23 ms·

Hacker School banning “feigned surprise” is absolutely brilliant

234 points by SoftwarePatent 13y ago

golergka 13y ago
This needs to be a rule. Can we make it a rule?
wingerlang 13y ago
This seems to be the post in question: https://www.hackerschool.com/blog/1-summer-2012-applications-open https://www.hackerschool.com/blog/1-summer-2012-applications...
- logn 13y ago
  Reading that post and the blog post linked, I think I see computer science programs in a better light now. At least in an automata/assembly/algebra class you're not going to find people who think they're hotshots for knowing the material. Most people struggle through and then go find spare time to learn programming. I'd be really down on myself for not knowing all the latest programming trends in hacker school, kind of like now when I read endless Javascript blogs about new tools, but the difference is I know enough now to know what's important to have a grasp on and what's noise.
- nicholasjbs 13y ago
  You can also read more about feigned surprise in our User's Manual: https://www.hackerschool.com/manual#sec-environment https://www.hackerschool.com/manual#sec-environment
octo_t 13y ago
What about just surprise? I've met people who claim to be 'experts' in C++, but (for example) don't know how to use STL algorithms.
- marvin 13y ago
  The article is pointing out a phenomenon related to interpersonal relationships, not technology. Part of interacting with other developers is nonverbal communication (or subtext) and the reactions it causes. So if you are genuinely surprised, a natural reaction would of course be to display this through verbal and nonverbal reactions. But at that point (or even before, as a matter of emotional awareness), people should probably stop and think for a bit what sort of reactions they want to cause in other programmers. Is the guy wrong (in the sense of giving the wrong impression) for calling himself an expert even though he doesn't know some STL features of C++? Is this something that should be communicated to him? Would it have a net positive effect on your working relationship if it was? Do you feel threatened by an expert who doesn't know this feature? Is there a possibility that you are wrong and that he is only missing a specific feature that you yourself have worked with but is not necessarily stanard? Is your (overt) surprise meant to evoke a certain reaction in the other developer? Would it make your working relationship easier if you hid your surprise instead of making a show of it? Etc. I hope this comment doesn't come across as condescending, but this sort of interpersonal communication is hard for a lot of programmers I know (at one point including myself). Being aware of these things can help smooth over rough points (and improve productivity, even if you are looking at the purely utilitarian perspective and ignoring general happiness).
  - collyw 13y ago
    Gross generalization here but, I think developers are probably the group of people least responsive to subtle non-verbal communication. Lots of them seem unable to interact with the opposite sex successfully (and the two are related believe it or not).
- eksith 13y ago
  My response to that is "Hmm. Interesting". Overt surprise, feigned or otherwise, is rarely a useful expression of emotion in my experience. This has the added benefit of making you more approachable to those who have legitimate questions.
- awjr 13y ago
  I'm guessing this may not have been something they have needed to use. I dislike the use of the word 'expert' when describing my skillset. Over the years you begin to realise other people can be more expert in different areas within the same knowledge domain. I find the willingness to learn to be more important.
facepalm 13y ago
Why not just have a rule to be nice to each other? Personally I wouldn't like a climate of micromanaged human interaction. But of course for others it might be different. I am not saying they should change their policy, just that it would be off-putting to me.
- asuffield 13y ago
  Because that's really hard and you can't tell whether people are following it.
  - 6d0debc071 13y ago
    If your rules are a very small set - 3 or so - then you can reasonably expect people to remember them all. However, if your rules are a bit longer than that, then, IME, it's better to try to come up with a rough heuristic and link in the specific rules as advice on how to avoid violating that - with warnings before the final firing or whatever so that people can see which specific things don't match their perception of the heuristic and have a chance of learning those.
- alttab 13y ago
  Feigned surprise may not be seen as "not nice" by those doing it. It's a combination of superiority, surprise, and interest in the other person. Not everyone was aware they were being a dick
- zhemao 13y ago
  From the Hacker School manual in which these rules are spelled out. > The goal isn't to burden Hacker School with a bunch of annoying rules, or to give us a stick to bludgeon people with for "being bad." Rather, these rules are designed to help all of us build a pleasant, productive, and fearless community. To build a positive environment, it sometimes helps to have a list of specific toxic behaviors that should be avoided.
  - facepalm 13y ago
    Sure, I guess it depends how you interpret the world "rule". It could just be a recommendation, or people could be expelled for breaking it.
yanowitz 13y ago
There's a set of human interaction anti-patterns like this. (The article mentions another one -- excessive confidence and its inverse, ability to acknowledge ignorance and learn from others. I'd also add a variant to that--having and expressing varying degrees of confidence in your opinions. The more experience/evidence-based your opinion is, the more strongly you are likely to be attached. But every opinion in software should have error bars around it, especially given the rapidity of change.) The inverse of feigned surprise was neatly displayed to me by a coworker recently, "oh cool, today is the day you get to learn about X." I assume someone has written something brilliant about these sets of interactions.
- probably_wrong 13y ago
  Perhaps your coworker was referencing this XKCD strip? I've seen it quoted fairly often: http://xkcd.com/1053/ http://xkcd.com/1053/
- read 13y ago
  Pay close attention to guilty words like: just, always, never, everything, nothing, all, none, very, actually. They are an alarm that indicates you are going to an extreme to justify a position. If what you say is evidently true, you wouldn't feel the need to try hard to qualify it.
  - collyw 13y ago
    Interesting that you pick up on those words, as I have noticed that whenever my team leader asks me for "just a small change", it usually means he hasn't bothered to think it through properly, and it will involve a lot more thinking or work or maintenance in the long run than he imagines.
  - zimpenfish 13y ago
    Isn't this kinda related to "Black and White Thinking" / "All or Nothing Thinking"?
- macca321 13y ago
  That can still sound patronising - what if you actually know about X already?
awjr 13y ago
One of the reasons I'm leaving my current role at the end of the month is due to this egocentric development approach from the team lead. "Bzzzzzt" and "Schoolboy error" are not good peer review comments to hand out to the team. Technically the guy is very good, but it's toxic and unpleasant. Work for me is about doing cool stuff, learning new things, and most importantly, helping the people I work with to do their job better and grow as individuals (I feed them donuts on a daily basis ;) ).
- awjr 13y ago
  As an aside, if you go for an interview and notice that each person has a Fail Buzzer (I never had one) as a 'joke', you should probably not accept a role if you don't have a thick skin.
  - sergiotapia 13y ago
    They sound like fratboy douchebags. Did they hi-five you and chug some beers after hiring you?
    - awjr 13y ago
      I should probably write it up somewhere but the concept of the team going out and having a drink/socialising was quite alien to them.
      - sergiotapia 13y ago
        I'd love to work on a team like that to be honest, all of the places I've worked at we haven't so much as even gone to the movies because of the age differences. One married w/kids, other 20-something, other Vim warrior from the 70's, etc.
        marknow 13y ago
        I can relate! Sure wish more teams would do things together - *despite the age differences. I'm 20 yrs older than some of my coworkers, but we still have similar interests. And a good beer is a good beer, no matter how old you are! ;-)
michaelochurch 13y ago
Feigned surprise is petty bullying by people who get their asses kicked by even nastier bullies: the business assholes who run this industry because, as engineers, we're absolutely terrible at fighting for our own interests, and have let ourselves become a colonized people who mostly implement others' shitty ideas and are paid in table scraps. It's no different from the playground bully who goes home and gets the shit beaten out of him by his drunk-ass dad. Because he can't wallop his father, he takes it out on the other kids. These asshats (the ones who feign surprise) can't do anything about the VCs and product executives and idiot fuckups who make the life of a typical programmer so terrible, so they take it out on other engineers whom they perceive as marginal: women, minorities, people over or under the group's age range, and new entrants to the field.
- mjolk 13y ago
  It's pretty heavy conjecture to assume that jerks are bigots or misogynists becuase they're mad at someone else at work.
  - michaelochurch 13y ago
    If someone's a member of the Taliban or the Ku Klux Klan, it's likely that his issues go deeper than "mad at the boss man". However, even your most obnoxious brogrammer is not likely to be in the Klan. He probably isn't even a bigot. He's a bully. There's a difference. Bullies attack those who are politically weak. It so happens that politically weak people are often in a minority in that environment, but I don't think gender, race, or age are explicitly part of their selection process. The archetypical bully brogrammer doesn't wake up and say, "after my 10:30 protein shake, I'm going to direct a few microaggressions at female programmers. Oh, and Mark turns 40 on Thursday, so I need to put him on my rotation." It doesn't work that way, obviously. They pick on the weak-- whoever that may be, and it often changes-- because they're picked-on from above and it's their only way to restore their battered confidence.
    - mjolk 13y ago
      You seem to have a very specific anecdote in mind.
bryan_rasmussen 13y ago
gasp I didn't even know what feigned surprise was!
- hablahaha 13y ago
  How could you not not have? Everyone knows what feigned surprise is!
- theorique 13y ago
  I'm amazed that you didn't know about feigned surprise. Everyone knows about feigned surprise (or so I thought).
Argorak 13y ago
I struggle with this anti-pattern. I used to use it, but I know how bad it is. In bad moments, it still slips. My solution has been to be more proactive about it. If I see a topic coming up, I just ask "you know about (ABC)?", which gives the other person the option to say "yes" (instead of getting something explained they know) or "no", which is a good start to an explanation.
- sjtrny 13y ago
  The problem is that sometimes the person feels under pressure to pretend they know so they say yes anyway.
  - Argorak 13y ago
    Sure, but thats a different problem you have to solve on another level and inherent in all such conversations.
aaronetz 13y ago
I am very much against feigned surprise, but this just a symptom of the underlying personality. Ban one thing - and the personality will find other ways to manifest itself. It's better, in my opinion, to just have an unspoken rule like "respect your coworkers" and make sure to help arrogant people improve their social skills (sometimes those people don't even realize that their behavior is causing grief to others).
- gommm 13y ago
  I think sometimes correcting the symptom leads the person to realize that they are doing that and correct the problem. It's easy to behave like a jerk without realizing it and a lot of people who come off as arrogant don't imagine themselves as being so. If you tell them to respect their coworkers, it doesn't have the same impact because it not actionable (they already imagine themselves as being respectful). That's why banning specific toxic behaviors work, it encourages introspection for people whose bad behavior is unintentional.
  - peterwwillis 13y ago
    I think the tone of how you address such a "ban" is incredibly important in encouraging that introspection. Ban is a pretty harsh word; it makes it seem like there's some kind of punishment or consequence should you feign surprise. Instead of "banning" different kinds of interaction, they could simply encourage their students to take those instances as an opportunity to help someone improve personally. Instead of turning it into a negative thing, you could make it a positive. Like, instead of feigning surprise to shame someone for their lack of knowledge, take the opportunity to teach someone something valuable, if they'd like to learn about it. Encouraging people to think this way and help others is going to be more positive than a negative like a ban, and thus probably be more effective towards positive change.
  - lawtguy 13y ago
    The ban also removes some of the reward for this behavior. Some of the people are doing it to make themselves look superior and the target inferior. With the ban, they can instantly be pulled up short ("Hey! We don't do that here at Hacker School.") thus instantly removing some of the superiority they thought they had gained.
jl6 13y ago
This was a new term for me, though I recognise the behaviour. I think the term will help fight it. Reminds me of the phrase "false balance" which was also new to me recently. Names are so important!
brianpgordon 13y ago
Another way of looking at it is that shame is a good disincentive for ignorance. It shouldn't be OK to ask questions like "what's Lisp?" or "what's synchronization?" (both of which I've heard). We can enforce that norm by rewarding such questions with a grimace. Of course, the absolute most important thing is to make sure that the environment doesn't become toxic with disdain, but I don't think it's in general a sin to "feign surprise" or similar.
- Dolimiter 13y ago
  It should be OK to ask any question, that is how we learn. The passive aggressive "rewarding with a grimace" creates a toxic work environment.
- AndrewDucker 13y ago
  If it's not ok then make that clear up-front and then tell people when they've crossed over into an area that you expect them to understand on their own. Doing it in a comedic fashion doesn't help, it's just bullying.
  - brianpgordon 13y ago
    Playing out that scene, I can't imagine taking your approach in actual conversation with a peer. Peer: Synchronized? Me: I'm sorry, you've crossed over into an area that I expect you to understand on your own. That kind of room-silencing confrontation makes you seem like way more of an asshole than answering their question but with a raised eyebrow or feigned surprise.
    - AndrewDucker 13y ago
      Nope, an arched eyebrow makes you look like much more of a dick there. Because you're implying that it's basic stuff, _and_ that it's not even worth you telling them that, because they're so beneath you at that point. In a meeting with a peer (rather than a training course/academy situation) you'd presumably tell them that that's fairly basic stuff that you don't want to derail a meeting with, and that you'd point them at some resources later.
tikhonj 13y ago
Ah, confidence. I tend to do the opposite: I hedge too much. If I don't watch myself, I'd probably say, "I think 3 is a prime number...". Then again, I have been guilty of projecting confidence a bit too much, probably in a way unpleasant to others. In some ways, just banning a particular behavior feels a bit too much like treating the symptom rather than the root cause. On the other hand, I can't imagine how to approach this problem more holistically. More importantly, this rule is simple. Having a simple, strict rule like this will help people help themselves. If they actually want to be nicer—and, I've found, most people do—a few rules like this will help them catch their own bad habits. And over time, it will help them be more introspective. So perhaps it actually is a way to treat the underlying problem. I've been trying something similar myself, pattern matching on some of my bad habits to try to reduce them. I don't know if it's been working holistically, but at least I feel like a nicer person. So that's something.
- nardi 13y ago
  > More importantly, this rule is simple. Having a simple, strict rule like this will help people help themselves. Even more importantly, having a simple, strict rule like this encourages people to think along these lines and find other behavioral anti-patterns also deserving of rules.
- eshvk 13y ago
  > Ah, confidence. I tend to do the opposite: I hedge too much. I never had a formal computer science education and I also tend to do that.I took enough Math, CS and Electrical Engineering courses to be utterly frightened by what I don't know. This means that I also over-estimate what other people know. Oh, Sally has a pure math degree from Harvard, let me be very careful talking about kernels around her. James studied Distributed Systems at MIT, I better over think my system design before I talk to him. What I have realized is that, this anti-pattern comes in conflict with the opposite anti-pattern. The one that comes from people who hide their insecurities by being over-confident. The one that comes from people whose deepest fear is saying "I don't know". To them, a person who says that is a person who can't code. If you want to progress in your career, you will have to deal/learn to deal with such people. Being nice doesn't really help when the other person is a "Oh, you don't know X" dick. Especially if you are working in something that is a specialized domain where the other person doesn't have the expertise to evaluate you.
axanoeychron 13y ago
I honestly find this behaviour so difficult to understand. Why treat people like this? What advantage does it serve? If someone does not know something, it is not an excuse for belittlement. It is not an upperhand. It's an opportunity to teach and learn from teaching. This probably makes me a minority and just reinforces my perspective that human ego can be fundamentally broken and requires time to healthily construct.
- leephillips 13y ago
  "Why treat people like this? What advantage does it serve?" You seem to have answered your own question in your subsequent remarks. The feigned surprise is a habit of people with very low self esteem. They constantly seek to reassure themselves by trying to place others (usually people whom they fear are more capable than they are) into a position of lower social status. If you are on the receiving end of a feigned surprise attack, think back through your interactions with the attacker: you will probably remember something recent that revealed that you had some skill or knowledge that the attacker lacked. From that moment on, he was looking for a way to reassert his social status.
- emmelaich 13y ago
  They have to say something, and for some people it's hard to find the right words to be nice without sounding condescending or superior. So they try to be funny without realising it is received completely differently. At least it's one of my theories. I find it marginally more common in people with poor verbal skills. It's a subset of the 'we judge others by their behaviour, and ourselves by our intentions.' phenomenon.
moron4hire 13y ago
I have tried for a long time to be understanding of people's differing experiences. Mostly because I've been on the receiving end of so much feigned surprise. I was home-schooled, but actually had a fairly normal childhood otherwise. My parents didn't shelter my sister and me from pop culture, we embraced it just as much as any other family in our podunk Pennsylvania town. It used to really put me off in college when people would laugh at me for not getting an obscure cultural reference--even if I knew what franchise it was from, just hadn't had time to watch that particular one--assuming it was another "home schoolers are so sheltered" moment. No, I'm sorry, there is just a finite number of television watching hours in a life, and when you were watching Captain Planet, I was watching Teenage Mutant Nina Turtles. Incidentally, I used to get it from my home schooler "friends", too. They would gasp to learn I hadn't read such and such work of classic English literature. Comments about how poor of a reader I must be too have not read Dickins. Will, sorry I haven't helped validate your childhood, but just because I hated Oliver Twist and read Kipling instead doesn't mean I didn't read any classics. So yeah, just be careful. Feigned surprise ids also a form of exclusionary prejudice. If you can't even be accepting of someone who is nearly culturally identical to you, then your chances are grim for when you meet someone who is really different.
- jrs99 13y ago
  could be a different kind of feigned surprise. Like they want to express how weird they find it that you don't know about something. if someone said "What!? You've NEVER listened to this album?", and then removed the album from their shelf and shoved it in my hands, I don't know if that would be in the same class as the passive aggressive type of feigned surprise. or if someone sees a bag of milk in my fridge and says "What!? Your milk comes in BAGS???"
  - moron4hire 13y ago
    When it was followed up with "told you homeschoolers are weird", I think I'm well outside of the realm of assumption. Usually, when people learn I was homeschooled, the first words out of their mouth are "really? You don't seem weird." I used to reply with, "oh? How many homeschooled kids do you know?" Now I answer, "oh, I'm certainly weird, just not for that reason."
ColinWright 13y ago
> "Feigned surprise" (when someone gasps and says > something like: "you don’t even know about monads?") When someone doesn't know about something it's an opportunity for them to learn, and for you to experience again the wonder and excitement of discovering something new. Don't exhibit your superiority just because you've been exposed to something they haven't, seize with both hands the thrill of learning. https://xkcd.com/1053/ https://xkcd.com/1053/
- jerf 13y ago
  Tone and context are everything. Let's not pretend this isn't usually passive-aggressive. (And not even very passive passive-aggressive...)
  - ColinWright 13y ago
    Agreed - my comment is to emphasize how doing such is a complete waste of an opportunity for everyone.
  - hamburglar 13y ago
    I agree that tone and context are everything, but I don't agree that it's "usually" passive-aggressive. On my team, if someone says "oh, man, you haven't heard about X?" it's usually said with a relish that translates to "dude, you're gonna love this. Check it out: ..." I guess that means I don't work with dicks.
- ThrustVectoring 13y ago
  It's not just an opportunity for them to learn - it's an opportunity for you to learn, as well. There are deeper levels of understanding beyond merely being able to use something, and you can only reach them by the kind of explicit descriptions and breakdowns that teaching a concept necessitates.
  - bitcrusher 13y ago
    "Once taught is twice learned."
zk00006 13y ago
I work myself, so don't actually have much experience with this rule. But people need negative feedback which often creates big motivation for them and enforces learning. Giving only positive examples does not help to become better person/programmer/whatever...
- cowls 13y ago
  There's a difference between constructive negative feedback and trying to subtly belittle someone. Not knowing about something is not really a negative feedback point
  - Karunamon 13y ago
    To be fair, the author does not successfully make their case that "feigned" surprise (how does one know enough about the mental state of another person to make that assumption anyways?) is always negative or always bad. Funny, in that an article about not making assumptions is packed with them, not the least of which is the assumption that someone who is visibly surprised when you don't know something is expressing some kind of superiority or belittling.
rmrfrmrf 13y ago
I combat "feigned surprise" by admitting that I don't know something and asking the person for an explanation.
minikomi 13y ago
This reminds me of how great I thought this was: Hacker School is positive. When I had a bug that I didn’t understand and asked one of the facilitators to help me out, they would frequently say “Oh, interesting!”. The attitude was “Oh, is something not working? How delightful! A learning opportunity!”. source: http://jvns.ca/blog/2014/02/15/how-was-hacker-school/ http://jvns.ca/blog/2014/02/15/how-was-hacker-school/
myth_drannon 13y ago
Here is a short presentation about Hacker School at our local Python meetup given by someone who went there. She also talks about feigned surprises https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3W6yQ2dXJk8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3W6yQ2dXJk8
cruise02 13y ago
As always, there's a relevant xkcd. It's one of my favorites. https://xkcd.com/1053/ https://xkcd.com/1053/
qwerta 13y ago
> “Feigned surprise” (when someone gasps and says something like: “you don’t even know about monads?”) Too often the surprise is real. There are developers who do not know basics such as loops, conditions, arithmetic and so on. I use Java for a long time, but I have problem writing 'switch' statements. In Scala it is very powerful so I use it often, in Java it is too primitive, so I always just use bunch of 'if-else' statements. I am not sure what context of previous example applies to. It could be on someone who claims Haskel skills. But I think every well educated hacker / software developer should know about nomads.
- asuffield 13y ago
  I have this unhappy experience every day, when I find people don't know things that are essential to doing their jobs. I try hard not to let it show too much or fall into the trap of acting superior, but the soul-crushing depression makes this hard.
  - shubb 13y ago
    The more I learn, the clearer it becomes that I know very little. Things that I used to know fade away - a few years out of college, I can't do matrix maths anymore. Software engineering is a big job. Software engineers might know about assembly code, pointers, design patterns, UML, functional programming, algorithms, AI, statistics, reverse engineering, driver programming, SQL, NoSQL, matrix calculations and numeric simulation, control theory, cloud scaling, devops, unit testing, XML schema design... Then, if you think about the things outside programming an engineer might need to know, like marketing, sales, budget control, estimating, project management, user experience design, graphic design, human psychology. And the domain they are working in of course. That's a lot to know. Even the basics. I don't know the basics of a lot of those things. Doesn't meeting all these people who don't know things make you wonder what you don't know that you don't know?
    - judk 13y ago
      Of course I don't know everything. But the stuff I don't know is irrelevant to my job. If you join my team, I expect you to know everything relevant to your new job, not whatever trivia you might have found amusing elsewhere.
jgroome 13y ago
Reminds me of this article from way back when: http://thingist.com/item/4372/ http://thingist.com/item/4372/ Not exactly the same, but talks about this attitude prevalent among tech types that encourages belittling of those less experienced/knowledgable.
mbetter 13y ago
It's funny how the author acts like I should know what the fuck "Hacker School" is.
cool-RR 13y ago
What? You don't know what feigned surprise means?
gelisam 13y ago
After reading the title but before reading the article, I was trying to imagine a situation in which anybody might want to fake surprise in a work environment. The only thing I came up with was as a teaching mechanism, as in: "your program is crashing when you divide by zero instead of returning NaN? How strange! Let's investigate together". I was quite surprised to see that by "feigned surprise", the article actually meant something along the lines of "really, you expected an integer operation to return NaN?". The article does explain why people might say that, but I still have a hard time believing it. Why would anybody want to say that? It's not helpful at all. I guess I must be lucky never to have worked in the bad working environments described by the article.
- chadwickthebold 13y ago
  It's just a response people have built up, and they don't really think about it. When I started my current job, I had absolutely no javascript experience at all. My team lead is great, and I learned a ton from him, but he definitely said a lot of stuff like this without thinking. He always helped me figure it out, but responses like this always made me think twice before going to ask for help. I think it's just a side-effect of being in an insulated position and knowing a ton more about the subject than most people you work with.
- biscarch 13y ago
  > Why would anybody want to say that? It's not helpful at all. The way I read the article (and think about this topic in general) is pretty close to the way I perceived the part of your response that I quoted. Essentially it often combines explicit or implicit generalized language (anybody, nobody, everybody, etc) with an assertion that something is "obvious" or in some other way "beneath" the person saying it. It's not necessarily that people want to say it but more likely that they are unaware of what they're saying for whatever reason. By giving it a name Hacker School is letting people realize the topic and, hopefully, reducing occurrences. IMO "Feigned Surprise" is a bit of a misnomer but I haven't come up with anything better to call it. It may be more correlated with imperfect articulation of people's assumptions than actual surprise.
mathattack 13y ago
The "Let me find something you don't know" is almost always compensation for a problem of the overconfident. Usually it stems from them being on the receiving end of it. Perhaps in the form of, "Oh, you can't run a 7 minute mile?" when they were younger.
Mozai 13y ago
Would it be better to ban all sarcasm or intentional irony? It's sending a message by using the opposite signal.
- normloman 13y ago
  Would it be better to ban all subtlety in human communication and reduce the expressive capabilities of speech to straight forward description?
ef47d35620c1 13y ago
If I went around lording my specific domain knowledge over others, I would never learn anything new myself. What a waste of my life and human interactions that would be.
ufukbay 13y ago
I have been in a similar situation where my "good will" caused one of my best coworkers to feel superiour than me and started to try to boss me around. For more than two years everything was fine because we worked on different projects. However for the last couple of months, working together on the same project, everything went down the drain. I talked to him about big changes and new features before implementing them to hear his opinion in order to make him feel more involved but in one of those meetings, he said something like: "You wouldn't be able to do this on your own if I didn't help you. Did you learn about this kind of stuff at school?". This was the start of a chain of events which finally led to quitting my job and taking up new one from the beginning of May. Next time I will make sure that I either won't talk about everything in detail to my coworker or make sure that people understand why I'm involving them in the decision making.
- judk 13y ago
  People at my office are afraid to communicate because they don't want other people to think they are dumb and punish them politically. Don't fall victim to that. Be the good teammate you know how to be. You will learn more and get more done than if you keep your shields up. You may suffer from insulting peer reviews short term, but you will be a hero to others who are like you but more timid, and you will learn and grow faster which will make you more impressive at your next gig.
  - ufukbay 13y ago
    Yeah, with lack of communication, stress and chaos is inevitable, it's just a matter of time. At my next gig, I'll give my best to keep an high level of communication between my teammates.
ap22213 13y ago
I always try to remember that the most expressive (e.g. loudest) person isn't necessarily the smartest, even though my brain is built to associate the two.
mcguire 13y ago
The article might be improved if it mentioned what Hacker School was and how they had banned "feigned surprise".[1] [1] https://www.hackerschool.com/manual#sec-environment https://www.hackerschool.com/manual#sec-environment
punkrockpolly 13y ago
Before Hacker School, I never realized how unhelpful this was. The naive logic is, "well, I'm genuinely surprised that this person didn't know this". But in the grand reality of things, all of us know very little. Even experts in one area, don't know basic things in another area. By removing the shaming of admitting what you don't know, Hacker School encourages everyone to move past that and help each other learn.
- lawtguy 13y ago
  I think this is exactly why they added this rule: some people didn't realize the negative effects of acting surprised when someone doesn't know something. The jerks are probably still going to be jerks of course, but for the others it's a chance to learn about how to better interact with the people around them.
daemonk 13y ago
The more you know, the more you realize how much you don't know. Feigning surprise just reflects how much of a knowledge bubble one exists in.
badman_ting 13y ago
Oh, people who do that are terrible. But then, nerds have so many terrible personality tics like that, which is why they/we are considered socially ungraceful. Another favorite of mine is the one where you take what someone said super literally, as a joke (a terribly unfunny joke).
DanBC 13y ago
Some schools in the UK recognisd that some children do not want to look stupid by givin the wrong answer or appearing not to know something. They realised that this stops those children from asking questions, not jist from answering questions. One technique used to overcome this is for the teacher to nominate a pupil to attempt an answer. It doesn't matter iftheu don't know - that's part of the process. A side benefit is the teacher gets more inderstanding of any mosconceptions the pupils have. There are lots of subtle things happening with teaching and it's a bit worrying that we don't have much research or we don't ise the research we have.
- arjie 13y ago
  It's an interesting pedagogical technique I've seen elsewhere too. What are the results of applying it? I know that I was in a class where the teacher followed this procedure. I _dreaded_ the moment when I'd be picked even though the questions were usually simple enough if you read for the class and paid attention. It turned my insides to water every time. Absolute dread. Made an otherwise fun class scary.
kyberias 13y ago
I still think there are valid and sincere reasons to be surprised when someone doesn't know something and it's OK to express that surprise. Especially in private conversations!
AnimalMuppet 13y ago
The rule is a great idea. But even without it, you can counter this kind of junk. "Hey, why did you respond that way? Does your ego need the boost from acting smugly superior? Or is the problem that you don't understand it well enough to help me out by actually explaining it?" That would probably cost you someone's friendship, but if they're pulling this kind of stunt on you, I'm not sure that they were your friend anyway...
lowglow 13y ago
If you've gone to a dev school, please help share your experience with others who are looking: http://schools.techendo.co/ http://schools.techendo.co/
d4vlx 13y ago
When I worked at Thoughworks there were several people who were terrible for this. Many of them senior. It significantly reduced my respect for the company and I left as soon as I found a good replacement. What made it particularly irksome was that they heavily market themselves both internally and externally as being above such things. The cognitive dissonance really grated on me.
judk 13y ago
article seems to be a response to an announcement HS made, but source is not linked or quoted.

234 points by SoftwarePatent 13y ago

This needs to be a rule. Can we make it a rule?

This seems to be the post in question: https://www.hackerschool.com/blog/1-summer-2012-applications-open https://www.hackerschool.com/blog/1-summer-2012-applications...

logn 13y ago
Reading that post and the blog post linked, I think I see computer science programs in a better light now. At least in an automata/assembly/algebra class you're not going to find people who think they're hotshots for knowing the material. Most people struggle through and then go find spare time to learn programming. I'd be really down on myself for not knowing all the latest programming trends in hacker school, kind of like now when I read endless Javascript blogs about new tools, but the difference is I know enough now to know what's important to have a grasp on and what's noise.
nicholasjbs 13y ago
You can also read more about feigned surprise in our User's Manual: https://www.hackerschool.com/manual#sec-environment https://www.hackerschool.com/manual#sec-environment

octo_t 13y ago

What about just surprise? I've met people who claim to be 'experts' in C++, but (for example) don't know how to use STL algorithms.

marvin 13y ago
The article is pointing out a phenomenon related to interpersonal relationships, not technology. Part of interacting with other developers is nonverbal communication (or subtext) and the reactions it causes. So if you are genuinely surprised, a natural reaction would of course be to display this through verbal and nonverbal reactions. But at that point (or even before, as a matter of emotional awareness), people should probably stop and think for a bit what sort of reactions they want to cause in other programmers. Is the guy wrong (in the sense of giving the wrong impression) for calling himself an expert even though he doesn't know some STL features of C++? Is this something that should be communicated to him? Would it have a net positive effect on your working relationship if it was? Do you feel threatened by an expert who doesn't know this feature? Is there a possibility that you are wrong and that he is only missing a specific feature that you yourself have worked with but is not necessarily stanard? Is your (overt) surprise meant to evoke a certain reaction in the other developer? Would it make your working relationship easier if you hid your surprise instead of making a show of it? Etc. I hope this comment doesn't come across as condescending, but this sort of interpersonal communication is hard for a lot of programmers I know (at one point including myself). Being aware of these things can help smooth over rough points (and improve productivity, even if you are looking at the purely utilitarian perspective and ignoring general happiness).
- collyw 13y ago
  Gross generalization here but, I think developers are probably the group of people least responsive to subtle non-verbal communication. Lots of them seem unable to interact with the opposite sex successfully (and the two are related believe it or not).
eksith 13y ago
My response to that is "Hmm. Interesting". Overt surprise, feigned or otherwise, is rarely a useful expression of emotion in my experience. This has the added benefit of making you more approachable to those who have legitimate questions.
awjr 13y ago
I'm guessing this may not have been something they have needed to use. I dislike the use of the word 'expert' when describing my skillset. Over the years you begin to realise other people can be more expert in different areas within the same knowledge domain. I find the willingness to learn to be more important.

facepalm 13y ago

Why not just have a rule to be nice to each other? Personally I wouldn't like a climate of micromanaged human interaction. But of course for others it might be different. I am not saying they should change their policy, just that it would be off-putting to me.

asuffield 13y ago
Because that's really hard and you can't tell whether people are following it.
- 6d0debc071 13y ago
  If your rules are a very small set - 3 or so - then you can reasonably expect people to remember them all. However, if your rules are a bit longer than that, then, IME, it's better to try to come up with a rough heuristic and link in the specific rules as advice on how to avoid violating that - with warnings before the final firing or whatever so that people can see which specific things don't match their perception of the heuristic and have a chance of learning those.
alttab 13y ago
Feigned surprise may not be seen as "not nice" by those doing it. It's a combination of superiority, surprise, and interest in the other person. Not everyone was aware they were being a dick
zhemao 13y ago
From the Hacker School manual in which these rules are spelled out. > The goal isn't to burden Hacker School with a bunch of annoying rules, or to give us a stick to bludgeon people with for "being bad." Rather, these rules are designed to help all of us build a pleasant, productive, and fearless community. To build a positive environment, it sometimes helps to have a list of specific toxic behaviors that should be avoided.
- facepalm 13y ago
  Sure, I guess it depends how you interpret the world "rule". It could just be a recommendation, or people could be expelled for breaking it.

yanowitz 13y ago

There's a set of human interaction anti-patterns like this. (The article mentions another one -- excessive confidence and its inverse, ability to acknowledge ignorance and learn from others. I'd also add a variant to that--having and expressing varying degrees of confidence in your opinions. The more experience/evidence-based your opinion is, the more strongly you are likely to be attached. But every opinion in software should have error bars around it, especially given the rapidity of change.) The inverse of feigned surprise was neatly displayed to me by a coworker recently, "oh cool, today is the day you get to learn about X." I assume someone has written something brilliant about these sets of interactions.

probably_wrong 13y ago
Perhaps your coworker was referencing this XKCD strip? I've seen it quoted fairly often: http://xkcd.com/1053/ http://xkcd.com/1053/
read 13y ago
Pay close attention to guilty words like: just, always, never, everything, nothing, all, none, very, actually. They are an alarm that indicates you are going to an extreme to justify a position. If what you say is evidently true, you wouldn't feel the need to try hard to qualify it.
- collyw 13y ago
  Interesting that you pick up on those words, as I have noticed that whenever my team leader asks me for "just a small change", it usually means he hasn't bothered to think it through properly, and it will involve a lot more thinking or work or maintenance in the long run than he imagines.
- zimpenfish 13y ago
  Isn't this kinda related to "Black and White Thinking" / "All or Nothing Thinking"?
macca321 13y ago
That can still sound patronising - what if you actually know about X already?

awjr 13y ago

One of the reasons I'm leaving my current role at the end of the month is due to this egocentric development approach from the team lead. "Bzzzzzt" and "Schoolboy error" are not good peer review comments to hand out to the team. Technically the guy is very good, but it's toxic and unpleasant. Work for me is about doing cool stuff, learning new things, and most importantly, helping the people I work with to do their job better and grow as individuals (I feed them donuts on a daily basis ;) ).

awjr 13y ago
As an aside, if you go for an interview and notice that each person has a Fail Buzzer (I never had one) as a 'joke', you should probably not accept a role if you don't have a thick skin.
- sergiotapia 13y ago
  They sound like fratboy douchebags. Did they hi-five you and chug some beers after hiring you?
  - awjr 13y ago
    I should probably write it up somewhere but the concept of the team going out and having a drink/socialising was quite alien to them.
    - sergiotapia 13y ago
      I'd love to work on a team like that to be honest, all of the places I've worked at we haven't so much as even gone to the movies because of the age differences. One married w/kids, other 20-something, other Vim warrior from the 70's, etc.
      - marknow 13y ago
        I can relate! Sure wish more teams would do things together - *despite the age differences. I'm 20 yrs older than some of my coworkers, but we still have similar interests. And a good beer is a good beer, no matter how old you are! ;-)

michaelochurch 13y ago

Feigned surprise is petty bullying by people who get their asses kicked by even nastier bullies: the business assholes who run this industry because, as engineers, we're absolutely terrible at fighting for our own interests, and have let ourselves become a colonized people who mostly implement others' shitty ideas and are paid in table scraps. It's no different from the playground bully who goes home and gets the shit beaten out of him by his drunk-ass dad. Because he can't wallop his father, he takes it out on the other kids. These asshats (the ones who feign surprise) can't do anything about the VCs and product executives and idiot fuckups who make the life of a typical programmer so terrible, so they take it out on other engineers whom they perceive as marginal: women, minorities, people over or under the group's age range, and new entrants to the field.

mjolk 13y ago
It's pretty heavy conjecture to assume that jerks are bigots or misogynists becuase they're mad at someone else at work.
- michaelochurch 13y ago
  If someone's a member of the Taliban or the Ku Klux Klan, it's likely that his issues go deeper than "mad at the boss man". However, even your most obnoxious brogrammer is not likely to be in the Klan. He probably isn't even a bigot. He's a bully. There's a difference. Bullies attack those who are politically weak. It so happens that politically weak people are often in a minority in that environment, but I don't think gender, race, or age are explicitly part of their selection process. The archetypical bully brogrammer doesn't wake up and say, "after my 10:30 protein shake, I'm going to direct a few microaggressions at female programmers. Oh, and Mark turns 40 on Thursday, so I need to put him on my rotation." It doesn't work that way, obviously. They pick on the weak-- whoever that may be, and it often changes-- because they're picked-on from above and it's their only way to restore their battered confidence.
  - mjolk 13y ago
    You seem to have a very specific anecdote in mind.

bryan_rasmussen 13y ago

gasp I didn't even know what feigned surprise was!

hablahaha 13y ago
How could you not not have? Everyone knows what feigned surprise is!
theorique 13y ago
I'm amazed that you didn't know about feigned surprise. Everyone knows about feigned surprise (or so I thought).

Argorak 13y ago

I struggle with this anti-pattern. I used to use it, but I know how bad it is. In bad moments, it still slips. My solution has been to be more proactive about it. If I see a topic coming up, I just ask "you know about (ABC)?", which gives the other person the option to say "yes" (instead of getting something explained they know) or "no", which is a good start to an explanation.

sjtrny 13y ago
The problem is that sometimes the person feels under pressure to pretend they know so they say yes anyway.
- Argorak 13y ago
  Sure, but thats a different problem you have to solve on another level and inherent in all such conversations.

aaronetz 13y ago

I am very much against feigned surprise, but this just a symptom of the underlying personality. Ban one thing - and the personality will find other ways to manifest itself. It's better, in my opinion, to just have an unspoken rule like "respect your coworkers" and make sure to help arrogant people improve their social skills (sometimes those people don't even realize that their behavior is causing grief to others).

gommm 13y ago
I think sometimes correcting the symptom leads the person to realize that they are doing that and correct the problem. It's easy to behave like a jerk without realizing it and a lot of people who come off as arrogant don't imagine themselves as being so. If you tell them to respect their coworkers, it doesn't have the same impact because it not actionable (they already imagine themselves as being respectful). That's why banning specific toxic behaviors work, it encourages introspection for people whose bad behavior is unintentional.
- peterwwillis 13y ago
  I think the tone of how you address such a "ban" is incredibly important in encouraging that introspection. Ban is a pretty harsh word; it makes it seem like there's some kind of punishment or consequence should you feign surprise. Instead of "banning" different kinds of interaction, they could simply encourage their students to take those instances as an opportunity to help someone improve personally. Instead of turning it into a negative thing, you could make it a positive. Like, instead of feigning surprise to shame someone for their lack of knowledge, take the opportunity to teach someone something valuable, if they'd like to learn about it. Encouraging people to think this way and help others is going to be more positive than a negative like a ban, and thus probably be more effective towards positive change.
- lawtguy 13y ago
  The ban also removes some of the reward for this behavior. Some of the people are doing it to make themselves look superior and the target inferior. With the ban, they can instantly be pulled up short ("Hey! We don't do that here at Hacker School.") thus instantly removing some of the superiority they thought they had gained.

jl6 13y ago

This was a new term for me, though I recognise the behaviour. I think the term will help fight it. Reminds me of the phrase "false balance" which was also new to me recently. Names are so important!

brianpgordon 13y ago

Another way of looking at it is that shame is a good disincentive for ignorance. It shouldn't be OK to ask questions like "what's Lisp?" or "what's synchronization?" (both of which I've heard). We can enforce that norm by rewarding such questions with a grimace. Of course, the absolute most important thing is to make sure that the environment doesn't become toxic with disdain, but I don't think it's in general a sin to "feign surprise" or similar.

Dolimiter 13y ago
It should be OK to ask any question, that is how we learn. The passive aggressive "rewarding with a grimace" creates a toxic work environment.
AndrewDucker 13y ago
If it's not ok then make that clear up-front and then tell people when they've crossed over into an area that you expect them to understand on their own. Doing it in a comedic fashion doesn't help, it's just bullying.
- brianpgordon 13y ago
  Playing out that scene, I can't imagine taking your approach in actual conversation with a peer. Peer: Synchronized? Me: I'm sorry, you've crossed over into an area that I expect you to understand on your own. That kind of room-silencing confrontation makes you seem like way more of an asshole than answering their question but with a raised eyebrow or feigned surprise.
  - AndrewDucker 13y ago
    Nope, an arched eyebrow makes you look like much more of a dick there. Because you're implying that it's basic stuff, _and_ that it's not even worth you telling them that, because they're so beneath you at that point. In a meeting with a peer (rather than a training course/academy situation) you'd presumably tell them that that's fairly basic stuff that you don't want to derail a meeting with, and that you'd point them at some resources later.

tikhonj 13y ago

Ah, confidence. I tend to do the opposite: I hedge too much. If I don't watch myself, I'd probably say, "I think 3 is a prime number...". Then again, I have been guilty of projecting confidence a bit too much, probably in a way unpleasant to others. In some ways, just banning a particular behavior feels a bit too much like treating the symptom rather than the root cause. On the other hand, I can't imagine how to approach this problem more holistically. More importantly, this rule is simple. Having a simple, strict rule like this will help people help themselves. If they actually want to be nicer—and, I've found, most people do—a few rules like this will help them catch their own bad habits. And over time, it will help them be more introspective. So perhaps it actually is a way to treat the underlying problem. I've been trying something similar myself, pattern matching on some of my bad habits to try to reduce them. I don't know if it's been working holistically, but at least I feel like a nicer person. So that's something.

nardi 13y ago
> More importantly, this rule is simple. Having a simple, strict rule like this will help people help themselves. Even more importantly, having a simple, strict rule like this encourages people to think along these lines and find other behavioral anti-patterns also deserving of rules.
eshvk 13y ago
> Ah, confidence. I tend to do the opposite: I hedge too much. I never had a formal computer science education and I also tend to do that.I took enough Math, CS and Electrical Engineering courses to be utterly frightened by what I don't know. This means that I also over-estimate what other people know. Oh, Sally has a pure math degree from Harvard, let me be very careful talking about kernels around her. James studied Distributed Systems at MIT, I better over think my system design before I talk to him. What I have realized is that, this anti-pattern comes in conflict with the opposite anti-pattern. The one that comes from people who hide their insecurities by being over-confident. The one that comes from people whose deepest fear is saying "I don't know". To them, a person who says that is a person who can't code. If you want to progress in your career, you will have to deal/learn to deal with such people. Being nice doesn't really help when the other person is a "Oh, you don't know X" dick. Especially if you are working in something that is a specialized domain where the other person doesn't have the expertise to evaluate you.

axanoeychron 13y ago

I honestly find this behaviour so difficult to understand. Why treat people like this? What advantage does it serve? If someone does not know something, it is not an excuse for belittlement. It is not an upperhand. It's an opportunity to teach and learn from teaching. This probably makes me a minority and just reinforces my perspective that human ego can be fundamentally broken and requires time to healthily construct.

leephillips 13y ago
"Why treat people like this? What advantage does it serve?" You seem to have answered your own question in your subsequent remarks. The feigned surprise is a habit of people with very low self esteem. They constantly seek to reassure themselves by trying to place others (usually people whom they fear are more capable than they are) into a position of lower social status. If you are on the receiving end of a feigned surprise attack, think back through your interactions with the attacker: you will probably remember something recent that revealed that you had some skill or knowledge that the attacker lacked. From that moment on, he was looking for a way to reassert his social status.
emmelaich 13y ago
They have to say something, and for some people it's hard to find the right words to be nice without sounding condescending or superior. So they try to be funny without realising it is received completely differently. At least it's one of my theories. I find it marginally more common in people with poor verbal skills. It's a subset of the 'we judge others by their behaviour, and ourselves by our intentions.' phenomenon.

moron4hire 13y ago

I have tried for a long time to be understanding of people's differing experiences. Mostly because I've been on the receiving end of so much feigned surprise. I was home-schooled, but actually had a fairly normal childhood otherwise. My parents didn't shelter my sister and me from pop culture, we embraced it just as much as any other family in our podunk Pennsylvania town. It used to really put me off in college when people would laugh at me for not getting an obscure cultural reference--even if I knew what franchise it was from, just hadn't had time to watch that particular one--assuming it was another "home schoolers are so sheltered" moment. No, I'm sorry, there is just a finite number of television watching hours in a life, and when you were watching Captain Planet, I was watching Teenage Mutant Nina Turtles. Incidentally, I used to get it from my home schooler "friends", too. They would gasp to learn I hadn't read such and such work of classic English literature. Comments about how poor of a reader I must be too have not read Dickins. Will, sorry I haven't helped validate your childhood, but just because I hated Oliver Twist and read Kipling instead doesn't mean I didn't read any classics. So yeah, just be careful. Feigned surprise ids also a form of exclusionary prejudice. If you can't even be accepting of someone who is nearly culturally identical to you, then your chances are grim for when you meet someone who is really different.

jrs99 13y ago
could be a different kind of feigned surprise. Like they want to express how weird they find it that you don't know about something. if someone said "What!? You've NEVER listened to this album?", and then removed the album from their shelf and shoved it in my hands, I don't know if that would be in the same class as the passive aggressive type of feigned surprise. or if someone sees a bag of milk in my fridge and says "What!? Your milk comes in BAGS???"
- moron4hire 13y ago
  When it was followed up with "told you homeschoolers are weird", I think I'm well outside of the realm of assumption. Usually, when people learn I was homeschooled, the first words out of their mouth are "really? You don't seem weird." I used to reply with, "oh? How many homeschooled kids do you know?" Now I answer, "oh, I'm certainly weird, just not for that reason."

ColinWright 13y ago

> "Feigned surprise" (when someone gasps and says > something like: "you don’t even know about monads?") When someone doesn't know about something it's an opportunity for them to learn, and for you to experience again the wonder and excitement of discovering something new. Don't exhibit your superiority just because you've been exposed to something they haven't, seize with both hands the thrill of learning. https://xkcd.com/1053/ https://xkcd.com/1053/

jerf 13y ago
Tone and context are everything. Let's not pretend this isn't usually passive-aggressive. (And not even very passive passive-aggressive...)
- ColinWright 13y ago
  Agreed - my comment is to emphasize how doing such is a complete waste of an opportunity for everyone.
- hamburglar 13y ago
  I agree that tone and context are everything, but I don't agree that it's "usually" passive-aggressive. On my team, if someone says "oh, man, you haven't heard about X?" it's usually said with a relish that translates to "dude, you're gonna love this. Check it out: ..." I guess that means I don't work with dicks.
ThrustVectoring 13y ago
It's not just an opportunity for them to learn - it's an opportunity for you to learn, as well. There are deeper levels of understanding beyond merely being able to use something, and you can only reach them by the kind of explicit descriptions and breakdowns that teaching a concept necessitates.
- bitcrusher 13y ago
  "Once taught is twice learned."

zk00006 13y ago

I work myself, so don't actually have much experience with this rule. But people need negative feedback which often creates big motivation for them and enforces learning. Giving only positive examples does not help to become better person/programmer/whatever...

cowls 13y ago
There's a difference between constructive negative feedback and trying to subtly belittle someone. Not knowing about something is not really a negative feedback point
- Karunamon 13y ago
  To be fair, the author does not successfully make their case that "feigned" surprise (how does one know enough about the mental state of another person to make that assumption anyways?) is always negative or always bad. Funny, in that an article about not making assumptions is packed with them, not the least of which is the assumption that someone who is visibly surprised when you don't know something is expressing some kind of superiority or belittling.

rmrfrmrf 13y ago

I combat "feigned surprise" by admitting that I don't know something and asking the person for an explanation.

minikomi 13y ago

This reminds me of how great I thought this was: Hacker School is positive. When I had a bug that I didn’t understand and asked one of the facilitators to help me out, they would frequently say “Oh, interesting!”. The attitude was “Oh, is something not working? How delightful! A learning opportunity!”. source: http://jvns.ca/blog/2014/02/15/how-was-hacker-school/ http://jvns.ca/blog/2014/02/15/how-was-hacker-school/

myth_drannon 13y ago

Here is a short presentation about Hacker School at our local Python meetup given by someone who went there. She also talks about feigned surprises https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3W6yQ2dXJk8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3W6yQ2dXJk8

cruise02 13y ago

As always, there's a relevant xkcd. It's one of my favorites. https://xkcd.com/1053/ https://xkcd.com/1053/

qwerta 13y ago

> “Feigned surprise” (when someone gasps and says something like: “you don’t even know about monads?”) Too often the surprise is real. There are developers who do not know basics such as loops, conditions, arithmetic and so on. I use Java for a long time, but I have problem writing 'switch' statements. In Scala it is very powerful so I use it often, in Java it is too primitive, so I always just use bunch of 'if-else' statements. I am not sure what context of previous example applies to. It could be on someone who claims Haskel skills. But I think every well educated hacker / software developer should know about nomads.

asuffield 13y ago
I have this unhappy experience every day, when I find people don't know things that are essential to doing their jobs. I try hard not to let it show too much or fall into the trap of acting superior, but the soul-crushing depression makes this hard.
- shubb 13y ago
  The more I learn, the clearer it becomes that I know very little. Things that I used to know fade away - a few years out of college, I can't do matrix maths anymore. Software engineering is a big job. Software engineers might know about assembly code, pointers, design patterns, UML, functional programming, algorithms, AI, statistics, reverse engineering, driver programming, SQL, NoSQL, matrix calculations and numeric simulation, control theory, cloud scaling, devops, unit testing, XML schema design... Then, if you think about the things outside programming an engineer might need to know, like marketing, sales, budget control, estimating, project management, user experience design, graphic design, human psychology. And the domain they are working in of course. That's a lot to know. Even the basics. I don't know the basics of a lot of those things. Doesn't meeting all these people who don't know things make you wonder what you don't know that you don't know?
  - judk 13y ago
    Of course I don't know everything. But the stuff I don't know is irrelevant to my job. If you join my team, I expect you to know everything relevant to your new job, not whatever trivia you might have found amusing elsewhere.

jgroome 13y ago

Reminds me of this article from way back when: http://thingist.com/item/4372/ http://thingist.com/item/4372/ Not exactly the same, but talks about this attitude prevalent among tech types that encourages belittling of those less experienced/knowledgable.

mbetter 13y ago

It's funny how the author acts like I should know what the fuck "Hacker School" is.

cool-RR 13y ago

What? You don't know what feigned surprise means?

gelisam 13y ago

After reading the title but before reading the article, I was trying to imagine a situation in which anybody might want to fake surprise in a work environment. The only thing I came up with was as a teaching mechanism, as in: "your program is crashing when you divide by zero instead of returning NaN? How strange! Let's investigate together". I was quite surprised to see that by "feigned surprise", the article actually meant something along the lines of "really, you expected an integer operation to return NaN?". The article does explain why people might say that, but I still have a hard time believing it. Why would anybody want to say that? It's not helpful at all. I guess I must be lucky never to have worked in the bad working environments described by the article.

chadwickthebold 13y ago
It's just a response people have built up, and they don't really think about it. When I started my current job, I had absolutely no javascript experience at all. My team lead is great, and I learned a ton from him, but he definitely said a lot of stuff like this without thinking. He always helped me figure it out, but responses like this always made me think twice before going to ask for help. I think it's just a side-effect of being in an insulated position and knowing a ton more about the subject than most people you work with.
biscarch 13y ago
> Why would anybody want to say that? It's not helpful at all. The way I read the article (and think about this topic in general) is pretty close to the way I perceived the part of your response that I quoted. Essentially it often combines explicit or implicit generalized language (anybody, nobody, everybody, etc) with an assertion that something is "obvious" or in some other way "beneath" the person saying it. It's not necessarily that people want to say it but more likely that they are unaware of what they're saying for whatever reason. By giving it a name Hacker School is letting people realize the topic and, hopefully, reducing occurrences. IMO "Feigned Surprise" is a bit of a misnomer but I haven't come up with anything better to call it. It may be more correlated with imperfect articulation of people's assumptions than actual surprise.

mathattack 13y ago

The "Let me find something you don't know" is almost always compensation for a problem of the overconfident. Usually it stems from them being on the receiving end of it. Perhaps in the form of, "Oh, you can't run a 7 minute mile?" when they were younger.

Mozai 13y ago

Would it be better to ban all sarcasm or intentional irony? It's sending a message by using the opposite signal.

normloman 13y ago
Would it be better to ban all subtlety in human communication and reduce the expressive capabilities of speech to straight forward description?

ef47d35620c1 13y ago

If I went around lording my specific domain knowledge over others, I would never learn anything new myself. What a waste of my life and human interactions that would be.

ufukbay 13y ago

I have been in a similar situation where my "good will" caused one of my best coworkers to feel superiour than me and started to try to boss me around. For more than two years everything was fine because we worked on different projects. However for the last couple of months, working together on the same project, everything went down the drain. I talked to him about big changes and new features before implementing them to hear his opinion in order to make him feel more involved but in one of those meetings, he said something like: "You wouldn't be able to do this on your own if I didn't help you. Did you learn about this kind of stuff at school?". This was the start of a chain of events which finally led to quitting my job and taking up new one from the beginning of May. Next time I will make sure that I either won't talk about everything in detail to my coworker or make sure that people understand why I'm involving them in the decision making.

judk 13y ago
People at my office are afraid to communicate because they don't want other people to think they are dumb and punish them politically. Don't fall victim to that. Be the good teammate you know how to be. You will learn more and get more done than if you keep your shields up. You may suffer from insulting peer reviews short term, but you will be a hero to others who are like you but more timid, and you will learn and grow faster which will make you more impressive at your next gig.
- ufukbay 13y ago
  Yeah, with lack of communication, stress and chaos is inevitable, it's just a matter of time. At my next gig, I'll give my best to keep an high level of communication between my teammates.

ap22213 13y ago

I always try to remember that the most expressive (e.g. loudest) person isn't necessarily the smartest, even though my brain is built to associate the two.

mcguire 13y ago

The article might be improved if it mentioned what Hacker School was and how they had banned "feigned surprise".[1] [1] https://www.hackerschool.com/manual#sec-environment https://www.hackerschool.com/manual#sec-environment

punkrockpolly 13y ago

Before Hacker School, I never realized how unhelpful this was. The naive logic is, "well, I'm genuinely surprised that this person didn't know this". But in the grand reality of things, all of us know very little. Even experts in one area, don't know basic things in another area. By removing the shaming of admitting what you don't know, Hacker School encourages everyone to move past that and help each other learn.

lawtguy 13y ago
I think this is exactly why they added this rule: some people didn't realize the negative effects of acting surprised when someone doesn't know something. The jerks are probably still going to be jerks of course, but for the others it's a chance to learn about how to better interact with the people around them.

daemonk 13y ago

The more you know, the more you realize how much you don't know. Feigning surprise just reflects how much of a knowledge bubble one exists in.

badman_ting 13y ago

Oh, people who do that are terrible. But then, nerds have so many terrible personality tics like that, which is why they/we are considered socially ungraceful. Another favorite of mine is the one where you take what someone said super literally, as a joke (a terribly unfunny joke).

DanBC 13y ago

Some schools in the UK recognisd that some children do not want to look stupid by givin the wrong answer or appearing not to know something. They realised that this stops those children from asking questions, not jist from answering questions. One technique used to overcome this is for the teacher to nominate a pupil to attempt an answer. It doesn't matter iftheu don't know - that's part of the process. A side benefit is the teacher gets more inderstanding of any mosconceptions the pupils have. There are lots of subtle things happening with teaching and it's a bit worrying that we don't have much research or we don't ise the research we have.

arjie 13y ago
It's an interesting pedagogical technique I've seen elsewhere too. What are the results of applying it? I know that I was in a class where the teacher followed this procedure. I _dreaded_ the moment when I'd be picked even though the questions were usually simple enough if you read for the class and paid attention. It turned my insides to water every time. Absolute dread. Made an otherwise fun class scary.

kyberias 13y ago

I still think there are valid and sincere reasons to be surprised when someone doesn't know something and it's OK to express that surprise. Especially in private conversations!

AnimalMuppet 13y ago

The rule is a great idea. But even without it, you can counter this kind of junk. "Hey, why did you respond that way? Does your ego need the boost from acting smugly superior? Or is the problem that you don't understand it well enough to help me out by actually explaining it?" That would probably cost you someone's friendship, but if they're pulling this kind of stunt on you, I'm not sure that they were your friend anyway...

lowglow 13y ago

If you've gone to a dev school, please help share your experience with others who are looking: http://schools.techendo.co/ http://schools.techendo.co/

d4vlx 13y ago

When I worked at Thoughworks there were several people who were terrible for this. Many of them senior. It significantly reduced my respect for the company and I left as soon as I found a good replacement. What made it particularly irksome was that they heavily market themselves both internally and externally as being above such things. The cognitive dissonance really grated on me.

judk 13y ago

article seems to be a response to an announcement HS made, but source is not linked or quoted.