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by epaga·10y ago·view on hn ↗
Lean on others around you for feedback - ask a trusted co-worker to be brutally honest with you when he/she gets the impression you are being toxic. Tell them to approach you afterwards and make you aware of it.

Apart from this, here are a few things to watch yourself for:

  * sarcasm & cynicism
  * passive aggressive behavior
  * insults
  * loving proving others wrong and making them look bad
  * loudness / brashness
2 comments
hm, I am quite loud and direct. I'll ask a colleague to give me a nudge when I'm being too much.

Others have mentioned a book, I'll make sure I read it and I hope it helps people's impressions of me. I just want to do the best I can and I love my work- I just get very frustrated by people who don't want to do their jobs.

It's like driving a Ferrari in LA traffic.

Thanks for the feedback. :)

Hey, some hopefully constructive feedback here:

This sentence "It's like driving a Ferrari in LA traffic" is kind of a red flag. Think about how the people around you would feel about this comparison. It's pretty insulting, right? If you carry around the attitude that you're put upon dealing with other people's incompetence, they're going to notice and take it badly.

Younger me would see my comment and say "so what? they're incompetent!" This is the wrong emotional reaction. It doesn't matter if they're incompetent. Telling them they're incompetent will harm your relationship with them, and worsen your LA traffic gridlock.

There's almost always a way to be direct, correct and also kind. If you can't figure one out, then talk to someone. "Hey, I'm a little irritated about xyz situation, but I don't want to handle it badly. Do you have any suggestions for how I can constructively engage, or do you think I should just let it go?" Many people can't help, but some people have great emotional intelligence and can help crack those things open. I'm not particularly good at it, but man, the difference between trying and not trying is night and day.

Thank you for the feedback! :) I understand what you mean.

May I ask though, how can I convey my frustration to anyone? and how to I avoid becoming jaded and apathetic to my goals?

> May I ask though, how can I convey my frustration to anyone? and how to I avoid becoming jaded and apathetic to my goals?

Spend time cultivating empathy and patience.

A million times this answer. We're in need of a good dose of that in engineering organizations.
>how can I convey my frustration to anyone

You don't. If something is impeding you, calmly tell someone who can help that you're having trouble doing something because of XYZ. Don't be negative or pessimistic or blame anyone.

The problem is if you're always frustrated, everyone is going to view you as an angry asshole. I am constantly frustrated but I gave up doing anything about it when it's out of my control. I just move on.

> You don't. If something is impeding you, calmly tell someone who can help that you're having trouble doing something because of XYZ.

Or, even better, ask what you can do to help with getting XYZ done.

My imperfect understanding would be that, at best, you could convey your frustration to someone well removed from your work environment.

Frustration is rarely a constructive thing to convey. It may seem okay at times, but even if it's objectively justifiable, it's going to leave an impression on people.

Too many of those, and everything you say is viewed through that lens.

Re: conveying frustration: Ask questions -- once you try to understand a situation, the frustration will recede, at least partially.
Your boss. He should be the primary person responsible for making sure your organization minimizes the disruptions to your work. He may or may not be in a position to personally solve any issues, but at least you have now shared concerns about your work environment with someone "up the chain".

That person could also be a project manager or any other person who is ultimately responsible for deliverables. It IS their job to make sure you deliver. If you are getting constantly blocked for external reasons, they should know and work towards fixing those issues.

I'm in the exact same boat, btw. Good luck.

Realize that the only person in the world who cares about your frustrations is you. If you can't handle your shit, people won't want to be around you. You need to make it your personal responsibility to be a good team player. It should help you to realize that all of your amazing skills and talent aren't worth anything if no one can stand being around you.
Everyone has their own specific set of strengths and weaknesses.

It's toxic to compare people's weaknesses to your own strengths, or to compare your own weaknesses with other's strengths.

Enjoy connecting to people and making banter. Stop trying to get "somewhere". Don't even try to push for the project to finish earlier. It finishes when it finishes. The quality it's done at is the quality it's going to be. Do what you're going to do then step back. Focus on the present, and enjoy it because it is everything you have. The only "somewhere" everyone ever gets to is death. What's more important, your joy in the present, or some illusion of the future?

Choices are illusory. Our lives are not ours to control. We can follow the flow of life's river and enjoy the sights life offers, or push against the current, and encounter resistance, spending all our time bucketing water out of our boats. The only choice we have is between focusing on reality of the present, the small boons we experience every day, a smile, an eye contact, a joke, listening to a story, and focusing on the illusions of the future, finding weaknesses in yourself or others through comparison, fighting against the current of life. Who are you in this moment?

Brilliant analysis. This is wisdom for the ages, thank you.
I agree with 9935c101ab17a66's [dead] post: your comment contains some good advice, but it's diluted with garbage and platitudes beyond all utility.

Choices are illusory? Nope. Life is an endless, continuous stream of choices, and making those choices is the only thing that you can do to influence how your own life goes.

I'm not going to convince you, but in my experience I find it to be true. The more I am focused on the present, the more the choices I do pick appear to be the obviously good ones. The other choices merely clouds my life, like the OP, trying to pushing things through faster, experiencing gridlock, and then getting labelled as toxic. If we know that's what the consequence of a choice is like, it'd be obvious not to pick it, none of it is enjoyable. It so happens these obviously bad choices in hindsight all happen to be picked when I am too attached to some future outcome, and all the good choices I do make, I was not attached to the future, I made them by being immersed as the present, picking the obviously good choice.

By good choice I mean one I would never regret no matter what the outcome was, and instead would have regretted if I never made it.

That's what I mean by choices being merely an illusion. All I can pick is the present, or the illusion of being in control of the future.

> It's like driving a Ferrari in LA traffic.

You're the Ferrari, your co-workers are the traffic? Are you fucking serious? This is the crux of the problem - you think you are better than everyone else, and you make that obvious. Unless you can get your ego under control this will be a serious impediment to your career.

The situation as I describe it is certainly apt, I'm not calling them out on being "traffic" but it's more like this:

I am dedicated to a project, my sole job is to ensure the continuity and delivery of the product that the project makes. Part of this is relying on central IT, who do not want to delegate responsibility on certain things (IE; firewalls, networking, authentication, timekeeping, package management services, storage, etc). Those people are constrained because they are used by every project.

While it's not their fault they're not fully available to me at all times when I need them; being blocked by a firewall for a week is frustrating. It stops me being able to complete tasks for extended periods of time.

So yes, I am trying to move, and they are not moving. It's not their fault but that's the fact as it stands.

Classic bureaucracy calls for classic techniques; Radar on MAS*H knows what's up. Your best bet is to cultivate relationships that can help you get things done faster. The more important your project the easier this will be; from official resource allocation to a guy on the inside acting as a back channel. It may be worth working both ends of the spectrum at the same time.

If your project is important enough or the problem pervasive enough you might be able to get people together on an official solution. Raise awareness that your progress is being blocked frequently. An "all on the same team" approach to working on a solution will bring departments together to work out a path forward. This will often appear in the form of limited delegation of IT resource ownership, priority work queues, and dedicated/embedded resources.

If your project is NOT important enough and/or the problem lacks interest at the right levels(awareness raising fails) you might have to game the system. Get friends in the right places that can help you out when you have something blocking you. You might also have to just suck it up.

Traffic is normal, the issue is thinking of yourself as a Ferrari. You are a normal car in LA traffic, just like everyone else. Everyone has to move slower because of the organization, everyone gets blocked sometimes. If you actually can't do anything for a week then talk to your boss, but with the attitude of "this is a fact of life and I'm looking for something else to work on in the meantime", not "these assholes are holding me back".
Option 1. Honk your horn. Sounds like this is what you're doing, and it makes other people around you more stressed, more frustrated, and less willing to do extra work to help you. After a while, noise like that just gets tuned out.

Option 2. Recognize this is an inappropriate metaphor, and that you are part of an organization that has certain policies and procedures, and that anything being done for reasons other than legal compliance can be up for debate and change.

Do you know why the central IT branch is behind? Are they working with shitty software that makes their jobs harder instead of easier? Are the business processes in place to grant a simple request unnecessarily complex? Is a mistake very costly and difficult to fix, meaning that correctness is incentivized at the expense of throughput? How much is it costing the business while you sit and twiddle your thumbs waiting for approval? Who in your organization has these answers? Who has the power to make decisions about these things? What can you do to get those people together in a room to discuss these issues?

You can get a lot further by trying to fix a problem instead of just complaining about it.

@dijit, if you want to improve your relationships, practice the Golden Rule (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Rule), treat others as you would want to be treated, and don't treat them the way you wouldn't want to be treated.

Have a look at http://www.thewaytohappiness.org/thewaytohappiness/precepts/... and http://www.thewaytohappiness.org/thewaytohappiness/precepts/... which describe and give examples of both sides of this rule.

Don't concentrate on how others may be treating you (delaying your projects) or what you might be doing wrong (toxic interactions) but focus on the positive way you can treat others (fairly? with respect? helping them? etc.)

I challenge you to practice the Golden Rule assiduously for a week and see how life seems then. =)

Good luck!

The problem is that you prioritize your work over others' work. Being blocked is not an excuse to treat people poorly, so whenever it happens, just focus on another task until you can continue. Use that blocked time to learn something new, make progress on something else or review your work.
You're a Ferrari, and project is very important. So escalate and get it done.

If unable to get that escalation, than you're just another Honda Accord, and there is no dishonor in that. Accept and move on.

It sounds like you're hating the player, not the game.
If you're in typical corporate IT, driving a Ferrari in LA traffic is an understatement. I'm baffled by the mass incompetence I see on a daily basis. Changes that should take 15 minutes to implement take two or three weeks of dilly-dallying and shilly-shallying. Fiddle-fucking around abounds. You treasure those occasions that you get to deal with a marginally competent US/UK/EU IT person, rather than a person from elsewhere who has 0 authority, independent thinking, and more often than not is an outsourced contractor with no official status and less real knowledge.
Have you considered switching to a less beurocratic team/company. I used to be in a place where I'd fight the system. Most felt the system was good enough.

Moving to a team where your personal values are aligned with team values, may be you won't need to have those discussions.

> Others have mentioned a book, I'll make sure I read it and I hope it helps people's impressions of me. I just want to do the best I can and I love my work- I just get very frustrated by people who don't want to do their jobs.

> It's like driving a Ferrari in LA traffic.

I must say I really understand what you mean. :) But I think I have learned that to strong emotions, either positive or negative, doesn't belong in the workplace. It costs so much when you get burnt and dumb bosses interfere and imposes their will. I still do 100% everyday and every hour I work, but I'm a little emotionally detached or shielded from the result of it.

Instead, I'm contributing to a free software project where I can be really passionate. You should probably try that too.

Woosh.
Perfect advice. I would add, if possible, to ask same question to person-boss who gave you this feedback. It's in everybody's interest that issues are identified clearly by all sides, otherwise improvement won't happen. It might not work if he is too introvert/polite, then check with somebody else.