Do not try to be the smartest in the room; try to be the kindest

I have to say: It's really annoying that some idiot who wrote a book in the 90's has resulted in everyone redefining "nice", when they should have invented a new word.

As far as the English language goes, what you define as "kind" is also "nice".

To summarize the idea in a work concept for those who won't read through -

East Coast "kind" would be to tell the person working for you about their performance issues early, in a constructive feedback manner such that they could course correct or find a role they are better suited for. The hope is they either improve in the role, find a new role internally, or decide to move on before having to stomach a firing.

West Coast nice would be to let the person working for you continue to perform poorly without feedback, being "nice" to them, but privately considering them incompetent. Eventually you will end up firing them without much warning when a cut actually has to be made. Think Amazon PIP.

"Tough love" is kind but not nice. There doesn't seem to be a good phrase for the opposite in English but there should be.

This is real.

When the car broke down in a turn lane in the rain: lots of honking behind me

When the hazard lights came on: honking stopped, people materialized to help push it back out of the road

Ever since that back and forth about "East Coast being kind vs West Coast being nice" thing a while back

Missed the thing but what a front-loaded mess. What we want to say is

    Nice sucks, be kind.

Which of the two would say nothing in the public meeting to let you save face, but then would pull you aside for a "quick chat" afterward, and tell you your idea is bad then?

Honestly, I think it’s a mistake to try to retroactively impose a technical distinction between two words that have been synonyms for quite a while.

The intent is probably to clarify and communicate better. But with that word choice you end up confusing and muddying. The problem is, people have to know exactly what you mean already (which means you probably don’t have that much to talk about on that topic anyway).

Will you be kind as well to the people who repeatedly fuck up and don't care about delivering good processes or products?

So you want to be kind only for utilitarian motives, not because it’s a good thing in principle ?

Sad to say that my experience is exactly opposite

When I’m kind to people, especially in other departments, they don’t mirror it: they’re stressed, they’re pressured by their boss or it’s just not the culture of that department… even after months of cooperation

Sweetness and kindness are not necessarily the same thing. Just like how “nice” can be a toxic trait.

His list of points is fine. It’s mostly the servant leadership mentality, which I’m all for. But sometimes to be an effective leader you have to make hard decisions. You’ve got to know your personal boundaries and know when to yield and when to hold them, or other less sweet people are going to steamrolling you, or you’re going to get overloaded by taking on too much, etc. And sometimes you have to be direct and blunt and not so sweet to show true kindness. Confrontation is hard and it’s not something most people really want, but I believe it’s sometimes necessary to embody kindness. For yourself, your teammates, the customer, the organization. Because at the end of the day if you are not effective, that’s going to hurt everyone.

Exactly! When I look forward to working with people, we get more done and I don't come home burned out and discouraged. Even if the work is hard, at least you are in it together.

You have to be careful, though: there is no shortage of people who will happily take advantage of someone who shows them kindness.

While I believe you should show a baseline level of kindness to people when you first meet them much like you should give people a baseline level of respect, there are actions which can and should lose both.

I love reading discussions of people to whom following the social norms comes naturally and they can't fathom the idea that behaving in a way that makes other people feel good is something I need to consciously put effort into.

It's possible to be technically competent and kind. They're not mutually exclusive traits. One doesn't even need to be kind. Just don't be an asshole.

Technically correct is the best kind of correct.

I think you could argue that long term lack of kindness at all levels of an organization leads to organizational technical incompetence. It creates hostile work environment where employees don't feel valued which leads to talent attrition.

Yes, only valuing kindness with valuing technical competence is not ideal but so is the inverse. You want both.

I actually agree with you but at the same time, being unkind in those situations is only going to hurt yourself. The reality of many workplaces is that the technical aspect as not the main focus. Appearances and politics run the show at most companies. You can either accept that and work with the system or engage counterproductively with your colleagues in a misguided attempt to force them into technical competence (never gonna happen). Eventually I want to find a place to work full of technically competent people. I thought I would find that in my current company because it was so competitive to get a job here. Let’s just say that was not the case. It think it can be very hard for employees to filter on this without knowing someone on the inside.

Actually the most dysfunctional engineering orgs I've worked in had unkind hardos in charge who would yell & scream at people. More of it was because they were poorly emotionally regulated than because they were right in whatever they were yelling or screaming about.

Government projects stand apart because things like cost are balanced against the inherent jobs-creation objectives of funding them.

Kindness doesn't mean to let incompetent people sit in roles they are incapable of indefinitely. That's more "niceness", using all sorts of HR speak about family/win together/blah blah blah while waiting until the budget cuts come to surprise fire people who were never performing in their role.

Kindness is to give people feedback that helps them improve. It is sometimes a poorly socialized engineers impression that people simply do their jobs poorly on purpose. In reality it's a mix of skills and awareness. Eventually everyone gets put into a role they aren't truly capable of and either grows into it or moves on. Feedback helps that happen sooner rather than later.

Opposing view - most large scale projects fail because of political and financial reasons rather than technology. Even the bad tech decisions are usually downstream of politics.

If you’re wanting to build a high speed rail line, space rocket or nuclear power plant; a propaganda specialist is probably going to be more useful than an engineer.

I don't know if kindness is the right word you have used here. HR is not kind. At the end of the day they don't care about you. But they speak to you nicely. Same for the government too I guess

Huh! If I reflect back on my involvement in projects that had difficulties, there was rarely a dearth of competent people, and in fact it was often political and communication concerns that led to suffering.

Look at Conway’s Law: “any organization that designs a system (defined broadly) will produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization's communication structure.”

The “kind” people are the people who optimize an organization’s communication structure by helping competent people to have a voice and not be impeded by political wrangling.

In short, I think it’s the ‘kind’ people who can help an organization realize an architecture that is less warped by political considerations and more true to the customer’s needs.

Of course an organization needs both kindness and competence. In my decades in tech, competence was over-valued in my early years (the worship of the trope of the rockstar-but-asshole programmer), so if there is an overindication towards kindness right now, it is probably a counterbalance.

I would also question your conclusion about the government. While I have not worked in the government myself, I come from a sort of “federal government family”, in that I have multiple close family who have spent decades in federal government roles, and they are full of stories of incompetent managers undermining their employees, politically fighting one another, etc. To your point, they also have plenty of stories of crass incompetence, Nepotism, etc. But I think it’s an easy and incorrect answer to say it’s simply due to “HR-values” as opposed to “engineering-values”: it’s multi-faceted in both directions.

Incompetence isn’t a root cause though. You have to go deeper… why were the people involved in the project incompetent?

If you find a project was held back by infighting, siloed groups, major shifts in direction or key people leaving, kindness will help with all of these things.

The reality is, people working as individuals, no matter how competent those individuals are, can only accomplish things within the scope of a single person. There are some things like that, but there are many things that are not. To accomplish any of those things, people need to work together, in a complementary way, toward a common goal. That just won’t happen if they don’t get along. Social competence can become just as important as technical competence. Kindness is part of that.

Government works just fine when you let them do things in house instead of going with "we just need to pay one more private contractor". Also pay more.

i would say yes, a lot of things fail from a lack of kindness.

Tesla self driving Tesla robotaxi Tesla park summon Tesla cybertruck Tesla solar roof tiles Boring company etc etc

One of the main things that Toyota Production System brings to manufacturing is the concept of respect, everything is supposed to be based on respect for each other. Maybe people fall short of that alot of the time, but that is the goal and intrinsic to all their other techinques like genchi genbutsu, kanban, just in time, waste elimination, etc.

The article reads like kindness is only a correlated trait to what the author is actually trying to convey. To me this article is the same as any other basic "collaboration" explainer. I guess in cultures where a lot of external and internal pressure is put on exhibiting certain virtues, maybe framing it as kindness can override whatever other goals have made someone forget how to collaborate.

Ive also seen cases where business people truly don’t believe there is an underlying reality to a problem. They evaluate approaches and people purely from a sociability stand point.

You make a good point about government, there are so many big problems including bad incentives about working hard, taking risks, etc, it’s hard for to see that as the main one.

how many would be failing due to lack of kindness versus, say, straight-forwards incompetence?

Kindness and incompetence are orthogonal. You can be kind and still give honest, direct feedback. And your feedback will probably be received better because of your kindness.

I don't think anyone has yet worked out a way to convince people to live in reality and follow science and engineering and also be kind to people who are opposed to those ways of thinking. Being fake kind to people who are genuinely obstructing things getting done is unproductive but so is being unkind and it seems most people value being cordial even if it means things fail.

Almost all problems on projects boil down to a people problem in the end many of which are made intractable by company and wider culture.

And how many would be from incompetence in terms of execution vs poor planning and a lack of knowledge about what's actually needed to complete the project?

Feels like the majority of those well-known failures (the 'we spent $5 billion+ and spent 10 years on something that should have taken a few years and maybe a tenth of that budget ones) come from either management who has no idea what they want, planning that hasn't taken into account even half the obstacles the project will need to overcome, or dozens of leaders all trying to make their mark.

Actual technical/work incompetence probably plays some part, but it's probably less of a matter of "people weren't honest enough about the quality of other people's work" and more of a matter of "we hired the cheapest possible team to do the work, and they weren't qualified in the slightest".

Bonus points for the leader of that team being the nephew/niece/relative of some guy in charge of the project.

The biggest problem with government organizations is that they're monopolies.

The lack of competition means that (1) if the organization is dysfunctional, it won't be beaten by a better one, and (2) it has little incentive to improve.

If we tallied up all technical projects in the Western world that failed, how many would be failing due to lack of kindness versus, say, straight-forwards incompetence?

That's like saying a company didn't fail because it ran out of money. It failed because no one was around to operate it.

A lack of kindness can lead to mistakes not being rectified, as well as the wrong type of folks doing the work.

(Classic case of false dichotomy).

You could say that hiding or refraining from giving critical feedback is not kindness.

I too think that being too x, where x is any adjective, is a bad thing. I much prefer people being just the right amount of y, where y is any adjective.

Honesty doesn't conflict in any way with kindness, but with being "nice". Actually I think is a requirement of being genuinely kind.

This seems to misunderstand kind

Kindness reduces barriers to accepting the honest truth and is thus part of maximizing honesty and realism.

People don't like working with jerks. I don't.

It's hard to achieve business goals if no one wants to work with each other.

In general, the kindest people will be the ones who have the maturity to not be offended

The idea is to be genuinely kind, not to fake it.

It hits better with the rhyme

Side note: I find ChatGPT to be a much better translator. It doesn’t just do literal translations. Here’s how it explained this phrase:

The saying "Maestro Liendre: De tó sabe, pero de ná entiende" generally means that someone appears to know a little bit about many things but doesn't have a deep understanding of any of them. It's used to describe someone who pretends to be knowledgeable but lacks true expertise.

"A know-it-all who doesn't understand anything" sounds fine in English to my ear.

“Knows about everything yet understands nothing.”

from the context in the article, this seems to be the Spanish equivalent of “jack of all trades, master of none”

Google Translate is being too literal. It just means “jack of all trades, master of none”.

A more literal translation (with some liberties for the rhyme) would be “handyman nit: knows a bit of everything, but understands jack shit”.

I’m guessing you work at a startup where you are nice 60% of the time? And I’m also guessing your coworkers actually give a shit about the job vs just trying to game the FAANG compensation algorithm?

Listening and focusing on solutions is being smart though. If you’re only looking for people who are ‘respecting you’ and ‘show empathy’ you might not find competent people with whom you’re gonna produce useful things to trade with the rest of society

how is focusing on solutions a kind act?

I’d go further and assert that kindness usually aligns with intelligence.

Demonstrating that you’re the smartest guy in the room is an ape-like expression of dominance. The IQ is a distant second.

Those actually do sound like smartness. Emotional intelligence is as important as any other.

I feel like I am struggling with the same thing in my current role and point in my career. On one hand, I feel like I just need to come to terms with the fact that different people have different standards. On the other hand, I just desperately want to work with people who hold themselves to high standards and also get stuff done. In the meantime, I'm finding I'm running out of kindness. I often wonder if it's just me thinking I know more than I do and everything is always this way, that some people just don't care about what they produce and how, or if there teams out there who _do_ care and I just need to find one of those

Here in YC you can probably go full on with your tech/science knowledge/ideas/theories/whatever and people will judge you purely on your points made, and the people listening are in the same boat.

I would disagree with this, even here it is important to be kind. Too often I find the comments on a given thread are full of self importance or worse disdain for the "shortcomings" of the topic in question. Whether or not that disdain might be due to a wealth of knowledge and experience, it brings the general experience of being here down, and in my opinion lowers the quality of the site and the person doing the disdaining.

I'm not asking for fawning over every submission like it is a new revelation, but the adage that "if you can't say anything nice, don't say anything at all" springs to mind. HN is going to be full of people from differing experiences and walks of life. Tech is too big now for us to all be on the same page, or even within the same general age range. When someone drops a "Show HN" link to some hobby or passion project of theirs, and the comments are full of "experienced" people critiquing the project as if it were supposed to be a google scale web service or even as if it needed to be a viable commercial product – no matter how correct those assessments may be – that's damaging to our shared sense of community.

My own philosophy over time has been to only offer critique if it is also accompanied by my own efforts at providing what solutions I can directly (code, documentation whatever). If it bothers me enough to think I should say something, then it should bother me enough to also put in the effort to be/submit the change I want to see. Anything less is at best a piling on of cheap criticism ("cheap" in this case in the sense of "a dime a dozen"), and at worst unkindness for the sake of showing off knowledge. Absent something to contribute beyond criticism / critique, the goal I set for myself is either to engage with the subject and the creator on the assumption of earnest passion for the project, or if I'm disinterested for whatever reason, to not engage at all.

I definitely don't always succeed in this endeavor, but over the decades I've grown increasingly tired of the airs of cynicism that permeates the "smart" spaces I've been in. Be kind in all audiences, whether peers, betters or lay people and you will usually avoid being pretentious, confidently incorrect or condescending respectively. And those are 3 things I think we could do with less of in most communities.

What is interesting about that is the an aspect of original punkers was a desire for respect as individuals. The come as you are was very welcoming. The repulsionist look I saw as an attempt to see only inner beauty in humans.

Punk was the reaction of the individual vs. the global machine. The global machine’s surface is nice but the machine is not kind.

I direct my coworkers to the documentation that I wrote and that they clearly never read, despite my providing it to them repeatedly in the past and despite my anticipating their exact questions/issues in it.

Whenever I hear the term insecurity used in a derogatory manner the caller often feels that it mitigates understanding more deeply in this area.

There are personality types that thrive on competition, they get renewed passion and commitment by having others also better themselves, this is not an ego or alpha complex, instead of the mental models they work in.

Or we can just call them insecure and be done with it.

You're choosing one over another. You said kindness with some smartness, which implies kindness = 1.0, and smartness = some value between 0.0 and 1.0.

The author never implies that one should be kind to the exclusion of being smart.

Would kindness without intelligence (discernment) be more like naïve and easy to take advantage of?

Not sure why it makes you fake, there's lots of nice, simple people that are authentic

A stair is an inanimate object that other people step upon in order to move upwards.

Perhaps the human beings in question refused to participate in that game and therefore went "missing"? People using the term "missing stair" are very often sanctimonious, obsessed with power, and just do enough of faking kindness to fly under the radar. And they treat others like inanimate objects.

Sarcasm is definitely the road to success!

(Oh shit)

This visits a hard coordination problem.

I'd suggest the solution is coming and it will decentralize culture decisions the same way capitalism decentralized spending decisions.

And, really, it's self-congratulatory. It says only, "be like me, i'm great". And in refusing to translate "De tó sabe, pero de ná entiende" -- how empathetic is the writer really?

All together, it comes across a little smug.

Glad to see that kindness is finally going viral.

I'm Gen X, raised feral like the rest. Movies like The Lost Boys, The Goonies and Explorers feel like biographies. We were vicious to one another before the arrival of political correctness in the early 90s, which received backlash like today's woke. But kindness is always on the right side of history.

I agree though about feeling like some kind of crass <expletive> around young people today. I have a hard time staying domesticated as I watch society crumble under the guise of gentrification. I just want to act out so badly sometimes, deface something, watch it all burn like the good old days, SLC Punk style. But the real punk is to be ruthlessly human to one another.

There's a certain thrill in sacrificing one's ego to help someone achieve their dreams that just can't be replaced. The biggest baddasses are teachers, nurses, your mom, and everyone knows it.

I wonder if the middle ground is when one needs to be "unkind" in words, they should be "kind" in action. I worked on a team that had been moved to a project, in part because that project was behind schedule, haphazard and under-staffed. In our first months we were often (and to my dismay) unkind in words without kind actions to follow through. All of our critiques were correct. All of them were important and needed to be addressed. All of them were real problems. And often the critiques were blunt for the sake of being clear to management. But being right didn't stop that unkindness from stinging the other teams that were there before us. We were resisted and drew quite a bit of (understandable) animosity from those other teams. When we changed tack (partially in response to realizing we were being unkind, partially because we'd finally built up the knowledge we needed to do so) and started accompanying critique with solutions or at a minimum viable demonstrations of the solution, things were received much better. We still said hard things, we still brought in half bakes thoughts. But because we were being kind in bringing more than criticism to the table, it was much more effective.

100%. I'd also add that it doesn't mean you don't have to make tough decisions that some people won't like. But there's a way to do that that leaves those people knowing that your decision-making process was fair and not capricious. That it's in the best interests of the team, project, organization, company.

It's work. It's not where I make friends. It's far more worthwhile to have meaningful relationships with your neighbours than your colleagues.

Nothing you mentioned here disagrees with the title or the article