I've felt a lot of "false" positivity espoused by project managers, especially those in charge of agile ceremonies.
Examples: "I'm really {proud,impressed} of all of you for your output this sprint", "You guys are {killing,crushing,owning} it", "You all should be very proud of what you guys did", etc.
These aren't given after periods of crunch time, they're literally every week to the point where it feels so contrived and artificial. They're given when we're just doing normal, expected work.
I've mentioned this to colleagues and friends and there seems to be two camps of people: those who want constant positive reenforcement and those who it completely has the opposite effect, an annoyance. I guess I fall into the latter.
ChuckMcM 1190 days ago [-]
A lot of insight in the parent comment here. Most importantly this: "...there seems to be two camps of people: those who want constant positive reinforcement and those who it completely has the opposite effect ..."
If you are leading and or managing a team, one of the most important things you need to know are how do people want their feedback. My experience is that it varies from person to person (I suspect that there are many more than two camps :-)) and as such it is unlikely that you can meet that need in group feedback.
Because of that, my choice these days is to split feedback into two fora, the group status meeting and 1:1s. In the group, feedback is modulated by progress against plan. So "we need to work harder" for behind plan, "neutral" for on plan, and "this team is killing it" for ahead of plan. In 1:1s the feedback is based on the expectations that have been set for that team member, do they know what is expected of them? Do they know how it is being measured? And where are they with respect to measurement vs expectation.
1:1 feedback often times (for me) takes on more of a mentor/mentee tone rather than a how are we doing on the schedule tone. Doing that well also requires a certain amount of trust which, as a manager, you have to earn by being honest with your team members.
tchalla 1190 days ago [-]
In the end, HOW you deliver feedback matters. Personally, I have three important characteristics for a feedback.
Point 1 : "Be Specific". I can not stress this enough. Please point out specific observable behaviour.
Point 2 : Frame feedback in terms of team/organisational goals. Every team has a purpose within the organisation. It's a team game and every team member should know the feedback in context of the team game. Individual feedback, team context.
Point 3 : Cite the past but look for future changes in behaviour. You can not change the past but you can influence the future.
For example, "Hey John! When you do X, it helps the team achieve Y. Please continue doing so!" or "Hey John! When you do Z, it lets the team down. What can you do differently?".
_j6y1 1190 days ago [-]
Completely agree that HOW matters so much!
To me and probably many others (albeit often subconsciously), point 3 comes across as blaming, overly-generalized, and lacking in personal (and group) accountability for your experiences.
What about something like,
"Hey John, the last time you did X, Y happened, which had Z consequences.
I felt { disappointed / let down / concerned / irritated / worried / angry / $whatever_emotions_came_up_for_YOU }.
Other team members reported feeling $emotions.
What was going on there for you?
How can I / we help you to avoid X in the future?
Do you have any ideas about what you could focus or work on in order for Y not to happen again?
Here are some specific requests I have for you in order to avoid this kind of thing in the future: $requests
"
The edgy part about this for many people is taking ownership for their experience, we live in a society with a lot of deconditioning around this . Nobody else but you is responsible for how you feel. John didn't let you down, you had expectations about what he was going to do, and to your assessment, he didn't meet those expectations (that's also a reasonable thing to say, I think -- I would give more detail and context about specifically how those expectations weren't met). That you felt one way or another about this has nothing to do with John, and there's a lot of subtle and overt problems that can arise in a relationship when we attribute our experience to another person with our language.
I also mention that it sounds overly-generalized because saying "when you do X" has an implicit assumption that he will continue doing X in the future, and isn't really all that specific about why X has certain consequences - I think it's better to use specific situations in the past when X happened and to talk about what came up when that occurred. This is basically what I'm hearing you say in Point 2 :)
edit: fixed variables, wording
lazyasciiart 1190 days ago [-]
I used to see a therapist who told me to do that, and eventually I realized it was a bullshit idea and I should not be working on reframing my expectations of colleagues so I was OK with them actively lying about work, so I quit and it was fantastic.
You can try and change yourself to make things work, but it's not always the right or even healthy way to approach a problem.
karpierz 1189 days ago [-]
The point isn't to lower your expectations, the point is acknowledge that the way you feel is under your control and it's up to you to do something about it. So if your coworkers let you down, they don't make you feel let down, your own expectations make you feel let down. How you fix that is your responsibility.
You can try and help your colleagues, you can rely on them less, or you can quit your job. Blaming your colleagues and making them responsible for your feelings means feeling shitty and feeling powerless to feel better.
lazyasciiart 1189 days ago [-]
> John didn't let you down, you had expectations about what he was going to do
This is where we disagree. John did let you down. It's OK to blame him. It's OK to be a normal person that reacts to other people's actions and not some kind of zen robot. And recognizing that someone else's behavior causes you to feel shitty doesn't make you powerless to change.
karpierz 1189 days ago [-]
John did let you down, but he didn't make you feel let down. You can blame John for letting you down, but you can't blame John for you feeling let down.
You are responsible for your own emotions. Recognizing that doesn't make you a zen robot. You can still feel. But don't put those feelings on other people and make them responsible for making you feel the way you want to feel.
You can recognize patterns for your emotions, like "I get sad when people make fun of me", but that doesn't mean that you have to be sad when people make fun of you. Recognizing the distinction is what gives power to change.
And sure, there are limits. The feelings that arise when tortured for example are rooted in physiology and near unavoidable. But I suspect that John didn't let you down by waterboarding you.
mkr-hn 1189 days ago [-]
Even Vulcans can't quite manage this level of emotional control. Complete personal responsibility for one's own emotions is a nice ideal, but humans are not stoic robots. People are responsible for their behavior and its effects.
UpsilonAlpha 1190 days ago [-]
To add on to this. Following these steps will often avoid the problem described by GP. If you can't find specific actions to praise, then there is a good chance the recipient will feel the praise is hollow.
cutemonster 1189 days ago [-]
What are good things to say, if one is to give feedback but cannot think of anything to praise?
But indeed can think of things the other person could do better / improve upon. (However, maybe only "criticizing" isn't so nice)
tomnipotent 1189 days ago [-]
> Cite the past but look for future changes in behaviour.
I've heard this referred to as "feedforward" before (as opposed to feedback). Instead of saying "last time you did X, you made a mistake and should instead do Y" you phrase it "next time you do X, make sure to do Y". It's subtle, with the goal of avoiding defensiveness.
ChuckMcM 1190 days ago [-]
FWIW I strongly agree with this comment. I have painful experience from not doing each of these things at various times.
didibus 1190 days ago [-]
You should write a book for managers, and every page should just be this comment repeated for 200 pages.
CuriousSkeptic 1190 days ago [-]
> So "we need to work harder" for behind plan
That will just get me angry. If you screw up your commitments that’s on you. Own up to it and talk to your stakeholders. Don’t make me work harder for your mistakes.
Treblemaker 1189 days ago [-]
Reminds me of the story of the pilot who is being nagged repeatedly to expedite descent by ATC. "Don't you have speed brakes?" says the ATCO with exasperation. "Yes" comes the reply "But those are for my mistakes not yours."
ptr 1190 days ago [-]
So you can never make mistakes in your commitments?
CuriousSkeptic 1190 days ago [-]
I do. Sometimes I work harder to compensate, some times I apologize. But then it’s my mistake so I can negotiate with myself.
Sometimes working harder is warranted. Some salesperson screwed up, and it’s not really possible to reneg the multi million dollar contract. “I’m sorry guys, what can we do?”
ChuckMcM 1190 days ago [-]
FWIW, as the manager I don't feel I own the commitment date, the team does. That process has a 'content' aspect to it as well in the form, "by this date, this content, by this later date this additional content". But I understand the angst against managers who "manage up" promising impossible dates and "blaming down" when the dates aren't met. I learned early on as an individual contributor that "getting it in writing" was essential to protect myself and personally vowed never to inflict that pain on anyone that works for me.
tikhonj 1189 days ago [-]
I think this works, but only in cases where two things are true:
- the team is actually responsible for the date—often, there's massive asymmetric pressure to aim for less time
- if it's an actual deadline, the team has the autonomy to adjust scope to hit it
In my experience, the worst situations happen when estimates are treated like deadlines. An estimate has to have uncertainty. Without some way to manage uncertainty, you'd have to pad estimates out to like the 99th percentile to hit them consistently, but people read estimates as averages and push back against that. If teams are consistently going over estimates, it's a problem in how you do estimates, not how you're working. (Which is also why evaluating people's performance based on how well they hit estimates—which seems common on a lot of teams—is completely misguided. Estimating is a nice skill to have, but it matters far, far less than the quality of the work people actually do!)
On the other hand, a deadline is only a deadline if you're willing to adjust scope to hit it. If there is a real deadline and it looks like we might not hit it, the answer isn't "try to be more productive" (which is all that "work harder" actually means!). Instead, we should figure out how we can change what we're focusing on and what we're concretely building in order to still hit the underlying goal as well as possible with the time remaining. If we're working towards an estimate rather than a deadline, we might still adjust scope and focus, but the first step would be adjusting and sharing a new estimate.
But if the culture is that estimates are hard commitments and you can't adjust the scope or the timeline, the work environment is going to be absolutely miserable, people will get stressed out for no real reason and the quality of the work is going to suffer. People will do whatever it takes to technically achieve estimates, even if that means cutting corners everywhere, sweeping bugs under the carpet, not spending any time to iterate or improve on the system and indefinitely putting off engineering work that has a small cost now but gives a massive medium- to long-term benefit in productivity. A month or two into this process and you move towards a death march that burns everyone out and, on the time scale of months, accomplishes substantially less than a less aggressive approach would have.
I'm currently working with a team that has this problem to some extent—of course, the managers think of it as "accountability" and "a focus on delivery"—and in a bit over a year, they've built a codebase that already feels like a legacy mess, while accomplishing what would have been like eight months' worth of work with a better engineering approach. It's pretty frustrating to see and I'm trying to change things, but not sure whether I'm going about it effectively.
ChuckMcM 1189 days ago [-]
I don't disagree with you, but as you accurately infer this is a management problem not a team problem. When folks start becoming managers of managers this becomes a bigger focus of their job.
I see the whole "agile" movement as a response to this problem. In an effort to mitigate the "error bars" of an estimate a process that iterates over 2 week sprints allows for estimate corrections during development. It isn't obvious to everyone but this is just upping the sample rate on the estimation signal to get a better handle on the noise and thus the signal to noise ratio.
tikhonj 1189 days ago [-]
This comment ended up as a bit of a rant, on a topic where you have way more experience than I do. Sorry about that! At this point, I'm just using this as a chance to gather my own thoughts on the subject, and I figure I'll post it just in case I get some interesting responses.
-------------
Yeah, that's a great observation on Agile. Smaller but more accurate estimates + cheaper small course corrections.
The dual is that the rest of the organization needs to adapt too—good short-term estimates don't necessarily give you good long-term estimates! So we need loosely coupled, self-sufficient teams that don't depend on accurate estimates from other teams.
I've always hated formal Agile processes (especially Scrum) but I have to work with teams that use them, so I did a bunch of reading about it. The goals and even a lot of the concrete ideas behind it made a lot of sense! It's just that every single concrete instance of the process fell short. I've seen several concrete failure modes in practice:
1. Scrum-flavored micromanagement. People (not necessarily formal managers) use the process to dictate exactly what everyone else needs to work on at practically a daily granularity.
2. Siloing. People are incentivized to only work on "their" tasks—ad hoc collaboration with teammates, trying out speculative design ideas and experiments, figuring out better ways to do something, all get in the way of finishing your tickets, which makes you look flaky in inevitably awkward group meetings.
3. Loss of context. People see that the process helps the team switch priorities, so they switch focus every sprint. Couple this with micromanagement, and you get individuals moved around on wholly unrelated tasks. Too much context switching adds a lot of mental overhead and makes it much harder to build anything with a coherent design and vision (either from a product or from an engineering standpoint).
4. Performance mismeasurement. The whole process is supposed to help the team with estimates. Tracking metrics the process generates and treating them as a way to measure individual performance (whether formally, or just through peer pressure) doesn't work well and is awful for morale.
I haven't seen it, but I bet it is possible to have a Scrum process—or, more likely, something lighter like Kanban—that avoids these problems. But I believe that even idealized Agile processes put too much weight on consistency for its own sake. Making consistent incremental progress helps with estimates and, I suppose, makes the team somewhat easier to manage, but none of that matters nearly as much as, say, quality of work and impact!
Even if nothing from the Agile process makes it into formal performance evaluations, the ceremonies almost seem designed to create peer pressure around it. And that affects day-to-day job satisfaction a lot more than mere performance reviews. Although maybe this is another thing that goes away if you have high-trust teams that are legitimately self-organizing the way Agile is supposed to be... But I'm not sure even that would compensate for the pressure implicitly exerted by the structure of the process.
I bring this up because over-emphasizing consistency imposes a cost on people—individuals get a lot less flexibility in how they work, and end up feeling stress when they're less productive than normal. I tend to think an ideal environment should embrace inconsistency day-to-day and even week-to-week or month-to-month but that requires massive differences in culture. If a team pulls it off, the process starts mattering a lot less!
grayfaced 1190 days ago [-]
Yea, different personalities have different motivations. I find that if I receive positive feedback, it doesn't motivate me it only encourages me to take it easier. If I receive negative feedback, I will double down to fix the issue, but my morale will suffer.
What's most important is that the feedback is IMMEDIATE. Tell me after a presentation what I flubbed. Don't tell me after a quarter that my presentation skills are lacking.
I'm not sure I understand the purpose of the linked article. There are a few important distinctions, most notably (from the article itself):
> "We praise drawings ... because we want our kids to continue to work hard, and to do good work... But what we really want to teach our children... is that they should do good work because of the satisfactions it provides."
While I understand how this could apply to children (if not necessarily agree), we don't manage teams to have fun, we do want to encourage them to do good work.
As for the wider question, if a team is doing really good work, why not give credit where it's due? I feel like not acknowledging when people are putting in extra effort is a great way to discourage them from doing that.
throw14082020 1190 days ago [-]
I think the case with children is the same as with adults. We don't raise children "to have fun". Some would say we raise children to have a meaningful life for the parent, and I would hope for the children as well, i.e. "to do good work" as you say.
Like others have said, effect of praise would be very specific to individuals, but some have said praise hasn't helped them much. It definitely has not helped me, so here is my reasoning as to why you should not praise a good team. For me, stop the praise, tell me how to be better, and show me you care about me improving, and care about me on a personal level. Yes, I know that when I work hard and give you good output, it helps company, I don't need people to tell me that I worked hard. I can see it (If your company prevents your employees from seeing the effect of their output, thats the problem, don't say praise is necessary. The boss should not try to be the feedback loop). The reverse pavlovian effect can kick in otherwise: If it doesn't come when I am working hard, I feel bad. Also, the boss does not control reality, so becoming my feedback loops is bad, because he can warp reality based on his perspective.
It looks like this is highly specific to individuals though, the above works for me.
andersource 1189 days ago [-]
> Like others have said, effect of praise would be very specific to individuals, but some have said praise hasn't helped them much.
My understanding is that they were mostly referring to "fake" / superfluous praise, which I too respond quite badly to. But I think there's a big range between that kind of praise and no praise at all. Personally for me (and my guess is that for many people), if no matter how hard I work that's never acknowledged and I always get suggestions for improvement, that would create frustration and a feeling of unreasonable expectations from the company.
darkerside 1189 days ago [-]
I would assume all this is highly specific to environment, just as much as the individual. Have you worked in an environment where nobody cares whether you do a good job, and success and quality are not recognized? You start to define your own success, which may be very different from what the business actually needs.
throw14082020 1189 days ago [-]
Obviously, working in an environment where you are not appreciated would make you feel bad. If you think praise is going to make the difference for your employee between being appreciated and not, that is insulting.
Celebration is important. But praise is cheap. Maybe some managers think its okay to just say "great job" + more praise, and then implicitly say next piece of work please, but I don't think it is.
ChuckMcM 1190 days ago [-]
I find it useful to acknowledge when the team is performing beyond expectations. That has been in response to early feedback I received in management roles from team members that when they were putting in extra effort they didn't feel it was "seen" and so it demotivated them to put in extra effort.
rhizome 1189 days ago [-]
Why do you imply that Alfie Kohn's ideology is the only useful one?
tren 1189 days ago [-]
Along these lines, it's worth reading The Culture Map by Erin Meyer. It gives some interesting insight into how different cultures approach management and decision making. I think it also applies when thinking about people from within the same culture to some extent.
danielscrubs 1190 days ago [-]
“We need to work harder” is not the kind of manager I like. The best ones just set a great example and work harder and put in overtime themselves and the rest of the team are usually are sympathetic enough to follow.
temp8964 1190 days ago [-]
Overtime shouldn't be the solution. Team member shouldn't be put into overtime by social pressure.
mbrodersen 1189 days ago [-]
Overtime is a sign that the team is badly managed and/or understaffed.
danielscrubs 1189 days ago [-]
Indeed, but that’s already the case if the manager goes around and says that we should work harder.
darkerside 1189 days ago [-]
Pretty sure the best answer is to do both. You need to ask your teammates to help if it's really important.
shrimpx 1190 days ago [-]
This may sound a bit cynical but it's honest: When everyone else is gratuitously praising engineering, it sort of creates an atmosphere that feels like engineering is being taken advantage of by these other people: managers, sales people, execs. It feels like these people think you're their cash cow, and also that they think you're kind of stupid, and gratuitous compliments are enough to keep the cash cow going. That may not be what goes on, but that's what it feels like.
amelius 1190 days ago [-]
Next time you get such a compliment, maybe ask for a raise or a bonus? Then you know whether the compliment was real or not.
JJMcJ 1190 days ago [-]
Hey, you get free string cheese, what more do you want?
mkoubaa 1189 days ago [-]
We take those
stjohnswarts 1190 days ago [-]
That sounds like a personal issue though. I generally know if I'm doing a good job or being a load, and I don't look to external support or denial of that. I prefer regular work reviews but I don't need to hear it all the time. People are people and quite varied, some will think you're doing a great job and never say a thing, others prefer to be "positive" and lay it on a bit thick. When I want an honest evaluation I just ask to please point out both the good and bad from my manager/peer.
perl4ever 1190 days ago [-]
>I generally know if I'm doing a good job
Could you elaborate? I would agree that random praise from a manager is not an especially good way to evaluate how well one is doing. But to me, "doing a good job" inherently depends on things that aren't purely determined by introspection.
Here's a scenario for example: I do things for people, that are well received, my manager talks to other people, and it leads to people outside my department asking for special projects.
I create something, of which I'm reasonably proud, and it gets copious praise from the requestor. But it turns out, I learn through the grapevine, there are several people who I never came in contact with, who are the actual intended end users, who ultimately refuse to use it at all, because it doesn't fit into their workflow, because the manager who asked me to do it doesn't understand it.
Without external feedback, there's no way to tell what effect I'm having on the organization and the world. And I would think that every employee at any level has to deal with this.
stjohnswarts 1188 days ago [-]
There is always feedback. In general I judge my performance about how well I do compared to my coworkers in terms of output and what I know about my industry and what is "normal". I'm not the legendary 10x coder/engineer but I'm pretty good I think, in particular based on what I've done vs other people in terms of output and general reaction from peers (who i trust more on feedback than managers). I agree quite often "nice managers" will overdo it on praise, but there are other signs. You're not going to figure it out in a couple weeks, but I don't see how one can't get a general impression over a few months.
rdiddly 1190 days ago [-]
The word flattery might be useful here.
1190 days ago [-]
spaetzleesser 1190 days ago [-]
Same for me. I hate the celebratory management emails after crunch time. They feel insulting to me. I expect management to help during the project and not celebrating once everything is done. That while not having fixed obvious problems during the project. My partner is the other way. She loves and needs praise. The more the better.
Another interesting thing was at the end of one of the last projects. There was a survey where we could choose between a Patagonia shirt and a plaque. Guess what? The majority voted for the plaque. That was astonishing to me but a good reminder that I seem to be different.
rglullis 1190 days ago [-]
> between a Patagonia shirt and a plaque
If I wanted a shirt, I'd buy a shirt. If the plaque truly reflected some effort done by the team that accomplished something big and deserved proper recognition, I get why people would prefer it. You can't buy respect.
Now, of course the cynical me will argue that the whole thing is a trick question and that no one of the alternatives are good - downright offensive actually.
bigwavedave 1190 days ago [-]
I agree. It reminds me a bit of an episode of The Office, where the top salesman (Dwight) is explaining how he was Salesman of the Month 13 out of 12 months the previous year. In lieu of a pay rise, management had given him two plaques for the month of February.
TheOtherHobbes 1190 days ago [-]
I remember reading a Harvard Business Review article which was literally "How to motivate your employees to work harder without paying them more."
And it was full of this kind of nonsense - plaques, award ceremonies, teeny-tiny presents as bonuses, and so on.
Cynicism and offence are perfectly reasonable and fair reactions.
grayfaced 1190 days ago [-]
For us, the choice is time-off award or cash award. To me it's a no-brainer because in terms of hourly pay, the time-off translates to significantly more money. But others struggle to find reasons to take time-off.
Good management knows what people want. Even better management recognizes that someone is burning out and gives the time-off even when they'd prefer cash.
There's a third minor option. Gift certificates for company swag. It's almost never used, because people find it insulting.
spaetzleesser 1190 days ago [-]
Time off or cash is definitely the best way to show appreciation. Otherwise the old saying is still valid “Words are cheap”
stjohnswarts 1190 days ago [-]
I want celebratory bonuses not "attaboy" emails for sure. I like to know on a regular basis what they think but don't ever take it too much to heart. Managers/CEOs are just people too. I think I know myself best, and try to be honest with myself.
ryanSrich 1190 days ago [-]
> Another interesting thing was at the end of one of the last projects. There was a survey where we could choose between a Patagonia shirt and a plaque. Guess what? The majority voted for the plaque. That was astonishing to me but a good reminder that I seem to be different.
Holy shit. This is incredible. I’d be curious what management forced you to do during this period. Longer hours?
I wish there was some “fucked company” equivalent for tracking corporate charades like this.
didibus 1190 days ago [-]
Haha, I feel I fall on both groups. Like, tell me how awesome I did and also better give me a bonus or I'll take my awesome self somewhere else (⌐■_■)
randycupertino 1190 days ago [-]
Sorry, in lieu of individual bonuses, management has decided to reward employees with a company team building boat trip!
:-/ Nothing is worse than being stuck on a company boat trip. You can't arrive late, and you can't leave early! Also no where to hide or duck out for a bit. Literally stuck on the boat.
ciceryadam 1190 days ago [-]
From past experience I would LOVE to see some managerial acknowledgement of their fuckups that lead to crunch time. Praise is temporary, but if no changes are introduced from the other end of the work pipeline people will get crushed.
mdgrech23 1190 days ago [-]
I'm kind of in a weird in-between role. Usually when crunch time happens we were well aware that the deadlines were aggressive or the feature was going to be a major PITA to implement and brought that up but executives pull ranked and basically said I don't care figure it out. We're all kind of defenseless honestly, it's just some of us are lucky enough where we're not directly responsible for creating the actual product.
ciceryadam 1190 days ago [-]
The executives might not care right now, but when the peons who do the actual crunch time leave, they'll end up with newcomers with no one to train them. Crunch time should be for real emergencies only.
When I learned that my all-weekender overtime was only to keep an internal deadline, I started look for a new position immediately.
In general you can't trust/take seriously whatever the management says, except for 1. specific information reflected in the HR systems and 2. the specific tasks/deadlines/etc. assigned to you and the related progress/delivery/etc. discussions.
Specifically, when it comes to public praise, the manager publicly praising his team/dept/org is actually praising themselves while supposedly being publicly modest/coy by not explicitly praising themselves, and this is why management loves making those praises.
im_down_w_otp 1190 days ago [-]
I tend to see "toxic positivity" as an attempt to gaslight people, but with the presumption of good intentions, and that presumption of good intentions somehow washing away the deleterious effects of gaslighting people. Somewhat unsurprisingly it turns out it's the gaslighting that's the problem, not entirely the motivation for engaging in it. My experience has been that high-performing people gravitate toward being motivated by engagement with reality, not by suspending disbelief to engage in contrivance or farce. This is true on the other side of it as well. They won't tolerate "toxic negativity" either, which is just another form of gaslighting in an attempt to motivate by way manufactured crisis or exigency.
sneak 1190 days ago [-]
I generally refrain from comments that don't contribute to the discussion, but having already done the thing that indicates "good comment", I still wanted to cosign and further express how spot-on this comment is, in my experience.
(I also recognize the inherent irony of doing this in a thread about empty praise, heh.)
butwhywhyoh 1189 days ago [-]
I don't think you said the word "gaslighting" enough times.
im_down_w_otp 1189 days ago [-]
I can't tell if you're gaslighting me or not.
Puts 1190 days ago [-]
This made me think about how different it is to motivate people to exercise. Some people seams to need a full on military boot camp to get exercise done, and some people just totally shuts down when someone tells them what to do. When it comes to management, we don't only need to understand that different people need different types of motivation, but also that something that is essential to motivate some can be directly contra productive and harmful to others motivation.
orzig 1190 days ago [-]
A million times this. People are diverse, in basically every way. It’s the worst and best part about them.
tacocataco 1189 days ago [-]
If managing/coaching could be boiled down to "be positive" you could replace the manager with a motivational poster.
Isn't it the managers job to figure out what each individual on the team needs to perform?
5tefan 1190 days ago [-]
Very true. Not easy to deal with humans.
angelbar 1190 days ago [-]
Welcome Zukerberg...
caturopath 1190 days ago [-]
I was so taken back by this when I joined a huge tech company for the first time. I couldn't tell at first whether people were so miscalibrated that they couldn't tell that the work wasn't impressive or whether it was just a tradition to bullshit all the time. So many of the exaggerated positive statements are about things so minor that they actually come of a bit condescending to me.
josephorjoe 1190 days ago [-]
This has been my experience as well.
I'm still not sure who is fake and who is sincere about this stuff.
We have a weekly status meeting with the first section dedicated to "how are we winning" -- which is like awesome if you are a baseball team but when you are rolling out incremental features to a modest app and dealing w routine operational concerns it's hard to get that excited about "nothing caught on fire this week" or "we did the thing we said we'd do".
And we have these horrible self and peer appraisals that we have to do where you are expected to describe routine competence in terms that should normally be reserved for a someone who rescued all the kittens and puppies from a pet store fire.
caturopath 1190 days ago [-]
I was almost relieved the first time I listened to someone say, "Wow! This is huge. What a launch," to someone and then admit when they were gone that they couldn't even see the difference.
kovac 1189 days ago [-]
Same here. In fact, I've more or less stopped reading emails, listening to speeches from higher ups because there's literally no useful information in those other than empty, abstract phrases. One of those experiences was a series of bullshit praises over many months followed by a company wide retrenchment (not because of covid).
baxtr 1190 days ago [-]
I was one one of those people doing this. Not because I liked it. I hated it. It felt false. But because I somehow thought it was expected of me. All other leaders of the company would do the same. Cheer for their team, applaud them publicly, always, constantly. I felt I had to participate in that kind of political game because otherwise the team, the people I cared about would feel bad about themselves. I guess what I’m trying to say is that this depends also a lot on company culture.
thewebcount 1190 days ago [-]
Well depending on the type of org you're in, it could be dangerous not to. When everyone else is doing it, if you aren't, it just makes the other managers think, "Wow, that manager isn't praising their people. They must really suck. Remind me never to work with that team."
dbish 1190 days ago [-]
I'm a senior leader and I try to go against the grain on this. I can't stand pile-on emails where every leader has to reply all with "great job" for minor things. I work to provide positive feedback for specific and great work because people see-through false positivity and in the long run you can see that the folks doing the work are very clear with thinking these "ra ra" displays show a disconnect from reality rather then a positive reinforcement. They remind me of the (pardon the language) "shit sandwich" way of providing feedback that some people feel they have to do: give a (many times false and vague) positive not then say your true feelings and end with a positive note. If they aren't specific, it just feels fake and people are just waiting for the true feedback in the middle.
Fnoord 1190 days ago [-]
Manager 2 jobs back did sandwiching all the time. Its even fake if the positive is truthful because the middle part (criticism or substance or negative) is the meat. Its manipulative, and I prefer honesty.
jpetso 1189 days ago [-]
Not a manager, but I find myself thanking people a lot for all kinds of minor things. I'm among the group that hates excessive inflationary praise. Saying thank you, and being thanked, doesn't trigger my bullshit sensor though and feels right even for small routine work.
praptak 1190 days ago [-]
Presenting the neutral as great is merely cringy and annoying. It's much worse when failures are presented with the mandatory positive spin. Especially the failures of the management when the employees get to bear the costs.
lbblack 1190 days ago [-]
Failures shouldn't necessarily need a quote "mandatory positive spin". But they don't necessarily need a quote "mandatory negative spin". Meeting somewhere in the middle for a team is how generally speaking, consensus is met.
lbblack 1190 days ago [-]
I think one of the most important things for a person in a leadership role to understand, is how to understand other people by confidently understanding yourself.
If you can't offer me encouraging advice and honest critique - without being afraid of hurting my personal feelings, I'd be left without a clear direction. Otherwise, you'd be easily able to recreate a positive growth cycle in your team (e.g. significant boosts in morale, productivity, communication, etc.)
False positive emotions are usually the result of someone denying the acceptance of truth. What ever that truth may be.
This is probably going to sound super corny but YMMV. The psychological impacts of denial are devastating. The psychological impacts of love, acceptance and forgiveness are limitlessly fruitful.
I see a lot of HN posts recently on the existence of these superhuman developers with god-like abilities or productivity. Everybody on this planet is human, yet we interact with others intellect or knowledge as if it were a static state. It's not. Every human mind is quite literally, a quantum computer. Anyone can grow their intellect or wisdom or maturity, it just takes the proper push in the right direction and some guts.
SkyPuncher 1190 days ago [-]
"You guys are {killing,crushing,owning} it"
I say this to my team a lot, even though they're operating as "expected" levels for my company.
The reality is there are a lot of teams and a lot of companies that simply do not expect much from their teams. We do. I want to remind the team that they are doing good work.
When people have confidence they're doing a good job, they're more likely to continue to do a good job.
vagrantJin 1190 days ago [-]
I must be one of those who feel slighted when I recieve undue praise. It's kind of patronizing hyperbole and I see it as being treated like a toddler than a grown, paid professional.
I'm not one of Pavlov's dogs.
shrimpx 1190 days ago [-]
Something to watch out for is people becoming jaded if you use bombastic winning language like "crushing it" all the time, and your praise language doesn't measure up to the size of the win. If a tiny fix and a huge win are both "crushing it", a sense of meaninglessness will permeate.
halfmatthalfcat 1190 days ago [-]
There's a class of people though, myself included, that do not like external validation. I thrive on internal validation on my perceived work product strength. I feel like I'm a better judge of whether my work is good or bad than a non-technical project manager.
It's different when it comes from a technical peer or a technical manager. There it definitely means more.
Closer to my point though, it was the continued repetition of the positive reinforcement. I'm talking a weekly occurrence where the situation did not call for the reinforcement. It felt fake and, to me, had the opposite effect as intended.
clairity 1190 days ago [-]
everyone responds to intrinsic motivation (which in part is what you're describing). very few people can last very long on extrinsic motivation only (like fake praise). there's not two classes of people who divide neatly into one camp or the other.
clairity 1190 days ago [-]
no one wants fake praise, but rather real, genuine praise only. some folks will convince themselves the fake praise is genuine, but mostly, everyone can tell in their heart of hearts which is which. you're not really fooling most folks most of the time.
give real praise only when it's deserved. support and compassion, however, should always be readily at hand.
ser0 1190 days ago [-]
I think this is the main issue with generic "you guys are [something] it!" type of praise. There are no details at all, so it seems fake and superficial.
I do agree with the general sentiment of the parent post though. Having managed IT (operations not development) when good work is done, often the intention is that no one notices. Therefore the broader organisation may not have sufficient awareness that anything of value has been achieved.
In such circumstances I believe it is up to the manager to both manage up in terms of making the team's achievement known and recognised, as well as represent the organisation and acknowledge the team's work.
A few of the posts above are essentially prescribing using STAR to offer feedback, which I think is more thoughtful than just generic words of affirmation. This can be made even more authentic if you take the time to talk to affected stakeholders and gather real testimonials to pass back to the team.
megous 1190 days ago [-]
Depends. Your output may feel great to someone else, but you may not feel excited about it personally. (and there may be no conflict, or fakery of praise in it) Perhaps based on how perfectionist you are, or based on what you like about the work. You might be excited/motivated by different aspects of your work than your manager.
To me it would come down to whether I think other person is praising my work just to get more of it done just for the praise (I'd have negative reaction), or whether he just likes it that much personally (neutral to mildly positive reaction).
CuriousSkeptic 1190 days ago [-]
Perhaps it would be better to express a genuine feeling instead.
Praise implies being in a position to praise at all. Having some authority or mastery with regard to what is praised.
Often enough, I am that authority. I don’t expect praise from my clients. I’m getting payed precisely because they lack the mastery I offer.
Instead I would be happy to hear about their true feelings. Stories of gratitude, or relief, or whatever else happened in their life that I might have played a role in.
megous 1190 days ago [-]
Yes, I understand. But a lot of the time people express feelings indirectly, and it's pointless to try to change everyone's communication style. So people sometimes use praise if they're happy about something, or whatever, and I interpret that in a way that suits my well being.
It's just part of the communication style of someone, or even part of a culture of a country. If it bothers me, and it is the relationship I care about or looks to be long term, I may ask the person to communicate differently with me.
But most of the time I get praise from random people on the internet, and I just interpret it that they are grateful for my contributions, regardless of what they say.
Sometimes they want something from me, and are probably not comfortable with just asking for it, so they pad the communication with some praise about the software or me. Some state that they're uncomfortable asking for help more directly, some just add praise at the beginning/end of each reply. (which gets kinda strange after 3-4 interactions :))
It's nice if someone communicates more directly, but I can try to understand the other people, too, regardless of communication style.
CuriousSkeptic 1190 days ago [-]
"Be conservative in what you send, be liberal in what you accept" ;)
megous 1190 days ago [-]
Hehe, I approve of this protocol. :)
clairity 1190 days ago [-]
then it's not fake praise (in the latter case), but genuine praise, whether you value the output the same or not.
smrq 1190 days ago [-]
You might want to internalize the parent comment, because it's entirely possible that some of your team members are not taking it that way. I'm on the receiving end of such feedback often. I know that it's coming from a genuine place. But that doesn't stop it from being irritating!
klyrs 1189 days ago [-]
> When people have confidence they're doing a good job, they're more likely to continue to do a good job.
They're just as liable to continue doing a shit job, and with the confidence that your opinion isn't worth a dram.
strokirk 1190 days ago [-]
On behalf of the people that DO like praise for continuing to meet or works hard to meet expectations, thank you!
I'm always surprised with how many people (especially at this site?) doesn't seem to like praise and approval.
mbrodersen 1189 days ago [-]
Whatever you do, never ever pretend to be somebody you are not or fake praise when it isn’t sincere. Smart developers will instantly loose respect for you and write you off as personified BS.
PointyFluff 1190 days ago [-]
They should just dole out cryptocurrency every time they say that. The words would have meaning again.
dnautics 1190 days ago [-]
Or you know, currency.
arkitaip 1190 days ago [-]
They would just launch their own crypto, allowing them to gamify their teams for all eternity.
bavent 1190 days ago [-]
My work effectively does. "Points" we can redeem for physical goods or trips.
alexchamberlain 1190 days ago [-]
Isn't that a little patronising?
bavent 1188 days ago [-]
Kind of. It also creates a weird obligation to reward coworkers for things, since have a budget of points to give out as well.
1190 days ago [-]
pietrovismara 1190 days ago [-]
Put your money where your mouth is, or something like that
dehrmann 1190 days ago [-]
Because what Schrute Bucks really need is a blockchain.
brutal_boi 1190 days ago [-]
Sometimes, Sometimes not.
I can imagine everybody taking out the phone to check crypto prices as soon as the words were said
cordite 1190 days ago [-]
Maybe a terrible idea, but it was inspired by the parent comment here..
Fork DogeCoin, when someone goes above and beyond, reward them more each week.
When they want, they can use dogecoin to do something like 20% time.
I'm just following on the satirical nature of the parent comment here, don't take this as a real suggestion.
qwantim1 1190 days ago [-]
The story though is about toxic positivity affecting the person putting a lot of pressure on themselves. It led to success but the concern was of the excessive stress and taking a day off for mental health break “sick day” to make up for it.
If you personally don’t like positivity which isn’t fake, then it might be good to dig into that. I have a hard time with fake positivity but genuine positivity is usually acceptable.
malingo 1190 days ago [-]
Do you mean "espoused" instead of "eschewed"?
halfmatthalfcat 1190 days ago [-]
Ah yeah, my bad.
alexchamberlain 1190 days ago [-]
Our 2 groups seem to be split down the Atlantic: the US folks love the clapping and positive reinforcement, the europeans seem to roll their eyes. (Generalisation ofc)
mbrodersen 1189 days ago [-]
Yep agree I have noticed this as well. Not just in this post. Americans in general seems to spend a lot of time telling everybody how great they and/or their team and/or their country is and how hard working they are etc. independently of reality. Trump is a perfect example of this. You could almost call Trump the personification of American culture pushed to the extreme.
quercusa 1190 days ago [-]
I started DuoLingo recently (for Latin) and the over-the-top cheerleading there is driving me nuts.
1ark 1189 days ago [-]
It's a casual game. So they give you all this feedback all the time. If you got lingots for it it would be slightly better, becuase then it is no longer empty praise, but they don't want to give away those.
akudha 1190 days ago [-]
I too fall in the latter category. Nothing is more annoying than fake appreciation, fake love etc. It is better to keep my mouth shut if I can't mean what I say
chadcmulligan 1190 days ago [-]
I like my feedback in cash, if you like my work give me more money, I seem to be in the minority though.
blastro 1190 days ago [-]
those examples you gave turn my stomach - because i find them so manipulative. they focus only on your productive output as an employee and completely ignore the inherent value you have as an intelligent being.
i find it fascinating that the same "positivity" turned in another, more humane direction (ie. "you guys showed up today, that's fantastic!!", or "we failed but who cares, we rock anyways") can transform into something that i think actually serves a purpose - forging a robust spirit. i actually appreciate that attitude in my peers. it's funny how razor thin the difference between what we are each describing. it's the same thing - unflappable, stupid belief - but applied for different ends.
thanks for the thought prompt!!!!
muzani 1189 days ago [-]
Funny enough, it was playing Football Manager that taught me this lesson that too much praise is counterproductive and can actually harm morale.
1190 days ago [-]
topkai22 1190 days ago [-]
From the perspective of someone who leads an engineering team- I’m genuinely happy and proud of my team when things are going well. I’m not blowing smoke when I say something like that- it’s all true.
Now I will call out a bad sprint, and I’ll praise even more after a great sprint, but it seems to be me that just making our deadlines week after week is something to be genuinely happy for.
Jochim 1190 days ago [-]
Is it annoying because it seems disingenuous? If so what makes it so?
I used to be much more cynical about unwarranted praise/positivity. My mind has pretty much been changed by my current job, our team lead doesn't communicate how he's feeling to our team at all and this has had negatively affects on not just my morale/happiness but my teammates' as well.
BlargMcLarg 1190 days ago [-]
Words lose their meaning when overused. That's the one reason that to me, it feels disingenuous. When even the smallest thing is "really amazing", everything is "really amazing". Result being, whatever that person says has very little worth except when something is clearly detrimental.
That alone would be manageable. Yet, this behavior is often expected from others too, which creates an environment that, at least to me, is incredibly suffocating. What's worse, such an environment caused two problems for me:
First, by upping the average of "relatively perceived as positive", objectively neutral people are perceived as negative. I've actually had colleagues go into emotional distress and vent to me over this.
Second, it at least seems like overly positive environments are afraid of criticism and critical people. As a critical person myself, it has been incredibly difficult to navigate such an environment and it lead to me essentially becoming an assembly line worker who "just shuts up and does their job". Also anecdotal, without critical people, going into the wrong direction either ends up being corrected very slowly, or not at all (and given how multi-dimensional work tends to be, going into the wrong or nowhere-near-optimal direction is very likely).
As a result, to me, no feedback at all is only slightly worse than overly frequent, overly positive feedback.
halfmatthalfcat 1190 days ago [-]
Yes and I don't think it's because it seems disingenuous, it's because it is disingenuous. Not out of malice but because if you're not being super positive and supportive, you're causing discord and not being a "team player".
Most weeks at work are completely benign where we're not doing "amazing" work, we're doing "work". We're doing our salaried jobs as expected.
It's frustrating when every Jira ticket that gets closed is some moral victory that needs to be held high. It's not, it's our jobs and it's frustrating to deal with the faux positivity when I just want to do my job.
username90 1190 days ago [-]
There is just as much signal in constant praise as there is in no praise, ie none. The only difference is that in the constant praise scenario you are expected to be happy and thank your manager for the "praise".
matwood 1190 days ago [-]
I wonder if we all have just become too cynical. I don't need praise, and simply prefer more money. But, if someone in charge is trying to keep the team attitude right with some positive thoughts, letting it get to me is really my problem and not theirs.
sneak 1190 days ago [-]
If everything is super duper great, then nothing is.
nathias 1190 days ago [-]
Its a type of condescention, maybe some people fail to recognize it (thats probably the reason why its used in the first place).
namdnay 1190 days ago [-]
Yes yes yes. That’s what I can’t stand - I don’t mind the hypocrisy, what really grates is the condescension. Who are you to congratulate me? Why would the opinion of some random corporate bullshitter mean anything to me?
And of course the whole political game where people have to send congratulations just to signal that they’re part of leadership
dawnerd 1190 days ago [-]
Same people I guess that think you have to find something positive to say about every code review.
ryanSrich 1190 days ago [-]
Project and Product managers have to give this praise because they contribute much less to the project, but take the majority of the credit. Designers and Engineers do the actual work. This is the sad reality of most tech companies with more than 20 employees.
Not having PMs and PdMs is a massive benefit of smaller orgs. Do everything you can to avoid hiring these people.
hnarn 1190 days ago [-]
I vastly prefer honest negativity over dishonest positivity. An example of this is the behavior of service personnel in the US compared to my native country, every time I go there I almost want to tell them to tone down the niceness, but of course there's no point because I realize I'm the odd one out.
Of course I appreciate the effort of being "nice" but when you're not doing it out of genuine care for someone I'd much rather just be treated in a neutral way, like you'd treat any human being you encountered that you knew nothing about. I don't much enjoy being treated as an old friend by someone who wouldn't lend me five bucks, and I don't enjoy being asked polite questions that require elaborate answers when you really don't want to listen to the answer and your eyes glaze over within the first seconds.
Adults have left their insecurities behind them and should understand they're not, at least initially, the friend of every human being and shouldn't have a problem with being treated in a professionally reserved way.
Bayart 1190 days ago [-]
American in Europe : "Jesus, everyone here is so rude and cold."
European in America : "Jesus, everyone here is so fake and annoying."
bitcharmer 1190 days ago [-]
I couldn't agree more. I'm a slavic expat in UK. I recently raised an issue with how teachers at our kids' school are struggling with utilising technology in productive ways. I also offered taking a day off work to help them get better at things like google classroom and google docs. I was labelled rude solely by pointing out the deficiencies. It didn't really matter that I offered constructive way of resolving this. According to the brits, I was rude because I pointed out areas of improvement. WTF?
learnstats2 1190 days ago [-]
I guess that you haven't fully understood the complete problem space of everything that a teacher has to master in order to be effective, and everything that a school has to provide resources for (including other areas of training).
Classroom teaching is not highly dependent on technology and low-tech solutions are often better.
Your suggested solution asks teachers to give up a day of their time (unpaid?) for what you think is important, without listening to what teachers actually find difficult about their jobs.
Even if what you are saying is right and genuinely helpful, it won't immediately look like a good solution to the teachers or to the administration.
arp242 1190 days ago [-]
The British way of pointing these things out is something along the lines of "Oh this is great, have you considered X?" Translated to English as you or I would understand it, it's more akin to "meh, it kinda sucks, X is better".
Or something like that anyway; I never really figured out this whole thing in the time I lived there.
It's probably in the way you presented it. I'm sure there were positive things you could say about what they're doing. Then offer more help with topics you're an "expert" on without being patronizing. Nobody likes to be shit on. Start from neutral ground and call it improvements, not say "I don't like your shitty methods, here mine are better". No one will respond to that.
danielscrubs 1190 days ago [-]
Brits always say things by wrapping it with 100 layers of cotton, slavs are known to be more straightforward and therefore rude in that sense. It’s not what you said but how probably, you have to hint that it might be a problem.
Personally I love cutting through bullshit but it it can often land wrong.
bittercynic 1190 days ago [-]
American here. I think many of us are kind of socially unmoored, and actually don't know how to take a neutral tone, and get anxious when someone takes a neutral tone with us. Almost like we're so insecure that we need constant positive feedback/reassurance that we're in a friendly situation. I've been around this my whole life and haven't gotten used to it, but I do the overly friendly act when it seems that people are expecting it. It doesn't cost me anything, and it seems to help people leave an interaction feeling secure.
NoSorryCannot 1190 days ago [-]
Americans aren't socially unmoored. We come from a society where people smile as a matter of being polite. People everywhere have to learn social signals and ours happen to involve smiling as a matter of course.
This thread is pretty irritating for being kind of clueless to the reality that every culture on earth is going to have trappings like this and the alleged stoicism of Russia and Germany are no exception. (Thinking someone is simple or mentally ill because they smile too much is already such a trapping.)
danielscrubs 1188 days ago [-]
I don’t think it has anything to do with smiling, go ahead and smile. At least with the russians I’ve spent time with, it just takes some time before people open up.
Don’t ask a question and completely ignore the answer.
Don’t give platitudes when they could spend some effort and saying what a team member did well. It’s the same in dating, don’t tell someone they are beautiful, go the extra mile.
At least I think this is what people mean by “fake” but I’m not sure.
vbezhenar 1190 days ago [-]
I thought that was about Russians, not Europeans in general. In Russia it's considered a mental illness to smile without a good reason.
Barrin92 1190 days ago [-]
It's a thing in Germany as well. I remember that one of the reasons customers gave why they didn't want to go to Walmart when it opened a few shops in Germany was because they were freaked out by the happy act that employees had to put on.
The sort of always smiling, always laughing stereotypical American waiter or something would be perceived as juvenile, fake or not very bright over here.
odiroot 1190 days ago [-]
I think you could apply the same in Poland. Maybe not "mental illness" but being a bit "off", maybe drunk or drugged. We also associate smiling too much with snake oil salespeople.
sneak 1190 days ago [-]
This is one of the reasons I get along so well with slavic and eastern european people.
The dynamic range is higher, versus having to figure out the difference between smiling and mega-ultra-smiling (as in the USA).
stjohnswarts 1190 days ago [-]
Most Russians I've know on a one on one basis were pretty jovial and fun to hang out with. They did thing people were "fake" and "smiled too much" in America though. I told them the American take on reality was as legitimate as their more cynical attitude. It's all in learning about culture and why people are the way they are. Russians tended to be very straight forward and say what's on their mind, and Americans will hold it back. There are pluses for both positions.
hnarn 1190 days ago [-]
While that's definitely a Russian "thing" it's by no means confined to Russia.
elboru 1190 days ago [-]
How do Europeans feel in Latin America?
As a Latin American, I studied aboard in the US for a year, and I felt Americans were way colder than us.
I wouldn’t say we’re fake about our warmness. But maybe Europeans could associate that with being fake?
cambalache 1189 days ago [-]
Americans are "colder" in the among-peers relationships, but they are extra-sweet-hyper-annoying "warm" when they need to treat you as a client. We latinos are closer to they way southern-Europeans are.
standardUser 1189 days ago [-]
As an America, I absolutely adore how friendly people are in the parts of Latin American I've been to. Is it fake or forced? It doesn't feel like it to me, but I barely speak the language, so I'm probably missing tons of subtext.
bzb6 1190 days ago [-]
Welcome to Costco, I love you.
lallysingh 1190 days ago [-]
How does a European in Canada feel?
alacombe 1190 days ago [-]
Depends what Canada, cities are full of thin-skinned pussies, country side folks are ballsy as can be, even the women.
deanCommie 1190 days ago [-]
Canadian here.
Our culture tends to pick and choose from the best of either the American or the European approach. We don't always get it right, and the combination/middle ground isn't necessarily better than either of the alternatives, but I do feel like we have some general insight and sympathy to both the European and the American philosophies.
I've also lived as an ex-pat in Europe for 4 years working closely with both Europeans and AMericans.
In this regard, I think the American approach is superior.
1) Europeans are overly sensitive about "micro-friendliness". I've heard people complain that the cashier at the grocery store asks "How are you doing?". "They don't really care, why do they ask!"
I've had to explain that no, they don't care, but that moment of friendliness is still a pleasant one, and over the course of the day, all those moments add up to a generally positive contribution to one's existence.
Americans do take faux-friendliness over the top (especially if it's only reserved for the local in-group, see: southern "hospitality"), but I think the Europeans need to lighten up a bit.
2) While I don't need my waitresses to be so friendly to the point that they seem like they're flirting with you, the European waitstaff at restaurants are far from neutral, and are actively disinterested in your hospitality experience. This doesn't apply to fancy high-end restaurants, of course. But just a general casual lunch or dinner you're just not going to get the same quality of service as you do in North America.
While I abhor tipping, I can't help but think that it does create some positive incentives in staff here.
Bayart 1190 days ago [-]
>But just a general casual lunch or dinner you're just not going to get the same quality of service as you do in North America.
That's just circling back to North America and Continental Europe having diametrically opposed notions of what good service means and what social interactions are desirable.
At the risk of sounding like a prick, a good staff member here is someone who makes themselves completely invisible from customers while keeping the shop running smoothly. Having a waiter trying to build a rapport with me because ultimately I have to be the one paying them instead of their boss is infuriating, and the intrusion of a third party into my table-size privacy bubble is extremely unwelcome.
deanCommie 1189 days ago [-]
Meanwhile, coming from the other side, I would love if I can get a waiter to discuss something else I need (more mayo, a napkin, etc) without feeling like I need to either wait for half my meal, yell across the restuarant, or go wander through looking for it.
You went out into public to have a meal, why are you expecting privacy? If you wanted privacy, get takeout and eat at home.
danielscrubs 1188 days ago [-]
I’d assume most eat out because they want to meet friends without hassle and experience the chefs food piping hot.
Seeking eye contact with the waiter isn’t that inconvenient either...
But for me I have very happy memories of talking with waiters in mom and pop restaurants, at the same time I do feel tipping increases the incentive to talk with customers so... it comes back to honesty, do you really want to talk or does it JUST increase the probability of tipping?
arp242 1190 days ago [-]
> Europeans are overly sensitive about "micro-friendliness". I've heard people complain that the cashier at the grocery store asks "How are you doing?". "They don't really care, why do they ask!"
This is more of an expectations thing; certainly in Dutch, asking "how are you doing" is something you do when you ask when you really want to start a conversation, and you expect a somewhat serious reply in return, whereas in some other cultures it essentially just means "hi" with no expectation of a real answer beyond "good" or some such.
When I worked for an Irish company I had some coworkers say "how are ya" when meeting in the hallway or some such; I started replying serious ("yeah, I'm good, last night I [..]") but they didn't really expect an answer so continued walking leaving us both confused; me as they didn't stop, and them as I started a conversation. It led to some awkward-y situations before I figured this out haha
At any rate, I don't think it's "sensitivity", it's just that these words are taken to have a different meaning. These are the kind of subtle things about learning a language; you can know all the words and grammar, but you also need to learn what's meant with them, and that can actually be pretty hard. Translating a simple sentence such as this is easy, but really understanding what's intended (which may differ on the tone of voice, location, context, etc.) is really hard, and even Europeans who speak good English but haven't spent a lot of time in English-speaking countries tend to fail at this (I certainly did) as it's not really something you can learn from communicating in English over text either.
deanCommie 1189 days ago [-]
I hear you, but I'm not talking about people discussing this concept in the abstract, I'm talking about people that have moved to and lived in North America for YEARS, and never stopped being bothered by it.
I've also heard Italians, French, and Swiss complain about it.
The issue wasn't the language, it was the faux cheeriness that came with it.
robocat 1190 days ago [-]
> I've heard people complain that the cashier at the grocery store asks "How are you doing?". "They don't really care, why do they ask!"
Uggghhhh, I loath being asked that. Firstly, the staff are forced to say it as part of their job and they are checked. It’s inhuman to make someone do that. Also it fucks with my head - now I feel forced to do some interaction to lessen the evil of their work day (it is always shitty jobs) and I find it draining by sympathy. It breaks the humanness of just being polite and thankful to anyone you interact with that is working hard (even if they are tired, emotionally drained, or don’t want to be there).
> especially if it's only reserved for the local in-group, see: southern "hospitality"
Can you explain that?
> tipping, I can't help but think that it does create some positive incentives in staff here.
Tipping is outright disgusting: paying people to be nice just creates inhuman fakeness. The image of some fat leering arsehole, or ugly souled woman, getting their ego stroked by a young wage slave is abhorrent. The worst I ever saw was young American tourists on the coast of Mexico (a small town called San Francisco I think) - the way the tourists treated the staff was wretchedly vile (maybe due to the staff being mostly poor and Mexican?)
Edit: that sounded a bit US bashing, so I will add that I have met many wonderful, kind, interesting and friendly Americans. I have even been treated to Southern Hospitality and it seemed genuine enough to me (even though me and my partner essentially just gate-crashed their party on short notice!). Being white and kiwi might help my impressions though...?!
Edit: in my experience Canadians and New Zealanders have similar outlooks.
deanCommie 1189 days ago [-]
> > especially if it's only reserved for the local in-group, see: southern "hospitality"
> can you explain that?
I think you touched upon it in your last paragraph acknowledging being white and kiwi.
It is such an overwhelming force of human friendliness and welcomeness, that you assume it must be genuine human connection.
Except try being gay, black, or an atheist, and see how quickly all that turns...
As far as the rest of your points, I think you're exaggerating a bit. Most people (at least in north america) don't mind being micro-friendly as part of a service job. Sure, yes, it's "required", but the ratio of monstrous leering arseholes is not high, and while it's tiring to be friendly by the end of a long workday at a grocery store, people don't feel it to be a fundamentally dehumanizing act.
I think the bigger problem with tipping is situations where it allows employers to pay less than minimum wage - that is abhorent. Getting a tip shouldn't be a requirement to get to a living wage. But as an incentive to being a little more engaged with your job? I think it's good.
> Edit: in my experience Canadians and New Zealanders have similar outlooks.
We are alike in many ways. We both live in the shadow of a larger, brasher arrogant power who dismisses us, and people on the other side of the world lump us in together with them.
But no, when it comes to restaurants, service culture, tipping, and micro-friendliness in public Canadians are much closer to Americans than to New Zealanders.
_TwoFinger 1189 days ago [-]
> Uggghhhh, I loath being asked that.
Some of them hate asking you too. Sometimes it's a policy forced on them by management, and they are to be fined if they skipped a customer. Overheard this in the bus, a cashier was complaining to her friend. There were cameras installed at every register specifically for that.
To be honest, the cashiers and waitresses I've talked to in the US delivered a pretty good act, totally believable.
When the big chain stores in my country decided to copy the US, the lack of acting skills in our culture was very noticeable.
MaxBarraclough 1190 days ago [-]
> Europeans are overly sensitive about "micro-friendliness". I've heard people complain that the cashier at the grocery store asks "How are you doing?". "They don't really care, why do they ask!"
As a Brit I feel this way, I personally don't ask someone how they're doing unless I'm interested in the answer, but the rhetorical How are you doing? is used plenty in Britain.
How do you do? has fallen out of common usage but traditionally the proper response was How do you do?
danielscrubs 1190 days ago [-]
Say what you mean, mean what you say.
pdimitar 1189 days ago [-]
One of the hardest cultural shocks for me to this day is when an American off-handedly asks me "how are you?" at the beginning of a meet and how shocked they seem when I go on to elaborate on how I am feeling -- even it takes me 10-15s they seem to need time to get themselves together because it seems as though I did something outrageous.
Not bashing, let's be clear on that. But this keeps catching me off-guard, every time. Have to work on finally overcoming it. It seems it's an American tradition to say "hi, how are you?" and not just "hello" (namely, it's not a question but a greeting).
twizilla 1189 days ago [-]
I used to have problems with "Hi, how are you?" too.
I found that it can be useful to consider "Hi, how are you?" as a friendly game of catch. At the basic level you can reply "'Sall right, how _you_ doin'?" You've caught the ball and tossed it back. Even if you are walking in different directions down the hall this will work... or even looking up and saying "hey" is acknowledging the ball in the air. In an "office" this probably would work fine, but I have always been either self-employed or worked in small businesses. So I don't know if this would work on the 24th floor.
In day to day life... I imagine the person at the check out counter has a repetitive job that can be quite dreary if all they are doing is punching buttons all day without any engagement... asking the same questions: "Did you find everything?" "Do you have any coupons?" "How are you doing today?" So when I can I try to catch the ball, paint it a different color and toss it back. It's a two part process
How are you doing?
#1 catch the ball:
"I made it this far, I'm gonna keep going."
#2 toss it back:
"How are you keeping up?"
You can have dozens of responses for for each part... mix & match... Silliness can get you bonus points. It's just a game. You will discover ways in which a few words can make it so that you're having a bit more fun, the checkout person (or server, or phone support person, or...) can also get a few giggles while grinding through their, perhaps miserable, job... hey, everybody wins.
hnarn 1189 days ago [-]
I had the same problem for a long time when I was learning English. It was amazing to me that even NO response to “how are you” was acceptable.
My brain has these days taught itself to translate that “how are you” == “hello”, so these days I just answer “hey”, which feels weird but a lot of things do in English. Or if I’m not feeling great, I won’t respond at all, because apparently that’s fine too and the person asking isn’t really asking. (This is why this Fake niceness, in itself, can be depressing)
macintux 1189 days ago [-]
Even as an American, it took me a little too long to realize that wasn't actually a question. I don't know when it started becoming a common greeting, but it's certainly within my adult years.
pdimitar 1189 days ago [-]
Interesting, so it's a relatively new phenomena then.
macintux 1189 days ago [-]
I’d say either I was completely oblivious, or it’s within the past 3 decades. Both are possible.
heimatau 1190 days ago [-]
> I vastly prefer honest negativity over dishonest positivity.
As scripture says, 'Faithful are the wounds of a friend'. Sometimes the best thing we need is a little vinegar that is in our actual/tangible/observable best interest.
mkr-hn 1189 days ago [-]
>> "An example of this is the behavior of service personnel in the US compared to my native country, every time I go there I almost want to tell them to tone down the niceness, but of course there's no point because I realize I'm the odd one out."
This is usually mandated somewhere up the chain. They don't have a choice if they want to keep their jobs.
fastball 1190 days ago [-]
I think Toxic Positivity is a bit of a misnomer, I'd probably call it "False Positivity".
It's not some subset of real positivity that is toxic, it's just... not actual positivity. It's an act.
kayodelycaon 1190 days ago [-]
No, there is toxic positivity, but I don't think this article is talking about it. I'll give you an example.
"Don't worry, it'll get better."
People genuinely believe that and for many things, it's true. For someone with a chronic and severe mental illness with no known cure? We're sick of hearing it.
There is no better for me. I'll never be completely free of suicidal thoughts or medication side-effects. I will never be free from degree of pain and suffering many people don't understand.
Does that make me unhappy? Frequently but I'm used to hurting all the time and I try to make the best of it.
Speaking as someone with mental health issues and as someone who has been the shoulder for others who are the same, no, saying it'll get better doesn't help because almost nothing that could be said will.
But being lead in circles of doom talk and complaining by someone who is inconsolable naturally leads to vacuous sayings like it is what it is, it's not as bad as it seems, or count your blessings, only because I have to say something in reply despite not having any answers.
kayodelycaon 1190 days ago [-]
> only because I have to say something in reply despite not having any answers
I completely understand and my reply comes out of very hard experiences from decades of helping people.
Humans are emotional beings. We want to help. We hurt when we can’t. We feel guilty. The natural response is to say or do anything to make that guilt go away. This is a deep, hardwired response. It is a natural response and a good one. I consider this to be one of humanity’s best traits.
But it is not a good response in this situation. My goal is to help people. If I am to do that, nothing I say should said out of my own feelings of guilt or helplessness.
I’ve learned to embrace guilt and acknowledge it’s there but also tell it it is not helpful in that moment. I need to do what I know is right, not what I feel is right.
Hand and hand with this is letting go of the belief we have control. We can not save people who don’t want to be saved. There is only so much we can do. And we will fail. I’ve lost friends I’ve wished I could have saved but I know there were no words. Therefore, I have no responsibility for their actions.
As a very wise person once said,
It is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose. That is not a weakness. That is life.
tasuki 1189 days ago [-]
> "Don't worry, it'll get better."
I think people might say this so as to make themselves feel better. Or perhaps it's a (bad) shortcut for "oh that sucks, I hope it will get better".
> I'll never be completely free of suicidal thoughts or medication side-effects. I will never be free from degree of pain and suffering many people don't understand.
I'm one of the people who don't understand, but I think there is at least some distant theoretical possibility it will get better?
> I try to make the best of it.
"Sometimes we don't get to choose the role we play, but we always get to choose how well we play the role."
kayodelycaon 1188 days ago [-]
> I think there is at least some distant theoretical possibility it will get better?
Not likely. Our understanding of mental health is still extremely primitive.
Bipolar gets worse over time, not better. Medication can stop it from getting worse, but it is far from a cure.
WarOnPrivacy 1190 days ago [-]
The author's point seems to be that it is toxic to a person to (try to) exist in permanent state of positivity.
I can get behind that notion. I've had friends who were chronically positive. It gelded our friendship because they hoarded all the negative stuff in their life.
_qulr 1190 days ago [-]
> The author's point seems to be that it is toxic to a person to (try to) exist in permanent state of positivity.
Yes. The article started out with the psychologist explaining how the client was looking for fake doctor's notes just to avoid going to work because the client didn't feel "totally positive" that day. That's toxic positivity, the feeling that you can't outwardly display anything less than complete cheerfulness, that you have to bottle up any problem inside and not let it out.
jrumbut 1190 days ago [-]
Is gelded a typo or is this an expression I wasn't aware of?
I kind of like it, without sincere emotions something was missing (like when a horse is gelded).
You read it like I meant it. eg:neutered, typical interactions aren't happening here
beefman 1190 days ago [-]
It's more than just phony positivity. It includes supression of criticism.
op03 1190 days ago [-]
Next up True Negativity or Positive Toxicity. Take your pick.
“Our language is an imperfect instrument created by ancient and ignorant men. It is an animistic language that invites us to talk about stability and constants, about similarities and normal and kinds, about magical transformations, quick cures, simple problems, and final solutions. Yet the world we try to symbolize
with this language is a world of process, change, differences, dimensions, functions, relationships, growths,
interactions, developing, learning, coping, complexity. And the mismatch of our ever-changing world and our relatively static language forms is part of our problem.” - Wendell Johnson
jdsalaro 1190 days ago [-]
"Makes broad, meaningless and demeaning generalizations about language and its creators by alluding to their inability to capture the world's complex nature while doing that very same thing by means of rigid categorizations and stark remarks all in the interest of sounding edgy" - Wendell Johnson
Nice, albeit terribly useless, soundbite.
vagrantJin 1189 days ago [-]
The word toxic and the derived toxicity are starting to grate.
> And the mismatch of our ever-changing world and our relatively static language forms is part of our problem
Hegel and his merry-band of psuedo-intellectuals like this clown (Johnson) are the reason philosophy isn't taken seriously as it used to.
rimiform 1190 days ago [-]
Johnson sounds like he just finished reading Deleuze and Guattari.
dr_dshiv 1190 days ago [-]
I 100% agree with this.
Trasmatta 1190 days ago [-]
This has kind of been a problem at my workplace. Everything from the company's marketing material to its recruiting practices exudes an almost overwhelming amount of positivity. They put a huge emphasis on hiring "the nicest people in the world". Disagreements or arguments at the company are almost non-existent, because everyone tries their hardest to be positive and nice at all times. Every other sentence in Slack ends with an emphatic exclamation point (or two or three) and / or a smiley face.
I like my job, and I will gladly take it over a workplace with toxic negativity, but it's still been somewhat exhausting. There's that underlying anxiety that if you're somehow not seen as exuding the correct level of positivity, that you might get let go.
Everyone at the company is constantly patting themselves on the back about how it's "the greatest place to work in the world" and that they have "the most incredible co-workers". This makes it hard to disagree with things or point out things that aren't working, because everyone is so afraid to hurt somebody's feelings.
jcelerier 1190 days ago [-]
> Everything from the company's marketing material to its recruiting practices exudes an almost overwhelming amount of positivity.
I don't know if it's because I'm french but that kind of thing makes me throw up in my mouth and is a super big turn-off. Some things sucks, it's fine, accept it and move on or try to make them better through actions. Words don't make things better.
Trasmatta 1190 days ago [-]
I don't have any hard evidence for this, but it seems to me that this fake positivity is a lot more prevalent in the US than in Europe
tluyben2 1189 days ago [-]
Yep, it is a US thing and, as eu resident, I find it incredibly annoying. Everything is GREAT always, until it isn't (aka when it all collapses and it becomes obvious) and I am negative for pointing out that reality 'spoiling the good atmosphere'.
mbrodersen 1189 days ago [-]
I agree 100% having lived, worked, and paid taxes in Denmark, England, Scotland, the US, and Australia. It is a very US thing.
1189 days ago [-]
hntrader 1190 days ago [-]
> I will gladly take it over a workplace with toxic negativity
Agree, having a colleague with a negative disposition (< 3rd percentile of general population) is in my view much, much worse than colleagues that exude the normal amount of fake positivity, even though the latter is annoying and draining and is more deceitful than the former.
Trasmatta 1190 days ago [-]
Yeah, that's basically where I'm at. It's irritating sometimes, but my stress levels are much lower than places I've worked with a negative atmosphere, so I will live with it.
halfmatthalfcat 1190 days ago [-]
It's hilarious during interviews when everyone says "I've never worked at a company like this", "I've never worked with a team like this, truly the best"...I roll my eyes...
Trasmatta 1190 days ago [-]
I've worked at multiple companies where the interviewers will say stuff like "we have the best engineering team in the world!", and then you get hired and look at their codebase...
ryandrake 1190 days ago [-]
It’s often a facade too! I’ve heard privately at one employer the statement “We all outwardly sing Kum-ba-ya and hold each other’s hands but everyone has razor blades in their palms and they hold hands pretty hard...”
gxqoz 1190 days ago [-]
I've been converted to using exclamation points after phrases like "thanks" in emails. The book Because Internet convinced me that the rules of email politeness have changed. I don't love it, but whatever. Language changes.
Trasmatta 1189 days ago [-]
It's interesting how different the following four uses of "thanks" can come across, depending on the context:
thanks
Thanks.
Thanks
Thanks!
trentnix 1190 days ago [-]
Or better stated, dishonesty does more harm than good.
Frost1x 1190 days ago [-]
Well, you can be honest in the facts but the perspective around those facts is opinionated. Business culture pushes a constant optimistic outlook for perspective, which to me is ridiculous.
It suffers from not only being optimistic when you shouldn't be, but also being overly optimistic in situations. I pretty much only experience these behaviors in workplaces.
1190 days ago [-]
Bayart 1190 days ago [-]
Give me feedback, not encouragement. I don't care whether you tell me my work is good or bad, but I very much care than you qualify that statement with data points or a new outlook that enable me to improve that work.
I think a lot of technical guys see professional interactions that way, with pats on the back being at best an empty ritual, at worst a waste of useful time.
khalilravanna 1190 days ago [-]
For me this is the key. Positivity and negativity are both harmful if they’re not specific. Saying “the team did a great job” is basically worthless. Cool, let’s all do the exact same thing we did last time with no variation so we can do another “great job”. Versus “the team did a great job communicating changed expectations mid project that meant we didn’t lose a client” can actually lend some insight.
Negative feedback is the exact same (keep it specific) though with the nuance of saving negative feedback that’s personal for 1:1 convos.
lrossi 1190 days ago [-]
The article is mentioning Instagram as an amplifier of this need to fake being happy. But I think Facebook is responsible for it as well.
I was once talking to a colleague who was showing me some old vacation pictures. Some tropical area. I commented that they were looking amazing. He said that actually there was a pile of garbage next to them, but they only put the good looking photos on Facebook.
Everybody wants to look perfect online, so much of the appearances are faked. It makes sense, since everything is public, so we feel pressured to make ourselves look good. Repeated, I am not surprised that it can cause harmful psychological effects.
sigstoat 1190 days ago [-]
> He said that actually there was a pile of garbage next to them, but they only put the good looking photos on Facebook.
when your friends used a slide projector to show you their vacation photos, they left the bad slides out of the projector.
i'm on board with facebook being a problem, but it's in more subtle ways than folks not showing you their bad photos.
croissants 1190 days ago [-]
Sure, but I think film made each photograph a bit more dear, making it less likely that somebody'll take a dozen just to pick the best one.
tqi 1190 days ago [-]
I don't think the public nature of social media is driving this. After all people's private photo albums and slideshows back in the day were also heavily curated collections of "fake" happiness. I think the difference is thanks to the internet and the proliferation of smart phones, we are able to consume a much larger volume of these collections.
np_tedious 1190 days ago [-]
Not to downplay the mental harm discussed in the article, but the more mundane issue you touch on here is what gets to me.
With this constant demonstration of happiness / positivity, it's extremely difficult to get a real, honest read on something. Not everything you ate was incredible, not everywhere you went was perfect. In fact, 50% of them were below average! I wish more people would quit performing and give the real scoop. But that tends to only happen in pretty tight circles now. I noticed this effect even in a group chat of close friends once it grew from 5 to 8.
kazen44 1190 days ago [-]
its the same in small teams at work.
having worked in a small, close knit team which was in constant discussion and "conflict" with each other because people in the team where very passionate about the work.
its far note liberating to a have work environment where everyone can critique freely instead of taking up appearances just to be "nice".
analog31 1190 days ago [-]
Just wait until you're older, and Facebook devolves into nothing but rich parents humble-bragging and outright bragging about their kids. Yeah, Spring Break in Paris must have been wonderful, too bad your kid only got into 9 AP courses this semester.
MeinBlutIstBlau 1190 days ago [-]
It certainly hasn't made dating any more easier. Online dating is filled with sugar babies, catfishes, or doctored up photos beyond belief. Also it instigates a relationship to be solely through text. I mean jesus dating is about vetting and days or weeks of texting before actually meeting one another nowadays. Nobody wants to do anything physically anymore unless they've actually met you. It's to the point that it's almost a waste of time. COVID restrictions certainly haven't helped either.
I wonder if US culture will ever revert. I think it's gone down a very dangerous path for the middle class. It will be only a matter of a few decades before we adopt the Japanese strategy of paying women to retire and have families instead of advancing their careers because of major population decline.
I think the article touches on a distinction between these things:
> Even the oppressive insistence that we should love our body, no matter what, can tip into upbeat intolerance by implying that it’s not OK to want to work on tummy folds or laugh lines.
I read the Cosmo cover as suggesting "it's OK to not want to change your body", toxic positivity would be "it's not OK to want to change your body". In that case, toxic positivity is more restricting -- it's the difference between "it's fine to not be sad" and "it's not fine to be sad".
Der_Einzige 1190 days ago [-]
I claim "it's OK to not want to change your body" is itself toxic positivity.
Yes, it's "okay" in that you should not experience body or fat-shaming for being obese. No, it's not "okay" in that you are at extremely elevated risks of every health disease - and your quality of life is really terrible in comparison to people who are not obese. It's actually really terrible for the state and for society to normalize this level of disregard for out health.
I think this lesser form of "toxic positivity" inspires complacency and a general victim mentality out of people who for whom their pain is partially or entirely self-inflicted.
erikpukinskis 1190 days ago [-]
> you are at extremely elevated risks of every health disease
That's factually inaccurate.
> It's actually really terrible for the state and for society to normalize this
I don't believe there is any science to back this assertion up. It's an interesting hypothesis, but I doubt it's true.
> think this lesser form of "toxic positivity" inspires complacency and a general victim mentality
I'd be interested if you have seen evidence that shame increases weight loss in obese people? Am I understand you correctly that's your thesis?
bitcharmer 1190 days ago [-]
> I'd be interested if you have seen evidence that shame increases weight loss in obese people?
GP comment doesn't claim that. You're just making this up.
It's a scientific fact obesity is a health risk. What is the point in denying that?
erikpukinskis 1188 days ago [-]
Yes it does. GP says we should make people publicly feel that it’s not OK to not want to change their body. That’s shame.
I’m not debating what’s healthy, I’m debating what we consider “ok”.
“Obesity is a health risk” is a fact indeed. “All health risks are not ok” is not a scientific fact.
blackearl 1190 days ago [-]
It's funny that people got so mad about that cover because the article within is about how to be positive when going to the gym and doing the exercise that you're able to do. Not going "well I'm so fat already, hope is lost"
For all the fat hate, there are also the people who genuinely think that being obese is healthy. What better way to get through to those people than to trojan horse them with that controversial cover?
bitcharmer 1190 days ago [-]
I'm pretty tired of name calling like "fat hate". Obesity is a health risk; there's nothing wrong with calling a spade a spade.
username90 1190 days ago [-]
If it said "Smoking is Healthy" they would have been sued to hell, and obesity cuts more years of your lifespan than smoking.
hntrader 1190 days ago [-]
It's a bit different to the intended meaning of toxic positivity in the article, which is about dishonest cheerfulness. Maybe we need a different name for what you're describing. Promoting metabolic disease as healthy, when it's one of the leading causes of early mortality, is certainly some type of toxicity ...
rimiform 1190 days ago [-]
Per the article: "Even the oppressive insistence that we should love our body, no matter what, can tip into upbeat intolerance by implying that it’s not OK to want to work on tummy folds or laugh lines."
It's certainly related.
antisthenes 1190 days ago [-]
This is just a corporation pandering to one of their demographics.
Toxic positivity is something that happens in interpersonal communication. It's meaningless praise and excitement, bordering on condescension. It usually also comes from a person who isn't really qualified to distinguish accomplishments from regular work, because they aren't an expert in the field.
arkitaip 1190 days ago [-]
That's a terrible example and your biases are showing.
inglor_cz 1190 days ago [-]
TBH saying that someone with BMI 30 is "healthy" is twisting the meaning of the word beyond recognition.
Is smoking healthy? Philip Morris would certainly like it if people believed that. Fortunately, they do not believe it anymore.
The false dichotomy of "either you hate fat people or you feed them positive bullshit" definitely looks like toxic positivity to me. No space for "your weight will likely cause you health problems down the line, here is how you can help it" there.
1190 days ago [-]
11eleven 1190 days ago [-]
Something that I realized is, negative thoughts and emotions are normal and part of life. It's the counterproductive or hurtful behaviors we may engage in, as a reaction to the negative thoughts or emotions, that we can try to avoid.
Feeling bad about having negative thoughts or emotions and being afraid to express them, only makes it more likely we'll engage in counterproductive coping behaviors.
kazen44 1190 days ago [-]
this raises a good point.
being negative is almost always culturally seen as a bad thing, especially in the US, while in would argue hiding your negativity is far worse in the long run because it occludes your state of mind to your peers.
having moments when life just truly sucks is absolutely normal, but expressing it happens is not.
throwaway5752 1190 days ago [-]
This is one of those cases where I think that a subtle change to fit the headline into HN submission constraints made is a lot worse.
The original is, "Trying to Stay Optimistic Is Doing More Harm Than Good"
"Toxic positivity" makes more sense in the context of the article, which is much more about personal mental health than general workplace behavior. It is not about other peoples' positivity, it is about accepting your own negative emotions as healthy. It is not about positive feedback in meetings. Anyway, it has reasonable parting advice:
Ho, the neuropsychologist, has an unexpected suggestion to help calibrate a Pollyanna perspective: a session watching Disney-Pixar’s Inside Out, which animates and dramatizes human emotions. "One of the best antidotes to toxic positivity is reexamining your value system and understanding that some of the best moments in life, when you truly feel good, are full of mixed emotions," she says. "And that’s what we should be embracing as human beings."
reedf1 1190 days ago [-]
I've got friends that suffer something like this but I have never been able to put it to words. The danger is when these fastidiously benevolent people implode without warning or giving any signal they may do so.
smitty1e 1190 days ago [-]
> "usually followed by the hashtag #blessed"
Among the oldest portions of the Bible is the Book of Job.
Well worth spending some time there to remember that, short of stage 4 cancer, there is generally room for things to worsen.
caturopath 1190 days ago [-]
Sometimes I've wondered if this keeps down ambition -- the only workplace I've been in where this is common, people seem to have a pretty low bar for success. I wonder if part of that is that folks think that they've achieved a lot when they get so much praise, even when they are not achieving a whole lot.
itronitron 1190 days ago [-]
It certainly keeps down quality. It takes hard and thoughtful work to actually think about and evaluate the work product of others to the point that constructive guidance can be offered. It's much easier to just say 'wow, that looks great' and smile.
kazen44 1190 days ago [-]
also, sometimes hard decisions with severe negative consequences have to be made. not being open about these kind of decisions because they are not "positive" does far more harm then good.
blackearl 1190 days ago [-]
It's hard when you work with really nice people. I was looking at rolling out a new app to my company and everyone was really positive on it during our testing. It was only after pressing people on whether they ran into any issues that I finally started getting some real feedback and complaints that were dealbreakers.
It gives me a bit of anxiety and imposter syndrome when everything is going too well. It's easy to fall into the line of thinking that "I can't be doing a perfect job, so maybe they're keeping up appearances while scouting a replacement?"
Critical feedback doesn't have to be cruel to be effective. No feedback or everything being roses can be nearly as bad as angry feedback.
29athrowaway 1190 days ago [-]
Psychological safety is being able to speak your mind without negative repercusions. Toxic positivity is not psychological safety.
Personally, I think psychological safety leads to another phenomenon: groupthink. By emphasizing harmony over everything else, groups suffering from groupthink apply self-censorship, silence is seen as agreement, and the ability to make rational decisions is lost. Not only that, but the group develops a strong identity and anyone who doesn't agree is seen as disloyal.
For a software engineering team, groupthink usually means becoming a death march towards failure.
There are at least two things that annoy the hell out of me:
1 Fake positivity
2 Co-workers that are "happy" to work during PTOs
The first one is described in the article. The second one is somewhat related to the first one or could even be the result of fake positivity. Working during a paid time off (PTO) is terrible for culture – makes your co-workers feel guilty if they won't spend a few hours at work during their PTO. I almost feel like an employee's access to Slack/E-mail should be restricted to read-only while they are on vacation.
If you are one of those two, stop kissing your manager's ass! Enjoy your vacation–forget about work.
conanbatt 1189 days ago [-]
I straight up thing its non-sensical to have PTO at all. IF you need time off, you take time unpaid time off and that's it. Why would the employer need to worry about your leisure at all?
It's a vestige from another era. The people that dont have bargaining power do not get PTO, and the ones that do get some sort mandated vacation time or economically punished otherwise by lower wages or higher taxation.
Working during PTO is bad, but it would be better for everyone to not have PTO at all, just TO.
458aperta 1190 days ago [-]
You pretty much described Vancouver, BC. One of the lowest average salary in North America, expensive housing, and normalized exploitation of labor. Fake positivity is just the cultural fact of life here and I think it hurts productivity.
We all know that because housing is so scarce, having a job or not can mean you have a roof over your heads or not. It's really disgusting the way they treat workers here. So of course there is going to be a Stockholm syndrome effect here.
Won't pay the market price but want the best. From what I've heard from insiders, they all do "surveys" with each other to fix wages since the 2000 dot come bubble collapse. The Vancouver Model is essentially: underpay your workers, demand the best and increase margins.
Then they wonder why we can't be like Silicon Valley. Most startups here get acquired by pre-primary market and very few ever IPO thus rendering stock options worthless.
It's no wonder that there is a massive brain drain going on and that startups here consist mostly of immigrant workers. I'm sure in some scale the exact same thing is taking place in SV but at least Indian engineers are making far more than what they would here in the Florida of Canada.
bluefirebrand 1189 days ago [-]
I found a lot of this behaviour in Victoria BC too. Similar enough and geographically close enough I guess.
Funny you should mention Florida though, because I recently was working with a team from there and their culture was also absolutely the "work on weekends and PTO" variety.
I wonder if it's a coastal thing.
458aperta 1189 days ago [-]
My theory is the instagram effect. People actually believe what they see is real and so the people living in those instagram photos believe i the "fake it till you make it" toxicity.
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lbblack 1190 days ago [-]
Personally, having a good attitude will be better over the long run than a bad attitude for mental health but lying to people won't solve anything. An over-excited spirit can be just as weakening as an under-excitied spirit.
To each their own, but I find be joyful or humourous during hard times is much better for people to be around than to be someone denying someone else's individual right to be happy.
indymike 1190 days ago [-]
I'm not a big Jack Welch (former GE CEO) fan. But I did catch an interview on a news program where they asked him how to succeed in business, and the answer was awesome: "Know the facts and act on them." Seems being artificially positive (or negative) is a great way to become detached from reality, and eventually, make a lot of very bad decisions.
taurath 1190 days ago [-]
Toxic positivity often comes from the idea that seeking happiness is the right goal always. If you believe that then you believe anyone who is not happy is somehow failing and you can give them a hand up. The right word I think should be contentment. Happiness is impossible to have all the time. You can have contentment pretty much all the time.
kazen44 1190 days ago [-]
thank you for this comment. it has described the kind of thinking that is important very well.
Jakobeha 1190 days ago [-]
The article's conclusion makes sense to me. Too much negativity is wrong for kind of obvious reasons. Too much positivity is also wrong, because not everything is positive so it sounds fake.
In my experience, the best outlook is to appreciate what is actually good in life (e.g. your qualities, good things that happen), and accept that what is bad (e.g. your flaws, bad things that happen), are bad.
Unfortunately if you barely have anything, than your life objectively sucks and no outlook is going to make you happy. But the thing is, I've seen a lot of people who are depressed that don't "barely have anything", they have food and shelter and qualities and things going on in their lives which should make them happy, but they still spend their time thinking about the things they don't have.
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bickeringyokel 1190 days ago [-]
I'm sure this is a problem in companies large enough to have a sizable HR department, but don't most of us work with a bunch of cretin engineers that always think everything anyone else does is wrong and a sales team that is never satisfied with the thing they asked for?
totemandtoken 1189 days ago [-]
Thanks god some else hates this as much as I do.
As someone who probably is intellectualizing some latent mental illness, I find a lot more value in just adopting a pessimistic view on life. I get that I'm extreme in this regard, but honestly I'd rather have a cultural shift towards a slightly gloomier view than this sugar-coating.
Pretty opinionated and preachy while mixing different things. I think a can-do attitude is something one should have within oneself, but it is something completely different from the emotions a person emits to the outside world.
Having a critical but positive look at the world is most likely very healthy, in the spirit of 'Change what you can and accept what you can not'. Constantly emitting a positive image, on the other hand, leads to the problems described in the article. But the problem is not the positivity, but the need to express it even it is not coming from within.
Don't be afraid, to share your true feelings, but try to view the world in a balanced way (now I was preachy myself...).
jariel 1190 days ago [-]
'Emotional Dishonesty'.
In a positive direction it's at least more palatable than otherwise, but it's still bad.
Orgs. that focus on emotional support and politics more than outcomes will feature this prominently.
Oddly - it may not matter. Sometimes pushing the cogs of ABC corp forward is mundane, and everything else that happens is just fluff talk, like the sign on the bathroom door, it doesn't change how many widgest were bought and sold, or like the language on the 'stop sign' in Canada: French or English it doesn't matter, it's just something irrelevant argue about instead of having an actual war about it.
6gvONxR4sf7o 1190 days ago [-]
There is a massive region encompassing both Instagram filtered perfection as well as gallows humor.
I agree completely that positivity can be forced to toxic levels, but I also see folks drop a plate or get something on their shirt and it’s the worst thing ever and the idea adopting a “whoops, oh well” laughing it off outlook appears to them as forced and toxic positivity. Positivity is great and not letting things get you down is really important if not taken too far.
So what’s the measure for too far versus not far enough? I feel like I see too far and not far enough on equal measure in my peer group.
where they argue that Goths subculture manages to deal with aging very well precisely because they eschew fake positivity and eternal youth and concentrate on deeper emotions and themes instead
breck 1190 days ago [-]
2 quotes I like :
I’d rather be part a-hole than full of sh-t.
If you can’t say something nice apologize later.
snthd 1190 days ago [-]
I can recommend Oliver Burkeman's book "The Antidote" "Happiness for People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking".
> That’s where self-doubt and reflection are elbowed aside in favor of a gung-ho, can-do spirit.
Honestly, the times I can recall doing this, nothing bad happened as a result.
Then again, I didn't follow it up by snorting cocaine or compulsively posting on Instagram.
I'm going to rankly speculate it those kinds of follow-up behaviors that turn a natural part of life into a glaringly obvious self-destructive plot the likes of Wonder Woman 1980.
Edit: clarification
mzan 1190 days ago [-]
During reading the article, it was impossible not thinking to this famous Italian pop single:
"
I'm out of the tunnel
of amusement
[...]
we live on memories, gentleman,
and games
sincere embraces, kisses and fires
of all those moments,
sad and amusing
and not on moments
that were sadly amusing
"
danieltillett 1190 days ago [-]
As a manager what every report wants is to be genuinely listened to by their manager. If you make the effort to really listen to what your report has to say you don’t need to worry about praise or other feedback.
The downside is real listening is incredibly time consuming - I struggle to get under 60 min per person per day (not all at once of course) without compromising its effectiveness.
pawelduda 1190 days ago [-]
Too much positivity at the workplace and at one point, it feels so empty and cringy. Especially when it's just words, as opposed to actions. Or a facade like other commenters have mentioned. The worst part is when you don't feel like playing along but have to or else risk being seen as the "party breaker".
1190 days ago [-]
pmoriarty 1190 days ago [-]
There's a great book about this, called The Dark Side of the Light Chasers:
The qualifier "toxic" makes this a meaningless statement. You wouldn't call it toxic positivity if it were a good thing. The question is whether positivity in general is better than negativity in general, and it sure seems like it is.
projectileboy 1190 days ago [-]
This is the result of a culture where companies will lay you off tomorrow to bump the stock a quarter point. Every single one of us is in a gig economy. You eat what you kill, and you can never, ever project weakness, unless you already have money.
netsharc 1190 days ago [-]
The author sadly throws Seligman under the bus by comparing him to the quack author of "The Secret". Seligman's work is more than just "Pessimism should be avoided", and he didn't say avoid negative feelings, but that there are 2 ways of seeing setbacks; the pessimist usually thinks it's permanent ("it will be bad forever"), pervasive ("everything is fucked") and personal ("it's because of me"). Meanwhile the optimist would see a problem as temporary, specific ("We just need to fix this thing") and not due to the self, but more to do with circumstances (e.g. "I didn't sleep well so I didn't perform that well").
So it's not about how to avoid acknowledging problems, it's about how you shape your mind to see and deal with problems...
noir_lord 1190 days ago [-]
As a lead I find the best approach is to just figure out the person on your team and use whatever approach suits their personality well.
On that topic, remember to say thank you when someone on your team gets you out of a jam, There are parts of the systems at work that I simply don't understand yet/never will because they are far outside of my team typically so if someone saves me a bunch of time because they happen to know that system, a thank you goes a long way - it's also an admission that as a lead you don't know everything.
I find "I don't know either, lets find out" opens a more productive dialogue than pretending you know everything - on top of which seniors (and good juniors) can spot a bluff anyway and you just lose credibility.
Almost any management style works if you are genuine, open and authentic.
hda2 1189 days ago [-]
This reminds me of the Rust "community". They exhibit a lot of this toxic positivity, often to the determent of the discussion. I wonder what drives people to harm themselves and others like this.
dshpala 1190 days ago [-]
I discussed this article with my team, and the responses were very positive!
mpweiher 1190 days ago [-]
For a long-form examination of this topic, I can heartily recommend Barbarah Ehrenreich's 2009 book Bright-sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America.
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mensetmanusman 1190 days ago [-]
Apparently the solution example is to watch ‘inside out’ (yes I cried).
Ecclesiastical stoicism has kept me sane this year simply because my expectations are so incredibly low.
the_resistence 1189 days ago [-]
This is profound. It's a horrible extension of the participation medals mentality which drags down average performance and effort expended.
patcon 1190 days ago [-]
Wow, this comment section is like a flame for all the type-A moths (straight feedback; boo to "false encouragement" etc etc). Please understand, readers, that you are participating in a VERY misrepresentative subset. I believe this title really hit a nerve with y'all, and seems you swarmed in here.
aritmo 1190 days ago [-]
That's not "positivity". That's 'gratuitous praise'.
everdrive 1190 days ago [-]
Toxic positivity seems to be a major method of communication for human resources.
occamrazor 1190 days ago [-]
What’s wrong with “At least”? What is the implied rest of the sentence?
rimiform 1190 days ago [-]
"At least you still have a job (even if it sucks)"
JimTheMan 1190 days ago [-]
And further to that, by saying that sentence the person is not acknowledging someone’s pain and suffering. They are dismissing their concerns.
rubyist5eva 1190 days ago [-]
Being disingenuous is bad. In other news: water is wet. More at 11.
dade_ 1189 days ago [-]
As this is HN....
"An optimist will tell you the glass is half-full; the pessimist, half-empty; and the engineer will tell you the glass is twice the size it needs to be."
Oscar Wilde
When I was a kid, I read somewhere that if you smile all the time it will make you feel happier. I decided to try it. I smiled all the time whether I was feeling happy or not. It worked. It made me feel better.
Say what you want, but I enjoy feeling happy, and if I have to engage in a bit of mental convolution to achieve it I'm all for it whether it is a lie or not.
williesleg 1190 days ago [-]
Needful H1B's are always positive.
And I'm positive they're destroying our IT infrastructure, one project at a time.
They do the minimum to make it appear it works so they get it off their desk. Just like their home country. What a fucking mess.
Because you linked to a site that brutally punishes users who browse in private mode, I had to search for alternate articles.
cma 1190 days ago [-]
Apparently Bloomberg is now breaking the back button on mobile.
bryzaguy 1190 days ago [-]
You know what’s more toxic than toxic positivity? Diagnosing your coworkers with a writer invented, empathy devoid term because they annoy you. Is this opinion piece helpful?
Rendered at 12:05:07 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
Examples: "I'm really {proud,impressed} of all of you for your output this sprint", "You guys are {killing,crushing,owning} it", "You all should be very proud of what you guys did", etc.
These aren't given after periods of crunch time, they're literally every week to the point where it feels so contrived and artificial. They're given when we're just doing normal, expected work.
I've mentioned this to colleagues and friends and there seems to be two camps of people: those who want constant positive reenforcement and those who it completely has the opposite effect, an annoyance. I guess I fall into the latter.
If you are leading and or managing a team, one of the most important things you need to know are how do people want their feedback. My experience is that it varies from person to person (I suspect that there are many more than two camps :-)) and as such it is unlikely that you can meet that need in group feedback.
Because of that, my choice these days is to split feedback into two fora, the group status meeting and 1:1s. In the group, feedback is modulated by progress against plan. So "we need to work harder" for behind plan, "neutral" for on plan, and "this team is killing it" for ahead of plan. In 1:1s the feedback is based on the expectations that have been set for that team member, do they know what is expected of them? Do they know how it is being measured? And where are they with respect to measurement vs expectation.
1:1 feedback often times (for me) takes on more of a mentor/mentee tone rather than a how are we doing on the schedule tone. Doing that well also requires a certain amount of trust which, as a manager, you have to earn by being honest with your team members.
Point 1 : "Be Specific". I can not stress this enough. Please point out specific observable behaviour.
Point 2 : Frame feedback in terms of team/organisational goals. Every team has a purpose within the organisation. It's a team game and every team member should know the feedback in context of the team game. Individual feedback, team context.
Point 3 : Cite the past but look for future changes in behaviour. You can not change the past but you can influence the future.
For example, "Hey John! When you do X, it helps the team achieve Y. Please continue doing so!" or "Hey John! When you do Z, it lets the team down. What can you do differently?".
To me and probably many others (albeit often subconsciously), point 3 comes across as blaming, overly-generalized, and lacking in personal (and group) accountability for your experiences.
What about something like,
"Hey John, the last time you did X, Y happened, which had Z consequences.
I felt { disappointed / let down / concerned / irritated / worried / angry / $whatever_emotions_came_up_for_YOU }.
Other team members reported feeling $emotions.
What was going on there for you?
How can I / we help you to avoid X in the future?
Do you have any ideas about what you could focus or work on in order for Y not to happen again?
Here are some specific requests I have for you in order to avoid this kind of thing in the future: $requests "
The edgy part about this for many people is taking ownership for their experience, we live in a society with a lot of deconditioning around this . Nobody else but you is responsible for how you feel. John didn't let you down, you had expectations about what he was going to do, and to your assessment, he didn't meet those expectations (that's also a reasonable thing to say, I think -- I would give more detail and context about specifically how those expectations weren't met). That you felt one way or another about this has nothing to do with John, and there's a lot of subtle and overt problems that can arise in a relationship when we attribute our experience to another person with our language.
I also mention that it sounds overly-generalized because saying "when you do X" has an implicit assumption that he will continue doing X in the future, and isn't really all that specific about why X has certain consequences - I think it's better to use specific situations in the past when X happened and to talk about what came up when that occurred. This is basically what I'm hearing you say in Point 2 :)
edit: fixed variables, wording
You can try and change yourself to make things work, but it's not always the right or even healthy way to approach a problem.
You can try and help your colleagues, you can rely on them less, or you can quit your job. Blaming your colleagues and making them responsible for your feelings means feeling shitty and feeling powerless to feel better.
This is where we disagree. John did let you down. It's OK to blame him. It's OK to be a normal person that reacts to other people's actions and not some kind of zen robot. And recognizing that someone else's behavior causes you to feel shitty doesn't make you powerless to change.
You are responsible for your own emotions. Recognizing that doesn't make you a zen robot. You can still feel. But don't put those feelings on other people and make them responsible for making you feel the way you want to feel.
You can recognize patterns for your emotions, like "I get sad when people make fun of me", but that doesn't mean that you have to be sad when people make fun of you. Recognizing the distinction is what gives power to change.
And sure, there are limits. The feelings that arise when tortured for example are rooted in physiology and near unavoidable. But I suspect that John didn't let you down by waterboarding you.
But indeed can think of things the other person could do better / improve upon. (However, maybe only "criticizing" isn't so nice)
I've heard this referred to as "feedforward" before (as opposed to feedback). Instead of saying "last time you did X, you made a mistake and should instead do Y" you phrase it "next time you do X, make sure to do Y". It's subtle, with the goal of avoiding defensiveness.
That will just get me angry. If you screw up your commitments that’s on you. Own up to it and talk to your stakeholders. Don’t make me work harder for your mistakes.
Sometimes working harder is warranted. Some salesperson screwed up, and it’s not really possible to reneg the multi million dollar contract. “I’m sorry guys, what can we do?”
- the team is actually responsible for the date—often, there's massive asymmetric pressure to aim for less time - if it's an actual deadline, the team has the autonomy to adjust scope to hit it
In my experience, the worst situations happen when estimates are treated like deadlines. An estimate has to have uncertainty. Without some way to manage uncertainty, you'd have to pad estimates out to like the 99th percentile to hit them consistently, but people read estimates as averages and push back against that. If teams are consistently going over estimates, it's a problem in how you do estimates, not how you're working. (Which is also why evaluating people's performance based on how well they hit estimates—which seems common on a lot of teams—is completely misguided. Estimating is a nice skill to have, but it matters far, far less than the quality of the work people actually do!)
On the other hand, a deadline is only a deadline if you're willing to adjust scope to hit it. If there is a real deadline and it looks like we might not hit it, the answer isn't "try to be more productive" (which is all that "work harder" actually means!). Instead, we should figure out how we can change what we're focusing on and what we're concretely building in order to still hit the underlying goal as well as possible with the time remaining. If we're working towards an estimate rather than a deadline, we might still adjust scope and focus, but the first step would be adjusting and sharing a new estimate.
But if the culture is that estimates are hard commitments and you can't adjust the scope or the timeline, the work environment is going to be absolutely miserable, people will get stressed out for no real reason and the quality of the work is going to suffer. People will do whatever it takes to technically achieve estimates, even if that means cutting corners everywhere, sweeping bugs under the carpet, not spending any time to iterate or improve on the system and indefinitely putting off engineering work that has a small cost now but gives a massive medium- to long-term benefit in productivity. A month or two into this process and you move towards a death march that burns everyone out and, on the time scale of months, accomplishes substantially less than a less aggressive approach would have.
I'm currently working with a team that has this problem to some extent—of course, the managers think of it as "accountability" and "a focus on delivery"—and in a bit over a year, they've built a codebase that already feels like a legacy mess, while accomplishing what would have been like eight months' worth of work with a better engineering approach. It's pretty frustrating to see and I'm trying to change things, but not sure whether I'm going about it effectively.
I see the whole "agile" movement as a response to this problem. In an effort to mitigate the "error bars" of an estimate a process that iterates over 2 week sprints allows for estimate corrections during development. It isn't obvious to everyone but this is just upping the sample rate on the estimation signal to get a better handle on the noise and thus the signal to noise ratio.
-------------
Yeah, that's a great observation on Agile. Smaller but more accurate estimates + cheaper small course corrections.
The dual is that the rest of the organization needs to adapt too—good short-term estimates don't necessarily give you good long-term estimates! So we need loosely coupled, self-sufficient teams that don't depend on accurate estimates from other teams.
I've always hated formal Agile processes (especially Scrum) but I have to work with teams that use them, so I did a bunch of reading about it. The goals and even a lot of the concrete ideas behind it made a lot of sense! It's just that every single concrete instance of the process fell short. I've seen several concrete failure modes in practice:
1. Scrum-flavored micromanagement. People (not necessarily formal managers) use the process to dictate exactly what everyone else needs to work on at practically a daily granularity.
2. Siloing. People are incentivized to only work on "their" tasks—ad hoc collaboration with teammates, trying out speculative design ideas and experiments, figuring out better ways to do something, all get in the way of finishing your tickets, which makes you look flaky in inevitably awkward group meetings.
3. Loss of context. People see that the process helps the team switch priorities, so they switch focus every sprint. Couple this with micromanagement, and you get individuals moved around on wholly unrelated tasks. Too much context switching adds a lot of mental overhead and makes it much harder to build anything with a coherent design and vision (either from a product or from an engineering standpoint).
4. Performance mismeasurement. The whole process is supposed to help the team with estimates. Tracking metrics the process generates and treating them as a way to measure individual performance (whether formally, or just through peer pressure) doesn't work well and is awful for morale.
I haven't seen it, but I bet it is possible to have a Scrum process—or, more likely, something lighter like Kanban—that avoids these problems. But I believe that even idealized Agile processes put too much weight on consistency for its own sake. Making consistent incremental progress helps with estimates and, I suppose, makes the team somewhat easier to manage, but none of that matters nearly as much as, say, quality of work and impact!
Even if nothing from the Agile process makes it into formal performance evaluations, the ceremonies almost seem designed to create peer pressure around it. And that affects day-to-day job satisfaction a lot more than mere performance reviews. Although maybe this is another thing that goes away if you have high-trust teams that are legitimately self-organizing the way Agile is supposed to be... But I'm not sure even that would compensate for the pressure implicitly exerted by the structure of the process.
I bring this up because over-emphasizing consistency imposes a cost on people—individuals get a lot less flexibility in how they work, and end up feeling stress when they're less productive than normal. I tend to think an ideal environment should embrace inconsistency day-to-day and even week-to-week or month-to-month but that requires massive differences in culture. If a team pulls it off, the process starts mattering a lot less!
What's most important is that the feedback is IMMEDIATE. Tell me after a presentation what I flubbed. Don't tell me after a quarter that my presentation skills are lacking.
Why do you think telling your team this is useful? https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/about-fathers/201202...
> "We praise drawings ... because we want our kids to continue to work hard, and to do good work... But what we really want to teach our children... is that they should do good work because of the satisfactions it provides."
While I understand how this could apply to children (if not necessarily agree), we don't manage teams to have fun, we do want to encourage them to do good work.
As for the wider question, if a team is doing really good work, why not give credit where it's due? I feel like not acknowledging when people are putting in extra effort is a great way to discourage them from doing that.
Like others have said, effect of praise would be very specific to individuals, but some have said praise hasn't helped them much. It definitely has not helped me, so here is my reasoning as to why you should not praise a good team. For me, stop the praise, tell me how to be better, and show me you care about me improving, and care about me on a personal level. Yes, I know that when I work hard and give you good output, it helps company, I don't need people to tell me that I worked hard. I can see it (If your company prevents your employees from seeing the effect of their output, thats the problem, don't say praise is necessary. The boss should not try to be the feedback loop). The reverse pavlovian effect can kick in otherwise: If it doesn't come when I am working hard, I feel bad. Also, the boss does not control reality, so becoming my feedback loops is bad, because he can warp reality based on his perspective.
It looks like this is highly specific to individuals though, the above works for me.
My understanding is that they were mostly referring to "fake" / superfluous praise, which I too respond quite badly to. But I think there's a big range between that kind of praise and no praise at all. Personally for me (and my guess is that for many people), if no matter how hard I work that's never acknowledged and I always get suggestions for improvement, that would create frustration and a feeling of unreasonable expectations from the company.
Celebration is important. But praise is cheap. Maybe some managers think its okay to just say "great job" + more praise, and then implicitly say next piece of work please, but I don't think it is.
Could you elaborate? I would agree that random praise from a manager is not an especially good way to evaluate how well one is doing. But to me, "doing a good job" inherently depends on things that aren't purely determined by introspection.
Here's a scenario for example: I do things for people, that are well received, my manager talks to other people, and it leads to people outside my department asking for special projects.
I create something, of which I'm reasonably proud, and it gets copious praise from the requestor. But it turns out, I learn through the grapevine, there are several people who I never came in contact with, who are the actual intended end users, who ultimately refuse to use it at all, because it doesn't fit into their workflow, because the manager who asked me to do it doesn't understand it.
Without external feedback, there's no way to tell what effect I'm having on the organization and the world. And I would think that every employee at any level has to deal with this.
Another interesting thing was at the end of one of the last projects. There was a survey where we could choose between a Patagonia shirt and a plaque. Guess what? The majority voted for the plaque. That was astonishing to me but a good reminder that I seem to be different.
If I wanted a shirt, I'd buy a shirt. If the plaque truly reflected some effort done by the team that accomplished something big and deserved proper recognition, I get why people would prefer it. You can't buy respect.
Now, of course the cynical me will argue that the whole thing is a trick question and that no one of the alternatives are good - downright offensive actually.
And it was full of this kind of nonsense - plaques, award ceremonies, teeny-tiny presents as bonuses, and so on.
Cynicism and offence are perfectly reasonable and fair reactions.
Good management knows what people want. Even better management recognizes that someone is burning out and gives the time-off even when they'd prefer cash.
There's a third minor option. Gift certificates for company swag. It's almost never used, because people find it insulting.
Holy shit. This is incredible. I’d be curious what management forced you to do during this period. Longer hours?
I wish there was some “fucked company” equivalent for tracking corporate charades like this.
:-/ Nothing is worse than being stuck on a company boat trip. You can't arrive late, and you can't leave early! Also no where to hide or duck out for a bit. Literally stuck on the boat.
When I learned that my all-weekender overtime was only to keep an internal deadline, I started look for a new position immediately.
In general you can't trust/take seriously whatever the management says, except for 1. specific information reflected in the HR systems and 2. the specific tasks/deadlines/etc. assigned to you and the related progress/delivery/etc. discussions.
Specifically, when it comes to public praise, the manager publicly praising his team/dept/org is actually praising themselves while supposedly being publicly modest/coy by not explicitly praising themselves, and this is why management loves making those praises.
(I also recognize the inherent irony of doing this in a thread about empty praise, heh.)
Isn't it the managers job to figure out what each individual on the team needs to perform?
I'm still not sure who is fake and who is sincere about this stuff.
We have a weekly status meeting with the first section dedicated to "how are we winning" -- which is like awesome if you are a baseball team but when you are rolling out incremental features to a modest app and dealing w routine operational concerns it's hard to get that excited about "nothing caught on fire this week" or "we did the thing we said we'd do".
And we have these horrible self and peer appraisals that we have to do where you are expected to describe routine competence in terms that should normally be reserved for a someone who rescued all the kittens and puppies from a pet store fire.
False positive emotions are usually the result of someone denying the acceptance of truth. What ever that truth may be.
This is probably going to sound super corny but YMMV. The psychological impacts of denial are devastating. The psychological impacts of love, acceptance and forgiveness are limitlessly fruitful.
I see a lot of HN posts recently on the existence of these superhuman developers with god-like abilities or productivity. Everybody on this planet is human, yet we interact with others intellect or knowledge as if it were a static state. It's not. Every human mind is quite literally, a quantum computer. Anyone can grow their intellect or wisdom or maturity, it just takes the proper push in the right direction and some guts.
I say this to my team a lot, even though they're operating as "expected" levels for my company.
The reality is there are a lot of teams and a lot of companies that simply do not expect much from their teams. We do. I want to remind the team that they are doing good work.
When people have confidence they're doing a good job, they're more likely to continue to do a good job.
I'm not one of Pavlov's dogs.
It's different when it comes from a technical peer or a technical manager. There it definitely means more.
Closer to my point though, it was the continued repetition of the positive reinforcement. I'm talking a weekly occurrence where the situation did not call for the reinforcement. It felt fake and, to me, had the opposite effect as intended.
give real praise only when it's deserved. support and compassion, however, should always be readily at hand.
I do agree with the general sentiment of the parent post though. Having managed IT (operations not development) when good work is done, often the intention is that no one notices. Therefore the broader organisation may not have sufficient awareness that anything of value has been achieved.
In such circumstances I believe it is up to the manager to both manage up in terms of making the team's achievement known and recognised, as well as represent the organisation and acknowledge the team's work.
A few of the posts above are essentially prescribing using STAR to offer feedback, which I think is more thoughtful than just generic words of affirmation. This can be made even more authentic if you take the time to talk to affected stakeholders and gather real testimonials to pass back to the team.
To me it would come down to whether I think other person is praising my work just to get more of it done just for the praise (I'd have negative reaction), or whether he just likes it that much personally (neutral to mildly positive reaction).
Praise implies being in a position to praise at all. Having some authority or mastery with regard to what is praised.
Often enough, I am that authority. I don’t expect praise from my clients. I’m getting payed precisely because they lack the mastery I offer.
Instead I would be happy to hear about their true feelings. Stories of gratitude, or relief, or whatever else happened in their life that I might have played a role in.
It's just part of the communication style of someone, or even part of a culture of a country. If it bothers me, and it is the relationship I care about or looks to be long term, I may ask the person to communicate differently with me.
But most of the time I get praise from random people on the internet, and I just interpret it that they are grateful for my contributions, regardless of what they say.
Sometimes they want something from me, and are probably not comfortable with just asking for it, so they pad the communication with some praise about the software or me. Some state that they're uncomfortable asking for help more directly, some just add praise at the beginning/end of each reply. (which gets kinda strange after 3-4 interactions :))
It's nice if someone communicates more directly, but I can try to understand the other people, too, regardless of communication style.
They're just as liable to continue doing a shit job, and with the confidence that your opinion isn't worth a dram.
I'm always surprised with how many people (especially at this site?) doesn't seem to like praise and approval.
Fork DogeCoin, when someone goes above and beyond, reward them more each week.
When they want, they can use dogecoin to do something like 20% time.
I'm just following on the satirical nature of the parent comment here, don't take this as a real suggestion.
If you personally don’t like positivity which isn’t fake, then it might be good to dig into that. I have a hard time with fake positivity but genuine positivity is usually acceptable.
i find it fascinating that the same "positivity" turned in another, more humane direction (ie. "you guys showed up today, that's fantastic!!", or "we failed but who cares, we rock anyways") can transform into something that i think actually serves a purpose - forging a robust spirit. i actually appreciate that attitude in my peers. it's funny how razor thin the difference between what we are each describing. it's the same thing - unflappable, stupid belief - but applied for different ends.
thanks for the thought prompt!!!!
Now I will call out a bad sprint, and I’ll praise even more after a great sprint, but it seems to be me that just making our deadlines week after week is something to be genuinely happy for.
I used to be much more cynical about unwarranted praise/positivity. My mind has pretty much been changed by my current job, our team lead doesn't communicate how he's feeling to our team at all and this has had negatively affects on not just my morale/happiness but my teammates' as well.
That alone would be manageable. Yet, this behavior is often expected from others too, which creates an environment that, at least to me, is incredibly suffocating. What's worse, such an environment caused two problems for me:
First, by upping the average of "relatively perceived as positive", objectively neutral people are perceived as negative. I've actually had colleagues go into emotional distress and vent to me over this.
Second, it at least seems like overly positive environments are afraid of criticism and critical people. As a critical person myself, it has been incredibly difficult to navigate such an environment and it lead to me essentially becoming an assembly line worker who "just shuts up and does their job". Also anecdotal, without critical people, going into the wrong direction either ends up being corrected very slowly, or not at all (and given how multi-dimensional work tends to be, going into the wrong or nowhere-near-optimal direction is very likely).
As a result, to me, no feedback at all is only slightly worse than overly frequent, overly positive feedback.
Most weeks at work are completely benign where we're not doing "amazing" work, we're doing "work". We're doing our salaried jobs as expected.
It's frustrating when every Jira ticket that gets closed is some moral victory that needs to be held high. It's not, it's our jobs and it's frustrating to deal with the faux positivity when I just want to do my job.
And of course the whole political game where people have to send congratulations just to signal that they’re part of leadership
Not having PMs and PdMs is a massive benefit of smaller orgs. Do everything you can to avoid hiring these people.
Of course I appreciate the effort of being "nice" but when you're not doing it out of genuine care for someone I'd much rather just be treated in a neutral way, like you'd treat any human being you encountered that you knew nothing about. I don't much enjoy being treated as an old friend by someone who wouldn't lend me five bucks, and I don't enjoy being asked polite questions that require elaborate answers when you really don't want to listen to the answer and your eyes glaze over within the first seconds.
Adults have left their insecurities behind them and should understand they're not, at least initially, the friend of every human being and shouldn't have a problem with being treated in a professionally reserved way.
European in America : "Jesus, everyone here is so fake and annoying."
Classroom teaching is not highly dependent on technology and low-tech solutions are often better.
Your suggested solution asks teachers to give up a day of their time (unpaid?) for what you think is important, without listening to what teachers actually find difficult about their jobs.
Even if what you are saying is right and genuinely helpful, it won't immediately look like a good solution to the teachers or to the administration.
Or something like that anyway; I never really figured out this whole thing in the time I lived there.
Here's a chart to help you get started: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DL8gbEoX0AAcwAq?format=jpg&name=...
Personally I love cutting through bullshit but it it can often land wrong.
This thread is pretty irritating for being kind of clueless to the reality that every culture on earth is going to have trappings like this and the alleged stoicism of Russia and Germany are no exception. (Thinking someone is simple or mentally ill because they smile too much is already such a trapping.)
Don’t ask a question and completely ignore the answer.
Don’t give platitudes when they could spend some effort and saying what a team member did well. It’s the same in dating, don’t tell someone they are beautiful, go the extra mile.
At least I think this is what people mean by “fake” but I’m not sure.
The sort of always smiling, always laughing stereotypical American waiter or something would be perceived as juvenile, fake or not very bright over here.
The dynamic range is higher, versus having to figure out the difference between smiling and mega-ultra-smiling (as in the USA).
As a Latin American, I studied aboard in the US for a year, and I felt Americans were way colder than us.
I wouldn’t say we’re fake about our warmness. But maybe Europeans could associate that with being fake?
Our culture tends to pick and choose from the best of either the American or the European approach. We don't always get it right, and the combination/middle ground isn't necessarily better than either of the alternatives, but I do feel like we have some general insight and sympathy to both the European and the American philosophies.
I've also lived as an ex-pat in Europe for 4 years working closely with both Europeans and AMericans.
In this regard, I think the American approach is superior.
1) Europeans are overly sensitive about "micro-friendliness". I've heard people complain that the cashier at the grocery store asks "How are you doing?". "They don't really care, why do they ask!"
I've had to explain that no, they don't care, but that moment of friendliness is still a pleasant one, and over the course of the day, all those moments add up to a generally positive contribution to one's existence.
Americans do take faux-friendliness over the top (especially if it's only reserved for the local in-group, see: southern "hospitality"), but I think the Europeans need to lighten up a bit.
2) While I don't need my waitresses to be so friendly to the point that they seem like they're flirting with you, the European waitstaff at restaurants are far from neutral, and are actively disinterested in your hospitality experience. This doesn't apply to fancy high-end restaurants, of course. But just a general casual lunch or dinner you're just not going to get the same quality of service as you do in North America.
While I abhor tipping, I can't help but think that it does create some positive incentives in staff here.
That's just circling back to North America and Continental Europe having diametrically opposed notions of what good service means and what social interactions are desirable.
At the risk of sounding like a prick, a good staff member here is someone who makes themselves completely invisible from customers while keeping the shop running smoothly. Having a waiter trying to build a rapport with me because ultimately I have to be the one paying them instead of their boss is infuriating, and the intrusion of a third party into my table-size privacy bubble is extremely unwelcome.
You went out into public to have a meal, why are you expecting privacy? If you wanted privacy, get takeout and eat at home.
Seeking eye contact with the waiter isn’t that inconvenient either...
But for me I have very happy memories of talking with waiters in mom and pop restaurants, at the same time I do feel tipping increases the incentive to talk with customers so... it comes back to honesty, do you really want to talk or does it JUST increase the probability of tipping?
This is more of an expectations thing; certainly in Dutch, asking "how are you doing" is something you do when you ask when you really want to start a conversation, and you expect a somewhat serious reply in return, whereas in some other cultures it essentially just means "hi" with no expectation of a real answer beyond "good" or some such.
When I worked for an Irish company I had some coworkers say "how are ya" when meeting in the hallway or some such; I started replying serious ("yeah, I'm good, last night I [..]") but they didn't really expect an answer so continued walking leaving us both confused; me as they didn't stop, and them as I started a conversation. It led to some awkward-y situations before I figured this out haha
At any rate, I don't think it's "sensitivity", it's just that these words are taken to have a different meaning. These are the kind of subtle things about learning a language; you can know all the words and grammar, but you also need to learn what's meant with them, and that can actually be pretty hard. Translating a simple sentence such as this is easy, but really understanding what's intended (which may differ on the tone of voice, location, context, etc.) is really hard, and even Europeans who speak good English but haven't spent a lot of time in English-speaking countries tend to fail at this (I certainly did) as it's not really something you can learn from communicating in English over text either.
I've also heard Italians, French, and Swiss complain about it.
The issue wasn't the language, it was the faux cheeriness that came with it.
Uggghhhh, I loath being asked that. Firstly, the staff are forced to say it as part of their job and they are checked. It’s inhuman to make someone do that. Also it fucks with my head - now I feel forced to do some interaction to lessen the evil of their work day (it is always shitty jobs) and I find it draining by sympathy. It breaks the humanness of just being polite and thankful to anyone you interact with that is working hard (even if they are tired, emotionally drained, or don’t want to be there).
> especially if it's only reserved for the local in-group, see: southern "hospitality"
Can you explain that?
> tipping, I can't help but think that it does create some positive incentives in staff here.
Tipping is outright disgusting: paying people to be nice just creates inhuman fakeness. The image of some fat leering arsehole, or ugly souled woman, getting their ego stroked by a young wage slave is abhorrent. The worst I ever saw was young American tourists on the coast of Mexico (a small town called San Francisco I think) - the way the tourists treated the staff was wretchedly vile (maybe due to the staff being mostly poor and Mexican?)
Edit: that sounded a bit US bashing, so I will add that I have met many wonderful, kind, interesting and friendly Americans. I have even been treated to Southern Hospitality and it seemed genuine enough to me (even though me and my partner essentially just gate-crashed their party on short notice!). Being white and kiwi might help my impressions though...?!
Edit: in my experience Canadians and New Zealanders have similar outlooks.
> can you explain that?
I think you touched upon it in your last paragraph acknowledging being white and kiwi.
It is such an overwhelming force of human friendliness and welcomeness, that you assume it must be genuine human connection.
Except try being gay, black, or an atheist, and see how quickly all that turns...
As far as the rest of your points, I think you're exaggerating a bit. Most people (at least in north america) don't mind being micro-friendly as part of a service job. Sure, yes, it's "required", but the ratio of monstrous leering arseholes is not high, and while it's tiring to be friendly by the end of a long workday at a grocery store, people don't feel it to be a fundamentally dehumanizing act.
I think the bigger problem with tipping is situations where it allows employers to pay less than minimum wage - that is abhorent. Getting a tip shouldn't be a requirement to get to a living wage. But as an incentive to being a little more engaged with your job? I think it's good.
> Edit: in my experience Canadians and New Zealanders have similar outlooks.
We are alike in many ways. We both live in the shadow of a larger, brasher arrogant power who dismisses us, and people on the other side of the world lump us in together with them.
But no, when it comes to restaurants, service culture, tipping, and micro-friendliness in public Canadians are much closer to Americans than to New Zealanders.
Some of them hate asking you too. Sometimes it's a policy forced on them by management, and they are to be fined if they skipped a customer. Overheard this in the bus, a cashier was complaining to her friend. There were cameras installed at every register specifically for that.
To be honest, the cashiers and waitresses I've talked to in the US delivered a pretty good act, totally believable. When the big chain stores in my country decided to copy the US, the lack of acting skills in our culture was very noticeable.
As a Brit I feel this way, I personally don't ask someone how they're doing unless I'm interested in the answer, but the rhetorical How are you doing? is used plenty in Britain.
How do you do? has fallen out of common usage but traditionally the proper response was How do you do?
Not bashing, let's be clear on that. But this keeps catching me off-guard, every time. Have to work on finally overcoming it. It seems it's an American tradition to say "hi, how are you?" and not just "hello" (namely, it's not a question but a greeting).
I found that it can be useful to consider "Hi, how are you?" as a friendly game of catch. At the basic level you can reply "'Sall right, how _you_ doin'?" You've caught the ball and tossed it back. Even if you are walking in different directions down the hall this will work... or even looking up and saying "hey" is acknowledging the ball in the air. In an "office" this probably would work fine, but I have always been either self-employed or worked in small businesses. So I don't know if this would work on the 24th floor.
In day to day life... I imagine the person at the check out counter has a repetitive job that can be quite dreary if all they are doing is punching buttons all day without any engagement... asking the same questions: "Did you find everything?" "Do you have any coupons?" "How are you doing today?" So when I can I try to catch the ball, paint it a different color and toss it back. It's a two part process How are you doing? #1 catch the ball: "I made it this far, I'm gonna keep going." #2 toss it back: "How are you keeping up?"
You can have dozens of responses for for each part... mix & match... Silliness can get you bonus points. It's just a game. You will discover ways in which a few words can make it so that you're having a bit more fun, the checkout person (or server, or phone support person, or...) can also get a few giggles while grinding through their, perhaps miserable, job... hey, everybody wins.
My brain has these days taught itself to translate that “how are you” == “hello”, so these days I just answer “hey”, which feels weird but a lot of things do in English. Or if I’m not feeling great, I won’t respond at all, because apparently that’s fine too and the person asking isn’t really asking. (This is why this Fake niceness, in itself, can be depressing)
As scripture says, 'Faithful are the wounds of a friend'. Sometimes the best thing we need is a little vinegar that is in our actual/tangible/observable best interest.
This is usually mandated somewhere up the chain. They don't have a choice if they want to keep their jobs.
It's not some subset of real positivity that is toxic, it's just... not actual positivity. It's an act.
"Don't worry, it'll get better."
People genuinely believe that and for many things, it's true. For someone with a chronic and severe mental illness with no known cure? We're sick of hearing it.
There is no better for me. I'll never be completely free of suicidal thoughts or medication side-effects. I will never be free from degree of pain and suffering many people don't understand.
Does that make me unhappy? Frequently but I'm used to hurting all the time and I try to make the best of it.
For more: https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-toxic-positivity-509395...
But being lead in circles of doom talk and complaining by someone who is inconsolable naturally leads to vacuous sayings like it is what it is, it's not as bad as it seems, or count your blessings, only because I have to say something in reply despite not having any answers.
I completely understand and my reply comes out of very hard experiences from decades of helping people.
Humans are emotional beings. We want to help. We hurt when we can’t. We feel guilty. The natural response is to say or do anything to make that guilt go away. This is a deep, hardwired response. It is a natural response and a good one. I consider this to be one of humanity’s best traits.
But it is not a good response in this situation. My goal is to help people. If I am to do that, nothing I say should said out of my own feelings of guilt or helplessness.
I’ve learned to embrace guilt and acknowledge it’s there but also tell it it is not helpful in that moment. I need to do what I know is right, not what I feel is right.
Hand and hand with this is letting go of the belief we have control. We can not save people who don’t want to be saved. There is only so much we can do. And we will fail. I’ve lost friends I’ve wished I could have saved but I know there were no words. Therefore, I have no responsibility for their actions.
As a very wise person once said,
It is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose. That is not a weakness. That is life.
I think people might say this so as to make themselves feel better. Or perhaps it's a (bad) shortcut for "oh that sucks, I hope it will get better".
> I'll never be completely free of suicidal thoughts or medication side-effects. I will never be free from degree of pain and suffering many people don't understand.
I'm one of the people who don't understand, but I think there is at least some distant theoretical possibility it will get better?
> I try to make the best of it.
"Sometimes we don't get to choose the role we play, but we always get to choose how well we play the role."
Not likely. Our understanding of mental health is still extremely primitive.
Bipolar gets worse over time, not better. Medication can stop it from getting worse, but it is far from a cure.
I can get behind that notion. I've had friends who were chronically positive. It gelded our friendship because they hoarded all the negative stuff in their life.
Yes. The article started out with the psychologist explaining how the client was looking for fake doctor's notes just to avoid going to work because the client didn't feel "totally positive" that day. That's toxic positivity, the feeling that you can't outwardly display anything less than complete cheerfulness, that you have to bottle up any problem inside and not let it out.
I kind of like it, without sincere emotions something was missing (like when a horse is gelded).
“Our language is an imperfect instrument created by ancient and ignorant men. It is an animistic language that invites us to talk about stability and constants, about similarities and normal and kinds, about magical transformations, quick cures, simple problems, and final solutions. Yet the world we try to symbolize with this language is a world of process, change, differences, dimensions, functions, relationships, growths, interactions, developing, learning, coping, complexity. And the mismatch of our ever-changing world and our relatively static language forms is part of our problem.” - Wendell Johnson
Nice, albeit terribly useless, soundbite.
> And the mismatch of our ever-changing world and our relatively static language forms is part of our problem
Hegel and his merry-band of psuedo-intellectuals like this clown (Johnson) are the reason philosophy isn't taken seriously as it used to.
I like my job, and I will gladly take it over a workplace with toxic negativity, but it's still been somewhat exhausting. There's that underlying anxiety that if you're somehow not seen as exuding the correct level of positivity, that you might get let go.
Everyone at the company is constantly patting themselves on the back about how it's "the greatest place to work in the world" and that they have "the most incredible co-workers". This makes it hard to disagree with things or point out things that aren't working, because everyone is so afraid to hurt somebody's feelings.
I don't know if it's because I'm french but that kind of thing makes me throw up in my mouth and is a super big turn-off. Some things sucks, it's fine, accept it and move on or try to make them better through actions. Words don't make things better.
Agree, having a colleague with a negative disposition (< 3rd percentile of general population) is in my view much, much worse than colleagues that exude the normal amount of fake positivity, even though the latter is annoying and draining and is more deceitful than the former.
thanks
Thanks.
Thanks
Thanks!
It suffers from not only being optimistic when you shouldn't be, but also being overly optimistic in situations. I pretty much only experience these behaviors in workplaces.
I think a lot of technical guys see professional interactions that way, with pats on the back being at best an empty ritual, at worst a waste of useful time.
Negative feedback is the exact same (keep it specific) though with the nuance of saving negative feedback that’s personal for 1:1 convos.
I was once talking to a colleague who was showing me some old vacation pictures. Some tropical area. I commented that they were looking amazing. He said that actually there was a pile of garbage next to them, but they only put the good looking photos on Facebook.
Everybody wants to look perfect online, so much of the appearances are faked. It makes sense, since everything is public, so we feel pressured to make ourselves look good. Repeated, I am not surprised that it can cause harmful psychological effects.
when your friends used a slide projector to show you their vacation photos, they left the bad slides out of the projector.
i'm on board with facebook being a problem, but it's in more subtle ways than folks not showing you their bad photos.
With this constant demonstration of happiness / positivity, it's extremely difficult to get a real, honest read on something. Not everything you ate was incredible, not everywhere you went was perfect. In fact, 50% of them were below average! I wish more people would quit performing and give the real scoop. But that tends to only happen in pretty tight circles now. I noticed this effect even in a group chat of close friends once it grew from 5 to 8.
I wonder if US culture will ever revert. I think it's gone down a very dangerous path for the middle class. It will be only a matter of a few decades before we adopt the Japanese strategy of paying women to retire and have families instead of advancing their careers because of major population decline.
> Even the oppressive insistence that we should love our body, no matter what, can tip into upbeat intolerance by implying that it’s not OK to want to work on tummy folds or laugh lines.
I read the Cosmo cover as suggesting "it's OK to not want to change your body", toxic positivity would be "it's not OK to want to change your body". In that case, toxic positivity is more restricting -- it's the difference between "it's fine to not be sad" and "it's not fine to be sad".
Yes, it's "okay" in that you should not experience body or fat-shaming for being obese. No, it's not "okay" in that you are at extremely elevated risks of every health disease - and your quality of life is really terrible in comparison to people who are not obese. It's actually really terrible for the state and for society to normalize this level of disregard for out health.
I think this lesser form of "toxic positivity" inspires complacency and a general victim mentality out of people who for whom their pain is partially or entirely self-inflicted.
That's factually inaccurate.
> It's actually really terrible for the state and for society to normalize this
I don't believe there is any science to back this assertion up. It's an interesting hypothesis, but I doubt it's true.
> think this lesser form of "toxic positivity" inspires complacency and a general victim mentality
Actually, the opposite is true. Shame is linked with health care avoidance: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S17401...
I'd be interested if you have seen evidence that shame increases weight loss in obese people? Am I understand you correctly that's your thesis?
GP comment doesn't claim that. You're just making this up. It's a scientific fact obesity is a health risk. What is the point in denying that?
I’m not debating what’s healthy, I’m debating what we consider “ok”.
“Obesity is a health risk” is a fact indeed. “All health risks are not ok” is not a scientific fact.
For all the fat hate, there are also the people who genuinely think that being obese is healthy. What better way to get through to those people than to trojan horse them with that controversial cover?
It's certainly related.
Toxic positivity is something that happens in interpersonal communication. It's meaningless praise and excitement, bordering on condescension. It usually also comes from a person who isn't really qualified to distinguish accomplishments from regular work, because they aren't an expert in the field.
Is smoking healthy? Philip Morris would certainly like it if people believed that. Fortunately, they do not believe it anymore.
The false dichotomy of "either you hate fat people or you feed them positive bullshit" definitely looks like toxic positivity to me. No space for "your weight will likely cause you health problems down the line, here is how you can help it" there.
Feeling bad about having negative thoughts or emotions and being afraid to express them, only makes it more likely we'll engage in counterproductive coping behaviors.
being negative is almost always culturally seen as a bad thing, especially in the US, while in would argue hiding your negativity is far worse in the long run because it occludes your state of mind to your peers.
having moments when life just truly sucks is absolutely normal, but expressing it happens is not.
The original is, "Trying to Stay Optimistic Is Doing More Harm Than Good"
"Toxic positivity" makes more sense in the context of the article, which is much more about personal mental health than general workplace behavior. It is not about other peoples' positivity, it is about accepting your own negative emotions as healthy. It is not about positive feedback in meetings. Anyway, it has reasonable parting advice:
Ho, the neuropsychologist, has an unexpected suggestion to help calibrate a Pollyanna perspective: a session watching Disney-Pixar’s Inside Out, which animates and dramatizes human emotions. "One of the best antidotes to toxic positivity is reexamining your value system and understanding that some of the best moments in life, when you truly feel good, are full of mixed emotions," she says. "And that’s what we should be embracing as human beings."
Among the oldest portions of the Bible is the Book of Job.
Well worth spending some time there to remember that, short of stage 4 cancer, there is generally room for things to worsen.
It gives me a bit of anxiety and imposter syndrome when everything is going too well. It's easy to fall into the line of thinking that "I can't be doing a perfect job, so maybe they're keeping up appearances while scouting a replacement?"
Critical feedback doesn't have to be cruel to be effective. No feedback or everything being roses can be nearly as bad as angry feedback.
Personally, I think psychological safety leads to another phenomenon: groupthink. By emphasizing harmony over everything else, groups suffering from groupthink apply self-censorship, silence is seen as agreement, and the ability to make rational decisions is lost. Not only that, but the group develops a strong identity and anyone who doesn't agree is seen as disloyal.
For a software engineering team, groupthink usually means becoming a death march towards failure.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groupthink
1 Fake positivity
2 Co-workers that are "happy" to work during PTOs
The first one is described in the article. The second one is somewhat related to the first one or could even be the result of fake positivity. Working during a paid time off (PTO) is terrible for culture – makes your co-workers feel guilty if they won't spend a few hours at work during their PTO. I almost feel like an employee's access to Slack/E-mail should be restricted to read-only while they are on vacation.
If you are one of those two, stop kissing your manager's ass! Enjoy your vacation–forget about work.
It's a vestige from another era. The people that dont have bargaining power do not get PTO, and the ones that do get some sort mandated vacation time or economically punished otherwise by lower wages or higher taxation.
Working during PTO is bad, but it would be better for everyone to not have PTO at all, just TO.
We all know that because housing is so scarce, having a job or not can mean you have a roof over your heads or not. It's really disgusting the way they treat workers here. So of course there is going to be a Stockholm syndrome effect here.
Won't pay the market price but want the best. From what I've heard from insiders, they all do "surveys" with each other to fix wages since the 2000 dot come bubble collapse. The Vancouver Model is essentially: underpay your workers, demand the best and increase margins.
Then they wonder why we can't be like Silicon Valley. Most startups here get acquired by pre-primary market and very few ever IPO thus rendering stock options worthless.
It's no wonder that there is a massive brain drain going on and that startups here consist mostly of immigrant workers. I'm sure in some scale the exact same thing is taking place in SV but at least Indian engineers are making far more than what they would here in the Florida of Canada.
Funny you should mention Florida though, because I recently was working with a team from there and their culture was also absolutely the "work on weekends and PTO" variety.
I wonder if it's a coastal thing.
To each their own, but I find be joyful or humourous during hard times is much better for people to be around than to be someone denying someone else's individual right to be happy.
In my experience, the best outlook is to appreciate what is actually good in life (e.g. your qualities, good things that happen), and accept that what is bad (e.g. your flaws, bad things that happen), are bad.
Unfortunately if you barely have anything, than your life objectively sucks and no outlook is going to make you happy. But the thing is, I've seen a lot of people who are depressed that don't "barely have anything", they have food and shelter and qualities and things going on in their lives which should make them happy, but they still spend their time thinking about the things they don't have.
As someone who probably is intellectualizing some latent mental illness, I find a lot more value in just adopting a pessimistic view on life. I get that I'm extreme in this regard, but honestly I'd rather have a cultural shift towards a slightly gloomier view than this sugar-coating.
A somewhat relevant TED talk that hits many of the reasons why I think it's better to be hopeless and/or pessimistic than be positive: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3LlWufvZLxI&fbclid=IwAR0QeEq...
Having a critical but positive look at the world is most likely very healthy, in the spirit of 'Change what you can and accept what you can not'. Constantly emitting a positive image, on the other hand, leads to the problems described in the article. But the problem is not the positivity, but the need to express it even it is not coming from within.
Don't be afraid, to share your true feelings, but try to view the world in a balanced way (now I was preachy myself...).
In a positive direction it's at least more palatable than otherwise, but it's still bad.
Orgs. that focus on emotional support and politics more than outcomes will feature this prominently.
Oddly - it may not matter. Sometimes pushing the cogs of ABC corp forward is mundane, and everything else that happens is just fluff talk, like the sign on the bathroom door, it doesn't change how many widgest were bought and sold, or like the language on the 'stop sign' in Canada: French or English it doesn't matter, it's just something irrelevant argue about instead of having an actual war about it.
I agree completely that positivity can be forced to toxic levels, but I also see folks drop a plate or get something on their shirt and it’s the worst thing ever and the idea adopting a “whoops, oh well” laughing it off outlook appears to them as forced and toxic positivity. Positivity is great and not letting things get you down is really important if not taken too far.
So what’s the measure for too far versus not far enough? I feel like I see too far and not far enough on equal measure in my peer group.
where they argue that Goths subculture manages to deal with aging very well precisely because they eschew fake positivity and eternal youth and concentrate on deeper emotions and themes instead
I’d rather be part a-hole than full of sh-t.
If you can’t say something nice apologize later.
https://openlibrary.org/works/OL16681873W/The_antidote
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780865478015
Honestly, the times I can recall doing this, nothing bad happened as a result.
Then again, I didn't follow it up by snorting cocaine or compulsively posting on Instagram.
I'm going to rankly speculate it those kinds of follow-up behaviors that turn a natural part of life into a glaringly obvious self-destructive plot the likes of Wonder Woman 1980.
Edit: clarification
https://youtu.be/jx8GhXm-HcA
" I'm out of the tunnel of amusement [...] we live on memories, gentleman, and games sincere embraces, kisses and fires of all those moments, sad and amusing and not on moments that were sadly amusing "
The downside is real listening is incredibly time consuming - I struggle to get under 60 min per person per day (not all at once of course) without compromising its effectiveness.
https://www.amazon.com/Dark-Side-Light-Chasers-Reclaiming/dp...
So it's not about how to avoid acknowledging problems, it's about how you shape your mind to see and deal with problems...
On that topic, remember to say thank you when someone on your team gets you out of a jam, There are parts of the systems at work that I simply don't understand yet/never will because they are far outside of my team typically so if someone saves me a bunch of time because they happen to know that system, a thank you goes a long way - it's also an admission that as a lead you don't know everything.
I find "I don't know either, lets find out" opens a more productive dialogue than pretending you know everything - on top of which seniors (and good juniors) can spot a bluff anyway and you just lose credibility.
Almost any management style works if you are genuine, open and authentic.
Ecclesiastical stoicism has kept me sane this year simply because my expectations are so incredibly low.
"An optimist will tell you the glass is half-full; the pessimist, half-empty; and the engineer will tell you the glass is twice the size it needs to be." Oscar Wilde
Say what you want, but I enjoy feeling happy, and if I have to engage in a bit of mental convolution to achieve it I'm all for it whether it is a lie or not.