world. If anything I'd suggest they'd be more inclined to dislike anything involving anger directed at them - after all, they generally have the option to go elsewhere so why should they put up with it? The comments you make about everything being out in the open are interesting. I can see if the manager or other berater is untrustworthy that this could be a thing, but if there are overall issues of trust of that type I think that how this sort of thing is handled is largely irrelevant in the face of that much larger problem.
    • subsection1h 13y ago
      I much prefer being publicly berated. Okay, then add your real name to your Hacker News account so we can publicly berate you more effectively. :-)