
Hacker School banning “feigned surprise” is absolutely brilliant - SoftwarePatent
http://brooklynoptimist.com/2014/04/10/hacker-school-banning-feigned-surprise-is-absolutely-brilliant/
======
awjr
One of the reasons I'm leaving my current role at the end of the month is due
to this egocentric development approach from the team lead.

"Bzzzzzt" and "Schoolboy error" are not good peer review comments to hand out
to the team.

Technically the guy is very good, but it's toxic and unpleasant.

Work for me is about doing cool stuff, learning new things, and most
importantly, helping the people I work with to do their job better and grow as
individuals (I feed them donuts on a daily basis ;) ).

~~~
awjr
As an aside, if you go for an interview and notice that each person has a Fail
Buzzer (I never had one) as a 'joke', you should probably not accept a role if
you don't have a thick skin.

~~~
sergiotapia
They sound like fratboy douchebags. Did they hi-five you and chug some beers
after hiring you?

~~~
awjr
I should probably write it up somewhere but the concept of the team going out
and having a drink/socialising was quite alien to them.

~~~
asuffield
Alcohol-centric social interaction is another form of exclusion. There are few
things I find quite so unpleasant as sitting in a noisy bar with people who
are getting progressively inebriated.

~~~
chollida1
> Alcohol-centric social interaction is another form of exclusion.

I get that, it also happens to be a very popular form of socializing with many
people.

To be fair to your point, you can replace alcohol-centric, with bowling,
concerts, sporting events, lunch and every single other form of socializing
and you can say its a form of exclusion as I can guarantee that no matter what
form of socializing you pick I can find someone who it makes uncomfortable.

Honestly sometimes I think the pendulum has swung too far back the other way
to inclusion that we are actually exuding people by trying to be all thing to
all people and not offending people.

~~~
chadwickthebold
I think the point is to recognize that some people, like the person you are
replying to, my have an issue with drinking as a social activity. Not that you
shouldn't have that as an option, but you should be aware if someone in the
group is made uncomfortable by that.

Speaking to your point though, I have a friend who - no joke - hates bowling.
Like, he gets violently angry when we suggested going bowling and said he'd
rather sit in the car by himself if we went. Some people...

~~~
AndyKelley
> Speaking to your point though, I have a friend who - no joke - hates
> bowling. Like, he gets violently angry when we

> suggested going bowling and said he'd rather sit in the car by himself if we
> went. Some people...

I'm one of those people.

------
yanowitz
There's a set of human interaction anti-patterns like this.

(The article mentions another one -- excessive confidence and its inverse,
ability to acknowledge ignorance and learn from others. I'd also add a variant
to that--having and expressing varying degrees of confidence in your opinions.
The more experience/evidence-based your opinion is, the more strongly you are
likely to be attached. But every opinion in software should have error bars
around it, especially given the rapidity of change.)

The inverse of feigned surprise was neatly displayed to me by a coworker
recently, "oh cool, today is the day you get to learn about X."

I assume someone has written something brilliant about these sets of
interactions.

~~~
archagon
One anti-pattern I particularly hate is sarcasm. For some reason, people in
many online communities seem to think that they can't do without it — even
that it somehow defines their personalities. But whenever somebody posts
something even remotely against the grain, and the top-voted reply is in the
vein of "Yeah, because _that 's_ a real problem", there's just nothing more I
can do in that thread. It's a conversational dead-end.

~~~
normloman
I will defend sarcasm. Because sometimes, the only way to see the stupidity in
your argument is to hear it said back to you. And yeah, it stings a bit. All
the better.

~~~
danielweber
The problem with sarcasm is that, when I use it, I'm not putting my own
opinion out there to be critiqued, I'm only attacking the other guy's. I can
change my argument at will and claim "I was only being ironic" with prior
claims.

~~~
Crito
> _" I can change my argument at will and claim "I was only being ironic" with
> prior claims."_

This is solved by explicitly stating when you are being sarcastic, _or_
following up the sarcastic paragraph with a paragraph that non-sarcastically
explains your position.

> _" The problem with sarcasm is that, when I use it, I'm not putting my own
> opinion out there to be critiqued, I'm only attacking the other guy's."_

I don't think that is actually problematic. There are certain issues that I do
not have strong feelings on one way or the other, so I consider my opinion on
those issues to be of relatively little consequence. Nevertheless, I am still
capable of analyzing and critiquing the merit of arguments made by others.

For instance, if the topic is tidal power stations being placed offshore of
expensive private beach property _(a topic that I do not care about one way or
the other)_ and somebody objects that the view from those beaches will be
destroyed, I might sarcastically quip that all transmission lines near golf
courses and country clubs should be razed, because rich people should never be
forced to gaze upon infrastructure. I would give this sarcastic quip because,
although I don't really give a shit about tidal power, I can still recognize a
ridiculous argument when I see one.

------
tikhonj
Ah, confidence. I tend to do the opposite: I hedge too much. If I don't watch
myself, I'd probably say, "I think 3 is a prime number...". Then again, I
_have_ been guilty of projecting confidence a bit too much, probably in a way
unpleasant to others.

In some ways, just banning a particular behavior feels a bit too much like
treating the symptom rather than the root cause. On the other hand, I can't
imagine how to approach this problem more holistically.

More importantly, this rule is _simple_. Having a simple, strict rule like
this will help people help themselves. If they actually _want_ to be
nicer—and, I've found, most people do—a few rules like this will help them
catch their own bad habits. And over time, it will help them be more
introspective. So perhaps it actually _is_ a way to treat the underlying
problem.

I've been trying something similar myself, pattern matching on some of my bad
habits to try to reduce them. I don't know if it's been working holistically,
but at least I _feel_ like a nicer person. So that's something.

~~~
eshvk
> Ah, confidence. I tend to do the opposite: I hedge too much.

I never had a formal computer science education and I also tend to do that.I
took enough Math, CS and Electrical Engineering courses to be utterly
frightened by what I don't know. This means that I also over-estimate what
other people know. Oh, Sally has a pure math degree from Harvard, let me be
very careful talking about kernels around her. James studied Distributed
Systems at MIT, I better over think my system design before I talk to him.

What I have realized is that, this anti-pattern comes in conflict with the
opposite anti-pattern. The one that comes from people who hide their
insecurities by being over-confident. The one that comes from people whose
deepest fear is saying "I don't know". To them, a person who says that is a
person who can't code. If you want to progress in your career, you will have
to deal/learn to deal with such people. Being nice doesn't really help when
the other person is a "Oh, you don't know X" dick. Especially if you are
working in something that is a specialized domain where the other person
doesn't have the expertise to evaluate you.

~~~
gdilla
That is a very interesting anti-pattern, and I see it a lot in non
engineering/tech companies (because I think people are insecure about the
rapid technical changes they see about them). It's called the Dunning-Kruger
effect [1].

“One of the painful things about our time is that those who feel certainty are
stupid, and those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt
and indecision.” - Bertrand Russel [1]

[1][http://www.spring.org.uk/2012/06/the-dunning-kruger-
effect-w...](http://www.spring.org.uk/2012/06/the-dunning-kruger-effect-why-
the-incompetent-dont-know-theyre-incompetent.php)

~~~
eshvk
I don't want to get into the pattern of assuming that all people who are
certain are stupid. :) Especially since my career involves working with enough
people who are non tech but bring so much value to the table that I would be
foolish to assume that.

However, another interesting side effect of Engineers who are so damn certain
about The Right Way is Product Owners or higher ups who have been trained by
such engineers are absolutely confused by a person who expresses uncertainty.

I have started learning the art of keeping the uncertainty to myself or a
trusted set of people who are OK with uncertainty and project a calm, clear
vision to those who don't.

------
qwerta
> “Feigned surprise” (when someone gasps and says something like: “you don’t
> even know about monads?”)

Too often the surprise is real. There are developers who do not know basics
such as loops, conditions, arithmetic and so on.

I use Java for a long time, but I have problem writing 'switch' statements. In
Scala it is very powerful so I use it often, in Java it is too primitive, so I
always just use bunch of 'if-else' statements.

I am not sure what context of previous example applies to. It could be on
someone who claims Haskel skills. But I think every well educated hacker /
software developer should know about nomads.

~~~
asuffield
I have this unhappy experience every day, when I find people don't know things
that are essential to doing their jobs. I try hard not to let it show too much
or fall into the trap of acting superior, but the soul-crushing depression
makes this hard.

~~~
shubb
The more I learn, the clearer it becomes that I know very little. Things that
I used to know fade away - a few years out of college, I can't do matrix maths
anymore.

Software engineering is a big job. Software engineers might know about
assembly code, pointers, design patterns, UML, functional programming,
algorithms, AI, statistics, reverse engineering, driver programming, SQL,
NoSQL, matrix calculations and numeric simulation, control theory, cloud
scaling, devops, unit testing, XML schema design...

Then, if you think about the things outside programming an engineer might need
to know, like marketing, sales, budget control, estimating, project
management, user experience design, graphic design, human psychology. And the
domain they are working in of course.

That's a lot to know. Even the basics. I don't know the basics of a lot of
those things.

Doesn't meeting all these people who don't know things make you wonder what
you don't know that you don't know?

~~~
judk
Of course I don't know everything. But the stuff I don't know is irrelevant to
my job. If you join my team, I expect you to know everything relevant to your
new job, not whatever trivia you might have found amusing elsewhere.

------
ColinWright

      > "Feigned surprise" (when someone gasps and says
      > something like: "you don’t even know about monads?")
    

When someone doesn't know about something it's an opportunity for them to
learn, and for you to experience again the wonder and excitement of
discovering something new. Don't exhibit your superiority just because you've
been exposed to something they haven't, seize with both hands the thrill of
learning.

[https://xkcd.com/1053/](https://xkcd.com/1053/)

~~~
jerf
Tone and context are everything. Let's not pretend this isn't usually passive-
aggressive. (And not even very passive passive-aggressive...)

~~~
hamburglar
I agree that tone and context are everything, but I don't agree that it's
"usually" passive-aggressive. On my team, if someone says "oh, man, you
haven't heard about X?" it's usually said with a relish that translates to
"dude, you're gonna love this. Check it out: ..."

I guess that means I don't work with dicks.

------
moron4hire
I have tried for a long time to be understanding of people's differing
experiences. Mostly because I've been on the receiving end of so much feigned
surprise. I was home-schooled, but actually had a fairly normal childhood
otherwise. My parents didn't shelter my sister and me from pop culture, we
embraced it just as much as any other family in our podunk Pennsylvania town.
It used to really put me off in college when people would laugh at me for not
getting an obscure cultural reference--even if I knew what franchise it was
from, just hadn't had time to watch that particular one--assuming it was
another "home schoolers are so sheltered" moment. No, I'm sorry, there is just
a finite number of television watching hours in a life, and when you were
watching Captain Planet, I was watching Teenage Mutant Nina Turtles.

Incidentally, I used to get it from my home schooler "friends", too. They
would gasp to learn I hadn't read such and such work of classic English
literature. Comments about how poor of a reader I must be too have not read
Dickins. Will, sorry I haven't helped validate your childhood, but just
because I hated Oliver Twist and read Kipling instead doesn't mean I didn't
read any classics.

So yeah, just be careful. Feigned surprise ids also a form of exclusionary
prejudice. If you can't even be accepting of someone who is nearly culturally
identical to you, then your chances are grim for when you meet someone who is
really different.

~~~
jrs99
could be a different kind of feigned surprise. Like they want to express how
weird they find it that you don't know about something.

if someone said "What!? You've NEVER listened to this album?", and then
removed the album from their shelf and shoved it in my hands, I don't know if
that would be in the same class as the passive aggressive type of feigned
surprise.

or if someone sees a bag of milk in my fridge and says "What!? Your milk comes
in BAGS???"

~~~
moron4hire
When it was followed up with "told you homeschoolers are weird", I think I'm
well outside of the realm of assumption.

Usually, when people learn I was homeschooled, the first words out of their
mouth are "really? You don't seem weird." I used to reply with, "oh? How many
homeschooled kids do you know?" Now I answer, "oh, I'm certainly weird, just
not for that reason."

------
ufukbay
I have been in a similar situation where my "good will" caused one of my best
coworkers to feel superiour than me and started to try to boss me around. For
more than two years everything was fine because we worked on different
projects. However for the last couple of months, working together on the same
project, everything went down the drain.

I talked to him about big changes and new features before implementing them to
hear his opinion in order to make him feel more involved but in one of those
meetings, he said something like: "You wouldn't be able to do this on your own
if I didn't help you. Did you learn about this kind of stuff at school?". This
was the start of a chain of events which finally led to quitting my job and
taking up new one from the beginning of May.

Next time I will make sure that I either won't talk about everything in detail
to my coworker or make sure that people understand why I'm involving them in
the decision making.

~~~
judk
People at my office are afraid to communicate because they don't want other
people to think they are dumb and punish them politically.

Don't fall victim to that. Be the good teammate you know how to be. You will
learn more and get more done than if you keep your shields up. You may suffer
from insulting peer reviews short term, but you will be a hero to others who
are like you but more timid, and you will learn and grow faster which will
make you more impressive at your next gig.

~~~
ufukbay
Yeah, with lack of communication, stress and chaos is inevitable, it's just a
matter of time. At my next gig, I'll give my best to keep an high level of
communication between my teammates.

------
aaronetz
I am very much against feigned surprise, but this just a symptom of the
underlying personality. Ban one thing - and the personality will find other
ways to manifest itself. It's better, in my opinion, to just have an unspoken
rule like "respect your coworkers" and make sure to help arrogant people
improve their social skills (sometimes those people don't even realize that
their behavior is causing grief to others).

~~~
gommm
I think sometimes correcting the symptom leads the person to realize that they
are doing that and correct the problem. It's easy to behave like a jerk
without realizing it and a lot of people who come off as arrogant don't
imagine themselves as being so. If you tell them to respect their coworkers,
it doesn't have the same impact because it not actionable (they already
imagine themselves as being respectful).

That's why banning specific toxic behaviors work, it encourages introspection
for people whose bad behavior is unintentional.

~~~
lawtguy
The ban also removes some of the reward for this behavior. Some of the people
are doing it to make themselves look superior and the target inferior. With
the ban, they can instantly be pulled up short ("Hey! We don't do that here at
Hacker School.") thus instantly removing some of the superiority they thought
they had gained.

------
facepalm
Why not just have a rule to be nice to each other? Personally I wouldn't like
a climate of micromanaged human interaction. But of course for others it might
be different. I am not saying they should change their policy, just that it
would be off-putting to me.

~~~
zhemao
From the Hacker School manual in which these rules are spelled out.

> The goal isn't to burden Hacker School with a bunch of annoying rules, or to
> give us a stick to bludgeon people with for "being bad." Rather, these rules
> are designed to help all of us build a pleasant, productive, and fearless
> community.

To build a positive environment, it sometimes helps to have a list of specific
toxic behaviors that should be avoided.

~~~
facepalm
Sure, I guess it depends how you interpret the world "rule". It could just be
a recommendation, or people could be expelled for breaking it.

~~~
zhemao
Different rules have different punishments. It's in the nature of rules. I
very much doubt that anyone at Hacker School has been kicked out for feigning
surprise.

------
axanoeychron
I honestly find this behaviour so difficult to understand.

Why treat people like this? What advantage does it serve?

If someone does not know something, it is not an excuse for belittlement. It
is not an upperhand. It's an opportunity to teach and learn from teaching.
This probably makes me a minority and just reinforces my perspective that
human ego can be fundamentally broken and requires time to healthily
construct.

~~~
leephillips
"Why treat people like this? What advantage does it serve?"

You seem to have answered your own question in your subsequent remarks. The
feigned surprise is a habit of people with very low self esteem. They
constantly seek to reassure themselves by trying to place others (usually
people whom they fear are more capable than they are) into a position of lower
social status.

If you are on the receiving end of a feigned surprise attack, think back
through your interactions with the attacker: you will probably remember
something recent that revealed that you had some skill or knowledge that the
attacker lacked. From that moment on, he was looking for a way to reassert his
social status.

------
minikomi
This reminds me of how great I thought this was:

    
    
        Hacker School is positive. When I had a bug that I didn’t 
        understand and asked one of the facilitators to help me out,
        they would frequently say “Oh, interesting!”. The attitude was 
        “Oh, is something not working? How delightful! 
        A learning opportunity!”. 
    

source: [http://jvns.ca/blog/2014/02/15/how-was-hacker-
school/](http://jvns.ca/blog/2014/02/15/how-was-hacker-school/)

------
octo_t
What about just surprise?

I've met people who claim to be 'experts' in C++, but (for example) don't know
how to use STL algorithms.

~~~
sillysaurus3
I'm a C++ expert, but I've never touched std::for_each, for example. (I could
learn it in about two minutes if it became necessary to know, but it hasn't
ever been.)

In general, #include <algorithm> is a bit worrisome, because it usually
indicates someone is trying to be overly clever with C++. On the other hand,
if the codebase is written in that style, then the _whole_ codebase should be
consistently written in that style. The inconsistency is the worrisome part:
either use it everywhere or nowhere.

Anyway, STL is pretty massive, and knowing all of it isn't the same thing as
being a C++ expert. Knowing what to avoid is almost as important as knowing
what to use.

~~~
jcd748
You probably don't need std::for_each anymore. With C++11, you can do the
following:

for (const auto& element : collection) { }

What's wrong with <algorithm>? I use it all the time for sort, swap, and
random_shuffle comes up more frequently than I expect.

~~~
sillysaurus3
Those are all fine. Actually, I forgot that sort was in <algorithm>. I was
just recalling some of the horrors I've seen due to pre-C++11 fanciness. There
seems to be a temptation for C++ programmers to overuse clever tricks.
Luckily, with C++11 fewer tricks are necessary.

Unfortunately, the gamedev industry will probably be stuck with pre-C++11 for
another decade.

~~~
emmelaich
> I'm a C++ expert ..

> I forgot that sort was in <algorithm>

Uhm, sillysaurus3, could I see you in my office please.

:-)

~~~
sillysaurus3
My brain space is limited, so I use it sparingly. Memorizing which header file
provides which function is something I've left out. That's what IDEs and
Google are for. ;)

------
bryan_rasmussen
_gasp_ I didn't even know what feigned surprise was!

~~~
theorique
I'm _amazed_ that you didn't know about feigned surprise. _Everyone_ knows
about feigned surprise (or so I thought).

------
jgroome
Reminds me of this article from way back when:

[http://thingist.com/item/4372/](http://thingist.com/item/4372/)

Not exactly the same, but talks about this attitude prevalent among tech types
that encourages belittling of those less experienced/knowledgable.

------
wingerlang
This seems to be the post in question:
[https://www.hackerschool.com/blog/1-summer-2012-applications...](https://www.hackerschool.com/blog/1-summer-2012-applications-
open)

~~~
logn
Reading that post and the blog post linked, I think I see computer science
programs in a better light now. At least in an automata/assembly/algebra class
you're not going to find people who think they're hotshots for knowing the
material. Most people struggle through and then go find spare time to learn
programming. I'd be really down on myself for not knowing all the latest
programming trends in hacker school, kind of like now when I read endless
Javascript blogs about new tools, but the difference is I know enough now to
know what's important to have a grasp on and what's noise.

------
mcguire
The article might be improved if it mentioned what Hacker School was and how
they had banned "feigned surprise".[1]

[1] [https://www.hackerschool.com/manual#sec-
environment](https://www.hackerschool.com/manual#sec-environment)

------
punkrockpolly
Before Hacker School, I never realized how unhelpful this was. The naive logic
is, "well, I'm genuinely surprised that this person didn't know this". But in
the grand reality of things, all of us know very little. Even experts in one
area, don't know basic things in another area. By removing the shaming of
admitting what you don't know, Hacker School encourages everyone to move past
that and help each other learn.

~~~
lawtguy
I think this is exactly why they added this rule: some people didn't realize
the negative effects of acting surprised when someone doesn't know something.
The jerks are probably still going to be jerks of course, but for the others
it's a chance to learn about how to better interact with the people around
them.

------
badman_ting
Oh, people who do that are terrible. But then, nerds have _so many_ terrible
personality tics like that, which is why they/we are considered socially
ungraceful. Another favorite of mine is the one where you take what someone
said super literally, as a joke (a terribly unfunny joke).

------
jl6
This was a new term for me, though I recognise the behaviour. I think the term
will help fight it. Reminds me of the phrase "false balance" which was also
new to me recently.

Names are so important!

------
Argorak
I struggle with this anti-pattern. I used to use it, but I know how bad it is.
In bad moments, it still slips.

My solution has been to be more proactive about it. If I see a topic coming
up, I just ask "you know about (ABC)?", which gives the other person the
option to say "yes" (instead of getting something explained they know) or
"no", which is a good start to an explanation.

~~~
sjtrny
The problem is that sometimes the person feels under pressure to pretend they
know so they say yes anyway.

~~~
Argorak
Sure, but thats a different problem you have to solve on another level and
inherent in all such conversations.

------
gelisam
After reading the title but before reading the article, I was trying to
imagine a situation in which anybody might want to fake surprise in a work
environment. The only thing I came up with was as a teaching mechanism, as in:
"your program is crashing when you divide by zero instead of returning NaN?
How strange! Let's investigate together".

I was quite surprised to see that by "feigned surprise", the article actually
meant something along the lines of "really, you expected an integer operation
to return NaN?". The article does explain why people might say that, but I
still have a hard time believing it. Why would anybody want to say that? It's
not helpful at all.

I guess I must be lucky never to have worked in the bad working environments
described by the article.

~~~
biscarch
> Why would anybody want to say that? It's not helpful at all.

The way I read the article (and think about this topic in general) is pretty
close to the way I perceived the part of your response that I quoted.

Essentially it often combines explicit or implicit generalized language
(anybody, nobody, everybody, etc) with an assertion that something is
"obvious" or in some other way "beneath" the person saying it. It's not
necessarily that people _want_ to say it but more likely that they are unaware
of what they're saying for whatever reason. By giving it a name Hacker School
is letting people realize the topic and, hopefully, reducing occurrences.

IMO "Feigned Surprise" is a bit of a misnomer but I haven't come up with
anything better to call it. It may be more correlated with imperfect
articulation of people's assumptions than actual surprise.

------
mathattack
The "Let me find something you don't know" is almost always compensation for a
problem of the overconfident. Usually it stems from them being on the
receiving end of it. Perhaps in the form of, "Oh, you can't run a 7 minute
mile?" when they were younger.

------
myth_drannon
Here is a short presentation about Hacker School at our local Python meetup
given by someone who went there. She also talks about feigned surprises
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3W6yQ2dXJk8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3W6yQ2dXJk8)

------
DanBC
Some schools in the UK recognisd that some children do not want to look stupid
by givin the wrong answer or appearing not to know something.

They realised that this stops those children from asking questions, not jist
from answering questions.

One technique used to overcome this is for the teacher to nominate a pupil to
attempt an answer. It doesn't matter iftheu don't know - that's part of the
process.

A side benefit is the teacher gets more inderstanding of any mosconceptions
the pupils have.

There are lots of subtle things happening with teaching and it's a bit
worrying that we don't have much research or we don't ise the research we
have.

~~~
arjie
It's an interesting pedagogical technique I've seen elsewhere too. What are
the results of applying it?

I know that I was in a class where the teacher followed this procedure. I
_dreaded_ the moment when I'd be picked even though the questions were usually
simple enough if you read for the class and paid attention. It turned my
insides to water every time. Absolute dread. Made an otherwise fun class
scary.

------
cruise02
As always, there's a relevant xkcd. It's one of my favorites.
[https://xkcd.com/1053/](https://xkcd.com/1053/)

------
AnimalMuppet
The rule is a great idea. But even without it, you can counter this kind of
junk. "Hey, why did you respond that way? Does your ego need the boost from
acting smugly superior? Or is the problem that you don't understand it well
enough to help me out by actually explaining it?"

That would probably cost you someone's friendship, but if they're pulling this
kind of stunt on you, I'm not sure that they were your friend anyway...

------
d4vlx
When I worked at Thoughworks there were several people who were terrible for
this. Many of them senior. It significantly reduced my respect for the company
and I left as soon as I found a good replacement.

What made it particularly irksome was that they heavily market themselves both
internally and externally as being above such things. The cognitive dissonance
really grated on me.

------
rmrfrmrf
I combat "feigned surprise" by admitting that I don't know something and
asking the person for an explanation.

------
kyberias
I still think there are valid and sincere reasons to be surprised when someone
doesn't know something and it's OK to express that surprise. Especially in
private conversations!

------
lowglow
If you've gone to a dev school, please help share your experience with others
who are looking:

[http://schools.techendo.co/](http://schools.techendo.co/)

------
ef47d35620c1
If I went around lording my specific domain knowledge over others, I would
never learn anything new myself. What a waste of my life and human
interactions that would be.

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ap22213
I always try to remember that the most expressive (e.g. loudest) person isn't
necessarily the smartest, even though my brain is built to associate the two.

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daemonk
The more you know, the more you realize how much you don't know. Feigning
surprise just reflects how much of a knowledge bubble one exists in.

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Mozai
Would it be better to ban all sarcasm or intentional irony? It's sending a
message by using the opposite signal.

~~~
normloman
Would it be better to ban all subtlety in human communication and reduce the
expressive capabilities of speech to straight forward description?

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cool-RR
_What?_ You don't know what feigned surprise means?

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judk
article seems to be a response to an announcement HS made, but source is not
linked or quoted.

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golergka
This needs to be a rule. Can we make it a rule?

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michaelochurch
Feigned surprise is petty bullying by people who get their asses kicked by
even nastier bullies: the business assholes who run this industry because, as
engineers, we're absolutely _terrible_ at fighting for our own interests, and
have let ourselves become a colonized people who mostly implement others'
shitty ideas and are paid in table scraps.

It's no different from the playground bully who goes home and gets the shit
beaten out of him by his drunk-ass dad. Because he can't wallop his father, he
takes it out on the other kids. These asshats (the ones who feign surprise)
can't do anything about the VCs and product executives and idiot fuckups who
make the life of a typical programmer so terrible, so they take it out on
other engineers whom they perceive as marginal: women, minorities, people over
or under the group's age range, and new entrants to the field.

~~~
mjolk
It's pretty heavy conjecture to assume that jerks are bigots or misogynists
becuase they're mad at someone else at work.

~~~
michaelochurch
If someone's a member of the Taliban or the Ku Klux Klan, it's likely that his
issues go deeper than "mad at the boss man".

However, even your most obnoxious brogrammer is not likely to be in the Klan.
He probably isn't even a bigot. He's a bully. There's a difference. Bullies
attack those who are politically weak. It so happens that politically weak
people are often in a minority in that environment, but I don't think gender,
race, or age are explicitly part of their selection process.

The archetypical bully brogrammer doesn't wake up and say, "after my 10:30
protein shake, I'm going to direct a few microaggressions at female
programmers. Oh, and Mark turns 40 on Thursday, so I need to put him on my
rotation." It doesn't work that way, obviously. They pick on the weak--
whoever that may be, and it often changes-- because they're picked-on from
above and it's their only way to restore their battered confidence.

~~~
mjolk
You seem to have a very specific anecdote in mind.

~~~
michaelochurch
Actually, no. The "protein shake" anecdote was just me throwing bro
stereotypes and tech-sphere complaints together.

Typical tech bullies avoid and ignore me because they know I'm good at what I
do, and better than most of them. The only time I face adversity from a
programmer is when I make him insecure (which doesn't require that I be
better, although that's often the case.)

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zk00006
I work myself, so don't actually have much experience with this rule. But
people need negative feedback which often creates big motivation for them and
enforces learning. Giving only positive examples does not help to become
better person/programmer/whatever...

~~~
cowls
There's a difference between constructive negative feedback and trying to
subtly belittle someone.

Not knowing about something is not really a negative feedback point

~~~
Karunamon
To be fair, the author does not successfully make their case that "feigned"
surprise (how does one know enough about the mental state of another person to
make that assumption anyways?) is always negative or always bad.

Funny, in that an article about not making assumptions is packed with them,
not the least of which is the assumption that someone who is visibly surprised
when you don't know something is expressing some kind of superiority or
belittling.

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brianpgordon
Another way of looking at it is that shame is a good disincentive for
ignorance. It _shouldn 't be OK_ to ask questions like "what's Lisp?" or
"what's synchronization?" (both of which I've heard). We can enforce that norm
by rewarding such questions with a grimace. Of course, the absolute most
important thing is to make sure that the environment doesn't become toxic with
disdain, but I don't think it's _in general_ a sin to "feign surprise" or
similar.

~~~
AndrewDucker
If it's not ok then make that clear up-front and then tell people when they've
crossed over into an area that you expect them to understand on their own.

Doing it in a comedic fashion doesn't help, it's just bullying.

~~~
brianpgordon
Playing out that scene, I can't imagine taking your approach in actual
conversation with a peer.

Peer: Synchronized? Me: I'm sorry, you've crossed over into an area that I
expect you to understand on your own.

That kind of room-silencing confrontation makes you seem like way more of an
asshole than answering their question but with a raised eyebrow or feigned
surprise.

~~~
AndrewDucker
Nope, an arched eyebrow makes you look like much more of a dick there. Because
you're implying that it's basic stuff, _and_ that it's not even worth you
telling them that, because they're so beneath you at that point.

In a meeting with a peer (rather than a training course/academy situation)
you'd presumably tell them that that's fairly basic stuff that you don't want
to derail a meeting with, and that you'd point them at some resources later.

~~~
brianpgordon
> you're implying that it's basic stuff, _and_ that it's not even worth you
> telling them that, because they're so beneath you at that point

That's not how I'd mean it at all. Maybe I'm overanalyzing our folkways but in
general it seems to be more polite to communicate something unpleasant in a
way which the other person can pretend to not have noticed. Twitching your
nose when you know they're looking is more polite than saying "dude you've got
BO." It allows you to gloss over the unpleasantness and continue the
conversation.

