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This has to be my single most favorite HN post in quite some time. The article is about people who raise petty objections and how to deal with them. And so the
by abtinf 13y ago
This has to be my single most favorite HN post in quite some time. The article is about people who raise petty objections and how to deal with them. And so the comments are filled with petty objections against the article.
- benched 13y agoIndeed. I opened the thread to see how pedantic pedants could get about pedantry.
- neilbearden 13y agoThis the first one I've seen, but I really enjoy. -- Author of the HBR Blog Itself
- summerdown2 13y agoI'm not sure the objections are petty. Reading down them, I get the impression of a lot of people who managers have categorised as "that guy" feeling even more disempowered by this article. Now two things (amongst others) could be true here: 1. They are "that guy," and should learn not to be captious. or possibly: 2. The article is a salvo in an ongoing workplace politics issue in which one side just wants to get work done without having to face objections or think deeply about them. My own impression is that the first part of the article is exactly correct - there are some people who do ask irrelevant objections. I'm not so sure about the second part: "you know them when you hear them." I think, reading through the objections here, that the art of knowing whether an objection is petty may well be a skill that some managers just don't have. I think also that a lot of managers feel very strongly that they have that skill. Hence, one way of reading this thread is not as a set of petty objections to the article, but as a set of emotional responses from people who already feel put down.