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A comment on Career advice I wish I’d been given when I was young. Parent comment

Re:Career advice I wish I’d been given when I was young by sanderjd on Tuesday April 30, 2019 @07:25PM (#19793030)
Personally, I prefer working with less competent pleasant people than more competent unpleasant people. You can find useful stuff to give less competent people (and help them become more competent over time), but it's hard to avoid unpleasant people affecting the morale of a whole team.
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Re:Career advice I wish I’d been given when I was young by barrkel on Tuesday April 30, 2019 @07:28PM (#19793047)
You can rely on competent people, you can give them a task and forget about it. That forgives a hell of a lot of abrasiveness. I 100% prefer being able to rely on someone rather than have to handhold or redo their work myself.
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Re:Career advice I wish I’d been given when I was young by zmmmmm on Tuesday April 30, 2019 @07:52PM (#19793200)
People aren't really binary like that ... "competent" or "not competent". It's all mushy and complicated. Some of the most competent people I manage at some kinds of tasks are basically a net loss at other tasks. The pleasant ones are lot easier to work into diverse tasks and get a "competent result" even if it is more messy than just tossing them a task an forgetting about it.
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Re:Career advice I wish I’d been given when I was young by barrkel on Wednesday May 01, 2019 @02:31AM (#19795013)
I think that's orthogonal to pleasantness. The tasks I have in mind revolve around coding, since that's my job. If the job extends beyond coding, to gathering requirements or coordinating a team, I'd be more inclined to agree. But they don't, for what I'm thinking about.
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Re:Career advice I wish I’d been given when I was young by abacadaba on Tuesday April 30, 2019 @11:09PM (#19794205)
Well to keep it positive, I'll just say that I find working with competent people to be quite pleasant.
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Re:Career advice I wish I’d been given when I was young by sanderjd on Tuesday April 30, 2019 @08:54PM (#19793534)
100% agree to strongly disagree :)
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Re:Career advice I wish I’d been given when I was young by eropple on Tuesday April 30, 2019 @07:38PM (#19793108)
Until in their efforts to be competent, they be unpleasant to the wrong person--and now you have a new and different and harder problem.
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Re:Career advice I wish I’d been given when I was young by icebraining on Tuesday April 30, 2019 @09:01PM (#19793595)
Arguably, that's being incompetent. If their task involves a social interaction, then to be competent at it they must know how to successfully manage that too, even if they are generally unpleasant.
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Re:Career advice I wish I’d been given when I was young by potta_coffee on Wednesday May 01, 2019 @12:14AM (#19794487)
Lack of competency has a much greater effect on my morale than lack of pleasantness. We're all different I guess.
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Re:Career advice I wish I’d been given when I was young by MRD85 on Wednesday May 01, 2019 @06:02AM (#19795775)
IIRC there was a study posted to Hackernews about a week ago that showed that humans really prefer competent coworkers over nice ones.
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Re:Career advice I wish I’d been given when I was young by sanderjd on Wednesday May 01, 2019 @03:00PM (#19800488)
Citation welcome! Otherwise I'll continue doubting this based on my experience.
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Re:Career advice I wish I’d been given when I was young by austincheney on Tuesday April 30, 2019 @07:40PM (#19793121)
That comes down to whether you are primarily looking for harmony or success.
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Re:Career advice I wish I’d been given when I was young by rootusrootus on Tuesday April 30, 2019 @08:10PM (#19793300)
I'd say it comes down to whether you have a team of one or not. If you have someone competent but unpleasant and you can isolate them to get useful work done, then it could be successful. But if they have to be on a team, and they're toxic, then no amount of competence is going to balance out the damage, and you will fail.
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