Unfortunately the accent on that audio file is strongly US to my ear.
I googled and got “In North-Eastern English dialect, ‘shy bairns get nowt’ is a well-known idiom that essentially translates to ‘shy children get nothing’. Often used to encourage children (or adults) to speak up and have self-confidence”. The original commenter gidorah has a UK email address. https://www.wordsense.eu/shy_bairns_get_nowt/ looked like a reasonable reference.
Edit: here’s it said proper good - skip to 42 minutes: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=UaErbstVKAQ Aside: The transcript feature on YouTube is amazing but the UX is soooooo frustrating - the feature doesn’t exist on iPad Safari - and the text is not searchable on YouTube iPad App.
Rejection is not a big deal, and you should just move on.
This is the reason I looked past the rejection argument in my reply below; because there is so much more to gain from sharing than to lose from rejections.
I don't understand why my first reply below is being downvoted. If someone disagrees and downvotes at least drop a note that would make sense. :-)
There's a range of reasons why sharing ideas help foster a positive culture of creativity so if you don't already have a time and place to do so I strongly suggest brainstorming, 10xing, or whichever other method makes this process easy on groups of individuals. It's a lot of fun and we get a lot out of it.
- you never know who might be interested in your idea
- putting your ideas out there helps you to get feedback and improve upon them
- it's an opportunity to practice articulating your ideas to others
- sharing your ideas can inspire others, help in creating a community of support around you and your work (culture++)
- getting your ideas out there can help you to build momentum, gain traction, find allies in your project or business
- sharing your ideas with others they could lead to new opportunities or connections that you never would have otherwise
Looks like you've since been upvoted, but try not to read too much into stuff like this. HN is usually decent on upvoted/downvotes, but honestly sometimes your comment just gets read first by that one random person who doesn't like it, or touches on something that a couple people disagree with. All you can do is move on. As long as you try to keep your commentary constructive, the stray randomly downvotes comment won't affect you much in the long run.
I can’t speak for OP but when I get unexplained/unexpected downvotes I don’t care about it affecting me eg in terms of karma. I care that I’ve contributed something I think is either helpful or at worst innocuous and people haven’t explained what they found wrong with it. I can’t learn anything from that. Usually with a similar appeal for feedback I get what OP has apparently experienced: my original comment levels out, my appeal gets downvoted. To HN’s credit this time, at least there’s been some feedback along with that.
I have another comment about Lord of the Flies downvotes (on the post about the HN parody). I suspect either no one wants to do anything about it, or else they think it's a feature, not a bug. They're dreaming of a world that's long gone.
The received wisdom of the rest of the social network Web is: up/down vote the comment, not the commenter. That doesn't quite solve your problem, but it's a good start.
I didn't downvote but summarizing the article in your second paragraph felt like a chore to read after having read the article, and I did initially skip the rest of the comment (which is good) because of that.
Your first three paragraphs are a précis of the article so at a glance your post seems pointless. I suspect that prompted the down votes. Maybe skip the fluff.
Thanks for the honest feeback. Also shortened my comment considerably to keep it to my thoughts and not the ones expressed in by the author of this article.
Its meant to be that you don't downvote people just because you disagree, but in practise its different.
If I were to downvote (and I don't recollect that I ever have) I hope I would take the time to explain why.
I think your point is good - downvoting because someone is holding an unpopular but considered opinion is bad practise - ultimately it will lead to us here being in even more of an echo chamber than we are already.
However at the end of the day, what's important to me is to feel I've tried doing the right thing.
This means I can't do things conditionally or "only if I trust my manger won't take credit for it". If I want to be credited for my work, I feel that it's mostly my responsibility take credit for it.
It can be very difficult to change people, teams, processes, companies so I understand why we may want to get something out of trying hard to improve things we feel others should want to improve as well. It's not always as obvious as "a salary increase" or "public recognition", but employees who try to improve processes indicates to management they are interested in sharing their input and committed to making things better. This fosters credibility, and creates a more positive work environment.
Job hopping may often be easier but is often seen as a red flag by employers and it can make it difficult to build a strong, long-term career.
What is unfortunate in my opinion is working with developers unwilling to learn more about systems and infrastructure. With the rise of DevOps, it's often the norm that many developers don't know how to do some part of their job. As opposed to your comment this is not on the level of "developer who doesn't know how to code" but "developer who don't know how to work with the underlying systems, builds, deployment processes, and the underlying infrastructure powering their code".
When people are unwilling to learn from others, they are missing out on opportunities to grow and improve. This can lead to a feeling of being stuck in a rut, and can ultimately lead to dissatisfaction with one's job or career; as much for people who lack some expertise and are unwilling to learn, than for those who can help them increase their competence in this closely related field of work, who often end up doing most of the work in this field
"From the testimony of the captured commander of the 36th Marine Brigade of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, Colonel Dmitry Kormyankov, it turns out that the internet terminals of Elon Musk's Starlink satellite company were delivered to the militants of the Nazi Azov Battalion and the Ukrainian Marines in Mariupol by military helicopters.
According to our information, the delivery of the Starlink Equipment was carried out by the Pentagon.
Elon Musk, thus, is involved in supplying the fascist forces in Ukraine with military communication equipment. And for this, Elon, you will be held accountable like an adult - no matter how much you'll play the fool."
May 9th (tomorrow) is the victory day for Russia (Soviet Union) and every year they celebrate victory with a parade. Considering the situation now, something might happen tomorrow. Keep an eye on the news.
Ah, shit, with Russia’s luck, Putin will try to take out an Elon satellite, miss, and end up starting a Kessler Syndrome collapse of important satellites. Fun.
What matters the most is the results. In my opinion a
decision like the following is totally reasonable providing
you are looking for people that owns your results to be in
charge:
during a factory visit over issues with the Model X's
window. When a worker on the assembly line proposed a
solution, Musk lit into the worker's manager.
"This is totally unacceptable that you had a person working
in your factory that knows the solution and you don't even
know that," Musk reportedly said before firing the head of
the factory.
I'm of the opinion that a manager's responsible to know issues raised by his subordinates.
In my opinion, there's entirely too much context missing from this for us to say whether or not what is quoted there was totally reasonable.
Had the employee even brought that up to the manager before? Had they had the idea for a long time and didn't bring it up? If so, why not - does the manager foster a culture where collaboration isn't encouraged? If that's the case, does the manager not do that simply out of ineptitude, or because that's the same culture coming down from above him/her? Maybe the individual just had the idea that morning? That week? The very moment it came out of their mouth, even? Has the manager had a stellar tenure up to that point, or a rocky one? How severe was the issue pre-fix that it warranted this termination? I could go on and on.
Point being, two sentences saying, "An employee had an idea and Musk fired his boss because he didn't know about that idea," is typically not going to be enough for us to say, "Oh yeah, that was a good/bad call".
This kind of thing sounds smart, but in practice it's terrible to work with higher ups who randomly do this kind of micromanaging and attach immense consequences to it.
Story I heard from a friend was of a CEO who asked a janitor if he used their store and if not why. He replied that he needed size Y of a product to efficiently store in his cupboard, size X was too small and Z too large. For months he hounded the department and forced negative performance reviews on them because there was no good way to provide Y with their current supplier. They ultimately switched to a different inferior supplier because of it (the brand the janitor normally brought) and lost several good employees in the process. They got a lot of negative feedback from customers from the switch and their revenue on the product went down.
This sounds completely insane, but totally on brand for Elon who needs to keep up his internet persona.
If I'm in a meeting with some higher-ups above my boss and I have some suggestion to a process I think may help the company out and relay my thoughts, my boss should be fired because I can think for myself? Completely idiotic.
(Note this is assuming it doesn't involve anything controversial, office politics etc, just a suggestion based on my observations that I think could help the company overall).
>>If I'm in a meeting with some higher-ups above my boss and I have some suggestion to a process I think may help the company out and relay my thoughts, my boss should be fired because I can think for myself? Completely idiotic.
Tho I've got very mixed assessment of Elon Musk, he's right in this case.
At the moment that you first think of the solution and mention it, your boss should not be fired.
However, this was not that situation.
But, from the above description alone, we know that there was a known problem, and that the employee had enough time to think about it and present it to Musk. One of two things happened. The manager had failed to put out a request like "we have problem X, please bring all ideas for solutions", and/or the employee had previously described the idea and been ignored up the chain of command.
Either of those are cause for a decision of "I now fail to see why we should allow you in our plant, nevermind paying you to be here.".
One of the most basic jobs as a manager is to identify problems, seek solutions and implement them. If the answer had been something like: "yes, he brought the solution to us yesterday, implementation will require P, D, and Q, and we expect to have it into production by next week", I'm sure Musk would have been fine with it.
IMO I don't expect someone with this type of "philosophy" to be that deep of a thinker:
"1. Email me back to explain why what I said was incorrect. Sometimes, I’m just plain wrong!
2. Request further clarification if what I said was ambiguous.
3. Execute the directions."
Failure to perform one of the three actions would result in termination, Musk noted.
He's proven this over the years by getting sanctioned by the SEC for posting on Twitter over the weekend while high with his girlfriend and then being forced to step down as chairman, and also consistently shitposting on Twitter the last few years that would get any line level employee fired.
I saw that and thought it was a succinct, highly distilled extract showing the result of 'if I'd had more time I'd have written you a shorter letter'. While there's obviously a myriad variations on the theme and actions crossing those lines, the message and call to action is very clear — either identify and address the problems with the directive, or execute it. Punting, dithering, or ignoring it are not options.
That said, the twitter nonsense is getting a bit much. When he wanders into anything outside his zones of expertise, he's a disaster.
Batshit. Sounds like a withdrawal moment. Anyone who studies institutions, management, and factories knows that the overarching culture that flows from the top-down is what sets the expectations and communication norms. This is typical old school American hierarchically organized culture that made it certain that the employees on the floor knew the solution and that the managers had no idea. The problem starts and ends with Musk and his shitty company culture/communication. It is his job to create a culture where ops communicates with management and vise versa. Toyota has answer to this problem.
This goes along with Nassim Taleb's idea of Skin in the Game:
To learn you need ‘contact with the ground’:
Actually, you cannot separate anything from contact with the ground. And the contact with the real world is done via skin in the game-having an exposure to the real world, and paying a price for its consequences, good or bad.
I actually do agree with this. The idea that only a certain set of individuals at a company could ever fathom a problem X with product Y and anyone else who shares a potential solution should be ignored is pretty short-sighted and ignorant.
I don't know if someone should be fired over that, but then again, a firing is a pretty potent warning to others not to commit the same offense.
This a horrible way to run a company, particularly one with high engineering risks.
I'd suggest reading one of the books by Sidney Dekker. The last thing you want to institute is a culture of fear surrounding surfacing problems. Every other manager in that factory just got a loud and clear signal to lock down their staff and suppress awareness of any problem that might get them axe'd.
There are things that justify firing on the spot, but these are generally malicious, criminal, etc acts. Short of that no matter the fuckup treating firing as something done by whim of the CEO is very corrosive.
You can follow the story as a step-by-step tutorial, while running every serverN.py examples at the same time they say they run them and then use telnet and/or netcat like they say they use it in the story.
If you really want to understand this it'll be easy enough, connect to irc.libera.chat, join say ##linux or even better #networking and ask any question that comes to mind.
I'd advise anyone to do it; this little story is one of a kind.
While I think this (like Slack) can provide value and might be welcome by some as a great tool for work I cannot stress enough the fact that from my experience chat for work becomes misused when it's allowed or encouraged to be used for organizational purposes.
At a glance it seems to me you might have found a good use for it, just please remember where chat starts and ends being a useful tool as it seems to me more and more people use it for things it is not good at.
Do educate me if you think I'm missing it's point.
Any; from my experience developing voice UIs using Google products and APIs I figured it was a very good thing to segregate the application logic from its integration with
select platform(s) like Google Actions, Alexa skill, Android Things, a standalone device, or one of many 3rd party chat application like Facebook Messenger or Hangouts Chat...
There are so many options it seems like the right thing to do is to release on those your potential users have access to.
