HN Theater @HNTheaterMonth

⬐ eknight15

Interesting topic, but the presentation makes me happy to be done with school. I don't miss sitting through 50 minute lectures that could be condensed to 10 minutes, or read even quicker.

⬐ durzagott

I disagree. I found the speaker's style to be very engaging and I was happy to sit through the whole talk.

⬐ putlake

OT but I wish Vimeo had an option to play the video at 2x the speed. YouTube has that option and I love it. Use it all the time for watching conference presentations.

⬐ sneak

It's invaluable. Additionally, voice recognition to give a text transcript (as they do now for automated subtitles) would be even more useful to me, as I can read even faster than 2x spoken.

⬐ dredmorbius

yt-download and the full-featured video-player of your choice.

Option to fast-forward, repeat, speed/slow, etc., from keyboard as well. Which rocks.

Web video players suck. All of them. YouTube is horribly inconsistent across interfaces.

⬐ krebby

Most vimeo videos nowadays are sent in html5 video tags. If you're reading HN, you're probably pretty comfortable in chrome's console. Just find the video element and adjust the `playbackSpeed` variable (default 1).

⬐ grrowl

the parameter is `playbackRate`

⬐ chippy

One would expect at least a dozen browzer plugins which change these speeds. Ive never encountered the need - i run a slow netbook and never load the videos and I run a fast-ish laptop and occasionally am prepared to load videos.

⬐ thrden

tl;dw: Happiness is fleeting, chasing an emotion is intrinsically difficult/impossible. too often we say we want team happiness but what we really want is happiness of specific members whom we consider important, thereby creating a two class system(at which point she makes reference to the holocaust?). what we really want is equanimity on our teams, i.e. calmness. This allows for more nuanced discussion of issues, because when you optimize for happiness you and your team can hide reality from one another in order to ensure happiness.

feel free to add anything i missed, it was an hour long and I zoned out during some parts.

⬐ mtreis86

I just read "Man's Search for Meaning" by Viktor Frankl. The reference to the holocaust makes sense, if that book is fresh in your mind. I highly recommend it if anyone has not read it yet.

⬐ hasenj

Yea. The opposite of drama and dysfunctional interactions is not happiness and cheers and jokes all the time. It's simply calmness and emotional stability.

⬐ hoodoof

I think the way to get the best out of people is not to pander to them to make them the happiest people but to expect high standards from them, to expect everyone to give their best, work well and hard and be proud of what they do. Work/life balance is important so don't expect more than working hours but demand the absolute best from people.

Ask them "how do we get the best from you? When do you do your hardest and best work, how do we tap into that?". Tell them it's what you expect of them so they need to turn on their A game.

Pay people more than market rate.

Work is satisfying if you give it your best and do something worthwhile and challenging and hard.

Foosball table, pinball room, Xbox room, lego playroom bullshit not needed.

⬐ stdbrouw

> I think the way to get the best out of people is not to pander to them to make them the happiest people but to expect high standards from them, to expect everyone to give their best, work well and hard and be proud of what they do.

This is an impossible demand masquerading as common sense. Nobody can be at peak performance all the time, and a sane work environment shouldn't expect you to.

⬐ mtreis86

I think "give their best" is an entirely relative term. The best today may far exceed best tomorrow if you rate the effort based on work accomplished or effort given. But if you are rating both of those days purely on 'the best you could do given circumstances' then there is no peak performance persay.

⬐ penguinduck

Terrible speaker basically spouting nonsense.

⬐ ionforce

This presentation is far too long for such little content.

⬐ usloth_wandows

The speaker spoke in a roundabout way diluting her meaningful content with cliche after cliche. I think he point is nice though: aim for calmness and be honest with your team, not the allusion of happiness.

⬐ tzakrajs

I think I heard her use Nazi concentration camp guards as a metaphor to describe the potential bad behavior of employees. That was a strange talk.

⬐ hkjgkjy

From my experience (I'm a coder), the best work has been done where we adhere to what Zuckerberg called "The Hacker Way". WRT the talk from "Lean Agile" conference...

Slightly OT, but Erik Meijer spoke wonderfully about it at GOTO Copenhagen[1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FvMuPtuvP5w

⬐ jaunkst

Why work where your not happy if you don't have too? Demand + skill =p opportunities. Opportunities + happy relationship = I give a shit. I know making a living is important but I don't think working under this concept is sustainable. I have been in this scenario and it's dehumanistic and unsustainable in markets where your employees have options.

⬐ harryf

Happiness takes place in your head, typically based on a series of judgements you make about what's been happening around you "oh that was nice", "hmmm I didn't like that". That means it a relative phenomena and can be in your control if you can get concious enough about the stream of judgements your make throughout the day.

Bearing that in mind it makes more sense to optimize for good health. If a job is causing your health to deteriorate perhaps it's time to stop? There are a lot of happy workaholics in software

⬐ grrowl

for me, opportunities + i give a shit = happy relationship; Lets work on awesome, compelling problems together, and if (as an employer) you enable me giving a shit, we'll have a happy relationship.

Like, "the enemy of my enemy is my friend", if you're solving an interesting problem and I'm on-board solving that same problem, we'll both work in a way that enables us solving that interesting problem. The bit about Emergency Services really resonated with me.

⬐ shostack

Many (most?) people don't have great options, and so the choice is often between a livable wage and unhappiness, or poverty and unhappiness.

⬐ milesf

Provide an environment that give workers autonomy, mastery, and purpose (see Daniel Pink's work title Drive https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc). You provide those three things and a sane group of people, happiness will follow.

⬐ manigandham

Happiness is a state of mind and also a side-effect of a higher meaning and purpose. It's also absolutely subjective.

Optimizing for happiness is not a worthwhile or even possible endeavor. Instead focus on providing purpose and meaning and everything else will follow by the people who are best fit for it.

⬐ greenspot

I saw the title and instantly clicked on it. It's a refreshing view on leadership. The best quote come right at the beginning: "We are chasing a mood and mood is not a realiable method of delivery". Very intriguing but frankly the rest of her talk is tedious and full of rambling without making more strong points. Would have preferred just a short blog post on her views. The things she said are valid and if you as a leader just rely on making the team happy you won't succeed. Still she doesn't provide any fool-proof solution except being more transparent. I didn't see the last third of the video, so maybe she provided more help then.

I think a big part of being a leader is to frame situtations always, really always in a positive way. Every event or incident can be seen in a negative, realistic but also in a positive way, eg seen as a new opportunity. Latter is much more motivating and eventually makes people happy. Also you as a leader want to be in a positive environment where people are happy, otherwise you end up just being a dull delegating robot degrading socially which is btw the biggest risk of being in executive positioms. So just ignoring this mood called happiness sounds a bit too simple for my taste. Leaderhship is way more complex. Especially in engineering where creatvity is the key you don't want people who just function you need people who can and want to go to the max--and this only works if they are motivated--or just call it--'happy'.

However, I still think she addressed an important point but I would tackle this from a different perspective: What you need as a leader are individuals which are happy by nature--or to be more precise who do not suffer of a severe depression. If you have depressive people on your team, you can't make them happy or motivated. They will always find something which doesn't work, which hinders them, which makes their entire life miserable. And not relying on making them happy, won't let them be productive neither. So, what's the point? Moreover, you risk that they infect the entire team with their negativity. How to identify or avoid having depressive people is a different question and even more challenging. And also important, you as a leader can trigger depression if you are not careful, so even if the claim 'team happiness can be the wrong thing to aim for' would be true, a leader should still aim for not making the team unhappy. And to go further the leader should aim for giving the team a perspective, a trending one. A persepctive which let them grow. Then they should be happy and again: maybe we still should aim for happiness and her talk title was just a click- or view-bait.

⬐ kd5bjo

At least in the US, you'll want to be careful with these views as an employer or manager. At least some cases of depression will be classified as a disability under the ADA, leaving your company open to a discrimination lawsuit if you make employment decisions based on it.

(I've read the ADA, but I'm not a lawyer -- this advice could be completely wrong in practice)

⬐ ciju

approx slides (has common slides, but is different from the presentation): https://qconlondon.com/london-2016/system/files/presentation...

⬐ karyon

these don't seem to be the correct slides.

⬐ sidcool

JPMorgan is a sponsor of the event talk, no doubt team happiness does not count (FYI, worked there) Also, sarcasm.

⬐ None

None

⬐ xyzzy4

What you should really aim for is customer/user happiness.

⬐ st3v3r

If you're talent isn't happy, you're not gonna be able to make your customers happy.

⬐ xyzzy4

Tell that to Amazon.

⬐ manachar

Amazon has been making me less and less happy lately. I had a customer service interaction that left me speechlessly pissed. They were clearly not empowered to do anything but tell me to suck it.

They don't optimize for happy customers. They optimize for being the place you go to buy things online first and profit. Oddly, they bought Zappos which is orientated to customer happiness.

⬐ kpil

I've more or less stopped buying things from Amazon, basically because the horror stories about their warehouses.

Also, I doubt that product quality is a factor at all when they put something is a store. I would like to think that I buy things from people that care just a little bit about me and the things I buy.

⬐ douche

Two day free shipping, at essentially the same prices as anywhere else on the web, makes me a happy customer. I would rather buy shit through Prime than go to WalMart. At least searching is optimized.

⬐ nostrebored

That's actually exactly the opposite of Amazon's business model. I would report your customer service rep. You can tell Amazon you didn't receive your order and they'll typically send you a replacement.

⬐ astrange

Amazon usually gives you a refund and free month of Prime for pretty much any complaint. They won't even make you send the items back!

⬐ slededit

The customer service has drastically dropped. To the point where there customer responses have poor spelling (and don't actually solve the problem). They allow third party sellers which sell counterfeit goods - meaning you have to carefully look at who is actually selling the item you are about to buy. If you buy shoes its clear Amazon isn't getting the same quality as the bigger box stores despite selling the same brands.

Amazon is quickly becoming the walmart of the internet for me. I'll buy from them because its easy but I don't expect them to sell me a quality product.

⬐ devishard

Now you're just confusing the concepts because we don't have separate words for them.

This conversation is about longer-term happiness, not the brief rush you get from buying something or getting something in the mail. I think there's a strong argument that in that sense of the word "happy", Amazon actively contributes to the unhappiness of their customers.

⬐ jdavis703

McDonalds' customers aren't happy then? I remember I used to be happy before going, being at, and leaving McDonalds when I was a kid. I'm sure the staff had a totally different attitude before going, being at, and leaving work though.

⬐ Clubber

How about now? The only reason my parents were happy taking me to McDonalds is because I was happy to be at McDonalds. I was the customer, my parents were the employees, and McDonalds was just a facilitator.

I have a kid. She loves going to McDonalds. No matter how miserable a person is at work, interacting with a happy and excited kid usually makes them feel, or at least act, a little better.

The funny thing is she doesn't even eat the food. I would complain and tell her to eat McDonalds food, then I realized what a bad idea that was. She likes the experience, playground, and the happy meal toys.

So, I guess the point is, at McDonalds, when you are a kid, the miserable employees either act or feel less miserable because you're an excited kid. It's kind of a strange exception.

Chuck E. Cheese is another example that is similar. Good God, that place is hell on Earth.

⬐ knucklesandwich

Look, try to hire emotionally intelligent people. Be honest to them about what they're getting into when they get hired (ways in which the company operates, the technology stack the company is required to support, etc.). Finally, be open to suggestion when you can be accommodating to better ways of doing things that are mutually beneficial. If you're still having problems, you might need to acknowledge that you made a bad hire and act accordingly (toxic people make your emotionally intelligent employees unhappy in ways that you are responsible for).

Obviously optimizing for "happiness" in some sort of naive, single-minded sort of way is not the way to go about things. If you have the type of employees that you have to infantilize and throw dumb perks, entitlements, and power to in order to make them happy, you need to reconsider a few things. But on the flip side, if the only inputs to your model of employee wellbeing are "bad news" and "ignorance/delusion", you're probably running an abusive workplace.

This kind of stuff shouldn't be rocket science.

⬐ askafriend

It really is that simple. Empathy is key.

But this type of philosophy has to come from the top, and if a founder or management team is even a little psychopathic, then I feel like there's really not much you can do (but maybe I'm wrong here, and people with more experience can chime in)