If you constantly solve all the problems that come it can be stifling for the people you manage.
edit: I am not critiquing enthusiasm itself, but a compulsion that can be productive and unhealthy.
I think it's just a case is perspective
As a fellow traveller, I offer one caution: learn to turn this down in personal relationships as it can be counterproductive. It took decades for my wife to finally get through and explain not every problem she voices is something that needs a solution. Some times people just want to be heard. It bugs the hell out of me because I tend to need to solve All The Problems before I can do any self-care, but rather than seem heroic, I think this attitude can seem transactional or uncaring as though everyone is just a screw that needed a bit of tightening, etc.
I am ~30 years old, hopefully I will be able to just hear, without offering any solutions. It bothers me too. I am a SWE because I love solving problems!
In my case, I've recently been wondering whether I really love solving problems, or rather just hate stupid bullshit and solving it - quickly and efficiently - is usually the best way to make it go away for good.
In many cases, the behavior is identical - I just find myself to be motivated by frustration more often than curiosity these days.
Tangentially, you could ask: Are you addicted to being useful or to being recognized as useful.
One is your own need, the other often a covered contract where you lash out or silently resign if you don't get the recognition that you think you deserve.
Next time, maybe ask her to come up with solutions, e.g. do a brainstorm session.
If she then says she doesn't really want a solution, you can tell her then don't phrase your issues like that.
Or maybe nobody is? Why does someone has to be “at fault”?
> you can tell her then don't phrase your issues like that.
Sometimes people just want to be heard. There is value in recognising that.
The challenge is, some people (most) get stuck on some emotional thing, and will drain you dry if you try to even engage with them on it. It’s especially prevalent right now.
Yup. I've long learned to suppress my problem-solver nature because "people want to be heard", but then what it gets is turning me into a sounding board for people who get stuck on something indefinitely. It's easy to not jump in with solutions the first time you hear a story, but it's much harder when you hear the exact same story, with exact same underlying emotion, dozen+ times in the span of a few months. The other side is clearly not really processing their emotions - so if not that, and not practical advice, then what's the point of even talking about it?
It's really draining and in some cases I'm not in a position to disengage either.
And there's no solution. Nothing you can do, say, or not do or say will help. Even just listening will be perceived, after the umpteenth time, as condescending; and voicing your opinion is obviously a no go. It's lose-lose.
But if people only reach out to drop their toxic waste and leave you without the chance to get rid of your own toxic waste you feel not good afterwards. Like where you have conversations and then afterwards notice that you were not able to actually speak about any of your own problems and worries.
That's what I really like about the kids and their words of the year: They used "aura" and at first I thought what a bullshit term is that, but after a while I came to understand it. It's totally fine to listen to your stomach feelings, if someone's aura is negative or their vibes are off you don't need to give them a reason why you stop interacting, you just leave.
We've been trained to be helpful and nice to everyone but then wonder why we feel drained at the end of the day. It's because we're spending emotional bandwidth on people and things that don't give us any energy back.
The word "aura" for all of this is extremely nice. If you see a spooky person approaching you on the street at night you also don't need to explain to them what exactly put you off about them - you just switch sides.
I can only recommend to trust your feelings.
“Do you want to be right or do you want to be happy?”
My wife wants to throw out our perfectly functional table to get a better looking one. Financially and practically, I am right in fighting this. Is a few hundred bucks worth making someone aesthetically-minded not feel satisfied? No, you have to pick your battles.
Which, clearly, I struggled to find a useful compromise on.
That said, I do tend to get upset, when I’m taken for granted, but that’s really my own fault. I know it, rationally, but my inner brat still wants to throw a tantrum.
Part of the setup by default, but should not take decades to discover or reveal. Similar to how women experience stuff mainly via emotions, hence what was fine yesterday may not be today albeit factually nothing changed.
101 of each adult should be also figuring out how one works (and how doesn't) and optimizing with other relevant parties further interactions.
I can so relate. I once read something that shifted my perspective a bit and helped me start the work of learning to better care for myself.
It was basically somebody talking/writing about the safety instructions when taking a flight. They tell you that in case of an emergency, when the o2 masks drop down to first put your ownmas on, before helping others. Because you are no help, if you loose conciousness.
This image/metaphor , to first put my own mask on, so that I can ensure, I will be able to help others without falling over, was what helped me start this process.
I sadly can't remember if it was Brené Brown or where I originally read that.
(I didn't downvote)
Saying "oh yeah the bible mentions that" doesn't really add to a conversation - the bible mentions a lot of stuff!
However, if I downvote you because you didn't provide context, you might misinterpret it as "wow, hacker news hates the bible" (I have no opinion on hn audience feelings towards religion)
So for additional context, one could look up the "speck vs log" which seems most straightforwardly about taking care of your own issues first (although it's in the context of hypocrisy, which doesn't quite match the original thread iiuc)
I found a few others, but none quite seemed like the close match I was hoping for (Mark 12:31, 1 Corinthians 6:19-20, etc)
I would have said ‘no way is someone that evil’, but uh…. Ask most men in their 40’s or 50’s.
Often when someone wants to talk about a situation involving difficult feelings, they're actually trying to process those feelings: to understand where the feelings are coming from, to be validated, and to be able to take a broader perspective.
You can help by being curious about what they're saying, reflecting it back to them in your own terms, explaining how what they're feeling is understandable, and offering context or alternative viewpoints. These are actually complex problem-solving skills, although they can all fall under the umbrella of what people mean when they say "to be heard".
As a man, I've realised that once my emotions feel validated and accepted, I relax and the practical solutions just pop into my mind.
Some people really don’t like ‘no’, especially when they have emotional problems.
Thank you for this useful tip! I've recently become aware that I may not be as good a listener I thought I was - I too make the common mistake of immediately offering solutions, or talking too much about my own relatable situations and feelings, instead of trying to really listen to them and help them figure out their own world view and feelings of a particular situation (and thus understand them better too in the process).
Exactly, help exploring their problem, maybe direct them into one nook or the other, support a proper perspective from different angles (to a small extent within the context and constraints they provided!!!), but don't solve the riddle for them. They might not even know how they really feel about it all, yet.
If you’re speaking to a rational person with good intentions and good self-management this can help a lot.
If the other person doesn’t have good emotional regulation and is prone to catastrophizing, exaggeration, or excessive self-victimization then validating and reinforcing their emotions isn’t always helpful. It can be harmful.
I had a relationship long ago where the other person would always find a way to be the victim in their personal and workplace relationships. I made the mistake of following the advice to only listen, withhold suggestions and attempts to help, and to validate their emotions. The problem was that frequently their emotions and reactions were not valid, and I was only making things worse by providing a sounding board to validate those reactions. Once I stopped being an emotional validator for every reaction things started improving a lot, though it wasn’t what they wanted to hear.
It could be related to the personality trait of how much of our world model is "in our mind" vs "out there":
If I speak with your while working on the world model in my mind, it looks like I just "want to be heard". But your feedback is actually very important, it's just that it should only feed my mental world model.
I am then surprised that my math coprocessor reaches for the GPIO.
Relatable. Is true for even the simplest problems that some people have.
Sometimes they just didn't even address it yet and are only becoming adequately aware of it and here you are spelling out a plan of action during a 7 min encounter in the kitchen.
I'm glad she managed to solve this problem in the end.
;)
This can become toxic in itself, though. Some times venting and being angry is what someone wants to do, but in a workplace environment that’s not a good thing to implicitly condone and support.
I’ve had some team members who just wanted to vent but not discuss solutions and (again, in a workplace, not personal relationship) it was a sign that something deeper was amiss: Being a perpetual victim of their circumstances and believing those circumstances were beyond their control was a safe, comforting place to exist. It was always easier to build up excuses that problems were thrust upon them by others, who could be held solely responsible for the results. In some cases I had to be very clear that they were responsible for working with teammates to address these issues together, not become a passive receiver of everything that happens with their peers.
Swooping in as the hero to solve everything for someone else isn’t a good solution, but (in a workplace environment) getting someone to switch from the passive victim mindset to the active mindset of engaging with their own problems is very important.
This is one topic where carrying advice from personal romantic relationships into the workplace isn’t a good idea, IMO.
Now that I think about it, most of my advice starts something like "Here's what you're gonna do..."
Wait, that itself sounds like a problem, but how do I fix it...
The amount of ai generated planning and fluffy workloads that I've been able to just delete from the team has saved the company many engineering hours. Not least of all in bugs.
Value your expertise and experience. It's only greeting more valuable, not less.
I actually enjoy process of writing code, understanding deeply the system I work on, finding elegant solutions to business problems - not just a list of checkboxes with features for a given sprint that agent churns in background. Sure, practically I understand that business doesn't care how well something is written as long as it works somewhat reliably. I might eventually adapt to this new horrible reality of developers who have no idea what's going on in the codebase they "work" on.
I remember, decades ago, reading an article about some African politician visiting the UK. He was given a tour, which included some of the social housing. The UK bragging about how they took care of their people. He saw people sitting around with with their housing and food paid for. His comment? "How horrible!".
He found it horrible, because - from his perspective - they had no role in society, nothing to do, no purpose to their existence.
But that's not how the system works. It forces everyone into binary categorizations, with the aim of removing help if at all possible. So it becomes economically necessary for people to present themselves as helpless and stay away from work or even volunteering, because doing so jeopardizes their means of surviving the bureaucracy.
> We really like your work! How can you help other engineers be more like you?
The thing I think (but usually don't say) is:
> You realize I'm like this because I often work directly against your instruction in order to satisfy my personal sense of professional pride and responsibility?
This is proves its mostly over for the high income industry.
There are no good paying jobs where you are having a blast. Otherwise there is a lot of those who want to do that job which drives wages waay down.
High paying jobs are tough/stressful/not fun. Which was the case with software before.
Nothing wrong with that, I have that compulsion as well.
Having a compulsion to play, purely for the sake of playing is a much healthier view. Useful, not useful, hard problem, easy problem, should not matter, you're playing.
Sometimes you can't be useful, yet you can always play.
All stems from inability to have systems without labor. Work, work.
I like how Pope John Paul II flipped the narrative and said work exist for the person, as a way for person to express itself. Made me realize how even communism stays trapped in labor mentality.
I love being an engineer and solving problems that I’m good at, which are problems too complex for most people to approach. But not everyone feels that way, some or most people don’t care or don’t understand the motivation, as they may have different motivations of their own. Learning to accept that and be confident without validation from others is very tough but possible, as you apply yourself consistently with focus and clarity, you gain a stronger sense of purpose. You are never fulfilled, but continue to pursue anyway, that is the trick I learned for myself. The trait is called equanimity and is more of a sustainable attitude vs a feeling, that is transactional. It’s easier as you get older and comes with maturity.
ChrisMarshallNY•2h ago